Why give up your Sunday morning? [4]

In these posts I have been examining the question, “Why should I give up my Sunday morning to attend church?”
So far I have just been discussing worship – a different experience and more than just about me

Worship is pledging allegiance to God.

God is the great King over all creation. He is sovereign, Lord of lords and King of kings. And we are invited to give him our allegiance.
When we worship God we are re-committing, re-surrendering our lives to him. We are entering the throne room of God and declaring that we are his.

The funny thing about pledging allegiance to a king or nation is that it is not something that you do privately. I have several friends who have recently become Canadian citizens. They go through a public ceremony in order to become a citizen. It is not something that is done behind closed doors with no one watching. In fact all of them are very excited and proud to become citizens of Canada. They invite their friends to this ceremony. They want to it to be as public as possible.
Now I know that becoming a citizen is a one time event and we are talking about a weekly experience. But we need to understand that pledging allegiance is public not private. Within our western world Christianity has become something that is suppose to be private. Something that we are suppose to do in our homes and not really bring into the public areas. But the very nature of worship demands that it have a public aspect to it. Please note I am not denying that we need to worship in private. It is just that an aspect of worship is pledging allegiance to God and that has public dimensions.

Another aspect of pledging allegiance to God is that we are also saying that we will not live for the things of this world. We commit ourselves to be under the rule of God, not under the rule of the world. We dedicate ourselves to pursuing God and his Kingdom, not the goals, dreams, hopes and aspirations of this world. I do not have the time/space to even begin to unpack how this might look in action. Let me just say the direction of our lives will (should) be different than those who don’t follow Jesus. The problem is that we are bombarded, enticed, invited to surrender ourselves to the world and its agenda daily.

For myself I find that I need to constantly and regularly re-commit myself to God and his Kingdom. I have to regularly declare to allegiance to God, otherwise I begin to drift and fall under the rule of the world instead of God.

For these reasons I need to publicly worship weekly.