He Qi Gallery

Worship is where God touches your heart. It is not the ONLY place God does that -- but it is a SPECIAL place where God acts in ways on your behalf. In Worship, God works to bring special gifts to you -- gifts of forgiveness, encouragement, spiritual strength and clarity, that are yours regardless of your past. If Worship is a sentence, God is the verb, and we are the direct object.

Worship here at Light of the Glades, then, emphasizes God's work among us. We are blessed by Christ's promises in Baptism and the Lord's Supper. We are inspired by the written Word of God. We take advantage of His promise "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am, right alongside" (Matthew 18:20) and bring Him our prayers.

Worship, then, does not depend on us -- it doesn't matter what we look like (so there is no dress code), or how much money we make (we don't pass a plate), or how religious we are (the power of worship is in GOD'S promise and activity). Worship is God's chance to take struggling, confused, doubting, sinful, even indifferent people, and share His heart with them, without precondition. God, after all, fulfilled all His conditions already, as Jesus on the cross.

To top

God invites us all, then, to meet him as we are as we gather around what theologians love to call the "Means of Grace" -- and in the midst of a world which either ignores us, or seeks to use us, or deals with us on a basis of "reward and punishment" (stressful, even if we are currently on the "reward" side of the scale), we can ALL use a dose of grace! So what do we find? God FOR us -- God WITH us -- God committed TO us -- God STRENGTHENING us - and in this safe place, we find a perspective for our own personal journey of discovery that is rooted in God's love, fleshed out (quite literally) for us in Christ.

Now of course, that sort of gift and that sort of God places worship on a completely different plane. It is no longer "duty" -- no longer an "obligation" - no longer a moral mandate. It is gift, it is opportunity, it is comfort, it is healing, it is recharging batteries, it is renewal of the soul.. There is no need to be guilted there, because guilt has been banished by Christ, and Christ is the heart of worship.

Certainly we will have a response to an experience like this. There is music, there are praises, there is the result of God's work on the heart. But no wonder that we can "Sing a joyful noise to the Lord" (Psalm 98) -- whatever we have to offer to God is acceptable by faith! And we want to give everyone an opportunity to use their gifts as they respond to the work of God in their hearts! But we always understand that worship is not primarily about what we offer to God -- that comes along, because of what God first offers to us! And we at Light of the Glades invite you to join us as we experience those gifts of God every week on Sunday, at 10 a.m.

Phone Number 239-641-3980
Email lightoftheglades@yahoo.com
Copyright 2009 Light of the Glades Church