Yesterday, Tabernacle of Praise (TOP) and I began a sermon series on worship. For those of you who know us, you’ll remember that worship is one of the five central strategies to building our church. In this series we wish to define worship and share why we believe it has to be one of the critical means of building TOP.

There are many ways to define worship, yet for the purposes of this series, I have chosen to use Luke 10:27 as the foundation of our interpretation.

He answered: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

If you remember the context, a lawyer made this answer to Jesus’ question on what the Law says we have to do to access the kingdom of heaven. In the next verse, Jesus agrees with him. So, if using this to structure our definition, we can say that worship is loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. Yesterday, we began our definition by tackling the soul part of loving God.

How does one love God with his soul? Simply put, I believe the answer lies in a search. The soul is that part of man that thirsts, hungers and longs for things outside of itself. The soul’s hunt for something greater than itself is what I call worship. Worship is searching, looking, seeing.

Now, the Bible is full of verses describing the worshiper’s search for God. In the first part of the series, we used Psalm 63 for our reference. Please read it and you’ll see a man whose passionate pursuit of God will inspire you.

www.biblegateway.com

What are you looking for? What you look for every day?