Sunday, September 6, 2015

A worshipping life

WE have to be rescued from the hostaged idea, now made a
dominant world culture, that worship is strictly an intimate, private
matter between a person and his God, or that it is an optional thing.

            And if it happens to have some external manifestations,
then the mainstream view is that it should largely be confined and
restricted to Church or temple services, expressed in formulaic
prayers, chants, rituals, incense, kneeling and bowing, etc.

            That is wrong. While it is true that worship involves
these things due to its liturgical nature, we should also realize that
it actually is first of all an attitude arising from an indisputable
universal need of man

            As creature of God, man needs to give worship to God his
Creator and Father. That is to say, since he has been made in God’s
image and likeness, and elevated to be a child of his, he cannot but
unite his life with the life of God. This happens through grace that
needs the cooperation of man.

            Worship expresses our irrenunciable need for God and
defines how our relationship with him should be. We are nothing
without him. God is everything to us. We just cannot marginalize him
in our life, let alone ignore and deny him. As such, worship has to
characterize all our life, all of life’s aspects, in fact, all its
moments.

            Therefore, our life, even if spent most of the time in the
unavoidable mundane affairs of man, has to be a life of worship. We
need to learn how to link everything in our life—our work, concerns,
ambitions, joys and sorrows, our projects and all circumstances of our
life—to the dynamism of our need to worship God.

            Our problem is that we have divided our life at least into
two--one part for God and the other part for us, and for us alone.
This flies in the face of the fundamental truth that our life, though
having many aspects and developing in several stages, is only one.
That unity should always be protected, reinforced and defended.

            Because of this unfortunate division, we can not avoid
fragmenting our life further, such that we not only end up alienating
ourselves from God, which is quite obvious, but also alienating
ourselves from our own selves, a more subtle consequence.

            We lose the taste for God. We tend to think only of
ourselves and to distance ourselves from the others. In the end, we
worship ourselves instead of God, which is an absurd situation.

            We have to develop a lifestyle of worship, such that
whatever we are doing, whether we are working or playing, etc., we do
everything with God as the beginning, the end and the means. We should
sharpen our awareness that everything is done because of God.

            We have to find fresh reasons for this, so that we can
always feel the urge to worship God through the very things we do, no
matter how mundane or secular they are. God is always there. He waits
for us there. He wants us to deal with these things with him and for
him.

            Scripture is full of references to this truth. “Whether
you eat or drink, or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of
God.” (1 Cor 10,31) And again, “Let no man glory in men…for all things
are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” (1 Cor 3,20)

            The task at hand is how to acquire and develop this
awareness of our duty to give everything, or at least to relate
everything to God. This effort will not be a drag to our human
activities.

            It will rather orient and track all our activities
properly, so that they really reach their proper goal and possess the
proper character, instead of just drifting anywhere.

            We have to realize that God is everywhere, and as a Father
and our Creator, he always intervenes in our life, full of love and
concern. There’s actually no moment when he is not with us, because
even in our state of sin, he will always look at us with great concern
and unleash his plan of recovering us.

            God is never indifferent to us, whatever state and
circumstance we may find ourselves in. Thus, we should learn to enter
into an abiding relationship with him. What we can always do is to
praise him, to thank him for everything, to ask for forgiveness for
our faults and sins that we cannot seem to avoid, and to ask for help
always.

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