Somewhere along the way, I went from being a child in the worship assembly to worshipping in the assembly. It was a learning process. The first step to learning how to worship is being in a worship assembly. I had my mother to thank for that, but being in the room where people are worshipping is not yet worship.
My first step was participation in singing. I learned to follow along in the songbook, and then, I began to sing as well. Songbooks have a learning curve to them. The person opening a songbook for the first time may need some help in being oriented to it. I had some advantages in that I had learned to read music. It made it easier. If you don’t read music, the easiest beginning point is to sing along with the melody. Many people can eventually learn a part by ear. In time, I tried to think about what I was singing. What did it mean?
How do you participate in a sermon? You listen, obviously. But my own experience suggests that’s not always easy to do. I remember as a teenager being very, very sleepy in some sermons. One Sunday it hit me. I liked the preacher. The bits I was hearing were meaningful. I realized the problem was I had stayed up until 1 a.m. (I suspect that the total cure for staying up too late is adulthood.) But I became more aware of my part in the sermon event.
Sermons also have a learning curve. When you first begin to worship, you may not know where books of the Bible are. That makes it initially difficult to find readings. A lack of Bible knowledge may make some things harder to follow. If we deal with the Bible in too simple of a way, the danger is the church will be biblically illiterate. That is one of the issues of our time. Hopefully, lessons can be accessible, but still challenge us to grow. I try to give outlines with the scriptures we will look at on it, so someone could always look up these passages again privately. The good news is that as we work at this, we become better at finding Bible references, and our knowledge of the Bible grows.
During a sermon, I want to have my Bible open. I like to have some means of making a note if I want. I take occasional notes, but most importantly, I’ve learned to mentally follow the lesson. As we grow in our knowledge of the Bible and our experience in worship, we grow in our ability to meaningfully and actively listen.
Worship is a learned experience. It needs our participation. We must be mentally active and not passive. It is something that we grow in our ability to worship and our appreciation of worship.
while today 