A Series on Worship (Part 7) - Fourth Piece to the Biblical Model - Our Spiritual Thermometer

From this then, I see corporate worship as our “spiritual thermometer”. When we come into a corporate service of worship we may think that we are in a good place, that we have been walking in the Spirit, and that we are pleasing God, only to find that when we go to sing with others our heart is far from Him and our spirit is painfully asleep. Or someone around us in the meeting may receive a word from God about our spiritual condition that we were unaware of and speak into an area of our life that we were comfortable with, only to show us that we are living in sin. On the other side, we may have struggled during the week with different things and felt beaten down by Satan, but when we gather together as a body and sing the praises of God, and we feel our hearts turned towards heaven, things can be suddenly put in perspective and we can see that we were struggling because we were fighting the battle and it can encourage us to continue. In this way, corporate worship should be our spiritual thermometer, our hearts, spirits, and minds should be laid bare before us so that we see ourselves as we are, and then our eyes should be turned back to God and who He is, as people speak into our lives, for the edification of the body.