9308	Forums / Theology Forum / The Bible Driven Church	on: March 29, 2006, 02:00:37 PM
What is so essential to the christian life is that we must taste of the goodness of God before we can have any hope of having a strong faith. In worship we experience the effects of regeneration. In regeneration we are given new life and so we receive the Holy Spirit, and then we are filled with all the fullness of God. With the Spirit comes the Son and with the Son the Father.  So we have fellowship in the spiritual sense and our faith is exercised as a result of that experience. So we long for worship not as an exercise of preaching or receiving the word only. Our initial longings are for God. We long for the Living God. We pant after God as a dear pants for water. Sometimes in life we lose that most central experience of worship and meeting God and so we lose a sense of who we are. We lose the relish of these spiritual things and then we begin to lose heart and then we are faithless in much of our activities. This deli-ma causes us to become desperate as if we were starving for affection. We become depressed in our disposition and so we must take action as to stirring up these longings. These are dry times and are so mixed with human doubts and imaginations that there needs to be deep cries from the heart for the living God. If we do not ask the question where is my God then we may not understand the importance of just what His presence does as a gracious provision to over come sin in our lives. Many believers go through life not understanding the nature of meeting God in worship. They seldom have supernatural experiences and so they live in a depressed state without knowing it. We must think of meeting God as we do about eating and drinking. Unless we get a sense of the Fathers affection in worship we will lose heart and our faith will be very small. If we find ourselves in this situation we are naturally do pray and plead that we will again go to Gods house and really meet with Him. We must have Him, or we will mourn all our lives until meet Him again.