It has been wisely said that if everything is worship than nothing will be worship. Still the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 12: Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
In this passage there is no limit of worship to an assembly. Instead it is the constant awareness that my life is not my own, not in the assembly or out of it, but rather a gift to be given to God. That does not negate the idea of assembly as obsolete or irrelevant. It simply says that what we do together should not be done in a vacuum but rather as a reflection of my life; my whole life lived as one continuous act of worship. If I am living this way then the assembly isn’t an add-on but a microcosm of my real life. In contrast, when the gap between who I am Monday through Saturday versus who I am on Sunday morning gets too wide, my tendency will be to find fault with church, the worship service, the preaching, etc and to withdraw from fellowship for fear of being discovered to be a fraud or a hypocrite. But the truth is that on some level we are all of us struggling between the awesome man or woman of God we can be, and the person we actually are. No one escapes this struggle but by closing the gap between the daily me and the Sunday me, will we not only relieve the tension we feel, but it will also make it easier to enter into worship in the assembly when we gather together the rest of the saints.
I hope you have enjoyed this series on worship and that you have grown in your experience of God.
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