WORSHIP
November 04, 2021
Prayer: God this is your classroom. Help me to commit a special time to be alone with You here each day to pray. Amen
Scripture: …they bowed down and worshipped Him. Matthew 2:11 NIV
Today I worship God in His classroom. I acknowledge He is my first love and leader and I do this by communicating with Him while at school. I set aside a specific time of ten to twenty minutes each day to PRAY.
While alone in His classroom I Praise and thank Him for ALL the circumstances of the job – especially the most challenging. I Repent and tell Him mistakes that I have made and the mistakes those around me are making. I Ask Him for forgiveness and for the opposite of these things. I ask for the needs of parents, students and staff. I ask God for my own needs. I ask God questions. Then I Yield. I am still before Him.
Some days I spend all my God time in silence. I wait on the Lord and listen for His voice. I hear His still small voice within me. I hear His voice through the scriptures and devotionals I read during this time with Him. Sometimes He speaks to me when I meet with the other Christian teachers on campus for encouragement. Sometimes I hear Him speaking through the students. I have a classroom journal where I write down what He tells me.
One morning at school I recorded what God told me, “Dance with Me. There are three steps: be still, listen and obey. This dance is the purest form of worship.”
Worshipping, staying in communication with God, is necessary in my professional life perhaps even more than in my personal life. It is at school where I face some of the greatest challenges and the greatest godlessness in others. I cannot separate my life into secular and sacred compartments as if they were different class periods. All of my life is sacred and needs to be under God’s authority. My relationship with the Lord is not something I can tuck and hide away like a jack-in-the-box eight to ten hours a day while I’m at work and then turn a crank and pop Him up when I get home or on Sundays. God and I both want our love relationship to last twenty-four hours a day. If our love is expressed any less than this, then we are both unfulfilled.
As I worship in the classroom, I affirm that God is in control of ALL things, which includes me, parents, students, staff members, administrators, school board members, and state officials. I affirm the classroom where I serve is not “my” classroom. It is “His” classroom. I affirm that I am in God’s presence each and every day, every hour, every minute, and every second. God’s love and presence knows no boundaries. I cannot be where God is not.
For years I asked God to sit patiently outside the classroom in the hallway and wait until I finished my work. Now I daily keep the door open and invite Him in to take control and do His work. I patiently wait for Him to enter, knowing how long He waited outside the classroom for me. As He enters, I turn the class over to Him. The students and I are humbled and awed. We are blessed by His wisdom, power, and creativity to free us to unselfishly give, love, and learn in ways we have never seen, heard about, or ever imagined.
No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. I Corinthians 2:9 NLT
Reflection: How do I define worship? Do I maintain a discipline of prayer where I work? Why or why not? Getting Real: Ask God what He wants you to do to begin or continue to maintain a close(r) relationship with Him at school. Write down what He tells you in a classroom journal. Do what He tells you to do.
Copyright Don Clark. To connect with the author, email [email protected]
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