Sunday October 10, 2010 | Greg Boyd
Worship the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs.
Praise and celebration are foundational and essential to being God’s people. However, many Christians today are missing out on the importance of doing this together. We emphasize information, but we often don’t see the power of encountering God and the impact that it can have on our lives.
When we come together as a people with a common Lord, a common faith and common aspiration and when we focus our minds to praise and celebrate the goodness of God, things can happen that otherwise would never happen. Praise is singing to God while celebration is declaring truth about God. It’s good to do these alone, but there’s a unique experience we can have while doing these with others, whether in small group or larger, weekend group. In the case of praise and celebration, the principle of unity is far greater, for God has promised to show up in a unique way when his people come together.
Over the last 30 years worship has become more of a concert, but people are getting bored with that, so churches are increasingly shortening their worship time, some dropping it all together. This is also why many feel there’s no loss if they stop going to church and just download the sermon at home. There is an important dimension of the kingdom missing when your not regularly coming into God’s presence by worshiping him with others. Worshiping on your own is great, but the relational God designed everything to work best when done with others.
We tend to put an undue amount of importance on information. Hence, we think the sermon is most important and maybe the only important part of the service but information alone never transforms us. People can know a ton and not have it impact their lives. Only when transformation makes its way to the heart of an individual does it make a difference.