(This is a great blog article on Wholelifeworship written by my good friend and colleague, Scott Higa. Scott is the Youth Pastor at my church and he writes a wonderful weekday blog – thechristiannerd.com, which has great insights into the Christian life from current pop/tech/movie/nerd culture perspective).

I really love going to church. I suppose that’s good since I’m a pastor, but I’m sure there are some pastors who have no desire to sit through a worship service. I’m not one of those people. I may complain about having to wake up early every Sunday, but once I’m at church I love it. I especially love it when I can simply sit in service without any responsibilities. No preaching. No announcements. No anything.

I had one of those experiences yesterday where I just got to sit in a worship service with Alycia. I didn’t have to talk into a microphone and I was able to sit in a row other than the front row. It was a wonderful time, in large part due to the sermon and the new series we started at our church this past weekend.

Our new series is called More Than a Song. I knew this sermon series was coming and I even knew what the sermon itself was going to be all about. Even with all that foreknowledge, though, I was still surprised by the sermon. I was surprised by the simplicity of the message that worship isn’t just something we do in church or through music. The entirety of our lives can be worship to God. We can worship God, like The Police said, with every breath we take and every move we make. We just need to view our lives in that light.

It’s easier to view worship as an event contained within a specific time and place. When viewed like that, worship doesn’t take too much of a commitment. When we relegate worship to an hour and a half on Sundays and perhaps another hour or two throughout the week, it’s easy to feel like we are living sacrificially for God. However, in Romans 12, Paul tells us that we should be living sacrifices. If we are breathing then we should be a sacrifice to God. Sometimes we’d much rather be a Sunday morning sacrifice, a Wednesday night prayer meeting sacrifice or a Thursday morning men’s group sacrifice. Again, being that kind of sacrifice takes much less commitment, but it also disconnects us from our purpose in life.

God created us to worship him in all the we do. The universe constantly sings God’s praise and we were created to sing right along with it. Unlike a tree, star or dolphin, we have the choice of whether or not we want to worship God. We also have the choice of how often and with how much fervor we worship God. If we choose to live lives of worship, constantly praising God in all that we do, we will start to see him more clearly. We’ll see how he’s working in our lives more often and we’ll better see him for who he truly is. Instead of only focusing on praising God for an hour a week, we’ll be focused on bringing God praise in all that we do, through the good times and the bad.

And that kind of focus won’t only put us more in line with how we were created, it will also transform us more into the people we were created to be.

What helps you be a living sacrifice?