Worship in Word

Earlier this week, I wrote about listening to worship music and being drawn into worship. I love music – almost all kinds – and the reverent strains of worship will minister to me many times when other types of music sounds like fingernails screeching across hundreds of blackboards.

One can also worship by reading various Scriptures out loud. Many chapters in Psalms are ones of praise and worship. Check out Psalm 138, or Psalm 150. Read Psalm 145 before you fall asleep tonight. Share Psalm 34 with your family at the dinner table. Read Psalm 103:3 to someone who is ill.

My favorite Psalm is Psalm 139. This Psalm has guided me through some dark times, comforted me in some sad times and reassured me many times.

The Psalmist, David, writes in this Psalm about God’s perfect knowledge of man. He says that God knows everything about us. He knows when we lie down and when we rise. He knows what we think and what we are going to say even before we say it. (That should make us stop and think before we blab the first thing that comes to mind!) God is intimately acquainted with everything about us.

David goes on to say that there is nowhere we can go to escape God’s presence. If we are in heaven, God is there; if we are in hell, God is there; if we are in the sky or in the sea, God is there.

Then we come to the verses that should minister to us all, verses 13-16:

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother's womb.
I thank you, High God—you're breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I'd even lived one day. (The Message)

This section amazes me! God created me and you! We did not begin life as an accident, a blob of cells, a fetus with no viability of life. God’s mighty hands, full of strength and gentleness, formed our bodies, starting on the inside with the very first cell. As the verses above say, He knew how we were made from nothing into something because He made us and He watched us grow from the very moment we were conceived until we were born. He planned every day of our lives before we were ever born and He continues to watch over us.

Not only does He watch over us, but David continues this Psalm by speaking of God’s thoughts toward us:

17How precious and weighty also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
18If I could count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awoke, [could I count to the end] I would still be with You. (Amplified)

Think about every place on earth that has sand. Now think about how many grains of sand that would be. He thinks of us more often than the number of grains of sand in the entire world.

Is it any wonder that our hearts long for a personal, dare I say intimate, relationship with Him?