Whatever happened to Worship
A. W. Tozer
CHAPTER 1
Worship in the Christian Church
Revelation 3:15-22
Christian churches have come to the dangerous time predicted long ago. It is a time when we can pat one another on the back, congratulate ourselves and join in the glad refrain, 'We are rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing!' It certainly is true that hardly anything is missing from our churches these days except the most important thing. We are missing genuine and sacred offering of ourselves and our worship to the God and -Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the message of the Revelation the angel of the church of the Laodiceans made this charge and this appeal (3:17, 19): Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.... As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.
My own loyalties and responsibilities are and always will be with the strongly evangelical, Bible-believing, Christ-honouring churches. We have been surging forward. We are building great churches and large congregations. We are boasting about high standards and we are talking a lot about revival. But I have a question and it is not just rhetoric: What has happened to our worship? The reply of many is, 'We are rich and have need of nothing. Doesn't that say something about God's blessing?' Did you know that the often-quoted Jean-Paul Sartre describes his turning to philosophy and hopelessness as a turning away from a secularised church? He says, 'I did not recognise in the fashionable God who was taught me, Him who was waiting for my soul. I needed a Creator; I was given a big businessman!' None of us is as concerned as we should be about the image we really project to the community around us. At least not when we profess to belong to Jesus Christ and still fail to show forth His love and compassion as we should.
We who are the fundamentalists and the 'orthodox' Christians have gained the reputation of being 'tigers' - great fighters for the truth. Our hands are heavy with callouses from the brass knuckles we have worn as we beat on the liberals. Because of the meaning of our Christian faith for a lost world, we are obligated to stand up for the truth and to contend for the faith when necessary.
But there is a better way, even in our dealing with those who are liberals in faith and theology. We can do a whole lot more for them by being Christlike than we can by figuratively beating them over the head with our knuckles. The liberals tell us they cannot believe the Bible. They tell us they cannot believe that Jesus Christ was the unique Son of God. At least most of them are honest about it. Moreover, I am certain we are not going to make them bow the knee by cursing them. If we are led by the Spirit of God and if we show forth the love of God this world needs, we become the 'winsome saints'.
The strange and wonderful thing about it is that truly winsome and loving saints do not even know about their attractiveness. The great saints of past eras did not know they were great saints. If someone had told them, they would not have believed it, but those around them knew that Jesus was living His life in them.
I think we join the winsome saints when God's purposes in Christ become clear to us. We join them when we begin to worship God because He is who He is. Sometimes evangelical Christians seem to be fuzzy and uncertain about the nature of God and His purposes in creation and redemption. In such instances, the preachers often are to blame. There are still preachers and teachers who say that Christ died so we would not drink and not smoke and not go to the theatre. No wonder people are confused! No wonder they fall into the habit of backsliding when such things are held up as the reason for salvation.
Jesus was born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died on the cross and rose from the grave to make worshippers out of rebels! He has done it all through grace. We are the recipients. That may not sound dramatic but it is God's revelation and God's way. Another example of our wrong thinking about God is the attitude of so many that God is now a charity case. He is a kind of frustrated foreman who cannot find enough help. He stands at the wayside asking how many will come to His rescue and begin to do His work. Oh, if we would only remember Who He is! God has never actually needed any of us - not one. But we pretend that He does and we make it a big thing when someone agrees 'to work for the Lord'.
We all should be willing to work for the Lord, but it is a matter of grace on God's part. I am of the opinion that we should not be concerned about working for God until we have learned the meaning and the delight of worshipping Him. A worshipper can work with eternal quality in his work. But a worker who does not worship is only piling up wood, hay and stubble for the time when God sets the world on fire.
I fear that there are many professing Christians who do not want to hear such statements about their 'busy schedule', but it is the truth. God is trying to call us back to that for which He created us - to worship Him and to enjoy Him for ever! It is then, out of our deep worship, that we do His work. I heard a college president say that the church is 'suffering from a rash of amateurism'. Any untrained, unprepared, unspiritual empty rattletrap of a person can start something religious and find plenty of followers who will listen and pay and promote it. It may become very evident that he or she had never heard from God in the first place. These things are happening all around us because we are not worshippers. If we are truly among the worshippers we will not be spending our time with carnal or worldly religious projects.
All of the examples that we have in the Bible illustrate that glad and devoted and reverent worship is the normal employment of moral beings. Every glimpse that is given to us of heaven and of God's created beings is always a glimpse of worship and rejoicing and praise because God is who He is.
The apostle John in Revelation 4:10-11 gives us a plain portrayal of created beings around the throne of God. John speaks of the occupation of the elders in this way: The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth forever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven. But I can almost hear someone saying, 'Is Tozer getting away from justification by faith? Haven't we always heard that we are justified and saved and on our way to heaven by faith?'
I assure you that Martin Luther never believed in justification by faith more strongly than I do. I believe in justification by faith. I believe we are saved by having faith in the Son of God as Lord and Saviour.
But nowadays there is a deadly, automatic quality about getting saved. It bothers me greatly. I say an 'automatic' quality: 'Put a nickel's worth of faith in the slot, pull down the lever and take out the little card of salvation. Tuck it in your wallet and off you go!' After that, the man or woman can say, 'Yes, I'm saved.' How does he or she know? 'I put the nickel in. I accepted Jesus and I signed the card.'
Very good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with signing a card. It can be a helpful thing so we know who has made enquiry. But really, my brother or sister, we are brought to God and to faith and to salvation that we might worship and adore Him. We do not come to God that we might be automatic Christians, Christians stamped out with a die. God has provided His salvation that we might be, individually and personally, vibrant children of God, loving God with all our hearts and worshipping Him in the beauty of holiness.
This does not mean, and I am not saying, that we must all worship alike. The Holy Spirit does not operate by anyone's preconceived idea or formula. But this I know: when the Holy Spirit of God comes among us with His anointing, we become a worshipping people. This may be hard for some to admit, but when we are truly worshipping and adoring the God of all grace and of all love and of all mercy and of all truth, we may not be quiet enough to please everyone.
I recall Luke's description of the throngs on that first Palm Sunday: The whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen; saying, Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest.
And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master, rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out (19:37-40).
Let me say two things here.
First, I do not believe it is necessarily true that we are worshipping God when we are making a lot of racket. But not infrequently worship is audible. When Jesus came into Jerusalem presenting Himself as Messiah there was a great multitude and there was a great noise. Doubtless many who joined in the singing and the praise had never been able to sing in the right key. When you have a group of people singing anywhere, you know that some of them will not be in tune. But this is the point to their worship: they were united in praises to God.
Second, I would warn those who are cultured, quiet, self-possessed, poised and sophisticated, that if they are embarrassed in church when some happy Christian says 'Amen!' they may actually be in need of some spiritual enlightenment. The worshipping saints of God in the Body of Christ have often been a little bit noisy.
I hope you have read some of the devotionals left us by that dear old English saint, Lady Julian, who lived more than 600 years ago. She wrote that one day she had been thinking about how high and lofty Jesus was, and yet how He Himself meets the humblest part of our human desire. She received such blessing within her being that she could not control herself. She let go with a shout and praised God out loud in Latin. Translated into English, it would have come out 'Well, glory to God!'
Now, if that bothers you, friend, it may be because you do not know the kind of spiritual blessing and delight the Holy Spirit is waiting to provide among God's worshipping saints. Did you notice what Luke said about the Pharisees and their request that Jesus should rebuke His disciples for praising God with loud voices? Their ritual rules probably allowed them to whisper the words 'Glory to God!', but it really pained them to hear anyone saying them out loud. Jesus told the Pharisees in effect: 'They are doing the right thing. God my Father and I and the Holy Ghost are to be worshipped. If men and women will not worship me, the very rocks will shout my praises!'
Those religious Pharisees, polished and smoothed and polished again, would have died right there in their tracks if they had heard a rock given a voice and praising the Lord. Well, we have great churches and we have beautiful sanctuaries and we join in the chorus, 'We have need of nothing.' But there is every indication that we are in need of worshippers.
We have a lot of men willing to sit on our church boards I who have no desire for spiritual joy and radiance and who' never show up for the church prayer meeting. These are the men who often make the decisions about the church budget and the church expenses and where the frills will go in the new edifice. They are the fellows who run the church, but you cannot get them to the prayer meeting because they are not worshippers.
Perhaps you do not think this is an important matter, but that puts you on the other side as far as I am concerned. It seems to me that it has always been a frightful incongruity that men who do not pray and do not worship are nevertheless actually running many of the churches and ultimately determining the direction they will take.
It hits very close to our own situations, perhaps, but we should confess that in many 'good' churches, we let the women do the praying and let the men do the voting. Because we are not truly worshippers, we spend a lot of time in the churches just free-wheeling, burning up fuel, making a noise but not getting anywhere. Oh, brother or sister, God calls us to worship, but in many instances we are in entertainment, just running a poor second to the theatres. That is where we are, even in the evangelical churches, and I don't mind telling you that most of the people we say we are trying to reach will never come to a church to see a lot of amateur actors putting on a home-talent show. I tell you, outside of politics there is not another field of activity that has more words and fewer deeds, more wind and less rain.
What are we going to do about this awesome, beautiful worship that God calls for? I would rather worship God than do any other thing I know of in all this wide world. I would not even attempt to tell you how many hymnbooks are piled up in my study. I cannot sing a note, but that is nobody's business. God thinks I am an opera star! God listens while I sing to Him the old French hymns in translation, the old Latin hymns in translation. God listens while I sing the old Greek hymns from the Eastern church as well as the beautiful psalms done in rnetre and some of the simpler songs of Watts and Wesley and the rest.
I mean it when I say that I would rather worship God than do anything else. You may reply, 'If you worship God you do nothing else.' But that only reveals that you have not done your homework. The beautiful part of worship is that it prepares you and enables you to zero in on the important things that must be done for God.
Listen to me! Practically every great deed done in the church of Christ all the way back to the apostle Paul was done by people blazing with the radiant worship of their God.
A survey of church history will prove that it was those who were the yearning worshippers who also became the' great workers. Those great saints whose hymns we so tenderly sing were active in their faith to the point that we must wonder how they ever did it all.
The great hospitals have grown out of the hearts of worshipping men. The mental institutions grew out of the hearts of Christian and compassionate men and women. We should say, too, that wherever the church has come out of her lethargy, rising from her sleep and into the tides of revival and spiritual renewal, always the worshippers were behind it.
We will be making a mistake if we just stand back and say, 'But if we give ourselves to worship, no one will do anything.' On the contrary, if we give ourselves to God's call to worship, everyone will do more than he or she is doing now. Only, what he or she does will have significance and meaning to it. It will have the quality of eternity in it - it will be gold, silver and precious stones, not wood, hay and stubble. Why should we be silent about the wonders of God? We should gladly join Isaac Watts in one of his worship hymns:
Bless, O my soul, the living God,
Call home thy thoughts that roam abroad,
That all the powers within me join
in work and worship so divine.
Bless, O my soul, the God of grace,
His favours claim thy highest praise.
Why should the wonders He has wrought
Be lost in silence, and forgot?
Let the whole earth His power confess,
Let the whole earth adore His grace.
The Gentiles, with the Jews, shall join
in work and worship so divine.
I cannot speak for you, but I want to be among those who worship. I do not want just to be a part of some great ecclesiastical machine where the pastor turns the crank and the machine runs. You know - the pastor loves everybody and everybody loves him. He has to do it. He is paid to do it.
I wish that we might get back to worship again. Then when people come into the church they will instantly sense that they come among holy people, God's people. They can testify, 'Of a truth God is in this place.'
CHAPTER 2
True Worship Demands the New Birth
Ephesians 2:1-10
There are many weird ideas about God in our day and therefore there are all kinds of substitutes for true worship. Often I have heard someone or another within the Christian church confess sadly: 'I guess I don't really know very much about God.' If that is a true confession, the man or woman should then be honest enough to make a necessarily parallel confession: 'I guess I don't really know very much about worship.' Actually, basic beliefs about the Person and the nature of God have changed so much that there are among us now men and women who find it easy to brag about the benefits they receive from God - without ever a thought or a desire to know the true meaning of worship!
I have immediate reactions to such an extreme misunderstanding of the true nature of a holy and sovereign God. My first is that I believe the very last thing God desires is to have shallowminded and worldly Christians bragging about Him.
My second is that it does not seem to be very well recognised that God's highest desire is that every one of His believing children should so love and so adore Him that we are continually in His presence, in spirit and in truth. That is to worship, indeed.
Something wonderful and miraculous and life-changing takes place within the human soul when Jesus Christ is invited in to take His rightful place. That is exactly what God anticipated when He wrought the plan of salvation. He intended to make worshippers out of rebels; He intended to restore to men and women the place of worship which our first parents knew when they were created.
If we know this result as a blessed reality in our own lives and experience, then it is evident that we are not just waiting for Sunday to come so we can 'go to church and worship'. True worship of God must be a constant and consistent attitude or state of mind within the believer. It will always be a sustained and blessed acknowledgement of love and adoration, subject in this life to degrees of perfection and intensity.
Now, the negative side of the common approach to worship needs to be stated. Contrary to much that is being said and practised in the churches, true worship of God is not something that we do in the hope of appearing to be religious!
No one can really argue that many people whose dearest desire is just to be numbered with those who are 'sensitive to religion' place their weekly emphasis upon faithfulness in attending 'the service of worship'.
What do the Christian Scriptures have to say to us at this point as we consider the reality of fellowship between God and His redeemed children? What we learn is very plain and very encouraging. Having been made in His image, we have within us the capacity to know God and the instinct that we should worship Him. The very moment that the Spirit of God has quickened us to His life in regeneration, our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That response within our beings, a response to forgiveness and pardon and regeneration, signals the miracle of the heavenly birth - without which we cannot see the kingdom of God.
Yes, God desires and is pleased to communicate with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the souls of redeemed men and women is the throbbing heart of the New Testament religion.
Actually, it is impossible to consider this new relationship without confessing that the primary work of the Holy Spirit is to restore the lost soul to intimate fellowship with God through the washing of regeneration.
To accomplish this, He first reveals Christ to the penitent heart: 'Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost' (1 Corinthians 12:3).
Then consider Christ's own words to His disciples concerning the brighter rays from His own being which will illuminate the newborn soul: 'But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you' (John 14:26).
Remember, we know Christ only as the Spirit enables us. How thankful we should be to discover that it is God's desire to lead every willing heart into depths and heights of divine knowledge and communion.
As soon as God sends the Spirit of His Son into our hearts we say 'Abba' - and we are worshipping, but probably not in the full New Testament sense of the word. God desires to take us deeper into Himself. We will have much to learn in the school of the Spirit. He wants to lead us on in our love for Him who first loved us. He wants to cultivate within us the adoration and admiration of which He is worthy. He wants to reveal to each of us the blessed element of spiritual fascination in true worship. He wants to teach us the wonder of being filled with moral excitement in our worship, entranced with the knowledge of who God is. He wants us to be astonished at the inconceivable elevation and magnitude and splendour of Almighty God! There can be no human substitute for this kind of worship and for this kind of Spirit-given response to the God who is our Creator and Redeemer and Lord.
There is all around us, however, a very evident and continuing substitute for worship. I speak of the compelling temptation among Christian believers to be constantly engaged, during every waking hour, in religious activity.
We cannot deny that it is definitely a churchly idea of service. Many of our sermons and much of our contemporary ecclesiastical teaching lean toward the idea that it is surely God's plan for us to be busy, busy, busy - because it is the best cause in the world in which we are involved.
But if there is any honesty left in us, it persuades us in our quieter moments that true spiritual worship is at a discouragingly low ebb among professing Christians. Do we dare ask how we have reached this state?
If you are willing to ask it, I am willing to try to answer it. Actually, I will answer it by asking another obvious question. How can our approach to worship be any more vital than it is when so many who lead us, both in the pulpit and in the pew, give little indication that the fellowship of God is delightful beyond telling?
Think back for a moment into your New Testament knowledge and you will have to agree that this is exactly the point that Jesus was making to the stern and self-righteous Pharisees about true worship in their day.
They were religious in their daily life. They were outwardly pious and well acquainted with the forms of worship - but within their beings were attitudes and faults and hypocrisies which caused Jesus to describe them as 'whitewashed sepulchres'.
The only righteousness they knew and understood was their own outward form of righteousness based on the maintenance of a fairly high level of external morality. Because they thought of God as being as stern and austere and unforgiving as they themselves were, their concept of worship was necessarily low and unworthy.
To the Pharisee, the service of God was a bondage which he did not love but from which he could not escape without a loss too great to bear. God, as the Pharisee saw Him, was not a God easy to live with. So their daily religion became grim and hard, with no trace of true love in it. It can be said about us, as humans, that we try to be like God. If He is conceived to be stern and exacting and harsh, so will we be! The blessed and inviting truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings, and in our worship of Him we should find unspeakable pleasure.
The living God has been willing to reveal Himself to our seeking hearts. He would have us know and understand that He is all love and that those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.
God would have us know that He is just, indeed, and He will not condone sin. He has tried to make it overwhelmingly plain to us that through the blood of the everlasting covenant He is able to act toward us exactly as if we had never sinned. Unbeknown to the understanding of a Pharisee, God communes with His redeemed ones in an easy uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. The God who has redeemed us in love, through the merits of the Eternal Son, is not unreasonable. He is not selfish. Neither is He temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and next year.
The God who desires our fellowship and communion is not hard to please, although He may be hard to satisfy. expects of us only what He has Himself supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him and just as quick to overlook our imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will.
This is the best of good news: God loves us for ourselves. He values our love more than He values galaxies of new created worlds. He remembers our frame and knows that we are but dust. The God we love may sometimes chasten us, it is true. But even this He does with a smile-the proud, tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is. We should revel in the joy of believing that God is the sum of all patience and the true essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections and believing that He understands everything-and loves us still.
The gratifying part of all this is that the intercourse between God and the redeemed soul is known to us in conscious, personal awareness. It is a personal awareness, indeed. The awareness does not come through the body of believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to the body through the individuals composing it.
And, yes, it is conscious; it does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul.
This communication, this consciousness is not an end but really an inception. There is the point of reality where we begin our fellowship and friendship and communion with God. But where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.
When we come into this sweet relationship, we are beginning to learn astonished reverence, breathless adoration, awesome fascination, lofty admiration of the attributes of God and something of the breathless silence that we know when God is near.
You may never have realised it before, but all of those elements in our perception and consciousness of the divine Presence add up to what the Bible calls 'the fear of God'.
We can know a million fears in our hearts in our hours of pain or in threats of danger or in the anticipation of punishment or death. What we need to plainly recognise is that the fear of God the Bible commends can never be induced by threats or punishment of any kind.
The fear of God is that 'astonished reverence' of which the great Faber wrote. I would say that it may grade anywhere from its basic element - the terror of the guilty soul before a holy God - to the fascinated rapture of the worshipping saint. There are very few unqualified things in our lives, but I believe that the reverential fear of God mxed with love and fascination and astonishment and admiration and devotion is the most enjoyable state and the most purifying emotion the human soul can know.
In my own being I could not exist very long as a Christian without this inner consciousness of the Presence and nearness of God. I guess there are some persons who find themselves strong enough to live day by day on the basis of ethics without any intimate spiritual experience. They say Benjamin Franklin was such a man. He was a deist and not a Christian. Whitefield prayed for him and told him he was praying for him, but Franklin said, 'I guess it is not doing any good because I am not saved yet.'
This is what Franklin did. He kept a daily graph on a series of little square charts which represented such virtues as honesty, faithfulness, charity and probably a dozen others. He worked these into a kind of calendar and when he bad violated one of the virtues he would write it down. When he had gone for a day or a month without having broken any of his self-imposed commandments, he considered that he was doing pretty well as a human being.
A sense of ethics? Yes. Any sense of the divine? No. NO mystical overtone. No worship. No reverence. No fear of God before his eyes. All of this according to his own testimony.
I do not belong to that breed of man. I can only keep right by keeping the fear of God on My soul and delighting in the fascinated rapture of worship. Apart from that, I do not know any rules at all. I am sorry that this powerful sense of godly fear is a missing quality in the churches today, and its absence is a portent and a sign.
It should hover over us like the cloud over Israel. It should lie upon us like a sweet, invisible mantle. It should be a force in the conditioning of our inner lives. It should provide extra meaning for every text of Scripture. It should be making every day of the week a holy day and every spot of ground we tread holy ground.
We continue to shake from our own kinds of fears: fear of Communism, fear of the collapse of civilisation, even the fear of invasion from some other planet. Men think they know what fear means. But we are talking about the awe and the reverence of a loving and holy God. That kind of a fear of God is a spiritual thing and can only be brought by the Presence of God.
When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, there was a great fear upon all the people, yet they were not afraid of anything! A child of God, made perfect in love, has no fear because perfect love casts out fear. Yet he or she is the person of all persons who most fears God. Take the apostle John as an illustration. When Jesus was arrested in the garden, John was among those who ran away. Probably he was afraid of being arrested and put into jail. That was his fear of danger, fear of punishment, fear of humiliation.
But later the same John, exiled on Patmos for the testimony of Jesus Christ, saw an awesome Man standing amid the golden lampstands. The Man was clothed in a white robe and girded with a golden girdle. His feet were like burnished brass, and a sword proceeded from His mouth. His hair was as white as snow and His face shone like the sun in its strength. The awe and reverence and fascination and fear suddenly concentrated so completely in John's being that he could only fall unconscious to the ground. Then this holy Priest who he later found was Jesus Christ Himself, bearing the keys of death and hell, came and lifted John up and brought life back into him.
Now, John was not afraid, and he did not feel threatened. He was experiencing a different kind of fear, a godly fear. It was a holy thing, and John felt it. The Presence of God in our midst - bringing a sense of godly fear and reverence - this is largely missing today. You cannot induce it by soft organ music and light streaming through beautifully designed windows. You cannot induce it by holding up a biscuit and claiming that it is God. You cannot induce it by any kind or any amount of mumbo-jumbo.
What people feel in the presence of that kind of paganism is not the true fear of God. It is just the inducement of a superstitious dread. A true fear of God is a beautiful thing, for it is worship, it is love, it is veneration. It is a high moral happiness because God is. It is a delight so great that if God were not, the worshipper would not want to be, either. He or she could easily pray, 'My God, continue to be as Thou art, or let me die! I cannot think of any other God but Thee!' True worship is to be so personally and hopelessly in love with God that the idea of a transfer of affection never even remotely exists. That is the meaning of the fear of God.
Because worship is largely missing, do you know what we are doing? We are doing our best to sew up that rent veil in the temple. We use artificial means to try to induce some kind of worship. I think the devil in hell must be laughing, and I think God must be grieving, for there is no fear of God before our eyes.
CHAPTER 3
Much That Is Called Worship Is Not
John 4:19-24
The whole import and substance of the Bible teaches us that the God who does not need anything nevertheless desires the adoration and worship of His created children. This conclusion is more than a matter of proof texts. Our Lord Himself said it plainly and with certainty when He was here upon this earth. 'Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve' (Luke 4:8).
There is not a tribe in all the world that does not have some kind of religion and some form of worship. Men and women have an instinct toward worship.
I once wrote an editorial in which I pointed out my feeling that when a man falls on his knees and stretches out his hands and says, 'Our Father which art in heaven,' he is doing what seems natural to him.
One elderly gentleman, when he read the editorial, took vehement exception to it. He wrote that 'only a completely liberal editor' would say that worship is a natural thing with mankind.
The fact is that God made us to worship Him, and if we had not fallen with Adam and Eve, worship would have been the most natural thing for us.
Sinning was not the natural thing for Adam and Eve, but they disobeyed and fell, losing their privilege of perfect fellowship with God, the Creator. Sin is the unnatural thing; it was never intended by God to be our nature.
The brief summary of this important matter is that God still desires worship, but we must learn that we cannot have our own way and worship God just as we please.
Have you ever given thought to the words of our Lord Jesus Christ when He referred to a certain group of religious people in His own day with the comment: 'They worship they know not what'? I dare to tell you that Jesus was actually emphasising a very cogent truth about worship. It is entirely possible for humans to have recognised forms of worship apart from Christ and apart from the salvation He offers. I need to go even a little further beyond that statement to point out a similar and parallel truth. Authentic religious experience is altogether possible apart from Christ. Now, I hope you are not misunderstanding me and charging me in your own mind with heresy. Yes, I said there may be worship apart from Christ and I said there may be authentic religious experience apart from Christ. But I did not say - and I do not believe - that such religious experience or forms of worship are acceptable to God. There are certain kinds of worship that God will not accept, though they may be directed toward Him and meant to be given to Him.
It is recorded that when Jesus was teaching here on earth, He told His hearers that the day would come when people would say to Him, 'Did not we do miracles in Your name? Did not we speak for You on the street corner?' Do you remember the sternness and the sharpness of His reply? 'I never knew you! Depart from Me!' Men and women on this earth ought never to fool themselves about the reality of true worship that must always be in spirit and in truth. It is plainly possible to have religious experience and forms of worship that are not at all acceptable to God. The apostle Paul wrote something very sharp and plain and final to the early Christian church in Corinth. Paul knew very definitely that men and women could engage in an experience of worship and still not worship according to the will of God. Thus their worship would not be accepted by God at all.
Listen to what Paul declares: 'The things which the Gentiles sacrifice , they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils' (1 Corinthians 10:20).
Paul was surely teaching that every form of idolatry is hated by God. It is hated for the very reason that it is real. Forms of idolatry can become very real to those who engage in them, but that does not make them acceptable to the living God. That is one of the reasons why Jesus said of a certain group, 'They worship they know not what.' It is possible to have some of the elements of worship - perhaps admiration, self-abasement, surrender, attachment - and not be among the redeemed at all.
I think it is worthy to note that Thomas Carlyle, in his Heroes and Hero Worship, warned us not to make the mistake of thinking that the great pagan religions of the world are all phony. Carlyle declared that from his investigation, those great forms of religion are not phony at all. They are real, and the terror of them is that they are real. Years ago in Mexico, I was attracted by the sight of an old, old church. I walked in with my hat removed and found that the church had no floor except the ground itself. I paused to look around at the statues and the carvings and then noticed that an elderly Mexican lady had come into the building. She was carrying a small shopping bag. She paid no attention to me but walked straight down to the altar area. I had the feeling she was so familiar with that aisle she could have walked it with her eyes closed. She walked directly to kneel in front of a statue of the virgin Mary. She looked up into the facial features of that inanimate statue with deep devotion, deep yearning, deep desire. I thought, 'That is the kind of spiritual longing and desire that I would like to see turned to the Lord Himself!' There was no doubt in my mind that she was having an experience of worship. I believe it was very real to her. She was not pretending. She wanted to worship, but her worship was being poured out on a lifeless statue which was only the work of some person's hands.
There are many kinds of worship that God cannot accept. Cain's worship in the Old Testament was not accepted because he did not acknowledge the necessity of an atonement for sin in the relation between God and fallen man. Cain hoped to please God in worship, but he brought no blood sacrifice. He came instead with an offering 'of the fruit of the ground'. probably beautiful flowers and a basket of fruit. When God frowned on his gift, Cain's attitude and answer seemed to be, 'I don't know anything about this sin-and-atonement idea.' God's rejection of his offering and His acceptance of Abel's 'firstlings of his flock' made Cain so angry that he went out and killed his brother. The kind of worship Cain offered to God has three basic and serious shortcomings.
First is the mistaken idea that God is a different kind of God than He really is. This has to do with the person and the character of the sovereign and holy God. How can anyone ever worship God acceptably without knowing what kind of God He really is? Cain surely did not know the true character of God. Cain did not believe that the matter of man's sin was eternally important to God.
Second is the mistake of thinking that man holds a relationship to God that in fact he does not. Cain casually assumed that he was deserving of acceptance by the Lord without any intermediary. He refused to accept the judgement of God that man had been alienated from his God by sin.
Third, Cain in the Old Testament record, and with him an unnumbered multitude of men and women since, have mistakenly assumed that sin is far less serious than it really is. The record is plain, if men and women would only look at it and consider it. God hates sin because He is a holy God. He knows that sin has filled the world with pain and sorrow, robbing us of our principal purpose and joy in life, the joy of worshipping our God!
The kind of worship offered by Cain is inadequate, without real meaning. Bringing it as an issue to our own day under the New Testament, I assure you that I would not knowingly spend an hour in any church that refuses to teach the necessity of the blood atonement for sin through the cross and the merits of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ!
Another kind of unacceptable worship is symbolised by the attitude of the Samaritans in the Bible. The Old Testament history reveals that Jeroboam, the first king of Israel after it became the Northern Kingdom, set up two places of worship. He wanted to be sure his people were weaned from their habit of worshipping at Jerusalem. He installed golden calves to be worshipped in convenient places, Bethel and Dan.
The heresy of Samaritanism - the practice of picking out what we like to worship and rejecting what we do not like is widespread.
Actually, it has opened up a whole new field for applied psychology and humanism under a variety of religious disguises. In this context, men and women set themselves as judges of what the Lord has said. Instead of getting down on their knees and letting the Lord judge them, they stand with pride and judge the Lord.
I have the report of a youth meeting held in a large and well-known church in Toronto. The guest speaker was brought to the city so he could give this kind of counsel to modern church young people: 'Don't believe anything in the Bible that does not square with your own experience!' If you are among those who pick and choose, you may have chosen the beauties of nature as the means by which you bring yourself to worship. Or, you may be of the opinion that your worship comes through music, and you talk about music that elevates the mind and raises the soul to near-rapture.
Now that we have mentioned nature and the inclination of some to let their worship begin and end there, I would like to put something in the record right here. If you will really give yourself to study, you will discover that the Old Testament is a marvellous rhapsody on the natural creation. Start with Moses, and when you get beyond the Levitical order you will find him soaring in his acute consciousness of the presence of God in all of creation.
Go on to the book of Job and in the closing sections you will be amazed at the sublimity of the language describing the world around us.Then go on to the Psalms and you will find David literally dancing with ecstatic delight as he gazes out upon the wonders of God's world. Begin reading in Isaiah and you will find the loftiest imagery. It is neither fanciful nor flighty but a presentation of the wonders of creation as the prophet observed them. These men, who were some of the holiest and godliest men of that ancient time, revealed in their writings that they were intensely in love with every natural beauty around them. But always they saw nature as the handiwork of an all-powerful, all-wise, glorious Creator.
Now, allow me one further observation here about our civilisation and our society. I consider it a sad and lamentable fact that men and women generally today are like zoo lions born in captivity. They are born in hospitals, walk on concrete sidewalks, breathe a lot of foul air and are finally taken back to the hospital to die. They never really get a chance to get their feet into the soil. How rarely do we get into a situation where we can feel the impulses of nature communicated to our beings. We seldom lift our eyes to look at God's heaven above except when an aeroplane crosses overhead or we are wondering whether we should wear our boots. In the very midst of the myriad of created wonders all around us, we have almost unknowingly lost the capacity to wonder. If the Holy Spirit should come again upon us as in earlier times, visiting church congregations with the sweet but fiery breath of Pentecost, we would be greater Christians and holier souls. Beyond that, we would also be greater poets and greater artists and greater lovers of God and of His universe.
Men and women continue to try to persuade themselves that there are many forms and ways that seem right in worship. But God in His revelation has told us that He is spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. God takes the matter of worship out of the hands of men and puts it in the hands of the Holy Spirit.
It is impossible for any of us to worship God without the impartation of the Holy Spirit. It is the operation of the Spirit of God within us that enables us to worship God acceptably through that Person we call Jesus Christ, who is Himself God. So worship originates with God and comes back to us and is reflected from us, as a mirror. God accepts no other kind of worship. We live in a mixed-up kind of world in which many, many people are not at all sure of what they believe or what they ought to believe. Most of them excuse it by telling us that they are 'seekers after truth'. Some churches advertise that way-you do not have to believe anything; 'just be a seeker after truth'.
People who do not acknowledge the new birth or the readings of the Holy Spirit acknowledge the ancient impulse to 'worship something'. If they are not educated, they may kill a chicken and put feathers on their heads and dance around in a little circle. We call them witch doctors. If they are educated, they may write poetry instead, and it comes out something like Edwin Markham's 'I Made a Pilgrimage to Find the Gods'.
Many persons are prepared to say with Markham that they 'saw his bright hand sending signals from the sun'. I, for one, never had any such signals. We live in a land where Bibles are everywhere and the gospel is being preached faithfully. Yet men and women seek God in old altars and tombs in dark and dusty places. They finally wind up believing that God is sending signals from the sun.
Someone generally gets mad at me when I say that this kind of seeking after 'truth' needs to be exposed. We need to double our efforts to tell the world that God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. It must be by the Holy Spirit and truth. We cannot worship in the spirit alone, for the spirit without truth is helpless. We cannot worship in truth alone, for that would be theology without fire.
Worship must be in spirit and in truth! It must be the truth of God and the Spirit of God. When a person, yielding to God and believing the truth of God, is filled with the Spirit of God, even his faintest whisper will be worship.
The stark, tragic fact is that the efforts of many people to worship are unacceptable to God. Without an infusion of the Holy Spirit there can be no true worship. This is serious. It is hard for me to rest peacefully at night knowing that millions of cultured, religious people are merely carrying on church traditions and religious customs and they are not actually reaching God at all. We must humbly worship God in spirit and in truth. Each one of us stands before the truth to be judged. Is it not now plain that the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit of God, far from being an optional luxury in our Christian lives, is a necessity?
CHAPTER 4
Born to Worship God
ONE OF THE GREATEST tragedies that we find, even in this most enlightened of all ages, is the utter failure of millions of men and women ever to discover why they were born. Deny it if you willand some persons willbut wherever there are humans in this world, there are people who are suffering from a hopeless and depressing kind of amnesia. It forces them to cry out, either silently within themselves or often with audible frustration, "I don't even know why I was born!" For an illustration, I want to share a story with you, a story that could have happened anywhere.
It concerns a man who lost his memory and thus lost his identity. Having to meet a friend at City Hall, I was waiting, seated on a bench near the walkway. Suddenly, a nicely dressed young man came over and took the seat beside me. He smiled at mea rather puzzled smile, I thought. "Do we know each other?" I asked.
"No, I don't think so," he replied. Then he added, "I think I am in some kind of a jam." He went on, "Something has happened to me. I think I tripped and fell somewhere in the city and bumped my head. I cannot remember anything for sure. When I woke up I had been robbed. My wallet and all of my cards and papers were gone. I have no identificationand I do not know who I am." "You must have a family somewhere; don't you have any recollection?" "I probably have, but I cannot recall."
