I need to stop going to bed on Saturday nights without knowing what I'm going to blog about the following morning. Also, I should have showered last night. There's a song our children sing in church, "Saturday is a special day, it's the day we get ready for Sunday." We did that by washing the car and shopping yesterday, but I didn't make any personal preparations myself. I need to do better at that. I also need to blog about something really quickly so I can take a shower. I don't want to be so lame that I relate preparing for church to preparing for the Second Coming. That's not creative at all. How about this: Why should we "get ready" for church? Really, what's so special about it that we need to make special preparations the day before so we can be "ready" when it comes on Sunday? What do we need to be ready for?
Revelation
On Sundays, we hear talks, testimonies and lessons. If the Spirit of God is in the words of the speakers, then their words could carry messages almost directly from God into our hearts. If we're listening, those messages can sink into our hearts, answer our questions, calm our fears, and change our lives for the better. These are life-altering blessings, but we need to prepare our hearts to receive them.
Commitment
In Sacramento Meeting, we take the Sacrament to testify that we are willing to always remember our Savior and to keep His commandments. In return for this commitment, God promises us that we may always have His Spirit (a member of the Godhead) to be with us as a constant companion. It's a strong promise, and we should prepare ourselves to take it seriously.
Instruction
Many of the messages we hear in church are calls to repentance. We're told that we need to pray more, have family prayer and scripture study more, serve more, worship more, do our Home and Visiting Teaching more. It can be overwhelming. But somewhere in the midst of everything we're told that we need to do more, there will be a handful of things, or maybe even only one, that God wants you, specifically you, right now, to focus on. I know a good quote to share, but I can't find it and I'm short on time.
In short, church is a special event in which we can connect and communicate with God better than we normally do during the week. Why is that? I would guess that it's because of many things at church that invite the Spirit. We sing hymns, we pray, we bear testimonies. And perhaps part of our personal receptivity to the Spirit we can feel at church is affected by our personal readiness for church. When I'm clean-shaven, freshly showered, and nicely dressed, I feel more ready to feel the Spirit than when I'm not. I had better go take care of that (assuming there's still time). But really, some of it I should have taken care of on Saturday, when I had more time to do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment