Day 10 of the 40 Days of Purpose

“The Heart of Worship”

The heart of worship is surrender, and surrender is so counter to our nature and culture. I have been raised on the stories of heroes being the people who against all odds would never surrender. The Winston Churchills of this world! The last standing at the Alamo. The fighters for the right because they have a dream of something better that keeps them going. The Martin Luther King, Jrs that will fight for the cause, even if it kills them. “Surrender,” is not a word in their vocabulary!

But surrender is the heart of worship. The giving up for Him. Letting Him reign over me, and through me. Letting Him have total and absolute control of my life no mater where it takes me.

In Luke 14, Jesus has several followers, but they find out that the demands of discipleship are more than just tagging along with the latest fad. It had become popular to be one of the curious onlookers of the ministry of Jesus. He turns to them and tells them that being one of his disciples means carrying a cross and dying daily. He tells them being his disciple means giving up the people you love. He tells them that before they start to follow, count the cost, for unless they are willing to give up everything, they cannot be his disciple. Some decided that they could not pay the price and stopped following. They decided to not worship Jesus.

With all the attention given to the elements of contemporary worship, do we have contemporary worshipers? People of our contemporary culture who will give up everything to be a follower, a disciple of Christ? Often our discussion about worship, a discussion about what we like or don’t like, paints the true portrait of our concept of worship – that we are not really willing to pay the price to worship the Lord.

David