Approaching

Somewhere, sometime, worship became about us.

It became something we scheduled into our week, an hour on Sunday and maybe another day. It became a commodity, a product marketed and bought up by the thousands in record shops and on Itunes. It became a battle, of old versus new, of organ versus drums, of ideologies and approaches.

We left our family of believers because we weren't feeling worshipful, and we blamed others, or the style or the type of music. And reall, worship has become for most people, all about the music- all about MY kind of music.

Don't get me wrong, music is a vital component of worship, but it is not the whole. And worship must never be about us. Worship has to be about God.

So it is that I came to view worship in regards to direction. For too long, worship for me was about withdrawal. I moved away from things, from sin, from people, from surroundings. When I worshipped, I would focus more on drawing into myself than everything else- shutting out the world. Again, this is not an evil or sinful approach to worship- its actually a good one. We need to get away from things, from distractions, but the attitude I found in 'withdrawal worship' was that I needed to get secluded so I could worship. It was easy to make the time about me, rather than about God. And in so doing, I had made worship about me.

So, then, if that had led to a type of worship that took a negative direction, a withdrawal, then the opposite attitude would be to approach something. To approach God, the object of worship.

Rather than focusing on the practices of 'getting away from it all' I would focus on looking for God, seeking Him. I would approach God, and allow Him to remove the distractions, I would be caught up more in Him than in trying to control my actions. The more I attempt to approach God, the more often I find myself worshipping. Not just with music, or in church, but throughout my day. Worship is prayer, worship is doing the best I can at a task, worship is loving my family, worship is watching the sunset, worship is listening to friend's struggles.

Worship is life.

Thats why Romans 12:1 calls us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. We are to offer our lives, our total existence, to God. To approach Him with this, our gift, our life.

I beleive our 'worship' in church is often less because we have failed to approach God with our lives. We've thrown Him a bone here and there, but we have not drawn near to Him. This attitude of withdrawal into what 'our needs' are has kept us from approaching Him. Worship does not occur on our terms, it occurs when we are caught in the gravitational pull of the much larger mass of God, and we drawn in, consumed in Him.

So let us approach Him with freedom and confidence, and let us worship.