WORSHIP

Worship is "lovemaking" with God. The most common New Testament word for worship - proskuneo - literally means to "step towards to kiss." We can bow and prostrate our selves before God from a distance, but we must be close, intimate, trusting, and vulnerable if we are to step forward into God's loving embrace and receive His kiss of life, His Holy Spirit. Worship, properly speaking, is our response of love to the God Who has reached out in love to us. "It is quite impossible to worship God without loving Him. " writes A.W.Tozer, " and the inward operations of the Holy Spirit will enable us ... to offer Him such a poured-out fullness of love."

In worship we come face-to-face with the living God, beholding Him as He really is, letting our hearts assume their rightful place in response to Him. God desires to reveal Himself to us. When we come before Him believing the "He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him." (Hebrews 11:6), we can expect that He will impress upon our thoughts, feelings, and understanding, by His Spirit, true knowledge of Himself. In this "seeing" or "beholding" of Him. all our self-righteousness, all our pretense, even all our "goodness" is seen for what it really is. We know that He is God, and we are not. Our only response, when we behold Him face-to-face, is to worship Him - giving ourselves over to Him in trust and in surrender to His love.

Worship is our deepest act of surrender. It is meant to be intimate, personal, and all-consuming. In worship, when Spirit touches spirit, God's life is imparted to us, His imprint is left upon us us, and we carry ever more clearly the Spirit-imparted pattern of adopted sons and daughters. Glorifying and praising God, giving Him His worth, is the very best thing for us as human beings. We are made to worship the Almighty God; meant to be transformed through worship into His likeness.

Do you want to be more like Jesus, Who is "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being?" (Hebrews 1:3). Then "fix your thoughts, on Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest Whom we confess" (Hebrews 3:1). We become like that upon which we focus. We begin to be transformed into the likeness of that which gains our attention. "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfector of our faith" (Hebrews 12:2). As we worship God in the freedom the SPirit gives, we reflect the Lord's glory and are being "transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, Who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:17-18).

An extract from - Discipline of the Holy Spirit by Dr. Tan Siang-Yang & Douglas H. Gregg

Blessings - TPWC