Here I Am To Worship

We've been talking this evening at worship: what worship is, what it means to worship, how we worship.

 

Taken from the Old English 'weorthscipe' meaning worthiness, worship means to acknowledge the worth of. 

 

When we worship God, we are acknowledging who He is and, therefore, are acknowledging His worthiness.

 

But worship isn't something we do for half an hour in church on Sundays.  Or during the week when we listen to a 'worship' CD.  It's not even really about singing.

 

Yes, singing is a large and significant part of worship, but true worship is about living a life which acknowledges God's worthiness in all areas.

 

Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well:

"It's who you are and the way you live that count before God.  Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth.  That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship.  God is sheer being itself - Spirit.  Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration."

 

[John 4:24 MSG]

 

 

I love that line - those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. 

I love it and I am deeply challenged by it.  I'm not sure that I've very comfortable simply and honestly being myself: I'm not sure I feel enough.  Sometimes I like to dress myself up in different layers of disguise.  I'm not even sure I know what it means to be simply and honestly myself.

But I want to start to find out.

I want to say, as Tim Hughes sang, "Here I am to worship."

No pretense, no disguise, no distraction.  Not just here I am for 20 minutes.  But every day, every moment - here I am to worship.


 

 

 

 

Blackberries

I love Autumn. 

 

I love the crisp chill in the air.  I love going for walks in the countryside in my wellies.  And most of all, I love blackberrying.

 

I love that, for those who have a few hours to spare, there is an abundance of delicious blackberries waiting in the hedgerows to be picked and enjoyed.  For free.

 

Yesterday, I spent a very enjoyable afternoon doing just that.

 

There are so many parables I could draw from the experience [and perhaps I will in another post], such as looking in the right places and taking a different perspective on things, and having to fight the thorns for the fruit. 

 

But what really struck me yesterday was the shape of the blackberries.  When I was little, I used to enjoy trying to pull off each of the drupelets [apparently the technical term for each of the little bobbles] to eat them individually.  It is a fiddly and messy business but, if achieved, can be quite satisfying.

 

All of the tiny seed-bearing bobbles joined together around the soft core made me think about what the church should be like. 

 

We are all unique individuals with our own roles to play.  We each have a 'seed' within us which will grow and develop and produce a flourishing plant.  But we are all joined together around the 'core' - the central person of Jesus.

 

Paul explains how we are all joined together through Christ -

 

"You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body.  It’s exactly the same with Christ.  By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives.  We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything."

 

[1 Corinthians 12:12-13 MSG] 

And he continues to explain how we are all linked together and affected by each other -

 

"The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t.  If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing.  If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance."

[1 Corinthians 12:25-26 MSG]

 

The church isn't a club for religious people to hang out at on Sundays.  The church isn't the building.  The church isn't the pastors, or the vicar, or the worship leaders. 

 

The church is you and me joining together through our shared faith in Jesus and sharing our lives together - the hurting and the healing, the joy and the weeping.