Up With Worship!

We have just posted a new sermon called Up With Worship! Here’s an excerpt:

There is a tendency today to be very hypercritical about worship. We tend to evaluate everything. We come with a critical mentality. We come shopping for a church, looking for this or that. I remember when I was a first-year seminary student. I had just gotten married a few days before starting seminary. For the whole first year in Dallas, we didn’t settle in a church. We went church hopping week after week after week. Because I was in seminary studying the word of God all week, I didn’t feel any need to go to church on Sunday. I felt I was in church all week long. Bad thought, but that was the way I felt. So I would go from church to church, taking Marlene with me. Marlene was working to help put me through school. I had this terrible practice that whenever we went to a church, I would be hypercritical of the preacher and his sermon. I would be critical of the choir, the organ, the piano, the way they decorated the sanctuary, how ugly the bulletin was. It got so bad that the service would end, we would get in the car, and before we had left the church parking lot, I had started cutting up and dissecting the church service. Finally, after about four or five months of that, my sweet bride sat me down and counseled with me about the matter. She is very powerful when she counsels with people. When she counseled with me, I felt led of the Spirit to stop that for the sake of greater things in my life.