Does worship start and stop depending on the circumstances of life?  Is it put on hold while we go to work or school?  Is it suspended when we take our family to a baseball game or meet friends at the golf course or go on vacation?

If those of us who facilitate gathered worship are not careful, our actions can imply that “time and place worship is the primary, if not only, venue for worship, while the remainder of our life falls into another category.”[1]  In fact our focus, preparation, and implementation can even imply that the official time and place is a 30-minute segment (song set) during our weekend gathering and that the other 6 days and 23.5 hours of the week is something else.

“I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1).  (OK, maybe golf wasn’t the best illustration)

My daughter was a very good student in high school but is an even better student in college.  When asked why she determined to take her studies to a new level she responded with:  “God has called me to ministry and to this university to prepare for that ministry, therefore, I believe that making good grades in what He has called me to do is an act of worship.”  Don’t you love learning from your kids?

Harold Best wrote, “Because God is the Continuous Outpourer, we bear his image as continuous outpourers.  Being made in the image of God means that we were created to act the way God acts, having been given a nature within which such behavior is natural.”[2]  Best also writes that outpouring implies lavishness and generosity; it requires giving up and letting go; it is seamless; and it surpasses measuring out or filling quotas, even to the extent that it doesn’t matter if some spills over in gracious waste.[3]

If this is true then a Call to Worship at the beginning of a worship service is redundant.  In fact, calling a congregation to worship might even be more appropriate at the end of the service just to remind them as they disperse that the entire life of a Christ follower is a call to worship…even on the golf course.
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[1] Harold M. Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 9.
[2] Ibid., 23.
[3] Ibid., 19-20.

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