VIRTUES OF THE CROSS 3C – (UNDERSTANDING WORSHIP II)

Every word that denotes worship begins with a posture of the body, your body speaks – this is called body language. If you attend an interview and express a wrong body language, you will fail the interview.  A lot of people fail at interviews because of a wrong body language, how much more your worship of our heavenly Father where there is heavenly protocol. The twenty four elders in the book of Revelations are always bowing down before God. Bowing down is part of it. For many, it is infra dig for them to kneel down before God. You cannot kneel down before God and you want to stand before men! It only means that you don’t understand God.

Psa. 63:1-3, “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary. Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee”.

Your body speaks in the presence of God. You don’t teach a worshipper to lift up his hands. Hand lifting is an expression of yieldedness or surrender. You cannot be a true worshipper if you are self-willed. One of the reasons why a lot of people struggle in their walk with God is because they are too self-willed to be led; they have their own agenda which they must follow. They do not wish to surrender anything.

Worship starts from yielding your will to the will of God. The cross is the greatest display of worship. It was at the cross of Christ that the will of God crossed with the will of man and Jesus surrendered one hundred percent to the will of the Father in order to fulfill his purpose. The cross is the emblem of worship. If you remove the cross, you cannot produce worshippers. If you look critically at the definition of worship in the Church today, you will understand why the Church stopped raising worshippers. It is so easy to raise workers. There are many bishops today who are not worshippers. God is not looking for workers, God is looking for those who will worship him in spirit and in truth. 

The only acceptable worship before God is spiritual worship because God is a spirit. If you really know and love God, you will not even know when you start rolling on the floor before him in worship. The problem of man is self. Those who are full of self can never be true worshippers. The only place where you can crucify the flesh is at the cross, so if you pervert the cross, you cannot produce true worshippers. If you cannot produce true worshippers, you will only produce workers.

If you teach people to give before you make worshippers out of them, you will produce idolaters. If you teach people intercession before making worshippers out of them, you will produce ‘wickedcessors’. They will end up killing everybody and there will be nobody left to evangelize. This is one of the reasons why the Church is no longer producing the kind of disciples that were being produced in the seventies anymore. The Church has left the message of the cross that should produce well-grounded disciples. If you drop the cross, you can never be a disciple (Luke:9:23). Drop the cross, you produce any other thing but worshippers. 

Pray –

• Everlasting and most merciful Father, I adore and praise your mighty name. Grant me the grace to worship you in spirit and in truth. I ask you to make me all you want me to be in Christ Jesus and help me to be addicted to your presence in Jesus’ name. Amen.

TO BE CONTINUED……….