Title: Worship with Life
<Lessons related to worship>
Worship is more than prayer. Prayer is primarily about immersing yourself in your own needs and saying, “God! Save my soul and bless me!” Also, worship is more than praise. Praise is mainly about immersing yourself in the blessings received and saying, “God! Thank you for saving my soul and blessing me.” On the other hand, worship means that the soul is immersed in God, and the worshiper says, “God! Thank you for your presence.” Worship is more than prayer and praise, it is the most important, noble, and blessed act that man can show.
The point is that a lot of worship today is dead. When worship dies, faith dies too. Ultimately, the success of worship is the success of faith. Give God a living worship. How do you do live worship? Let's look at some important principles of worship through the conversation between the Samaritan woman and Jesus in the text.
1. Place of Worship
The Samaritan woman knew Jesus as a prophet and asked, “Where is it proper to worship?” (verses 19-20). Then Jesus said, “Neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem.” Meaning the place doesn't matter. As such, have a heart of worship wherever you are, and live with a heart of worship not only at church, but also at work or at home.
Turn your home and workplace into places of worship, and sometimes even the streets as places of worship. What a wonderful place of worship in a car these days. If you close the windows and run down the street, you can shout and pray and praise to your heart's content. Christianity is not a religion that seeks to escape from the world, but a religion that seeks to fundamentally solve the world's problems because the core message is that God came down to the world as a man. So, the Christian life is a life that delves into the history of man and the world.
2. Worship time
The issue of worshiping with life applies not only to the meaning of place, but also to the meaning of time. In other words, just as a specific place is not important as a place of worship, only a specific time is not important as a time. Abandon too much meaning to the daytime on Sundays. The early morning hours on Sunday, the time when I first met the risen Lord, were considered more meaningful than the daytime hours on Sundays. So, in the early church, we worshiped at 9 o’clock on Sundays by compromising ‘the meaning of Sunday dawn’ and ‘realistic considerations’.
In the early days of the Korean church, they worshiped almost at 9:00 a.m. on Sundays, and if they worshiped after 11 p.m. on Sundays, they thought that they worshiped in broad daylight no matter how ungodly. However, as mega-churches emerged, the service hours expanded to 11 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm. Gradually, the 11 a.m. worship service on Sundays has become a universal worship service. In that sense, let go of the excessive meaning of Sunday and daytime and always live with a heart of worship.
3. Worship
The Lord said, “The hour is coming when you will worship the Father” (verse 21). The object of worship should be God alone. No matter how good a person is, they can be admired, but not worshiped. Even if a person has reached a very high level spiritually, he can always be spiritually bankrupt. When we look only at God and fully kneel before God, we receive the truth, hear God's voice, and receive God's blessings.
In a church in Copenhagen, Denmark, there is a famous statue of Jesus made by Swalson. The statue reads, “You who labor and are heavy laden! It is a statue inviting everyone to come to me!” One day, a man looked at the statue and muttered. “I came here because it was a famous statue, and there was nothing wrong with it!” A passerby nearby, who knew the history of the statue, said as he expressed his disappointment. "Teacher! If you want to see the statue, you have to get close, get down on your knees before it, and look up to see the face of Christ.”
Only get down on your knees before God and worship only God. Only God controls the beginning and end of life. Just as a sailor finds out his or her position in the sea by measuring the altitude of the sun, a saint can find a moral direction when he worships God. So, start everything with God. True worship reverses the natural instinct to see people and the environment, allowing us to learn a life that only looks at God.