Presuppositions

This past Wednesday, I had an interesting conversation with a sister in the Lord. I was explaining to her what a difficult time we'd had with the kids during the church the previous Sunday. I told her all three of the littles had to be taken out and disciplined at one point or another and that one of them had spent the majority of the service with Matt in the van until that child's tantrum subsided.

Her response was, "So you're not getting anything out of the service, are you?" I was a little taken aback. I bumbled about a bit and tried to explain to her that Matt and I are trying to train our children to sit through worship. I wanted to ask her if her parents got anything out of worship when they were training her to sit through church services, but I didn't.

Webster's 1828 dictionary defines worship like this: "The act of paying divine honors to the Supreme Being; or the reverence and homage paid to Him in religious exercises, consisting in adoration, confession, prayer, thanksgiving and the like."

This definition tells me that worship really has nothing to do with me, or "what I'm getting out of it." Worship is about giving the One True Holy God the honor that is due Him. It's not about me getting my feel good warm fuzzies for the week, it's about praising God for who He is. If the Holy Spirit touches my heart in some way during the service, I consider it an undeserved blessing.

Secondly, Matt and I take the training of our children in how to worship God to be of extreme importance--so much so that we weekly swallow our pride and deal with the inappropriate behaviors of our children during church. It can be very humbling at times, especially when one of the littles squeals (or screams) about a perceived injustice by another child right during the Pastor's prayer or sermon. (Let's be frank, it seems like that's the only time they scream.) But we persevere, knowing that someday our small children will be able to sit through church without incident as our three older children now do. And sometimes the thought that someday they'll be facing the same challenges with their own children during worship is quite comforting :)