What do you know about Worship?

23_04_20 -Ep.309 - Run With Horses Podcast - It’s all about Jesus

 

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Last week we talked about how Jesus is our focus. As a disciple, you become like the one you follow and we follow Jesus. Today we consider how we worship Jesus as we follow Him.

 

Welcome to Run With Horses! My name is Norman and my goal is to help you thrive as a follower of Jesus. The spiritual life is both incredibly simple and potentially the most difficult part of your life. God invites you to live intentionally and on His mission. It’s very cool that we can do that together!

 

We are working on what it might look like to live out my working definition of church by going through the definition a word at a time. Today we turn to worship.

 

MY WORKING DEFINITION OF CHURCH

A CHURCH is a group of followers of Jesus who worship Him in spirit and truth, humbly offering their lives as living sacrifices, together living out the mission of Jesus as His witnesses to the world, by sharing the gospel and making disciples through teaching obedience to His commands as they edify and equip others to join them on His mission.

 

Worship – Merriam-Webster

1: to honor or show reverence for as a divine being or supernatural power

2: to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion

 

****https://wheatmyermusic.com/on-christian-worship-old-testament-vocabulary/

The two most common Old Testament Hebrew words commonly translated as “worship” are shachah and abad. Vine’s Expository Dictionary defines shachah as meaning “to worship, prostrate oneself, bow down.” It occurs more than 170 times in the OT and is the principle Hebrew word translated into English as “worship.”

To bow is to express complete surrender to the mercy of the second person to be used as they willed.

 

Vine’s defines abad as meaning “to serve, cultivate, enslave, work.” It is very common throughout the OT (nearly 300 instances) but is only occasionally translated as “worship” (about 15 times). Rather, its most frequent English translation is “to serve” where it refers to all manner of ordinary labor.

 

To conclude, when we read the word “worship” in the Old Testament we should always see within it the essence of bowing, an aroma of surrender and service, of saying, “here I am, use me as you will.” To borrow a line from Issac Watts, when the Old Testament says worship, it is saying, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

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shachah

Gen 18:2 -

 

Gen 22:5 -

abad

Gen 2:15 -

 

Deut. 10:12-13 -

 

Key Points from OT worship – It involves HUMILITY and SERVICE.

 

NT worship

 

John 4: 19-24 - 1

 

1 Peter 1:4-5 -

 

Romans 12: 1-2 -

12:1 - latreia: service, sacred service - Usage: service rendered to God, perhaps simply: worship

 

Hebrews 13: 15-16 -

Let’s go back to our definition of the church for a minute.

 

MY WORKING DEFINITION OF CHURCH

A CHURCH is a group of followers of Jesus who worship Him in spirit and truth, humbly offering their lives as living sacrifices, together living out the mission of Jesus as His witnesses to the world, by sharing the gospel and making disciples through teaching obedience to His commands as they edify and equip others to join them on His mission.

 

Last week I said that We follow Jesus, because He is God and Savior and because He is doing something. Jesus offers us a part in His mission as His witnesses. There is no greater work we can give our lives to. We follow Jesus because outside of Him our lives have no purpose. Once you truly understand who Jesus is and what He offers you, there is no choice to be made.

 

We follow Jesus because of Who He IS and what He is doing. And that is also the reason we worship Him. He IS God.

 

What is your response to Jesus? Will you follow