Our Worship, What Is It?

Photo by Jeffery Whittingham as featured in Maui Magazine

I have been visiting quite a few different churches lately, and I have begun to start wondering; “What happened to our worship of God?” I guess I feel so challenged by all of this, because …  well…, “I’m Old School.” I’m reminded almost daily by my children and grandchildren of how things are “just different” today.

Well, what does that mean?

I know when I stopped playing my record player and started to use cassettes, and then that big jump to CD’s, I mean, how cool was that!?! And of course I remember when I got my first cell phone in 2001 when everyone was asking, “What took you so long?” I would not have gotten one then, if my job didn’t require it. I mean, why does life have to change so fast and so much?

Didn’t life work well for the past two thousand years?

I still remember some pretty amazing stories that my Grandfather told me, while sitting on his knee, like it was yesterday. He had tattoos all up and down his arms of three mast sailboats that represented all of his dreams of being a sailor. He told of how he had sailed from Ireland to the United States and then met my Grandmother and how they dated and how this and that and…wait a minute, you tell your kids stories like this don’t you? Ohh, life has changed hasn’t it.

And I believe we have lost a lot of “Life” in the process.

You see, the first time I was shocked was when I was sent to Hong Kong on a business trip in 1999, sitting in a five star hotel restaurant looking at a room full of young people filling every seat around tables, with every head down looking into a cell phone. There was not one, “face to face” conversation in the place, and it was kind of spooky seeing all these faces glowing from their phones. Then the second big shocker was when I went to visit my grandson for the first time when he was just a couple months old. Sitting at the dinner table in a high-chair, he started to make normal baby noises, and before I could even say something, a cell phone was shoved into his face and hands to “shut him up.” I wanted to cry.  And this feeling is only getting worse today as my kids and grandkids don’t want to hear my stories anymore.

Folks, we are in trouble!

Because the loss of storytelling is a loss of relationship with one another. When we share with each other, we bind hearts together, we carry each other through life with all its joy and sorrows. Relationships are a necessary part of who we are, they help carry us through our struggles, our challenges, our learning and our growing. Yet my grandkids say; “We have relationships too, they’re just different then the way you had them.” On this I totally agree…it’s very different. Just look at the social status; teen suicides, rape, abuse, crime, disrespect of authority, broken homes, and social lawlessness are all up. Why??? All because of the loss of personal relationships. And here it comes…, we have experienced this same loss in the church. There are no more personal relationships that the Bible calls “Fellowship,” which in-turn kills all “Discipleship,” which defeats our purpose and therefore destroys our “Worship.”

Now wait just one minute. How do you go from personal relationships to worship?

There is so much Bible on this topic with many verses to review, but I only want to focus on one. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” (Romans 12:1) The underlined can also be translated as your “daily worship.”

Let’s think for a minute. How do I present my body a living offering daily? And aren’t the mercies of God, in fact, stories to tell? As Paul develops this admonition in chapter 12, he hits home in verse 13 saying, “Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality.”

So back to the beginning. While visiting this Sunday school the subject was, “What is our worship?,” with 99% of the conversation focus on music. For nearly the whole hour, the talk was about the “Worship Service” and the kind of music that should be played and whether to have a “Worship Band” leading or just a song leader, or how long should the “Worship Service” be? My heart was starting to ache and to the point that I raised my hand and said;

“I believe nature and the animals in it worship better than we do.” (Nehemiah 9:6)

Being a visitor with no one knowing who I was gave me the floor to explain myself… So I asked, “When we see a bald eagle, why do we yell out for others to look? And when it takes flight with that five foot wingspan, and swoops down to catch a fish, we all say, “Wow, Look at that!” with excitement and wonder. Or why do we pay to go watch a whale blow water out of its spout, and then go absolutely crazy when it fully breeches the water in total amazement? Are not these animals just doing what God created them to do?  Are they not just giving back to God what God gave them to give?” They all started to look at me as if I was some lunatic, and then I said,

“Why, with all the mercies God has given to us, and His Love to share with others; that the Lost and Hurting are not looking at us and saying, “Wow, what makes them so different than us? Why are they so full of Joy?” This should be our daily Worship!”