Worship in the Ordinary Hour

Romans 12 reframes worship in a way that makes the church doors fall off. Worship is not the hour on Sunday. Worship is the body — your hours, your hands, your appetites, your inbox, your calendar, your tongue — offered up as a living sacrifice. The Sunday hour informs and trains the rest. But it does not contain the rest.

True worship is not loud. It is not necessarily even visible. Most of it happens in the ordinary hour: the kindness shown to the colleague nobody likes, the patience with the child who has asked the same question fifteen times, the prayer murmured while doing the dishes, the slow refusal to rehearse a grudge while driving home.

If your worship has been confined to a stage, expand it back to its biblical size. Let your true and proper worship be the giving away of every minute, every motive, every meal. The hour on Sunday will become richer when it is the punctuation, not the entire sentence.

The pattern is older than we are. The grace is older than the pattern. We come to it not as students at the head of the class but as children at the foot of a long table, where the meal has been ready for a while and the chair has always been waiting for us. Sit. Receive what has already been given. The day will be longer than you think, and the bread will be enough.