Wednesday Night Study on March 26th

This week we started a new series of talks. The series will be on worship. I hope that when we have finished this study we will have a greater understanding of what worship truly is, what it involves, and what it does to us. This week our main objective was to define worship and to ask ourselves the question, “Have I worshipped this week?” We looked at John 4:21-24; this passage is a conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. I believe in this passage Jesus tells her the future of how people will worship after He opens the door for all men to have fellowship with God. (Through the Cross).

The main scripture focus was on verse 24 when Jesus says, “God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.” From this statement we defined worship. We discussed that “in truth” refers to that which we know to be unchanging and uncompromising. We discussed that “in spirit” refers to the experience, expression, and emotion of life that all humans encounter. We defined worship in a simple statement: Worship is when the truth of God we know becomes the experiences of our life.

Let me use the example that I used last night. Ok last week I told a story about my favorite caving trip. I told about the fun of sliding down mud slides and slipping and falling in mud. (For some of you this may not sound fun but to them it sounded very fun.) When I told of all this fun they took it as truth and a large majority of them signed up to go on a caving trip Friday. Those who went experienced the joys of the cave that I had talked about. We discussed that this is how worship is with God; that we can know so much information (truth) but until we experience the workings of God through that truth in our lives we truly don’t understand. I believe that our students are saturated with the truths of what God has done in the past, who God is, and all the wonderful things He has promised us. I believe that is not a bad thing but I do believe that just knowing the facts isn’t going to help them. It is going to take the truth coming to life in their lives; that is worship.

I went on to state that without worship all tasks and activities done are done in vain. I gave examples such as doing missions or witnessing just because I’m supposed to. Another example was coming to church because it is what everybody else does rather than it being a time to encounter God.

My third statement was that worship involves all of us. It involves our problems, our hurts, our victories, and our failures. We should give and respond to God with all areas of our life. We so often go before God as if we are perfect and feel perfectly fine but we are not.

We closed with me reviewing our definition of worship and asking a simple question “Have you worshipped this week?”

walk brave, dustin