Spirit-led Meetings: Keeping Our Priorities Straight

This is Part 3 of my comments in regard to this article by David Walters. (Read Part 1 and Part 2).

Keeping Our Priorities Straight

When we come together as a church to worship God, we need to remember why we are doing so. If we forget our purpose for meeting, we can become focused on other good things while failing to achieve the most important things.

David Walters describes occasions where people do not hear clearly from God in the meeting, or the various contributions do not coalesce into a coordinated message.

"If we felt the presence of God wasn't really there, we would close the meeting and acknowledge that we missed God. We would have a coffee."

This suggests to me that the focus of that meeting has subtly shifted from being on God to being on the worshippers. If the worshippers don't experience God in a certain way (i.e. we somehow "miss" him), then there is no point in continuing the meeting. But what if God was actually enjoying the meeting?

There will always be occasions when we don't hear God's Spirit as clearly as we would like to, or times when some folks don't share their contributions out of fear or self-doubt. The result may be a meeting where there is no clear theme being heard from God. But what if God wanted to bring 3 or 4 themes that day? What if there were so many urgent issues happening in the church that particular week that God did not want to bring just one coordinated message? Maybe everyone was hearing God's Spirit correctly after all.

Worship Is Primarily An Opportunity For Us To Bless God.
Our primary purpose in a worship meeting should be to bring our worship offerings to God. We bring our songs of praise, prayers of thanks, our money, and our talents. We want to express in a public way how great God really is.

Hearing from God's Spirit is something excellent to pursue, and we should always desire to experience his presence, but that is not our primary reason for gathering to worship. We do not come to worship God for our benefit, but for his. If we primarily focus on receiving something from God in our meetings, our focus has subtly shifted to ourselves.

The great thing about our loving God is that he often blesses us, and speaks to us, and encourages us when we bring our worship to him, but let's not make "us" our main reason for coming together as a church. Let's allow God to have that privilege.

"Success" in a worship meeting (if we could measure such a thing) should be based on what offerings we bring to God, and not on what we receive from him.