Let’s Get Excited!
I wrote this for our Church newsletter this month. I updated it a little bit in light of the World Series outcome. I hope it encourages you this week!
Almost everyone knows that I am a pretty big Texas Rangers Fan. It stings a little when I realize that a World Series win for the Rangers was so close! A friend of mine said this and it made me feel a little better — “The next best thing to winning the world series is losing the world series!” I am however proud of the team I root for and I will be forever grateful to the very kind people in our church that bought me and Paula-Beth tickets to last Saturday’s World Series game. If you saw that game, you know it wasn’t their best performance, but that didn’t keep me from cheering on my team! The Rangers scored 7 runs, but the Cardinals scored 16. The sound that erupted when OUR team scored was truly awesome. People got excited to cheer on the Rangers!
We have a lot of sports fans in our church, and I’ve seen this same type of excitement from them for our local football team. There is an excitement when you enter the gates of the stadium or arena. (I got goosebumps when I walked in to the Ballpark last week!) True fans know all the players names, hits, errors, or fouls. We all get excited and praise the work of OUR pitcher, OUR point guard, or OUR quarterback, and we all love talking about their achievements.
Do we get that excited about being in God’s presence? Do we enjoy entering His gates with praise? Do we know all about Him? Do we shout for joy and praise Him for who He is and what He has done? Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t wrong to shout for a team, to support them, and to talk about how great they are. However, we are called to give the same, if not more, devotion and dedication to the Lord as we do for our favorite team. Look at what the psalmist writes in Psalm 100:1-5:
1 Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth! 2 Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into His presence with singing! 3 Know that the LORD, He is God! It is He who made us, and we are His; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.4 Enter His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise! Give thanks to Him; bless His name! 5 For the LORD is good; His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.
In this passage, we can see five ways we are to worship God and four reasons that we worship God.
1. We are to worship God with a joyful noise together. Corporate worship is very important. If we can come together and get excited about our favorite sports team, we can come together and worship together.
2. We we are to worship by serving the Lord. This isn’t just doing things for the church cause we feel like we have to. This is committing to serve and being happy (glad) about it!
3 and 4. We are to worship by coming into His presence singing, and to know or recognize that HE is God. The psalmist doesn’t say “Come into His presence and stand there if you don’t know the song!” The psalmist says, “Sing to the Lord a NEW song!” We eagerly learn new things about our favorite sport team’s stats, but when it comes to learning something new in worship we get a little skiddish. We need to make an effort to sing in HIS presence, and to intimately know HIM above everything else in our lives.
5. We are to worship God by entering His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise! Just as I entered The Ballpark excited and ready for the game last weekend, we need to enter His gates with excitement, ready to give thanks to Him for who He is and what he has done.
The psalmist also tells us four of the reason we are to worship God. (There are countless things we could tell the world why we worship, but the psalmist focuses on these four):
1. We worship Him because He made us, and He guides us like a shepherd guides His sheep.
2. We worship Him because He is a good God and wants what is good in our life.
3. We worship Him because His love is forever. No matter what we do He will love us to the end.
4. We worship Him because His faithfulness will be given to all generations. That means our grandkids, great grandkids, and so on will see Gods faithfulness in their lives.
Those are certainly some great reasons to worship! I hope they will encourage you to get excited as you come to worship as it has encouraged me to come and lead worship.
