Living Worship: Bearing God's Word into the World

**The following was written for Christmas Eve, but life got busy and it didn't get posted! I believe it is still just as appropriate on New Year's Eve though and pray that we all can live into 2019 bearing Christ into the world through our own actions and love.**

It is Christmas Eve and a very appropriate day to consider how we take our “living worship” into the world as we watch and wait with baited breath. The Christ child is coming!

It is an incredible thing to consider that this baby whom we await will completely change the world. It is an incredible thing to consider that the way we choose to live and worship Christ can also completely change the world.

We have focused on gathering in community and praising God together. We have spent more time with God’s Word, discerning what to do with it. We have seen the way our lives have reoriented toward God and others in response to this new way. Now, we reorient our focus just one last time, away from how our own lives are affected and towards the way we can reach out to other lives.

This isn’t the time to “save” or convert our neighbors. It is the time to include all that we have prayed for, read about, discerned, and questioned in our living worship, in our relationships with all who we meet. This is the hard part. This is the part that separates “Sunday morning Christians” from Christians.

Christ came to live with us, walk with us, eat with us, listen to us, and teach us. Christ came so that we might know God’s love and grace in a very personal manner. This is the same love and grace which we read about throughout the entirety of Scripture but it becomes something tangible on the night when Emmanuel arrives, when God is with us in a truly powerful way. This love and grace is that which the disciples marveled at, Paul wrote about, and church councils convened over for centuries (and still do). This is the love and grace which empowers us to take on every single day.

As we stare at that star which shines the brightest for the Christ child born tonight and as we join in with the choirs of angels, we are now called to break out of our comfort zone. We are called to live in a challenging and terrifying way. We are now facing a life of compassion, justice, mercy, and love which we cannot ever walk away from if we are truly living worship.

No present under a tree can ever compare with the life we will now live as we fully embrace and give ourselves over to living worship in every moment of our everyday life. This isn’t just what makes for a great ministry or great relationships with our neighbors, this is what will ultimately usher in the Kingdom of God which this baby will teach us so much about.

And we go forth in this new way of life,
as we go forth living our worship every moment of every day –

May God’s love surround you,
may Christ’s teachings guide you,
and may the light of the Holy Spirit shine on whatever path you take,
today and always.
Amen.