Last Sunday’s morning service was led by Mrs Carolyn Lawrence, one of our circuit local preachers, wife of our minister, Mark, and a recent Vice- President of the Methodist Conference with the theme “What is Worship?” Our steward Keith Harrison gave the warm welcome and spoke of our church receiving a card from His Majesty King Charles kindly acknowledging a recent ‘get well’ card the church sent to him at Buckingham Palace. “O worship the Lord in the beauty of Holiness, bow down before him, his glory proclaim” was the call to worship and opening hymn to the music of Neil and Jill Barnett on the organ and keyboard. We recited alternate verses of Psalm 95, a psalm of praise by King David.
Carolyn led our prayers of adoration and confession and we had two bible readings, read by Neil and Jill Barnett respectively. The first was from John, chapter four telling of the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well where Jesus accepted a drink of water from the woman and he told her the water he gave her is life-giving. And the second reading tells of life in God’s service.
Our prayers for others ranged far and wide in this troubled world of ours but we remembered those known to us locally and in need of prayer. In her sermon Carolyn asked the question “What is Worship?” Sometimes we think only of the hours of worship in church when we sing our hymns and say our prayers, “True, worship means worshipping a deity and only one is worthy of worship which is God himself”. Our worship should be centred on God and not centred on ourselves. “True worship centres on all of our lives emphasised by three things” said Carolyn; everything that I am, for God is interested in every part of our personalities and we should offer all that we have and are to God; everything we do, and as we do many things each week, each should be done to God’s glory; everywhere we go, we should shine bright for God. All this means that our whole life should be an act of worship of God.
We closed with a prayer and sang our final hymn of old “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine O what a foretaste of glory divine!” to conclude a meaningful act of worship.