i am an offering

Did you:

• Spend some time in His Word?
• Spend some time talking with Him?
• Listen to some praise and worship music instead of the radio station you usually listen to?

When situations come up that might be slightly irritating to you, will you:

• Take time to stop and think before reacting, making sure your reaction is an accurate reflection of how a follower of Jesus should react?
• Pray for whoever might have irritated you and forgive them completely?
• Admit that you’re really the one doing the irritating and ask for forgiveness?

When you feel jealous of someone else’s car, job, wealth, whatever, will you:

• Realize just how much God has blessed you (warm house, food to eat, a job - unlike many in our world who have none of the above and even less) and thank Him for it?
• Pray to God that those who might have a little more than you would use it to glorify Him?
• Take time to actually tell the people in your life that you are so thankful for them?

What are some other ways that you are worshiping God today?  Feel free to share!

Yesterday’s service was great.  Really great.  For the first time in a long time, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Holy Spirit was guiding the service.  I know this all of the time, but yesterday I was completely certain.

There were a few reasons:

First, I thought I had everything ready to go by loading the EasyWorship service onto a flash card to bring to church (our church is a church plant and currently runs off of a laptop that is in different hands from week to week).  The only problem was, I forgot my flash card reader.  Whoops!

Thankfully, the volunteer that was going to run EasyWorship was willing to run home and grab her copy of the file since she didn’t live too far away.  And, thankfully, she seemed to forgive my ridiculous lack of preparation.  Hence, she wins volunteer of the month award.  Thank you so much, Lisa!

So, Rock Star Volunteer Lisa runs home and grabs the service.  We’re good to go.

Second, during our prayer time in the service I was feeling led that we should sing the last verse of the hymn we had just sung after the prayer time was finished.  When the prayer time was finished, Pastor Wade walks next to me and whispers, “Let’s sing that last verse again.”  God still moves, folks!

Third, Lisa again proved her rock-star-ness by following along perfectly even though some verses in songs ended up getting skipped and/or repeated.

God was in control yesterday, not anyone else, and it was awesome!

The most important thing that I learned from yesterday’s service was that God is above anything we can imagine, but even though He’s able to take care of all the details if we think we’ve messed them up, we still need to make sure we’re properly prepared and we properly prepare those we’re working with.

Well, as you’ve noticed, I haven’t been writing a lot lately. To be completely honest I’m a little bit dry.

Enter scribit.

At the top of the right sidebar is now a nifty little widget that you can easily and anonymously tell me what to write about! So, if you have a burning question about worship ministry that you’ve been wondering about, go ahead and type it in.

The cool thing is that others can vote on the suggestions. So if I get a handful of votes for one suggestion, I’ll definitely write about it. Fire away.

How do you speak to people you come in contact with?  Do you think about the fact that even little things we say can have a huge impact on people?  Paul has two specific ways of worshiping God with the way we speak to people.  The first is how we speak to outsiders, or unbelievers:

Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”  Colossians 4:5-6.

“Seasoned with salt” is in interesting phrase.  It refers to salt being a preservative.  We are to use our speech to preserve a good attitude towards those we come in contact that don’t know Jesus.  We don’t answer them in judgment or condemnation, but with an answer full of grace.

The second way we can worship with the way we speak is to everyone:

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Ephesians 4:29.

Does what you say to others fit the occasion?  Is it something that is good for building up?   Do you realize that when you gossip about someone not only are you solidifying your bad attitude toward them, but drawing others into that same attitude?

Let’s worship Jesus by honoring Him with everything we say today.  Find a way to build someone up today!

Well, it has been a light couple of weeks of blogging from me and I apologize for that! Family’s been coming first lately as well as getting the house ready for some company this weekend. I hope to get back into the swing of blogging again full-on next week, but there will be a few posts this weeek.

You’ve probably seen this story already, but it was brought up at devotions this morning and man, it’s powerful. While the story doesn’t mention if anyone involved is a follower of Jesus, it’s good for us to see that these sorts of things still happen in the world. It is also good for us to remember that we should be the people that are making these things happen. Enjoy.