A CALL TO DIE BOOK - Day 21

DAY 21: true worship
His honesty was a step toward forgiveness and healing. When you sing
praises to God, allow him to show you any sin you haven’t dealt with
yet, and thank him for his forgiveness.
2. Let the songs be the cry of your heart.
When you sing to Jesus, “You are my everything,” you may realize that
he doesn’t have your whole heart. But use the song to tell him that you
want him to be your everything. Make the song your prayer.
3. Let the song be a benchmark of integrity.
Think about the words and the message they express. If they don’t
communicate your heart, and if you don’t want to use the song as a
prayer for God to change you, be honest about it. Don’t sing. I hope
some of us will have the courage to close our mouths and sit down
when a song doesn’t match our heart’s desire. When those around
you are singing, “Lord, you are more precious than silver,” be honest
with God and with yourself about the condition of your heart. If you
want your heart to change, sing passionately. If you’d rather value
other things more than Jesus, don’t sing. Worship in spirit and truth. Be
authentic in Your heart. God can handle your honesty, and being real
with him may be a turning point in your walk of faith.
4. Let the song be translated into action.
When a song talks about crying out to God, take some time to be
alone with God to pray. When a song encourages you to serve God
by helping others, take steps to help someone you know. When a
song describes the love Christians have for one another, choose
to listen to someone you’ve tried to avoid, or offer a kind word to
someone who isn’t so cool. If you’ve come back from a retreat or
some other terrific spiritual experience, it’s easy to drift back into the
“same old same old” patterns of life. Don’t let that happen. Let your
life be consumed with “walking worship.” Let the beauty and power
of the songs you sing change how you treat people. Don’t go back
and show the church “how committed” you are by demanding that
they change from their hymnals to new contemporary worship books.
Don’t demonstrate your “passion for Jesus” by standing up during
one of the songs on Sunday morning and raising your hands-and
demanding that others do it, too. Instead, find some elderly widow
in the church and cut her grass for the summer, or rake her yard all
winter. For no pay. Do it as an act of worship to God, and don’t tell
anybody in the world about it. If you call attention to yourself, you’re
doing it for your own glory, not God’s.Sometimes it is wrong to do the
right thing. That happens when we do the right thing for the wrong
reason. Serving God for selfish reasons (to get people to notice how
spiritual we are) is sin, not worship. Don’t do it! In one of his letters to
Timothy Paul described a list of sins. The last one in the list was people
who are “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God-having a form of
godliness but denying its power.
123