THE SPIRIT IN WORSHIP

Last night, as I was thinking through our Worship Creative Planning Team's agenda for this afternoon's meeting, the Lord kept impressing upon my heart-- more like reminding me of a very fruitful conversation I had with Tim Hughes over lunch a couple of months ago on the importance of the Holy Spirit in our worship. My mind kept racing back to that moment over and over. At 1:15 in the morning, I felt led to walk to my study table and turn on my laptop to specifically read Tim's Blog (which I have not visited in more than a week now. I began reading his July 10 post where he talks about the same issue- the Spirit in worship. Immediately, I sensed that when I open the meeting this afternoon, I should talk about this as part of the opening devotional.

Tim writes,

On 21 August 1911, Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' painting was stolen from the Louvre in France. The Louvre was immediately closed down for an entire week as a mass operation swung into action to hunt down the missing masterpiece. When the museum was finally reopened, thousands of people queued up to see the blank wall space, where the Mona Lisa once hung.

It seems crazy that so many people would pay to essentially see nothing. I guess this can be like our church services without the Holy Spirit. We get caught up with the external things - the songs, the sound, the lighting, how the band look, how people are responding. The danger is we judge a successful time of worship by how great the band played and how intense the experience was. All of this can happen without the Holy Spirit.

We mustn't let that happen...It's a challenge to remember that we must keep getting desperate to see God's Spirit at work. To be surrendered to His lead and obedient to His call. To be passionate in prayer and willing to take risks. Only then will we see true breakthrough in the worshipping life of our churches.



A. W. Tozer once said, “If God took His Holy Spirit out of this world, what the church is doing would go right on and nobody would know the difference.”

On a similar thread, WA Criswell said, "There are many things we do in our churches that does not have the Holy Spirit in it."

Worship is the active response to God the Father through the Son. The worshiper stands in a personal relation of son-ship to God on the basis of adoption in Christ. Praise, prayer, preaching, the celebration of ordinances, confession, and giving are all Christ-centered actions. The focus of the church's worship on the exalted Christ through the Spirit gives new depth to our walk as Spirit-filled disciples. The worship of God through the Son is in and by the Holy Spirit. Fitting and acceptable worship can only be offered by and through the enabling ministry of the Holy Spirit.