i am an offering

There are many things that hinder us from worshiping God, but sometimes we don’t even know what they are or what to do about them. For me, for a long time, it was a double life of saying and teaching one thing but living another, struggling with a particular sin. I still fight this battle often, but God has given me great resources to help. So what are some things that keep us from worshiping Him?

• First, unbelief. It is impossible to worship God if we don’t believe in Him. Shannon from 4whatitsworth has a great article about this.
• Second, a lack of understanding of who God is. Either we don’t know Him at all, or we’ve been taught incorrect things about Him. Solution: Get to know Him by reading and meditating on His Word daily, listening to messages and reading books on theology, and spending time with Him in prayer.
• Unconfessed sin. Once we get to know God we know that He hates sin. If we don’t confess our sin to Him and to others, it is very, very difficult to worship God rightly.
• Pet sin. Sure, we confess it, but we keep on coming back to it and justifying it. God says through the prophet Isaiah, and again as Jesus quoted this passage, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” (Isaiah 29:13, Matthew 15:8, Mark 7:6). This was a tough one for me for a long time, and I still battle with it, but as I mentioned, God has brought me a long ways and I’m so thankful for His correction and His grace!
• “I can’t worship when…” Perhaps you think you can’t worship God when a particular worship leader is leading or a particular song that you don’t like is sung. Or you think you can’t worship God when a particular song you like isn’t sung. This is a dangerous trap to fall into and it shows more about the attitude of your heart than your ability to worship. I struggled with this one for a long time as well until God has recently convicted me of this attitude and is helping me grow tremendously in this area.

I’m sure there are many other personal worship lids that we’ve dealt with. Care to share any and how God has perhaps freed you from them? Or maybe your struggling with how to break free. Leave a comment and we’ll help each other out.

I usually don’t post twice in one day but our pastor has just started a blog series that I think will be very beneficial for believers to read. I blogged last weak on the importance of knowing how to defend what we believe. This is what Wade is going to be diving into this week. Check out the first post here.

We started going through Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project” on Sunday night with a small group from our church and boy was it amazing. Just from the first lesson on “What is Truth” I know that this will be a highly intellectual and thought-provoking study. I was also able to meet some new people and am looking forward to getting to know them better.

I find it more than a little sad that so many Christians will defend their faith with, “Well, I believe it because the Bible says so, so that’s that.” While this is completely true and I agree that the Bible is the absolute sole authority on anything and everything, how does a defense like that stand with someone who doesn’t believe that any of the Bible is true? It doesn’t work. We need to be able to think and think well. We need to understand philosophy, history, ethics, anthropology, science and more. We don’t need to be experts in all of these things, but we need to at least have a grasp on them so that we can make clearer cases for our faith to people who trust in all these fields but have no trust in the Bible. I think “The Truth Project” will be doing just that.

In light of today being Darwin Day (ack - how in the world did we ever come to this??), it’s really good for us to know exactly what we believe and how to defend it intelligently. In light of worship ministry, we need to know why in the world we worship God as well. Yes, the Bible tells us to worship Him, but we need to understand why in order to have more intimate times of worship with Him.

Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?