Dedication
As I type this, I am sitting in a telco’s central office in Chevak, Alaska, surrounded by the hum of lots of computers and routers and switches and radios keeping this remote village on the west coast of Alaska in contact with the rest of the world. A CO in an isolated Alaskan village is a good place to meditate on the Word of God, so this is a good thing 
Just this morning, however, I had the good fortune to sit in on a service at the Bethel Evangelical Covenant Church, where a friend of mine, Hugh Forbes, is pastor. Hugh preached a lesson out of Mark on “the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod”. This lead me to read a little more from Mark today, and I was struck by a sentence in Mark 8:1,2:
Since they had nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples to Him and said, “I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat.”
This is such a short passage, and it is easily overlooked by the miracle Jesus performs by turning seven loaves of bread and a few small fish into enough food to feed four thousand men, leaving seven baskets of food left over (Mark 8:5-9). However, although we typically focus on Jesus’ miracle rather than the sentence in verses 1 and 2, these two verses say something that I find very important: these four thousand had been with Jesus for three days, with nothing to eat!
I need to tread — or rather type — very carefully here, because I do not want to browbeat anyone. However, it is very easy to fall into the trap of hectic, over-regulated modern life on Sunday mornings. Our worship service needs to start with three fast songs then transition to two slow songs before the sermon. The sermon needs to last for just about an hour — no less, because then the pastor isn’t doing his job, and no more, because we’ve got to meet family and loved ones at the Sunday All-You-Can-Eat-Brunch-Buffet as soon as the church service is over. We’ll stay and chat with friends for maybe half an hour, and then it’s time to get back to our lives. The really dedicated ones might return for the evening service in a couple of hours (yeah, the finger is pointing at me here; I’ve just been attending Sunday mornings for quite a while).
I recently attended a six day class for worship leaders that began at 8:30 every morning and ran until 11:00 every night. On the seventh day, the first day of no more classes, I was bumming because I didn’t get to go back to the class that day. That is the drive that the four thousand with Jesus in Mark felt, and that is the drive that we need to bring back to our church/worship services. Jesus gave everything He had for us: He gave His life on a cross, He suffered beatings and abuse in our place and He became separated from God when He took the shame for our sins upon Himself. In light of what Jesus gave, is it really so hard to give one day a week to worship Him? Not just an hour and a half in the morning, but an entire 24 hour period.
I’ve got to tell you, some of the coolest moments in worship that I’ve experienced have been in the half hour to an hour *after* the Sunday morning service ends, after everyone else had left and I was packing up my guitar and amp. In those moments, when it was just God and me, and I wouldn’t play songs from the set list, but would just play the songs on my heart, those were some of the most honest, most real worship times I’ve had. When I took a few minutes extra to say, “Hey, God…thanks.”
When the music fades,
And all is swept away,
And I simply come…
(Matt Redman, “The Heart of Worship”)
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