August 26, 2019
Matthew 15:8-9
“‘These people honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
    their teachings are merely human rules.’”
New International Version (NIV)
What is worship?  I’m not exactly sure when it happened.  Some time in the last thirty years when nobody was looking the word worship became a synonym for singing.  One good friend confided in me about her church, “The worship is great.  I also like the teaching.”  As one who loves congregational singing, I hold the music we use to worship in high esteem, but I never see it as the same thing.

Matthew’s story of Jesus reminds us It is possible to worship in vain.  When the Pharisees and teachers accosted Jesus because his disciples didn’t do the ritual hand washing, he answered them by questioning their elevation of tradition over the commands of God.  Apparently they took money with which they could have helped their parents and “devoted” it to God as worship.  So Jesus took them straight to Isaiah.  They paid lip-service to worship, but their hearts were far from God.  They neglected the internal for the sake of the external.  This did not serve them well. 

Worship is not only about what comes out of our mouths but more about what is in our hearts.  I like Eugene Peterson’s definition of worship:  “The strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.  Worship is the time and place that we assign for deliberate attentiveness to God – not because he’s confined to time and place but because our self-importance is so insidiously relentless that if we don’t deliberately interrupt ourselves regularly, we have no chance of attending to him at all at other times and in other places.”
Pray with me:    
Father, worthy of worship, to whom angels sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” forgive us for trying to confine worship to a particular activity.  Help us today to give you both our mind’s attention and our heart’s affection.  Show us how to worship you better.  Let us attend to you, our King, we pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.     
This year our Every Day with Jesus readings will follow The Bible Project Read Scripture Plan.  Copies of this reading plan are available at Tallowood Baptist Church, or download 
the app at readscripture.org.  Read through the Bible with us in 2019!
Joyfully, 
Duane 
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