Last time, I talked about the importance of joy over duty when it comes to worship. However, I don't want to make it seem like duty does not have a place in worship at all.
Worship is about our relationship with God. Like any good relationship, we need to put time and care into nurturing it, even when we don't want to or feel like it.
When I served as an Americorps member for City Year in Washington, D.C., I was working 40-60 hour work weeks. The only time I had to do important things like sleep and exercise was on the weekend, and that was only most weekends. With limited time for myself, I knew that it could be very easy for me to fall off track in my worship, so I made it my weekly duty to attend church. Doing so helped me fulfill a spiritual need my service in City Year could not, mainly furthering my relationship with God.
In his book Living Prayer, Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony Bloom says "When prayer is dry, instead of giving way we should make a wider act of faith and carry on" (90). There are times we may not want to worship, either because we lack the time or because we are struggling in our faith and don't want to be with God right now. Bloom tells us to carry on because if we don't continue building our relationship with God when we don't want to, we won't work on that relationship when we do want to. It helps us to form prayer into a habit. It can even help to make it into a personal duty.
Again, we should never do this at the expense of joy, but making worship into a personal duty can be a tool to help get us through the hard times of our life and faith. It can be a tool to ensure that we are always developing our relationship with God, which is something that should give us joy, and our worship is always the cornerstone for building up that relationship.
Tune in next time as we talk about joy in worship, specifically in music.