I was about to tell this puzzled fellow that he would have to go to the police because I did not have any means of helping him. Just then I noticed a distinguished gentleman standing on the sidewalk near us. He too looked rather puzzled and uncertain, but as he glanced toward our bench, he let out a sudden, delighted shoutalmost a scream. He rushed over to us and called my bewildered friend by his name. He grabbed him quickly and shook his hand. "Where have you been and what have you been doing? Everyone in the orchestra is worried sick about you."
The lost man was still bewildered . "Pardon me, sir, but I do not know you. I do not recognize you." "What? You do not know me? We came to Toronto together three days ago. Don't you know that we are members of the Philharmonic and that you are the first violinist? We have filled our engagement without you and we have been searching everywhere for you!" "So that is who I am and that is why I am here! But I still don't know whether I can play a violin."
Incidents similar to this are taking place among persons all over the world. The police continue to look for many amnesia victims, and doctors are facing this problem with many patients. Now, why have I told this story? To remind you of our first parents in the human race, the man named Adam and the woman named Eve.
Adam had a fall and he received a terrible bump; involved with him in the catastrophe was Eve, his wife. Then, when they tried to shake the fog out of their minds, looking at each other, they realized that they no longer knew who they were, and they did not know why they were alive. They did not know the purpose for their existence. Ever since that time, men and women alienated from God and trying to exist on a sick, fallen planet have been pleading, "I don't even know why I was born!" Those who have followed the revelation provided by the Creator God have accepted that God never does anything without a purpose. We do believe, therefore, that God had a noble purpose in mind when He created us. We believe that it was distinctly the will of God that men and women created in His image would desire fellowship with Him above all else. In His plan, it was to be a perfect fellowship based on adoring worship of the Creator and Sustainer of all things.
If you are acquainted with the Shorter Catechism, you know that it asks an age-old, searching question: "What is the chief end of man?" The simple yet profound answer provided by the Catechism is based upon the revelation and wisdom of the Word of God: "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." That needs no translation for a thinking person. To worship and glorify God, that is the chief end of any man or woman. Why have so many people missed it? Why have so many remained ignorant of God's love and God's plan throughout an entire lifetime? Why do so many curse all of the unkind situations in their lives, finally crying out in hopeless despair, "Oh, I don't even know why I was ever born into this World!" How could the Creator's desired will for all the sons and daughters of Adam be so thoroughly frustrated, so completely ruled out?
In this day of rampant sin, violence and transgression, we must point out that there is an almost universal denial of the willful and sinful fall of the human race, faithfully recorded in the book of Genesis. Let me assure you that it is only through the revelation of God in His Word that we are able to learn the things we need to know about ourselves. God's Word tells us frankly of the great injury we suffered, resulting in our numbing amnesia. It is the sad record of man's fall from the perfections of his original state. When Adam and Eve decided in that early morning that they had a right to put their own wills above the will of their Creator God, they experienced a terrible fall. The result: they lost their God-given identity. They tried to shake the fog out of their minds and out of their beings, but as they looked at each other, they realized that they no longer knew the purpose of their existence. They had suddenly been afflicted with a strange amnesia, precipitated by their willful sin of disobedience. They no longer knew precisely where they were. They no longer held that divine sense of what they were created to be and to do.
What a tragedy! Created to be a mirror to the Almighty, Adam and Eve forfeited the glory of God. Made in God's image, Adam and Eve were more like Him than the angels above. God had created man so He could look into him and see reflected there more of His own glory than He could see reflected in the starry skies above. But now the mirror was dimmed and blurred. When God would look at sinful man, He no longer could see His own glory.
Disobedient man had become sinful man. He had failed to fulfill the purpose of his creationto worship his Creator in the beauty of holiness. Men and women in our time, tired and guilty and lost, are too engaged with the tragedies of their own families and their own societies to look back at the great, overwhelming tragedy that we call the fall of man.
It is a compounded tragedy because God had said with pleasure, "Let us make man in our image" (Genesis 1:26). Then stooping down, God took up clay, shaped and formed man and blew the breath of life into his nostrils. God's man had become a living soul. The Creator then asked the man to look around at the rest of the creation. "This is all yours and I am yours," God said. "I will look at you and see in your face the reflection of My own glory. That is your end. You are created to worship Me, to glorify Me and to have me as your God forever."
But when God withdrew for a moment, that evil one, the dragon who is called Satan, poisoned the minds of the man and his bride. They sinned against God. When God returned, He came as though He did not know about the tragedy. He called out, "Adam, where are you?" Adam came out of hiding, knowing full well his guilt and his shame. God said, "Adam, what did you do?" Adam confessed, "We ate from the fruit of the tree that you forbade us to eatbut it was the woman who enticed me!" God said to the woman, "What did you do?" and she said, "It was the serpent that beguiled me!" In that brief time our first parents had learned the art of laying the blame on someone else. That is one of the great, betraying evidences of sin and we have learned it straight from our first parents. We do not accept the guilt of our sin and iniquity. We blame someone else.
If you are not the man you ought to be, you are likely to blame your wife, or your ancestors, or perhaps the place where you work. If you are not the young person you ought to be, you can always blame your parents. If you are not the wife or woman you ought to be, you may blame your husband, or perhaps the children.
Sin being what it is, we would rather lay the blame on others. We blame, blame, blame. That is why we are where we are. That is why disease fastens on us and drags us to death. That is why accidents come. That is why there are jails and mental hospitals and graveyards. Yes, all because of the great tragedy and disaster that we call the fall of man.
Is this the final end! Is this all there is? No, no! This is our answer to everyone in the entire human race: We have wonderful news for you! It is the good news that the God who created us did not give us up. He did not say to the angels, "Write them off and blot them from My memory." Rather, He said, "Oh, I still want them! I still want them to be a mirror in which I can look and see My glory. I still want to be admired by My people. I still want My people to enjoy Me and have Me forever." So God sent His only begotten Son through the miracle of: the Incarnation. When Jesus walked the earth He was the reflected glory of God. The New Testament says that He is the effulgence of God's glory and the brightness of His person. When God looked at Mary's son, He saw Himself reflected.
