Why Daily Prayer & Weekly Worship Matter

This summer, I’ll be taking a trip to Brazil. In preparation, I’ve been trying to learn some words and phrases in Portuguese. Here are some of the words I’ve learned:

igreja (church)

abacaxi (pineapple)

almoço (lunch)

cenoura (carrot)

cebola (onion)

Learning a new language is hard. Since January, I’ve been spending a little time every day practicing, and I’m still a long way from being able to communicate in Portuguese.

The only reason I am able to read and speak English is that I’ve been practicing nonstop, every day for over 45 years… and I still get things wrong! (Thank goodness for spellcheck!) It takes lots and lots of practice, with lots and lots of repetition, to learn a language.

The Portuguese words above are all simple nouns. I won’t even go into how verbs are conjugated in various tenses, or how prepositions are used – because I still haven’t figured such things out. In my practice, the same words and phrases keep coming up, and I keep getting them wrong. But with enough practice and repetition day after day after day, eventually the learning will come.

Why am I telling you this? Well, if learning a new language requires lots of daily repetition, what makes us think that we can learn how to be a Christian without practicing our faith every day? It takes a lot of repetition, day after day after day.

One of the best forms of practice is to go to worship regularly. Worship is where we learn the language of God, so that we can then use that language in our daily lives. Those who don’t go to worship regularly will never be fluent in God-language.

Other forms of practice include daily (yes, daily) prayer; time spent in service to others; and regular giving to the church.

Now – without looking back to the beginning of this article, let’s see how well you remember those five Portuguese words I shared with you:

igreja

abacaxi

almoço

cenoura

cebola

Make your guess, then look back and see how many you got correct. I’ll tell you, it took me a long time to stop confusing cenoura and cebola; those two words look a lot alike, and it took me a lot of daily practice to get that right.

And so it is with faith.