Psalm 100
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship the Lord
with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.Know that the Lord
is God.It is he who made
us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.Enter his gates
with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his
name.For the Lord is
good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all
generations.
So, are you watching the Winter Olympics in Sochi? The
Olympics, especially the winter Olympics, are a phenomenon to me. For 2 1/2
weeks we pay attention to sports we don’t really care about and haven’t watched for four years (since the
last Winter Olympics in Vancouver).
For example, I find myself watching the figure skating
competition. Normally, I wouldn’t
watch figure skating if you threatened to stick knitting needles in my
eyeballs, but during the Olympics I watch. Before I know it I’m talking about how Gracie Gold executes
a perfect “triple toe loop” or
didn’t quite land her “double Lutz” as
if I know what I’m
talking about.
Or maybe we watch an event like “Skeleton”; which looks vaguely like the
sledding we used to do as kids - only on steroids. It’s sledding taken to the level of
complete insanity. These guys jump onto high tech death traps on steel runners
and plunge head-first down a tube of sheer ice, reaching speeds of up to 90
MPH. The winner is the one who goes down the fastest and lives.
Then there’s
something called “Curling,” which is quite
possibly the funniest sport in the world. It’s kind of like human shuffleboard on
ice mixed with sweeping out your garage. It’s the one sport in the whole Olympic
games where every non-athletic person watching can say, “I could do that!”
Along with watching the events, we also learn about the
life-stories of some of the athletes, most of whom we’ve never heard of before.
We’ll
learn about a ski jumper from Kyrgyzstan; or a bobsledder from Latvia; or a
cross country skier from Togo. Yes, Togo, as in, Africa. Togo may be located
almost directly on the equator but there’s a woman who was born in Togo who has lived in the French
Alps most of her life and she exactly half of the entire Togolese Olympic team.
When asked why they have spend most of their lives training
and competing for the chance to be in the Olympics, these athletes will
inevitably say something like, “I was born to do this!”
We all might not be born Olympic athletes, but the Bible
teaches that we are all born worshipers!
The ancient book of Ecclesiastes says:
He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can
fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11
Anthropologists
tell us that of all the creatures on the face of the earth, only human beings
build altars and create objects of worship. I think we can also go so far as to
say that every human being worships something.
One of my
favorite definitions of worship is: “Offering extravagant devotion to someone or something.”
By that
definition, the question is not if we worship, the question is who or
what we worship.
A football fan
might offer extravagant devotion to his or her favorite team. An athlete might
offer extravagant devotion to the gold medal he or she dreams of winning. Or,
on the other hand, we might offer our extravagant devotion to the God who
created us to long for something bigger than ourselves; who made us with an
ache in our hearts that is only satisfied with himself.
As we start our
study on growing in worship, let me just say, “You were made for this!”
Brian Coffey
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