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Kingdom Living Worshiping in Spirit and Truth

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The topic I am writing about this week in my column is something that has been on my heart and mind very strong for the last few weeks. In fact, I have done a devotional and a short sermon around this topic and the scriptures I am going to be sharing.

Because it is a topic that I feel God has impressed heavily upon me as of late, I wanted to share those same thoughts with my readers. This week is about worshipping in Spirit and in truth.

The crux of being a believer, a Christian, a follower of Christ, is faith. That faith is in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation and the inherent processes of justification, sanctification, and glorification. But faith, is something that is required not just for these processes, it is the integral ingredient needed for us to trust God in all things, to love God in all things and to obey God in all things.

So often as human beings we find ourselves in a position of trying to reconcile our emotions and feelings with our faith. When we have times of feeling like God has forgotten us and forsaken us, it is in these times that we must persevere past our emotions and circumstances and believe the Word of God above all other things.

King David wrote about feeling this way and even Jesus Christ in His humanity struggled with feeling such things. I think sometimes we forget that although Jesus was fully God, He was also fully human, with emotions, feelings, desires similar to what all human beings experience. Despite that, faith persevered and won the day.

Consider the following passages of scripture:

Psalm 22:1-5 - NKJV

22 My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, And from the words of My groaning?

2  O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear; And in the night season, and am not silent.

3  But You are holy, Enthroned in the praises of Israel.

4  Our fathers trusted in You; They trusted, and You delivered them.

5  They cried to You, and were delivered; They trusted in You, and were not ashamed.

This entire psalm is about the suffering of the Messiah. If you know anything about the Bible and the synoptic gospels within, the phrase David prophetically writes in this psalm is spoken by Jesus Christ on the cross.

This is where I want to bring in my thought of worshipping in Spirit and in truth. As believers, having been made alive in Christ with His Spirit inside of us, we are a new creation. When we engage God we do so in the Spirit because the Spirit of God lives in us. We don’t have to go to a certain mountain or temple, in fact we physically are the temple of God.

Our desire to worship and even our level of participation and engagement in worship can be minimized because of our lack of emotional connection. There are times when we certainly don’t feel like singing, praying, or attending corporate worship in our church body. This is when we find we will worship with faith alone.

This is the time when worshipping in truth by faith prevails in spite of what we feel. We elevate the Word of God and the promises of God above our feelings and our situation and we worship and praise because we BELIEVE God. In doing so, we know from verse 3 of Psalms 22 that God’s presence intimately takes residence in our praises.

In the presence of our oppression and circumstances of life that are troubling, the Lord spreads a feast and says to us “Come and dine.” We are refreshed in His presence as we worship and praise Him.

I want you to understand something, worship does not have to be void of emotion, joy, happiness, or physically unexpressive. The bible is full of examples of people worshipping God with their faith and their emotions such as David who danced before the Ark of the Lord and Miriam, the sister of Moses, who danced, played the tambourine, and sang a song after the defeat of the Egyptians and crossing the Red Sea. After all, God created us with senses to understand and take in the world around us.

He created us with a mind full of reasoning, intellect, and complex emotions to articulate and convey ourselves to others and to experience and ascertain the perspectives of others, including God. What I want you to take away however, is that worship is not contingent upon emotion. It is contingent upon faith and believing that God is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do in His word.

God is always faithful, He is omnipresent and has promised to never leave nor forsake us. So, the next time you are struggling with your emotions or life circumstances and you don’t “feel” God’s presence or it seems that God has abandoned you, lift up your face, begin to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth by faith. There is a huge reward and blessing of revelation to be had concerning

the faithfulness of God when you do.



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