Kristen Lunceford
It’s Sunday morning. You know the drill. Get up, get dressed, chase the kids for an hour trying to get them ready, fed, and out the door in a manageable timeframe. It’s nothing short of pure chaos…every. single. time. Usually, the drive to church consists of some type of chastisement given either to the children or the spouse as to why the morning went so crazy. It hardly seems like a preparatory time for worship.
Reflecting on the previous week you begin processing the anger towards your incompetent co-worker, the laziness of your spouse, the intrusiveness of your in-laws, or the ungratefulness of your children. You pass a man on the street holding a sign and consider all of the jobs he should be having. Maybe if he’d apply himself he wouldn’t be on the street…right? You see a soccer team warming up for a game on a field close-by and condemn their skipping a Sunday service. Your head is full of thoughts coming in and going out, mostly negative or demanding.
As you approach the church, you put your smiles on, straighten out your clothes and begin the walk in. You find your pew, (We all know we have a pew), and sit down for the next two hours hoping for a sermon that just knocks you off your feet, for a worship service that keeps your mind focused and attentive to the Word of God. No sooner than the start of the first song you find your mind wandering: thinking about the coming weeks events, the groceries you need, the school projects coming up, and the hunger pangs that have all the sudden made an entrance at a time when on any other day, would have never come up. You’re there, at church, filling the pew. Check. I mean, at least you look like you’re worshipping. You’re good for the week…right?
Why is it so hard to worship? How have we let our time of fellowship with the Lord become just another event we go to on the weekends? I’m the first to admit that I have done these very things…regrettably. It is all too easy to go throughout the week, living out our day to day lives without even thinking about the Lord. And if somehow a thought of Him does sneak in, it is quickly pushed out by all of the other distractions that demand our attention. That’s the life we’re drawn to, the life that we so desperately cling to: a life filling our days to the max hardly allowing ourselves any down time, so to set aside a whole day, or even several hours to just sit, be still, and worship the Lord, seems daunting. We’re rarely just still…rarely just quiet…rarely in a mindset of worship. The truth is…we’re just not very good at worship.
I was recently reading in Isaiah 58 where God addresses Israel’s “worship”. I use quotations there, because in reality Israel’s worship was anything but that. Oh, I think Israel would have disagreed with that statement but in verse 2 the Lord says, “For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways as if they were a nation that does what it right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them.” The Lord says in approaching worship Israel seems to have the noblest of intentions. From the outside, they appear to seem eager for God. Why? Because they are there, doing what needs to be done. However, beginning in verse 3 going into 4, he calls them out on the falsity of it all. He says, “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife…” He goes on to say they their day of fasting has just become another day of bowing their heads like a reed, for lying on sackcloth and ashes. There’s nothing behind it. How did it get this far? How have we gotten this far?
Perhaps we started off with the wrong idea of worship. Maybe our idea of worship needs to be altered a bit. THIS is what the Lord sees as genuine worship: Isaiah 58:6-7, “To loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke. Is it not to share your food with the hungry and the provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” What we do in our every day lives and how we do it begins and ends the process of worship. Daily living should affect our worship and our worship should affect our daily living. They are intertwined. They are unceasing. We’re worshipping God all week, not just on Sundays. Perhaps if we were a little more intentional about seeking to worship the Lord in our marriages, through our parenting, in our reaching out to the lost, the hurting, and the broken, then maybe we wouldn’t find the worship of the Lord on Sundays quite as difficult. It’s consistent. It’s always a part of our life. We wouldn’t know any different. Maybe our life of praise should be the constant distraction interrupting our days, filling up our lives, and affecting those around us. Worship should be our life.
So this week, as we set out to live our chaotic lives, may we set out to be intentional. May we make it our mission to live every aspect of our lives as a form of worship: how we work, interact with people, treat our family, respond to the hurting, and even the random encounters with strangers we have throughout our day. May we seek to make it all about HIM, so that when Sunday comes around, we’re already prepared with a heart of worship.
