Making Worship my Lifestyle📍

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans 12.1-2 (MSG).

Worship is a continuous conscious reverence and adoration of something or someone. When we talk about worshipping something or someone, it means us putting the affairs and welfare of that person or thing above everyone and everything else. It means putting the most value on that person or thing. As humans, we were created to worship and it is seen in our everyday life. Worship doesn't begin and ends with singing slow songs in church with hands lifted high and tears streaming down your face. Worship is an art, worship is a lifestyle.

There are so many things and people we adore, each in its own hierarchy in our lives, nevertheless still 'holding much water' in our lives that we care about their opinions of us and the way their well-being or lifestyle affect us directly or indirectly. There are certain things and people in our lives that we adore so much that we would never let anyone tamper with, disrespect, or treat without regard. It might not sound pleasant to you to hear this, but you are worshipping those things or people.

Now, instead of getting into the denial phase of "I can never worship anything or anyone", accept that fact, then redirect that energy to God. The same way you can't do without something or someone because you have gotten so attached to it, get so attached to God that you literally can't see yourself doing life with Him. Embrace the truth of the human nature of being created to worship and the possibility that you've been worshipping something or someone else that's not God, then redirect that reality by focusing on God so much more.

Just like Romans 12.1 says, place your everyday life before God as an offering; your eating, drinking, talking, working, sleeping, your conversations with people, your ordinary everyday life. Be so engrossed in God and the relationship you have with Him that your entire life speaks of it. Dedicate your time, passions, and services to God. Spend more time knowing God for who He really is, not just what you grew up knowing Him to be. Have enough passion and zeal to follow God. Jeremiah 29.13 gives us an assurance that whoever seeks God diligently and intentionally will find God. Just as you have to be intentional about finding God, you have to be intentional about developing intimacy with Him too. Intimacy doesn't just happen, you create time and space for intimacy, and that's where your worship comes in. Dedicate your services to God. Whatever you can do, whatever service you can render, dedicate it all to God and give your best at it. God loves excellence, and the more you dedicate your time and effort to give God the best, the more you learn how to worship God.

Worship is an intentional act. John 4.24 says "God is Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth". Worshipping God in Spirit never goes unplanned. It is an intentional act you decide to do every day that becomes a habit, then a lifestyle, then it becomes your nature. Worship is submission. True worship is submitting and surrendering. It is giving God reverence and trusting Him enough to handle prime matters for you. True worship is dying to self daily to live in Christ, just like Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15.31, to live the life of Christ. True worship is saying to God every day, "Today, I choose to follow You. I don't want to have life any other way if You're not in it". True worship is giving up your idols to God and giving Him the first place in your life, not when it's only convenient for you, not when you feel like it, not when you think it's right, not when you're in the mood to follow Jesus, but every single day of your life, every moment, every second.

True worship is about the posture of your heart. The Bible says "the treasure is where the heart is". True worship is where your heart is. If I could open your heart for a day to know who or what is in there, would I find God in your heart? Would He be in the first place or somewhere at the fifth or sixth because you're "working on something that you need to get done"? What if I opened your heart every single day of the week for a month? Would it still be God in there every time I open your heart? Or do you alternate the days God takes the first place in your life? You don't have to feel guilty for what you've discovered about yourself from reading this blog post. This is a call to reawakening. Does our worship only begin and end in church during the worship session? Or are our daily lives a reflection of our complete worship and total surrender to God's will and guidance?

Worship can be our lifestyle. We just have to make an intentional decision to follow God unapologetically without holding back. When God talks about worshipping Him in Spirit, He is referring to the depth of the intimacy He wants us to share with HIm, to be one with God through His Holy Spirit. We are not worshipping if we are not surrendering. Worship is not just words or about the song nor the singing. Worship is backing up your words with actions by setting your heart posture right and consistently submitting yourself back to God every single day.