Worship – Page 13

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” (ESV – Read the chapter)

This is a powerful call to righteousness and justice in its own right, but its context makes it even more powerful. Take a minute to read again what comes just before this. God essentially tells the people to stop worshiping Him. Well, not exactly that, but close enough as far as they were concerned.

For the people of Israel, the worship of God was found in the rituals. Having rituals be a part of our worship isn’t a bad thing. In fact, where those rituals help focus our hearts and minds on the God to whom we are directing our attention they can be a very good thing. But, it is easy to begin thinking that the rituals are valuable in and of themselves. As a point of fact, they’re not. Read the rest…

This Sunday we continued our conversation about the church and how it was designed to work. With the help of a summary of the church Luke offers in Acts 2, we saw that the church was designed to rest on four pillars. Keep reading to see what those were and what we need to do about them.

While there have been very large churches at various times and in various places throughout the history of the church, the megachurch movement in this country began in the 1980s. One of the first churches that was a part of this movement and in many ways came to define it, was Willow Creek Community Church. Willow Creek was founded by Bill Hybels. It started as a youth ministry meeting in an old theater in 1975 in Chicago, but under Hybels’ visionary leadership it quickly became the largest church in the country. Today it averages 26,000 people a weekend. It’s main sanctuary seats just over 7,000 people. Read the rest…

Tag: Worship

Morning Musings: Isaiah 1:16-17

Being the Church