“Google
maps” has a “satellite” feature that allows people to see the earth from the
air. Take a guess as to what most people
do with that feature. If you said, “They
use it to look at their own town” you would be close. More specifically, most people use it to look
at their own house (At church when I asked “Who has done this?” 80% of the
people raised their hands. Those who
didn’t don’t use the internet!).
Why would you
look at your own house? You know what
your house looks like! In fact, you are
probably sitting in your house while looking at a satellite picture of it! Why do we do things like this?
We do it
because we are the centre of our own worlds.
In other words, I am the most important person to me! I care more about my problems than anyone else’s. My thoughts and ways of doing things are more
“right” than yours because they are mine.
Think about this: Who do people talk about most often? Themselves! Left to our own devices, everything revolves “me”.
That is why
worship is important!
Worship is
the mechanism that breaks my pre-occupation with myself and helps me focus on
God. Worship, both private and public,
is the thing that kicks me out of the centre of my life and puts God there. When that happens, suddenly I have new values
and new goals. More than that, I have a
new way of measuring success. Everything
changes when we worship. Jesus even
modeled this truth for us.
In Luke 22
we find him in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his
crucifixion. He does not want to die. In fact, he is praying for a different way. However, his prayer and his worship ends where
all worship times should end; “Not my will, but yours be done!” (verse
42). Worship was the thing that allowed
even the Son of God to refocus and put God’s will at the centre of his life and
that is what it ought to do for us as well.
As someone
once said, “Worship is not our time to rest up and get re-energized so that we
can rejoin the rat-race. Rather, worship
is the thing that allows us to ignore the rat-race altogether!” Worship puts things in their rightful place.
Why do we
worship?
We do not worship
because God needs it; we worship because we do!
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