For the next ten weeks we will be looking at our core values in the Sunday morning worship service. The only way they will be the core values of our church is if they are core values to us as individuals. So I, along with the other staff members, will be blogging each week about how to take the core value that was preached on Sunday and apply it to everyday life. Now, there will be many ways to apply these to everyday life, so we will just give a couple examples each week.
Core Value #1: Lifestyle Worship
On most Mondays through Fridays there is a little worship time that goes on in my car. Jenna and I leave the house around 7:30am and I drop her off at school. Each morning on the way to school I ask her who we are going to pray for. She will typically give me the name of a student in her class, and we may or may not talk about what we are going to pray for. We will then pray for them, we may pray for her teacher, a family member, or someone else. Most days we also pray for those that don’t have a lot of friends, and that Jenna would be a friend to them. This is not a long period of time, maybe a minute, but I hope it is communicating a lot to Jenna.
I hope it is communicating:
- We can worship God anywhere
- We can worship God in short spurts.
- By praying to God, we are putting our reliance on Him and not ourselves.
- We should care about other people.
Whether it is on the way to school, work, or Wal-Mart, we all have these opportune moments in the car when we can worship God. It could be through prayer (my red dot is on my steering wheel*), taking a Scripture writing, it on a post-it note, putting it the car where you can see it and meditate on it, or through a song that you listen to and focus on the words.
Worship really ought to become part of our life, not just something we do on Sundays or every morning or evening. What if we miss out on great times of worship because we regulate it to a quiet time we do at a set time and place each day, or something we go to on Sunday mornings? How can you expand your ideas on worship? How can you lead your family, your kids, or others in a practical form of worship?
* The red dot is something that was given out on a Sunday we focused on prayer. We were encouraged to place it somewhere we would see it on a regular basis, and use it as a reminder to pray.
Ben Schnipper 