Worship as a State of Being

Two days ago I posted a YouTube video of a young woman singing Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. As I listened to the hymn, I was reminded that the Triune God alone is the source of all blessing. When the words “prone to wander from the God I love” were sung, I knew only too well it described me. And yet, God’s mercy is “never ceasing.”

Sometimes the words of a hymn break through our everydayness, driving home our condition, as well as our redemption, and re-awakening us to absurdly marvelous truths.

In this, I don’t worship God enough. I don't incorporate it into daily life. So when I came across this video, that’s what I did, right then and there. But not only that, I prayed for a continuing attitude of worship; an ongoing joy of living in the knowledge of God, lest my worship end with the last musical note.

To worship God is to have everything else pale in comparison. It is to see Him and His works alone as worthy. Worship, like prayer, can, and ideally must, become a way of living this Christian life. We needn’t wait for the congregation. We needn’t wait for the choir or praise band. We needn’t wait for Sunday. And we especially needn’t wait for emotion.

Worship is more a state of being than an act, a state of, as the hymn puts it, having our hearts tuned to His grace and sealed for His courts above. Worship, indeed, is allowing God’s “goodness, like a fetter” to bind our wandering hearts to Him.

copyright Barb Harwood

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Come thou fount of every blessing

Tune my heart to sing thy grace

Streams of mercy never ceasing

Call for songs of loudest praise

Teach me some melodious sonnet

Sung by flaming tongues above

I'll praise the mount, I'm fixed upon it

Mount of thy redeeming love

Here I raise my Ebenezer

Hither by thy help I come

And I hope by thy good pleasure

Safely to arrive at home

Jesus sought me when a stranger

Wondering from the fold of God

He, to rescue me from danger

Interposed His precious blood

O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!

Let thy goodness like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee

Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love

Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.” Robert Robinson, 1758

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” John 4: 23-24