Perhaps one of the most well-known verses in the Bible about worship is Romans 12:1:
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
I’m thinking about worship as a lifestyle a lot lately, and have been meditating on this verse. It clearly talks about worship as a way of life, as the Message version brings out even more clearly:
“Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.”
This past week, an awful lot of work has gone on at church to sort out the problem with the drains. I doubt that the people who have sweated in the sunshine (why is the weather always good when you have hard manual labour to do?!) to dig out the old drains and put in new ones have thought of this work as ‘worship’, but I would contend that that is precisely what their work has been. They have offered their ordinary ‘going-to-work’ life to God to help sort out a very practical problem. They have not stinted on hard work or shunned doing what is, if we’re honest, not a particularly nice job. Dave’s appalling pun about ‘are you just going through the motions?’ was the least of their worries, as the photos show! But in offering themselves, in giving up their time and in doing the sheer hard work that was necessary to solve the problem, they have given true and proper worship to God.
Digging out to get to the problem:
Finding the blockage:
New piping
Filling in yet more layers:
