Have you ever had to do something that you really just didn’t want to do?\u00a0 Have you ever faked anything or pretended to be someone you are not?\u00a0 Most if not all of us have at least at some point done either one of those things.\u00a0 For most guys when meeting a young lady we want to date we are guilty of this.\u00a0 How many of us are guilty of this with church or our relationship with Christ?\u00a0 I was reading an article this morning that talked about this very thing.\u00a0 The title of the article was, “How long can you succeed in ministry WITHOUT God?”\u00a0 My first thought when I saw the title was “not very long.”\u00a0 However, as I read the article my opinion changed.\u00a0 The premised of the article was this, we have created a church culture in which we can pull off a pretty good worship service without expending a lot of energy.\u00a0 We have memorized the songs we sing, pastors who have been in ministry for a long time have a lot of sermons to pull from, and many times we judge how well a church is doing by the number of people who come to worship instead of by the number of souls being saved and changed by God.\u00a0 Israel created this culture for themselves in the Old Testament.\u00a0 As long as people were becoming more like the Pharisees, the Pharisees thought everything was ok.\u00a0 Going back to the article for a moment, there was a question in there.\u00a0 “How many weekends do we leave worship and think it was good because we liked the music, we enjoyed the sermon, we noticed that attendance was up, but we never ask was God pleased with our worship today?”\u00a0 There is a word for that statement, OUCH!<\/p>\n
During Jesus’ earthly ministry He challenged and confronted the worship of His day.\u00a0 The people were satisfied, but Jesus constantly challenged them on where they really worshipping the one, true God or were they worshipping the God they had created in their heart and mind?\u00a0 In one confrontation with the Pharisees Jesus quoted from Isaiah 29 when He said, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me; in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men” (Mt. 15:8-9).\u00a0 Wow is that ever challenging!\u00a0 How many times have we faked worship knowingly in church?\u00a0 The saddest truth is this one, we have become so good at it that others around us don’t even know we are doing it.\u00a0 Of course if they were honest, many times they are just as guilty of doing the same thing.\u00a0 So many times we manufacture things in church to make it look like we or the church is something that it isn’t, and we think that we are getting away with it because no one has caught on to it.\u00a0 Yet the whole time God is up there in heaven looking down on us, with His heart breaking for us and at the same time being righteously indignant because we have turned His house into a place where we are worshipped instead of Him.<\/p>\n
I wonder how many times Jesus would have quoted Isaiah 29:13 (Mt. 15:8-9 from above) to us during our worship services?\u00a0 May this convict us and challenge us to be changed by the power of the Holy Spirit, that our worship would not be in vain but that we would truly worship Jesus as He deserves to be worshipped.\u00a0 We can make all the excuses we want, I had a long week, I’m tired, everyone else is doing it, etc. and keep on going the same way we have been.\u00a0 Or we can realize that Jesus Christ and Him alone is worthy to be worshipped, we can remember the miserable, wretched sinner that we were before Christ showed us grace and saved us, and we can worship Him and thank Him for saving a wretch like me.\u00a0 May God be glorified as the body of Christ lift up His holy name this weekend.<\/p>\n
By His grace and through His strength may we live for Him<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have you ever had to do something that you really just didn’t want to do?\u00a0 Have you ever faked anything or pretended to be someone you are not?\u00a0 Most if not all of us have at least at some point … Read More