Day 13: Worship

The Day 15 Chapter is about how to worship God. There are four characteristics of how to worship:

1. Accurately: worship the God that is in the bible, not a version of God that you made up yourself.
2. Authentically: Your emotions should be engaged when you worship God and the best style of worship is the one that suits that background and personality God gave you.
   
3. Thoughtfully: Don't just repeat cliches, use your own words and be specific, ie tell God what you are praising him for
4. Practically: Offer yourself as a living scarifice through, for example, thanksgiving, praise, humility, repentance, offerings of money, prayer, serving others, and sharing with those in need.

Its great to learn that I don't have to enjoy those awful hymns that accompany church services, but I think I need to start reading the bible to learn what God is really like.

---------------------
P.S. The body corporate today agreed to refund my $120. Yeah! My prayer was answered.

Day 8: Purpose 1 of 5 - Pleasure

When I first learnt about the book The Purpose Driven Life I assumed that it was about finding your individual purpose for your life. But as the first line says - its not about you. Instead, the book is about the five purposes which God created for everyone.

In the Day 8 chapter, we get onto the first purpose. We learn that God created people for his "pleasure". (I really think Rick Warren could have employed a better choice of words.)

We give pleasure to God by worshiping him. Worship is more than going to church, worship is something we are supposed to do continuously. This can be done by:
- praising God
- dedicating any activity you are doing to God
- carrying out a conversation with God in your head

The first suggesting, praising God, reminded me of the practice of being grateful. Many people keep gratitude journals and one of the websites I read (www.astrologyzone.com) has a message board where people write daily posts on what they are grateful for (amongst other things). Many people say there is a psychological benefit to keeping gratitude journals, so I did a google search (of course, because the internet knows all) to see if I could find any studies.

Turns out two blokes at the University of California are doing a study on this very topic (see their website here: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons) and have found a range of evidence that being grateful improves your life eg:

• "In an experimental comparison, those who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events" and
• "Grateful people report higher levels of positive emotions, life satisfaction, vitality, optimism and lower levels of depression and stress. The disposition toward gratitude appears to enhance pleasant feeling states more than it diminishes unpleasant emotions. Grateful people do not deny or ignore the negative aspects of life."
  

To test this for myself I thought I would do some sort of wellness test now and at the end of the 40 days. I did a google search for "wellness test" and found the following site:

http://www.nationalwellness.org/testwell/index.htm

I took the test which asks you to assess various aspects of your life and got an overall score of 772, which falls into the range of Excellent. I will do the test again at the end of the 40 days and see if it improves.

In relation to the second and third suggestions:

• I think dedicating any activity you are doing to God will give it more significance and motivate you to do it better, just because that's what I do when I'm doing anything for somebody else.
  
• As our minds never stop thinking anyway, we might as well think of it as a conversation with God.
  

Day 7: Its all about God

In the Day 7 chapter we read the corollary to Day 1's "Its not about you":

"It's all for Him".

The universe was made to show the glory of God.

I find christianity full of jargon - glory, worship, witness. What do these words mean?

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines glory as:
- exalted renown, honourable fame
- subject for boasting, special distinction, ornament, pride
- adoring praise and thanksgiving

and glorious as:
- possessing glory, illustrious
- conferring glory, honourable
- splendid, magnificent, intensely delightful

So its a way of saying God is really good. The universe was made by God to show that God is really good.

Rick Warren says "All sin, at its root, is failing to give God glory. It is loving anything else more than God. ... In different ways we have all lived for our own glory, not God's."

If we accept that God created the universe (regardless of whether He did it by creation or evolution - which is a whole other debate that just doesn't interest me) then its not a hard ask to see God as glorious. Certainly I don't know how to create a universe.

So the point of our lives is to bring glory to God, we can do this by:
- fulfilling our purpose on earth - God made you to be you
- worshiping God - apparently everything you do can be an act of worship
- loving others
- becoming like Jesus
- serving others with our gifts - note this says "with our gifts", so I'm thinking doing something you hate doesn't qualify (unless its a test?)
- telling others about God (think this qualifies)

Back to the definitions:

worship:
- worthiness, merit, recognition give or due to these, honour and respect
- reverant homage or service paid to God
- adoration or devotion comparable to this felt or shown towards person or principle
- adore as devine, pay religious homage to
- idolise, regard with adoration

witness:
- testimony, evidence, confirmation
(really don't see how this applies to God)