“I will praise you, O Lord, with all my heart;
I will tell of all your wonders.
I will be glad and rejoice in you;
I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.”
~Psalm 9:1-2
I am so blessed to be the preacher for a church that really understands the congregation’s worship of God. When considering the emotional hot-button issues that sometimes, unfortunately, characterize our corporate worship, I’m surrounded here by people who do comprehend — or are honestly wrestling with comprehending — that to worship the Creator of Heaven and Earth is to give him our all.
When Holy Scripture speaks of praising and worshiping God with all our hearts — or doing anything with all our hearts — it’s talking about all of the wholistic will. Not just our emotions. Not just our heads. Not just our feelings. Not just our reason and logic.
With all my heart.
God is worthy of my / our eternal adoration. So, we worship God intentionally, deliberately, and mindfully, even when we don’t feel like it. We put everything we have into it everytime.
I am privileged to “eavesdrop” on a couple of on-going cyber conversations within our church family. I was struck (inspired, moved to thanksgiving, convicted) by a couple of comments made late last week regarding our Sunday morning worship here at Legacy. With their permission, consider this from Don Garrett:
“I have found that my worship has intensified as my awareness of God’s forgiveness of my sins has increased. Those times when I lose sight of the fact that God has forgiven me of a LOT of sins, my worship begins to lose its intensity and other, worldly things begin to encroach on my worship. When I have a deep sense that my Father has forgiven me of a lot…I have little trouble concentrating intently on my worship to him. I also find myself LESS affected by things like song selection, or heating / cooling problems in the building, or too many babies crying, or someone worshiping in a slightly different way than me, or all the other mundane things that can detract from our personal worship. I also find myself having less patience with those who gripe about such things (that is probably more a part of getting older and more grumpy).”
And this from Mason Scott:
“I will admit that I have been one to come into the worship center and anticipate to sing my favorite songs, hear the right sermon, and be engrossed with an uplifting worship experience. When I look for the right songs, the right sermon, or complain about the song leader, the song selections, the Scripture reader, or the sound booth, I’ve turned God’s time into ‘Mason Time.’ Yes, I feel small. The Lord is molding my mind and heart this week to come this Sunday with my offering. The offering I’m talking about is my heart. I will come this Sunday with the desire to give my heart, my mind, my adoration, and my money to praise and worship our Creator.”
Can’t you see why I love being Legacy’s preacher?
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Only 18 days ’til the Cowboys kick off their historic 50th football season. And today’s second-best player in team history according to jersey number came down to back-up quarterbacks. And the Red Ribbon Review is going with the only man to back-up both Roger Staubach and Danny White, UNLV’s own Glenn Carano.
Wade Wilson played for five teams and lost his only start for the Cowboys. Bernie Kosar played only one season in Dallas and lost his only start. Carano, a second-round pick in 1977, played his entire seven year career for the Cowboys and won his only start, a 37-13 whipping of the Colts in 1981. He suited up for five NFC Championship Games as a Cowboy backup and two Super Bowls. And he threw only one interception in his 57 career attempts.
My only memory of Carano is from the end zone seats at Texas Stadium on Thanksgiving Day 1981. I was 15. I can’t remember who was starting for the Bears that year —Bob Avellini? — but Vince Evans had replaced him that week. Danny White got knocked out early in the first quarter, and we wound up watching Evans and Carano duel to a sloppy 10-9 Cowboys win. It was only the third or fourth Cowboys game I’d ever attended. And I was disappointed. My team had won. But I was bent.
I was clearly already developing the cynicism and negativism that would serve my sports radio career so well.
Peace,
Allan
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