Worship
Saturday, January 6th, 2007January 6, 2007
Worship
LISTEN:
READ:
He
moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his
tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an
altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord
—Genesis 12:8
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful
what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from
God, give it back to Him as a love-gift. Take time to meditate before
God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship.
If you hoard it for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as
the manna did when it was hoarded (see Exodus 16:20
). God will never allow you to keep a spiritual blessing completely for
yourself. It must be given back to Him so that He can make it a
blessing to others.
Bethel is the symbol of fellowship with God;
Ai is the symbol of the world. Abram "pitched his tent" between the
two. The lasting value of our public service for God is measured by the
depth of the intimacy of our private times of fellowship and oneness
with Him. Rushing in and out of worship is wrong every time— there is
always plenty of time to worship God. Days set apart for quiet can be a
trap, detracting from the need to have daily quiet time with God. That
is why we must "pitch our tents" where we will always have quiet times
with Him, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not
three levels of spiritual life— worship, waiting, and work. Yet some of
us seem to jump like spiritual frogs from worship to waiting, and from
waiting to work. God’s idea is that the three should go together as
one. They were always together in the life of our Lord and in perfect
harmony. It is a discipline that must be developed; it will not happen
overnight.
