
It has come to my attention throughout the years as I've worshiped different places that there are 2 different dimensions to worship. One can have what is called "Pure worship", and one can have what I refer to as "stale worship". Firstly we will address the idea of the meaning of worship and then we will tackle stale and pure worship respectively. As I have come to understand it, the term worship is defined as "A reaction to an encounter with God". This directly correlates worship with God or at least with what we consider to be our "god". Now that we've defined worship let's put some superlatives on it and tackle stale and pure aspects of it. The term stale, we usually associate with a food item like ...potato chips for example. They are great while they are in their environment or fresh into the oxygen. However, once they have spent a while "out in the world" they become s accustomed to where they are...they lose their freshness. Speaking from the sense of corporate (usually musical) worship, stale worship I consider to be those times when we have become soooo accustomed to the world that we get stale...we lose our freshness and our vigor. Our desire and pull to lift high the cross and pour out ourselves to Christ becomes nothing more than conforming to what others around us are doing. We lift our hands cause thats what mama did in church when we were kids and we close our eyes because we want others to feel like we are "in on it" too. If we were to be honest with ourselves...we just get STALE sometimes. Pure worship is the complete opposite. I consider it pure worship obviously when we worship with our everything for no other reason than to glorify Jesus Christ and make his name known like a banner hanging over us. The opposite of the conforming we do in our staleness is to experience 1 on 1 encounters with God as a sort of "spiritual tunnel vision" for lack of a better term. Big Daddy Weave wrote a song I LOVE called Audience of One. What a great concept. Much like you can be in a secluded place and feel like you are being watched from everywhere, you can stand amid thousands and thousands of people and be experiencing "pure worship" with the father, and it will feel like you are simply an audience of one. THAT is what we should be aiming for EVERY time we worship. In the name of the father, son, and holy spirit...AMEN

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