I like all those things too…
“I want you to calculate all the time you spend talking to them, thinking of them, or trying to make them special; now compare it to the amount of time you spend doing the same for me.”
When God told me to do that exercise in 2023, I didn’t bother trying to tally the numbers; I knew for a fact that I had treasured this gift from God a lot more than I had considered the one who gave me the gift.
“I like all those things too,” the Holy spirit told me, “I want to be the first person you think of when you wake up, I want the thought of me to bring a smile on your face, I want us to be able to sit in comfortable silence without you jumping away to do something ‘more pressing’, I want you to tell me the little things that happen through the day, you can text me in your virtual journal, unlike others, I will never be too busy or unable to respond to you. I want you to love me back, and not just in your words this time.”
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.
What is Worship?
A blog post I saw described worship as “when we give our deepest affections and highest praise to something.”
True worship of God is when we love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It’s when we prize God above everything else and put Him first in our hearts.
If we replace God in the above definition with a loved one that we cherish, we can easily think of ways that we prize them in our hearts and show them deep affection:
Good morning texts, goodnight texts, when something happens you think of them first, when you want to make a decision, you think of how it’ll affect them or you ask their advice, at completely random times in your day you think about them and smile and if you’re a good lover, you spend sometimes coming up with ideas on how to show them you love them in extravagant ways and go on to do the extravagant things.
They aren’t physically with you most times, but they are constantly dancing around in your mind, their smile encourages you on a bad day, the thought of seeing them keeps you going when you want to give up on life, gives you the boost to become a better version of yourself and you look forward to the day you can finally make the big memories with them like vacation memories or adventure memories or celebration of wins. You can’t remember how it started, but little by little, all you want to do is share your life with this person in the best way possible.
All of that is worship in the purest and most innocent form, and it is glorifying to God when done in moderation.
However, all of that can be, actually, should be applied to our walk with God. I dare say, if you can affirm that experience relating to a human being but not relating to God, you have been engaging in some form of idol worship.
What I learnt in 2023 is that true worship, that is, Worship as a lifestyle, not just blocks of (good) activity, is in engaging God’s presence and essence at all times.
God’s presence is everywhere
God’s presence pervades all of nature; the bible describes him as filling both heaven and the earth in Jeremiah 23:23-24.
I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there.
There is a manifest presence of God
There are moments when God’s glory shows itself in a bigger or more tangible way. We can experience this during dedicated worship time, when a level of emotional intensity and spiritual sensitivity overwhelms our human senses. We can just feel his closeness almost as if we can touch it, and these moments can be so dramatic that we want to chase the highs. But even when we don’t have the same experience, it doesn’t mean God’s presence has left us.
The trumpeters and singers performed together in unison to praise and give thanks to the LORD. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals, and other instruments, they raised their voices and praised the LORD with these words: “He is good! His faithful love endures forever!” At that moment a thick cloud filled the Temple of the LORD. The priests could not continue their service because of the cloud, for the glorious presence of the LORD filled the Temple of God.
Be aware of his presence
Being aware that God is constantly accessible to us removes the structure of worship that we have constructed in our heads and traditions in a good way because you don’t need to find a prayer closet to be with God, or go to a mountain, or say specific words to unlock his presence; he is just there. We are his living, breathing temples, and he is always in us.
For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
Now you can involve God in every aspect of your day, informally. Imagine you’re walking, and you see something cool, and you’re like, “Wow, God, you make such awesome stuff.” That was a prayer of adoration, or “God abeg,” when you are faced with a hard task; that was a prayer asking for help. We tend to overlook these little things.
And because we don’t consider them as prayers or acts of worship, we tend to think that we aren’t good enough worshippers because we haven’t had time to do the more “deep” things, and we also can’t lean into these little moments consciously and take advantage of them.
Engage with his presence
And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
No matter how intentional you are, except if you’re a full-time pastor, the amount of time you spend praying, reading the Bible, and being with God in a structured worship atmosphere is a maximum of 20% of the time you have, and everything else is taken up by life, so does this mean that we will now ignore God for the 80%? Have secular life and Christian life, lol. That is a scam.
The goal is to be in constant communion and communication with God. Imagine you wake up, and you start your day with
Good morning God, I know you didn’t sleep but thank you for watching me while I slept, slightly stalkerish but you’re the best kind of stalker to have, lol. You’re having your bath and it’s like wow, thank you God for giving us brains, just imagine we were still bathing in rivers and we didn’t have running water? Or we just didn’t bathe full stop? E go bad.
You’re in the car, and you listen to a Christian devotional podcast to get you started, or before you leave while eating something light, you do the YouVersion verse of the day and do a bible plan. At work, you are giving God random commentary, or say “Holy Spirit, I acknowledge your presence. Hope my life is not too boring?”
You drive back home, and maybe you allow yourself to do some other things with God-centered music in the background, but when it’s time to sleep after whatever filled your evening, you come back and reset your mind, like how you plug your phone to the charger knowing and hoping that by the time you wake up in the morning, it will be full.
Let God lull you to sleep with bible sleep meditation, listening to an audio bible, listening to a worship session, or just staying in silence and running through your day with God: What pissed you off? What do you need help with? What did you mess up on? During the weekend when you have time, you can create your structure for deep dives, bible study, prayer group, home fellowship, church, sermons, other things to help you learn about God.
Just like any healthy human relationship, unstructured time spent together through random texts and calls makes up most of the relationship. In fact, the bulk of your expression of love for the people you love is in these “little things,” so in this context, your worship of God is in these unstructured and seemingly insignificant interactions.
We are called to live our worship with our lives. In every aspect of our lives we worship the Lord in Spirit and in Truth. In order for our worship to be alive we need to change what we’ve been doing and make our worship and our lives not about us but about our King, our Lord, our God. A true worshiper will worship in any context. If you’re at home with your family or at work or school, those are perfect environments to worship the Lord. Remember when you worship the Lord, He reveals himself in a mighty way. More than anything, we need the Lord to be revealed in our home, our work, and our school. Live out your worship and let the Lord be glorified in and through your life.
– Except from Living Worship Bible plan
Questions to Journal with God
- What is worship to you?
- What ways have you been putting worship into a box?
- What do you imagine worship as a lifestyle to look like
- How can you make your worship more authentic and continuous?
So this is a call to intimacy, real intimacy and true worship that doesn’t depend on how much free time you have but on how intentional you are about organically incorporating (and prioritizing) God in your busy life.
Don’t exit the pool…
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