11: BELIEVE - How Do I Honor God in the Way He Deserves?

Welcome, Church Fam!

This week on The Dig we will...

D - Deepen our understanding on this week's BELIEVE Key Idea: I worship God for who he is and what he has done for me.

I - Ignite our curiosity towards next week's Key Question: How do I grow by communicating with God?

G - Grow as fruitful, God-glorifying disciples in our time of discussion and learning together!

Scripture References:

• Psalm 95
• Hebrew 4:12
• 1 Corinthians 12:4-6
• Exodus 32:4
• John 4:23-24

Resources & Links:

• BELIEVE, Randy Frazee 
• Misplaced Worship - Biblehub

Transcript

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Welcome to the Dig, Church Family. This podcast will serve as a way for the church and the home to connect outside of the church building, providing parents and spiritual families with a resource to connect what we learned this past week to our everyday lives and prepare our family for what we'll be learning next week. As always, when we dig, we're deepening our understanding, igniting our curiosity, and growing as fruit-producing, God-glorifying disciples. During this season of the dig, we'll be digging into our learning from the Believe series by Randy Frazy. Believe is our church family's focus for 2026. Like a lot of our episodes, each time we're together, we'll spend some time recapping or deepening our understanding of what we learned this past Sunday during our Sunday school hour and during our worship services. Then I'll share some things for you to think about as a parent or spiritual parent to help your household warm up to next week's belief, practice, or virtue from the Believe series. Like you'll hear today, I'll be pausing within the podcast, giving you a chance to pause where you're listening and reflect in journal on your own or talk about your learning as a family. When this episode comes out, we'll be celebrating the Lent season. Lent is a 40-day window of time that starts on Ash Wednesday and leads the whole way up to Easter. It's a time for Christians to prepare their hearts for the time of remembering Jesus' death on the cross and the celebration of his resurrected life. Oftentimes, people give things up during Lent, sacrificing comforts to focus on Jesus. As a church family, we're challenging ourselves to take up a different spiritual practice each week of Lent. So instead of giving up, we're taking up intentional challenges, attitudes, and actions during each week of Lent. These taking up prompts will connect to each week's believe key idea too. This week's key believe question asks, How do I honor God in the way he deserves? Our key believe verse for this week comes from Psalm 95, one through two, which says, Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. So, like every other week, we can answer our key believe question with our key verse and our key believe idea, which says, I worship God for who he is and what he has done for me. In case you missed it in our last episode, our church family is transitioning from the key believe ideas that help us grow to think like Jesus towards the key believe ideas that help us grow to act like Jesus. You might remember that our very first episode in this season talks about the key belief of God's sovereignty. It all starts and ends with him. So it makes sense that our first key believe practice would be worship. When we worship, we move the amazing truths about God from just concepts in our heads to the cries of our hearts. All throughout the Bible we see stories of God's people worshiping him, and we get examples of worship that we can use to worship God today. It's not uncommon to hear the term worship and think that we're just referring to worship through song. That is a great way for us to worship. You know, the longest book of the Bible is made up of songs. That's the book of Psalms. So, yes, we can worship through song, but there are many other ways we can worship too. We can worship God while we pray. When we're talking with God through prayer, that's a great opportunity to personally worship him by praising him for different parts of his character and the wonderful things that he has done for you and provides for you. Pause the podcast here and take some time to worship God through prayer. Another way we can worship God is through spending time in his word. The Bible is God's word given to us. Hebrews 4 12 reminds us that it's living and active. It's another way that we can communicate with God. When we spend time in His Word, when we respect and honor and put into practice what it says, when we memorize it and hide it in our hearts, all of these are ways that we can worship God by spending time in His Word. Pause the podcast and grab your Bible. Turn to our key believe verse, Psalm ninety five, and together as a family or on your own, read through the whole psalm, and then read it again. But this time say it back to God, praising Him for being our great God. God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, gives each of us spiritual gifts. These are unique to us. In other words, God handpicked each of our spiritual gifts. These gifts are things like teaching or showing compassion, helping organize things, building and creating and having deep faith. When we use our spiritual gifts to serve the church and give God glory, that is another way that we are worshiping God. First Corinthians twelve, four through six says that there are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone is the same God at work. You probably know what's coming, but pause the podcast and share together as a household. What is a special gift or skill that God has given you that you can share with others to serve God and worship Him this week? There's a lot of ways that we can worship God. What matters most in our worship is that it's coming out of a right place in our hearts. There's a lot of right ways to worship God, but we can worship the wrong way. In our humanness, we can misplace our worship, and instead of honoring and praising God, we fall prey to honoring and praising objects, beings, or concepts. This issue of misdirected worship happens a lot in the Bible. All throughout scripture, we read about the worship of idols, false gods, or even the worship of self. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were repeatedly warned against the worship of idols and foreign gods. One example is in the incident of the golden calf in Exodus 32, where the Israelites, in Moses' absence, fashioned a calf from gold and proclaimed, These, O Israel, are your gods, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. This act of misplaced worship provoked the Lord's anger and led to severe consequences for his people. In the New Testament, misplaced worship continues to be a concern, though it often takes different forms. Jesus addresses the issue of worship in spirit and in truth, emphasizing that true worship is not about location or ritual, but about the heart's posture towards God. We read about this in John 4, verses 23 through 24. We serve a God who is always ready to forgive when we find ourselves giving more of our heart and attention to something or someone other than Him. We have to practice the discipline of creating a heart posture of worship as a disciple of Jesus. This week's taking up Lent Challenge is a great way to grow in this discipline. This week in Lent, you and your household are encouraged to take up private worship. Look for opportunities to take time in your private worship using the words of praise that we find in the Psalms. Reflect on your daily psalm with these four questions. What does this psalm reveal about who God is? How does this psalm point to Jesus? What does this psalm mean to the church? And how does this psalm prompt me to pray? Now is a great time to start. Pause the podcast and go back to our key believe passage, Psalm 95. Answer those four questions after you read the Psalm one more time. I've asked this question on the podcast before, but here it is again. How do you get to know someone? Well, you spend time with them. So how do you get to know God more? Well, you spend time with him. But how do you spend time with someone that you can't see or touch or maybe even hear sometimes? Well, we have two ways that we can spend time with God so that we can grow in our friendship with him. We can spend time hearing from him by reading his word, the Bible, and we can spend time talking with God through prayer. That's the believe key question that we'll be answering during our next episode. How do I grow by communicating with God? We serve a really, really big God, but we also serve a really close God. He is near to us and he wants to hear from us. We can talk to him just like we talk to a friend. We can praise him and thank him for his character. We can ask him for the things that are heavy on our heart and important to each of our days. We can come to him when we've done something wrong, he's ready to hear from us. While worshiping God for who he is and for what he has done for us can be a private or personal practice, we also can feel free to share our worship of the one true God with the world. So how can you worship with others this week? How can your conversations at work or with a friend at lunch reflect your worship to God? How will you serve alongside of someone and worship God together with your actions? Worship through song together with your church family wholeheartedly on Sunday. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for being so loving and so kind. We cannot help but praise you for all that you are and all that you've done. Help our hearts be directed only to you in worship. Keep our eyes set on the only thing that we need you. We love you too. In your name we pray. Amen.