WORSHIP IS WORK

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”  (John 4:23 NIV)

One thing my experience has taught me is that you have to bring something to the sermon to get something out of it. The expression is familiar in the African American church: “If you don’t put anything in, you won’t get anything out!” And sometimes it is a mere openness to the Spirit. For worship is neither something that the clergy does and the people sit back and watch, nor something that is an optional activity for the people. Worship is work – hard, active, disciplined, and sometimes painful work that demands something from us as it gives something to us. That is literally what the word that the New Testament uses so often for worship, leitourgia, means – “the work of the people.” 

-- Zan W. Holmes, Jr. in “Encountering Jesus”

#5688

WAITING FOR GOD

“I will stand at my watchpost,
and station myself on the rampart;
I will keep watch to see what He will say to me,
and what He will answer concerning my complaint.
Then the LORD answered me and said:
‘Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so that a runner may read it.
For there is a vision for the appointed time;
it speaks of the end, and does not lie.
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.’”  (Habakkuk 2:1-3)

The writer Anthony Padovano once observed that "we wait for everything that is really worth having . . . we even wait for God."  Waiting in the Biblical tradition is not passive or forgetful, but active, eager, yearning, and engaged.  Habakkuk determines to wait on God for the Resolution of his crisis; God, in turn, bids him, "If it seems to tarry, wait."  What are you waiting for most fervently for yourself? For your loved ones?  Your church?  Your community?  The world?  Name these things before God in prayer, claiming God's promises.

-- Paul L. Escamilla in Spiritual Formation Bible -- NIV

#3929