Worship the Lord your God and only the Lord your God. Serve him with absolute single-heartedness. [Luke 4:8 (MSG)]
In The Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 100 begins with the words, “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands; serve the Lord with gladness, and come before his presence with a song.” As a girl, I frequently read those words in my prayer book before worship began. I thought of them again last Sunday. Following the recessional, the visiting pastor exclaimed, “Our worship has ended, let our service begin!” During worship, I’d made a joyful noise and come before the Lord with a song. The minister’s words reminded me that now was the time to serve Him with gladness. The hour or so spent in worship on Sundays is just a small part of a Christian’s life. God blesses us with another 167 hours in the week. How will we choose to serve Him in that time?
Heavenly Father, thank you for the reminder that when our worship ends, the real work of furthering your Kingdom begins. May we not just hear your word, but comprehend it. May we not just say your word, but live it. Let your word turn into our works and cause our faith to turn into action. May we always serve you with gladness.
The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable. [Kevin Max]
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. [Rabindranath Tagore]
An illustration of a man stooped over with an enormous sack on his back adorned the cover of the church program. The man had a troubled look on his face as if thinking, “I’ve got this all this, now what I am supposed to do with it?” The words “Life does not consist in the abundance of possessions,” were superimposed over the picture.
In Leviticus, Moses laid out God’s law regarding sacrifices—only a perfect animal was acceptable. One thousand years later, in the time of Malachi, the priests allowed people to offer blind, crippled, diseased and even stolen animals as offerings. The Israelites were offering God the animals that were worthless or someone else’s animal entirely. Since, by definition, a sacrifice requires the giving up of something of great value to us, those certainly didn’t qualify as sacrifices. The Israelites, like a dishonest salesperson who substitutes an inferior product for a good one, were actually cheating God.
In the many television tributes to the recently deceased actor Gene Wilder, a scene from the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory frequently has been aired. In it, Willy tells Charlie not to forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted. When the boy asks what that was, Wonka replies, “He lived happily ever after!”
Second Chronicles tells of Uzziah, a man who became king of Judah at the age of sixteen and reigned for fifty-two years. A successful and renowned warrior, he defeated both Philistines and Arabs and expanded Judah’s borders. Uzziah was also a great builder; during his reign, cisterns were dug, towers fortified, forts built in the wilderness, and catapult-like machines that could sling stones and arrows were built on Jerusalem’s walls. With God’s help and guidance, Uzziah became famous and powerful.
Devotions of the Heart 