As I shared in an earlier blog, my prayer for 2019 is expressed simply in this song:
Day by day, dear Lord of Thee
Three things I pray:
To see Thee more clearly,
To love Thee more dearly,
To follow Thee more nearly,
Day by day.
I will try to expound on what these three phrases mean to me in three different blogs. The first is –
To see Thee more clearly:
It’s a brand new year – 2019.
I find that my heartfelt prayer for this year is summarized by a song adapted from a prayer of St. Richard of Chicester. His prayer went thus:
Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits thou hast given me,
for all the pains and insults thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,
may I know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly, day by day.
Amen.
Some of the words of this prayer were adapted for the song ‘Day by Day’ which words form my prayer for 2019:
To a lot of people, ‘praise’ and ‘worship’ mean the same thing. In reality, though, they are not the same thing. So, while I will address both why we praise and why we worship, this article is on the issue of praise.
I guess we should start from what it means to praise.
Dictionary definition:
– to express approval or admiration of; commend; extol;
– to offer grateful homage to (God or a deity), as in words or song.
We praise people for things they do, their abilities, their person (character, behaviour, looks), etc. We praise them directly (“You’re such a kind person!”) or indirectly, to a third party (“She’s such a kind person!”). Why? Simply because we truly admire something about them and can’t help talking about it. We don’t have any ulterior motive and if we did, it would gravitate towards flattery, not praise.
Why should we praise God?
We live in a day when we build doctrines around experiences rather than around the truth of God’s word. Somebody testifies about an experience they had and their experience becomes ‘gospel’. A popular one going around now is that because after giving God some expression of worship, a miracle occurred or an answer to prayer came, worship is now a tool to get a miracle or an answer to prayer. This particular issue will be addressed in another blog but the principle is what I am highlighting here.
In the same vein, because miracles have occurred after some folks took the communion, the communion has now become a key to receiving a miracle or an answer to prayer. At the other extreme, the communion is just another religious rite that is performed in church. The question, though, is who instituted the communion and why?
If you’re a member of a church, particularly in Lagos, most likely you have been encouraged to go out in groups at some point to speak to people and give them tracts or flyers. In some churches, you might have even been encouraged to speak to people on your own at work or in your neighbourhood. While this sounds commendable at first glance and we might come away from such evangelism efforts beating our chest, let us examine our motives to see if we should actually be beating our chests.
After sharing the post asking the question, ‘Why do we attend church?’, I realized that I can’t rush off to the next question. These days, we are seeing movies having not just a sequel but also a prequel. Well, this post is more like a prequel to the first one, as I would like to go even deeper into the motivation for attending church.
So what are the fundamental reasons for attending church?
Last week, I introduced a series – the ‘Why Series’ – that I will be sharing. If you haven’t read the introductory blog, please read it here. My hope is that this series will cause us to question things we have done as routine without really evaluating why we do them to ensure we are pleasing God in all our doing.
Our question this week is: Why do we attend church?
As many as call themselves Christians attend church at least on Sunday while some attend at least one other day a week. Why? I have come up with some reasons some of us have for attending church:
When we are born, we come into the world without preconceived ideas on how things are done. We are born into a family which has its own way of doing things – its own culture, as it were. Automatically, we imbibe this culture and we do things a particular way because ‘this is how we have always done it’. For instance, I grew up with the family eating meals together at the dining table. Now, as an adult in her own home, we eat at the dining table because that is what is normal to me (and fortunately, to my husband as well). In some homes, teeth are brushed first thing in the morning while in others, they are brushed after breakfast. A husband and wife from these two backgrounds can fight for years about which is the right way because we all feel the way we were brought up must be the right way.
I got a new perspective of the story of the prodigal son this morning. A lot of times, the things we read in the bible seem distant from us and we don’t always know how they apply to our present day lives. Well, here’s a present day understanding of this parable found in Luke 15:11-32.
As Christians, we have a certain hope that is meant to keep us motivated to run the race set before us and that hope is Heaven and all that comes with transiting from time as we know it into eternity – the hope of resurrection from the dead , being completely transformed into Christ’s likeness, relating with God face-to-face, rewards, crowns, final freedom from the stresses and pains of life on Earth, etc.
Last night, during a phone conversation with a dear friend, we touched on the topic of Christians and secular music. As the call ended and I thought over the matter, a thought came to mind:
“I would rather my children listened to secular music from which they themselves can pick out the blatant contradictions to the truth we believe, than for them to listen to ‘gospel’ music that forms a mindset in the listener about God and about Christianity that is wrong.”
INPUT = OUTPUT
It has become common knowledge that we are a product of what we put into ourselves, whether in the physical realm (our bodies) or what we refer to as the ‘soulish’ realm (our minds).
Our Bodies:
What we feed our bodies produces what we see in our bodies and our state of physical health.