Making Sense of Corporate Worship

I bumbled through a class last Wednesday night about Worship...at times it felt like I was on some sort of talking treadmill: speaking lots of words & getting nowhere. My brothers & sisters at the Fairfax church somehow heard my heart in all of that, but I long for the day when I can truly articulate & teach on the subject of worship (inexhaustible and undefinable as it is.) The Bible tells me to eagerly desire the greater gifts, so here I am, eagerly desiring the gift of teaching.

Today I came across some well-connected, well-put-together words by Harold M. Best from his book Unceasing Worship. I think this paragraph is spot on concerning life lived in worship to God and how that life fuels the Sunday morning gathering.

"Corporate worship is the necessary and sacramental widening of the everyday, all-the-day moment-by-moment walk of faith, of belief and of stewardship. Put as simply as possible, we do not go to synagogue, temple, cathedral, basilica, or church to worship. We go to these good places to continue our worship, but now corporately (that is, as a body, in a doubled communion with the Lord and with each other). We go to these places to give synergized expression to what we should have been doing all week long: praying, singing, listening, offering to the Lord, speaking, being silent, confessing, growing, and being broken. To think of church time as worship time without connecting it to the seven-day-a-week liturgy of being living sacrifices is to miss the entire biblical point of worship and to concoct an artificial parenthesis for an hour or so once a week or so. Corporate worship is irrelevant, however beautiful its protocols may be and however nourishing its sacraments are, unless it participates in the seamless life of continuous worship, and unless it is seen as a symptom of how we live and act all week long."

YES! That is it! That's what I was trying to say! :) Thank you Dr. Best. God spoke to me today through your words, written last year. Isn't God awesome.