Blog Posts

Corporate Discipline #2: Worship

God is actively seeking worshipers. Jesus declares, “The true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him” (John 4:23).

Scripture is filled with examples of God’s efforts to initiate, restore, and maintain fellowship with His children. God is like the father of the prodigal who upon seeing his son a long way off, rushed to welcome him home. Worship is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father.

The words of the chorus, “Set my spirit free that I may worship Thee,” reveal the basis of worship.

Singing, praying, praising all may lead to worship, but worship is more than any of them. Our spirit must be ignited by the divine fire.

Click here for more from Richard Foster on Worship

Andrew Murray’s With Christ in the School of Prayer

When I think of the practice of Confession (see this month’s focus here), my mind goes to the “ACTS” model for prayer (Adoration; Confession; Thanksgiving; and Supplication).  Of course, a key part of our prayer life is Confession.

On October 28, 1895, Andrew Murray said:

As long as we look on prayer chiefly as the means of maintaining our own Christian life, we shall not know fully what it is meant to be. But when we learn to regard it as the highest part of the work entrusted to us, the root and strength of all other work, we shall see that there is nothing that we so need to study and practice, as the art of praying aright.

The truth that has come to me with wonderful clearness as I studied the teaching of Jesus on prayer. It is this: that the Father waits to hear every prayer of faith, to give us whatsoever we will, and whatsoever we ask in Jesus’ name. We have become so accustomed to limit the wonderful love and the large promises of our God, that we cannot read the simplest and clearest statements of our Lord without the qualifying clauses by which we guard and expound them.

We need to learn more from Jesus Christ about how to pray.  May our fears vanish as we see Jesus, living ever to pray, living in us to pray, and standing surety for our prayer-life.

Click here for more from Andrew Murray on Prayer