Worship is our total being reaching out to God to adore him, praise him, and admire him.  Yet it is so easy to shift the focus from God to “me”.  Those of us in the congregation can so easily judge worship by what it did or did not do to or for “us”, “me”.  The worship team can drift without really realizing it to creating worship times with the criteria of perfect technology, lighting, feeling, leaving God virtually out of the reckoning.  Many churches that started out with true heart-felt worship of God for God have drifted away into purely mechanical forms of worship and the spirit of it all is gone.  Of course, we do need to do all we can to make our Sunday morning experience as beautiful as possible with our limited technology.  The point is the focus must always be to glorify and exalt our God.  When the focus is truly on God, we will do our best to have the best coordinated worship possible.  The instances of worship in the Old Testament certainly exemplify that.  But we must guard with all our might against all self-glory and self-promotion.  It is so easy to slip from serving to glorify God, and for no other reason, to wanting at last some of the glory for ourselves, and it goes downhill from there.  So we must be aware of this, and jealously guard our motives so God will truly receive all the glory.

Written by,

Dr. Richard L. Shaw Ph.D., Pastor