Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Preparing For Worship: Personal Victory

(Continuing the thoughts begun two weeks ago on Sunday worship being a culmination and celebration of what God has done in and through our lives during the week.)

How can we make gathered Sunday worship a place celebrate, instead of a place to get “filled-up”? Often we come to corporate worship feeling down, defeated, and empty, looking for filling.
Life is hard, and a lot of times we let it whip us. I believe that gathered Sunday worship should be a culmination of God working in me throughout the week. Here are some things I do:
Praying For Needs In My Life: Often we tell others our “prayer requests” because we like to talk about ourselves. We want people to have pity on our difficult lives. But how many of us really dig in and go before the Lord, and spend time praying for our needs? It’s easy: Pray for your needs. God will answer, we’ll see victories, and have something to celebrate!

Taking Steps Of Faith: Without faith it’s impossible to please God. We can take small and big steps of faith every day as we read what God’s Word says, as God gives us direction, and as we live it out. Being know as a person of faith shouldn’t mean we go to church. It should mean we live our lives by faith, trusting God in everything, every day.

Studying God’s Word: This is different from our daily personal worship time discussed last week. By daily studying God’s Word we learn a biblical worldview, over our culture’s worldview that we tend to live by. Also, daily studying God’s Word teaches us how to live a life of faith. (I study God’s Word in the evenings.)

Becoming Less “Me-centered”: If we’ll honestly look at our lives, we tend to be very me-centered. (Listen to your conversations, read your social media posts, see how often we turn someone else’s story into our story.) It takes effort, but we can change our thought patterns and action patterns to become less me-centered, and more God-centered and other-centered.

These simple steps, exercised daily, will produce victories in our lives. And those victories give us reason to celebrate in gathered Sunday worship. What else can you do during the week that allows God to work in you that gives cause for celebration? Lead Well!

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