A Devotion from Campbell Morgan

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.

—Psalm 96:9

Worship consists in the finding of my own life and the yielding of it wholly to God for the fulfillment of his purpose. That is worship!

You say, “Would you tell us to find our lives? Didn’t Jesus say we must lose them?” Yes, “whoever finds his life will lose it,” but he did not finish there: “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39), not another life, not a new life, not a new order of life—not an angel’s life, for instance, but his or her own life. The Cross is necessary, restraint is necessary, sacrifice is necessary, self-denial is necessary, but these things are all preliminary.

And so if the Cross is absolutely necessary, and it is—your cross, my cross, my individual dying to the ambitions of selfish desire, all that is necessary—but beyond it, life. What life? My life. The new creation is but the finding of the meaning of and the fulfillment of the purposes of the first creation. “Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.” Discover his law, answer his law, walk in the way of his appointing. Let him who made you lead out all the facts of your life to the fulfillment of his purpose, and then your whole life is worship.

This [church] service is but a pause in which in word and attitude we give expression to life’s inner song. And if there is no such inner song, there is no worship here. The outward acts are the least important parts of our worship. If I have not been worshiping God for the last six days, I cannot worship him this morning. If there has been no song through my life to God, I am not prepared to sing his praise. The worship of the sanctuary is wholly meaningless and valueless except as it is preceded by and prepared for by the worship of the life.

And it is in the service of a life, not specific acts done as apart from the life, not because I teach in Sunday school or preach here, that I worship. I may preach here today and never worship. But because my life is found in his law, is answering his call, responsive to his provision and arrangement, so, almost without knowing it, my life has become a song, a praise, an anthem. So I worship! I join the angels and all nature in worship when I become what God intends I should be.

And so I pray that when the service is over, and Sunday has passed, we may know that in the shop, in the home and marketplace, in all the toil of the commonplaces, we can worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.