I didn’t make it to the gym during the two weeks we were on vacation. I admit that I thought about going to the gym. I even looked up where the gym was. There was nothing keeping me from going to the gym except me. Skipping the gym during vacation may be acceptable, however, I only went to the gym once the week after we got back.

When I made the decision to go back to the gym it was like I had never gone before. I had trouble completing workouts. My breathing was not where it was before vacation, I ached in every way possible. After a few workouts though, my body started to reacclimate to the movements of the workouts and the weight that I was using. A few more workouts later, I began to look forward to getting up in the morning and feeling my body get stronger.

We all have worship muscles. These muscles grow when we regularly gather for corporate worship and practice personal worship at home. We can build up our worship muscles when we pour our hearts out to God. We tone our muscles in the ways we surrender to God. We can flex our worship muscles by praising God in the storms in our lives.

Just as we can build up our worship muscles, those same muscle can atrophy as well. When we regularly miss worship, we can forget how important it is to offer ourselves to God. When we skip the worship workout our focus begins to fade. We begin to look at the waves of the storm rather than looking at the Lord of the wind and the rain. Just as it is easy to make excuses to refrain from going to the gym, as our worship muscles atrophy we can become comfortable outside of the worshipping Body of Christ.

It’s been a long 18 months of a pandemic. We have a lot of reasons to have missed worship, but we must resist the temptation to believe we are better off without gathering together to worship. As Christians, we are called to worship (corporately and privately) as a way to follow Jesus and to love the people God has put in our path. Let us invite the Holy Spirit to strengthen us as we get our worship muscles back in shape!