....of the church service of course. Do you thrive off of seeing friendly faces? Warm handshakes and hugs? Being in a group of like-minded people? The teaching? What about worship?
For me, its the latter of that list. While I get excited and long each day for those other pieces, I truly long for corporate worship each and every Sunday.
Psalm 122 is a great example of what corporate worship is like. The first verse describes my reaction to a "t." When they say "Let's go to the house of God," my heart lept for joy. Worshipping together with a group, not only helps turn my focus to where it should always be, on God the Father and Creator, it also helps give me a small taste of what eternity will look like for me when the multitudes are before Him worshipping.
So what about now? My pet peeve in church is during the worship set to look around and to see people talking and chatting away, catching up on what their week was like. Corporate worship is something that we reserve for only special gatherings. Often only once or twice a week. There's notreason that we hold ourselves to gathering only these few times except it's a burden that we've placed on ourselves. So for me, to come to church and expect to "get something out of it" yet to talk away like you're in a coffee shop is a sad tragedy to me. Corporate worship is special and it's a special privilege for us to be able to take part.
Eugen Peterson explains it this way: "There is simply no place where these can be done as well as in worship. If we stay at home by ourselves and read the Bible, we are going to miss a lot, for our reading will be unconsciously conditioned by our culture.
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