i am an offering

Hopefully by now you realize that one of my passions is to teach others to worship God with every aspect of their life.  Often times we equate worship with Sunday or with a particular time or thing that we go to.  But if we are to honor what God says in His word, we do this:

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Colossians 3:17

“In word or deed…”  That includes everything. So let’s look at some ways we can worship God that you might not have thought about:

Media Choices

This is one of the most important areas where we need to learn to worship God.  We are bombarded with literally thousands upon thousands of pieces of media every day.  We have a choice to turn away from some (or all) of it. How can we do this?

• Just because a TV show is popular doesn’t mean it’s going to build you up.  In fact, most popular TV will slowly fill your mind with things that cause you to change how you make decisions over time, even if you don’t realize it.  Be discerning in what you watch.  If you are prompted by your “conscience” (which is really the Holy Spirit) to turn something off, turn it off.
• Be careful what music you’re listening to.  Studies have shown that explicit content shows up on MTV once every 38 seconds.  If the music videos are showing it, it’s obvious that it’s first coming from the music that these videos are made from.  We can easily chose to not listen to something.  Change the dial from your popular secular station to the Christian station.  By no means am I suggesting that you can’t listen to “secular” music, as much of it is full of good content (think Switchfoot, P.O.D., Daughtry, etc).  It is just so important that you learn to discern what is good content, and what is not, and most of the time the popular music stations are not playing the stuff with good content.
• Movies.  Just because someone you met randomly says it’s the funniest movie this year doesn’t mean anything.  Their definition of funny could include things that we shouldn’t even be thinking about. Keep yourself safe and visit pluggedinonline before you watch a movie.

Making choices about media that honor God is an act of worship and an act of worship that should be occurring every day in our lives.  Tomorrow we will look at worshiping God in our relationships.

I’ll admit it.  My prayer life is probably the one area of my Christian walk that needs the most work.  And yes, learning how to pray and pray consistently is work, but as we learned in The Truth Project last night, the word ‘work’ has been twisted into an ugly thing instead of the privilege that God gave to us.

Pastor Wade encouraged and challenged us to just plain spend time with God, to “trust in Him at all times…pour out your heart before Him, (because) God is a refuge for us.”  He encouraged men to realize that we can’t afford to NOT be praying and we have to model it for our families.  Good, good stuff.

We sang:

• Psalm 9 (a great lead/echo song right from Scripture)
• Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful (classic Keith Green)
• Sweet Hour of Prayer
• Strong Tower (Furler/Taylor)

The transition to EasyWorship seems to be going well, but we still need to work on getting some bugs out like making sure all the songs are on the default text so that it’s large enough and making sure songs and Scriptures are broken into more manageable screens.

And another fantastic part about yesterday…spending time with my daughter (lots of laughs from peek-a-boo and shoulder rides!) while being able to let my wife rest and catch up on some much needed sleep.

This week, since the Scribit widget in the sidebar has been utilized, we’ll look at different ways to worship God and not just on Sundays.

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.