Have you ever walked into a worship service and felt like you needed a little time to warm up to what was happening? Like you needed a little time to reshuffle your thoughts and get in the right frame of mind to worship?
As a worship leader, it's been obvious to me for a long time that large portions of our congregations struggle with this to some degree or another. Some people get acclimated during the first song, others take a little longer, and many people never get there at all. As a congregant, I know exactly how the struggle feels: it's as if you've just stepped out of normal life into a room where people are encountering the supernatural and you need a minute to get in the zone.
On the surface this seems like a fairly normal thing that we might deal with in other areas of life. It's not unlike stepping into a concert hall or a sporting arena and needing a little time to get a feel for what's happening. On a deeper level though, what if it's more like we're suddenly trying to do something that isn't really consistent with who we've been up until that moment?
In the book of Romans, Paul makes worship sound more like an all-inclusive-life thing rather than just a singing-a-few-songs-once-in-awhile thing. (I'm passionate about God's people joining their voices in musical worship, so don't get the wrong idea.) At the beginning of chapter 12 Paul writes: 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.
What? Offer my body as a living sacrifice?! That sounds a lot different than just singing along with a good looking singer who has a nice voice and a catchy new tune.
What does it even mean to worship by offering my body as a living sacrifice? It sounds ritualistic at best and a little morbid at worst, but before you get too freaked out let me assure you that we've all been engaging in this type of all-inclusive worship for years. (It's just that most of the time it hasn't been directed towards the God of the universe.) To be clear, when I speak of worship I'm referencing something like this definition from Merriam-Webster: "to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion // a celebrity worshipped by her fans." What do I give my time, attention, money, and devotion to? Whatever it is, that's what I'm worshipping. That being said, the simplified answer to the question: "what does it mean to offer my body as a living sacrifice (as an act of worship)" is that the worship of God is something that should work its way into every square inch of my life and affect every aspect of how I live. (Side note: I bet churches would have a much shorter waiting list for worship team auditions if their people really understood what it meant to have "a heart for worship".)
Let's expand this thought a bit. If you can, imagine your life as a house. In this house you might have various rooms for various activities: a workplace room, a tv/movie room, a golf room, a music (listening) room, an out-with-the-girls (or guys) room, a road warrior room, a softball league room, a Bible study room, and maybe even a worship room. Probably you've learned slightly different behaviors for each of the different rooms, but that's no big deal - that's why you have separate rooms in the first place, right? ((Do you see where this is going yet?)) A lot of times when we walk into a worship gathering what's happening inside of us is that we're scurrying from our whatever room into our worship room. Thus the time lag we experience as we try to get warmed up, in the right frame of mind, and ready to worship.
But what if you just lived in your worship room? What if you made it your goal as a Christian to methodically absorb all the other rooms in your house into your worship room so that you were eventually living in a one room house? The obvious problem for most of us is that we currently have behaviors in our lives that would be really out of place in a worship room. But isn't that the point of becoming more like Jesus, or did we really think that becoming more like Him only applied to some parts of our lives and not to others?
What if the new litmus test for all of my life activities was to simply ask myself if such-and-such behavior would feel out of place in my worship room? It's amazing how clarifying that thought has proved to be in my own life.
As our worship room expands we'll find ourselves more and more ready to worship at the drop of a hat. Our whole life will become a life of worship, and when we walk into a gathering where musical worship is happening we'll be ready to join right in because we were already worshipping on the way.