Lost Dutchman State Park, Apache Junction, Arizona
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. ~ Proverbs 22:6
Before you begin today, I want to let you know that the post for April 5th (Palm Sunday), is before this one. I posted it on actual Palm Sunday.
Today is Sunday, and we’re feeling like we did in Canada, where there were no churches to worship in. We’re really missing corporate worship! Who would’ve ever guessed that the churches in America would close their doors? It’s crazy!
So since we can’t do corporate worship, let’s begin today’s post by talking about worship.
How would you define worship?
Who or what do we, as believers, worship?
Why is (or should) corporate worship be so important to believers?
How does God expect us to worship?
Can non-believers worship?
My Student Bible Dictionary defines worship as adore, obey, reverence, focus positive attention on. Enjoy the presence of God. Any action or attitude that expresses praise, love, and appreciation for God. Worship can be expressed through obedience and the way we treat people. Worship can be private or public.
And on dictionary.com (I don’t have the room anymore to carry Webster around. 😊), I found to feel an adoring reverence or regard for (any person or thing).
But that’s someone else’s definition. How would you define it?
For me, it’s a cognizant response – usually to music, but also sometimes involving nature, and sometimes also during times of praising prayers. It’s a conscious time of my spirit (my inner Holy Spirit) reaching out and “touching” God. But that’s my spiritual worship. My heart to heart worship.
As believers, we would probably all respond the same – – “I worship God”. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. But being human, most likely we all lean towards worshipping at least some other thing(s) as well. Children, spouse, money, sports and/or their heroes, nature itself (rather than the God who created it), food, angels, home/property . . . It could be anything. But it shouldn’t be. And most of us spend our lives learning to recognize when our worship has strayed away from God and onto other people/things. Another way to look at this, is that we sometimes make people/things our god, in place of, or in addition to, God. And we should know that in both the Old and New Testaments, He considers this adultery. How I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which have lusted after their idols. ~ Ezekiel 6:9, and in James 4:4 ~ You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. God’s very first of His ten commandments is You shall have no other gods before Me. ~ Exodus 20:3
But why corporate worship? It tends to re-focus our priorities. It helps us learn what God expects from us and has in store for us, it helps us respond to Him in the way we should all the time – not just on Sunday morning (or Wednesday night, or whenever we meet together with other believers. It also brings us together as a teaching/learning/support system. God designed us to be together. King David says in Psalm 122:1, I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the LORD. And the writer of Hebrews in 10:24-25, And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – – and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
But why? Because it’s not about us as individuals. God created us to need one another. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. ~ Romans 12:4-5 Can we worship alone? Sure we can! But it’s infinitely better together!
God expects us to worship Him and only Him. Jesus told the woman at the well, Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. ~ John 4:23-24. Before each of the 10 plagues on Egypt, God through Moses told Pharaoh to let His people go so they could worship Him. (just as an aside, did you know that each of those plagues was done to prove that God was the one true God and was over any imitation gods the Egyptians worshiped? Each plague was connected to one of their gods.) Worshiping Him in Spirit and Truth. This is what God asks of us. Our spirit connecting with His. And our hearts uncorrupted by other gods and pursuits and beliefs. Truth. His Truth.
As far as unbelievers, they can worship other gods, just as we can and oftentimes do, but they cannot worship the One True God. They don’t have the Spirit for it.
This afternoon, we ventured out down Historic 88 again, but we were just looking for a place to walk. On our way out, we noticed how crowded everything was! There was a very long line to get into the Park and people were parked alongside the road too. Guess everyone decided to worship out in nature today. 😊 Anyway, we turned around and went back home. There was a Park guy at the entrance – – counting cars? Monitoring how many get in? Not sure. But it’s the first time we’ve seen anyone out by the street.
but we saw where that motorhome up there turned around and left the Park.
Must not have had a reservation, and was turned away because we’re full.
Hope they found a place!
The only trail we hadn’t been on was the Jacob’s Crosscut Trail, which runs sorta kinda along the base of the mountain. We didn’t make it the entire way, but we did most of it. We deemed it time to turn around when we began noticing a whole bunch of people headed our way on a very narrow trail. We don’t care for that at any time, let alone during COVID-19 days.
We’d stop and look at something, to give them a chance to get ahead since
there’s no where to pass on this narrow trail, but we always caught up pretty quickly. : )
Looks like old western to me. : )
Time to turn around. . . .
So instead of hiking more, we went home and took our home to the dump station to clean it out. No sewer at this campground. . .
If you think about it, pray for Blaine as he has a lot on his mind these days, what with Parks closing all around us, general up-keep of the coach, planning next year’s route destinations, dealing with finances, taking care of me . . .
Retirement doesn’t mean cessation of work – especially in his case. 😊
Another lovely sunset graced us tonight!
