“Do not seek a suitable place without a willing heart.”

We all know that our heart is the source of our praise, but we are often carried away by the idea of a quiet place to the point of forgetting this important prerequisite, which is the disposition of the heart. Wherever we go, worship will always begin from the heart before filling our lips, bodies, and space.

In the Bible, there are particular places where God decided to reveal Himself and receive the worship offered to Him. One essential aspect of understanding worship is the geographical aspect or simply the fact that worship is always linked to a physical location, a specific place where one must meet with God. Like David at the threshing floor of Ornan (1 Chronicles 21:18-27), or the people of Israel who were called to leave Egypt for the desert to worship (Exodus 5:1). Egypt was the place where Pharaoh ruled and reigned as king and god. And the Lord always wants to bring us out from where Pharaoh reigns to worship Him where He calls us.

When it comes to worship, there are always these two important gestures: Firstly, to leave, and then to go somewhere else. Leave Pharaoh’s worship to go into the desert with Moses’ God. Jesus comes to expand or simply clarify this truth when He speaks on one hand of the secret place where we must go to pray and meet our Father who sees us in secret (Matthew 6:6-8); and on the other hand, His response to the Samaritan woman in John 4:21, “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” clearly shows that worship is not primarily about physical location but spiritual and personal.

Our inner atmosphere determines the quality of our worship In this latter mentioned text, it is noticeable that the Lord focuses more on the quality of the person who worships “the worshiper,” and according to Jesus, the new place of worship is “in spirit” and the new position is “in truth.”

So do not rush off to anywhere, first ensure that you do it in spirit and in truth. For many people go far from their homes in search of a quiet place for prayer retreat, but they bring with them all the noise of their guilt and distraction in their hearts. The truth is, if one’s heart is turned towards God, they can speak to Him even in the belly of a sea monster like Jonah did (Jonah 2:1-10) because He hears us from anywhere. But if the heart is far from God, even if one were in Jerusalem, the Lord would not hesitate to command that our hymns be kept away from Him. Worship must first be done with all one’s heart and in truth, before it is done in a chosen geographical location to facilitate meditation.

Sometimes, even when trying to distance ourselves from people to find the best place to worship, we find ourselves in a solitude that becomes a distraction in itself, awakening all our frightening memories and concerns to the point of completely disorienting us. I have experienced this several times.

On the other hand, when I guard my heart at all times, an atmosphere of praise surrounds me wherever I am, and I delight in beholding the Lord even in an environment that doesn’t seem suitable for prayer.

The worshiper is not always prophetic, but inevitably prophetic.

God, who sees the heart, has many times condemned religious honors given to Him without the availability of the heart (Isaiah 29:13).

“The Lord says: ‘These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.‘”

It is through religion and appearance that we tend to reverse the order of importance between the interior and the exterior; it is through human tradition that we think we please God by what is apparent, thinking that the invisible is not accessible to Him. God is not a man; He does not judge by appearances like we do; 1 Samuel 16:6-7 says:

“When they arrived, Samuel saw Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed stands here before the Lord.’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.'”

The great lesson here is that our inner environment determines the quality of our worship, while our outer environment facilitates our spiritual momentum in personal worship. It is the inside that determines everything and not the place where we are.

Therefore, let us give more importance to what inevitably determines worship and prioritize that in our prayer lives…

This text is an extract from the book “Redefine: Praise, Worship and Worship” written by Athoms Mbuma Nkanda.

We invite you to read the following article “To Worship is to Maintain a Relationship with a King.”

Personal worship. Personal worship