What did Jesus mean when He told the people of His day, "When you have seen Me you have seen the Father"? He was actually saying, "When you see Me, you are seeing the Father's glory reflected. I have come to finish the work He has given Me to do."
God was glorified in His Son, even though at His Son's death the glory was terribly marred. Sinful men plucked His beard, bruised His face, tore out His hair. They made great blue lumps on His forehead. Then they nailed Him to the cross. There He groaned and sweated and suffered for six hours before He finally gave up His spirit and died. The bells in heaven rang out because lost man had now been redeemed. The way of pardon and forgiveness had been opened for sinners. On the third day, Jesus arose from the dead. Since then He has been at God's right hand. God has been busy redeeming people back to Himself, back to the original purpose of their being mirrors of His glory.
Yes, worship of the loving God is mans whole reason for existence. That is why we are born and that is why we are born again from above. That is why we were created and that is why we have been recreated. That is why there was a genesis at the beginning, and that is why there is a re-genesis, called regeneration. That is also why there is, church. The Christian church exists to worship God first of all. Every thing else must come second or third or fourth or fifth. In Europe many generations ago, the dear old saint of God, Brother Lawrence, was on his deathbed. Rapidly losing his physical strength, he witnessed to those gathered around him: "I am not dying. I am just doing what I have been doing for the past forty years, and doing what I expect to be doing for all eternity!"
"What is that?" he was asked. He replied quickly, "I am worshiping the God I love!"
Worshiping God ...that was primary for Brother Lawrence. He was also dying, but that was secondary. He knew why he had been born into this world and he knew why he had been born again.
Yes, and Brother Lawrence is still worshiping God. He died and they buried his body somewhere, but his was a living soul, created in the image of God. So, he is still worshiping with all the saints around the throne of God.
Sad, sad indeed, are the cries of so many today who have never discovered why they were born. It brings to mind the poet Milton's description of the pathetic lostness and loneliness of our first parents. Driven from the garden, he says "they took hand in hand and through the valley made their solitary way."
CHAPTER 5
We must worship only the Eternal God
Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy: for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written. He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours? And ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's. 1 Corinthians 3:16-23
TECHNOLOGY IS paramount in this generation. Much of our thinking about worship reflects a willingness to exchange a high view of God's eternity for a short-term concept called here-and-now. My ministries in the Word of God have not been marked by any running controversy with true science. I have voiced my suspicions about a variety of views that can be traced to pseudo-scienceviews that generally try to throw God out the window of His universe. I could never worship a God who was not concerned with our eternities. On the other hand, the answers science gives us are short-term answers. The scientist may be able to keep us alive for a few extra years but believing Christians know some things that Einstein did not know. For instance, we know why we are here. We can say why we were born. We also know what we believe about the value of things eternal. I confess that I used to try to read the theories about such things as the fourth dimension. But years ago I gave up trying to understand them. I have nothing against science and its claim to seek after the meaning of things and their relation and interaction. I am not about to ignorantly refute the scientist.
This is my position: let the scientist stay in his field and I will stay in mine. I am as glad and thankful as anyone for the benefits of research, and I hope scientists will soon find the cure for heart disease, for I have lost many good friends from sudden heart attacks. But listen to me now about the difference in meaning between the short-term matters of our physical beings and the eternal relationships between the believer and his God. If you save a person from diphtheria when he is a baby, or save him in his teens from smallpox, or save him in his fifties from a heart attack, what have you done? If that man lives to be ninety and still is without God and does not know why he was born, you have simply perpetuated the life of a mud turtle. That man who has never found God and has never been born again is like a turtle, with two legs instead of four and no shell and no tail, because he still does not know what life has been all about.
I am thankful that I have found a promise from the God of all grace that deals with the long-term and the eternal. I belong to a company of plain people who believe the truth revealed in the Bible. These are the people who believe that God in the beginning made the heavens and the earth and all things that are therein. We believe that it was God who made man in His own image and breathed into him the breath of life and said unto him, "Now, live in My presence and worship Me for that is your chief end. Increase and multiply and fill the earth with worshipers."
Yes, these plain people, these believing people, will tell you that God created the flowers to be beautiful and the birds to sing so that men and women could enjoy them. The scientist, with an entirely different kind of perspective, would never admit that fact. The scientist contends that the bird sings for a totally different reason.
"It is the male bird that sings, and he sings only to attract the female so they may nest and procreate," he tells us. "It is simply biological." It is at this point that I ask the scientist, "Why doesn't the bird just squeak or groan or gurgle? Why does he have to sing and warble and harmonize as though he had been tuned to a harp!"
I think the answer is plainit is because God made him to sing. If I were a male bird and wanted to attract a female I could turn handsprings or do any number of tricks. But why does the bird sing so beautifully?
It is because the God who made him is the Chief Musician of the universe. He is the Composer of the cosmos. He made the harp in those little throats and the feathers around them and said, "Go and sing." Thankfully, the birds obeyed and they have been singing and praising God ever since they were created. The scientific man may protest and say, "No, no!" But my heart tells me that it is so and the Bible declares that it is so. "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
Again, God made the fruit trees to bear fruit for the human race. But the scientist shrugs his shoulders and says, "Of course the trees bear fruit so there will be seeds and thus there will be reproduction of more fruit." We have the right to reply, "Why is it so necessary for the tree to bear fruit if reproduction is all that is involved, with no blessing or help for anyone?" God made the fruit and said to mankind, "Enjoy it." God also made the beasts of the field in order that mankind could be clothed. God made the sheep with his coat of wool so he could be sheared and provide the sweaters and garments that keep us warm. God made the humble little silkworm, providing the mulberry leaves for its food, so the silkworm could spin its cocoon. Men have discovered how to unravel the cocoons and produce the lovely silks that we admire so much. I am not exactly one of the world's ten best-dressed men, but I like a nice silk tie better than any of those synthetic ones rolled out of a manufacturer's vat somewhere. Oh, it is so much more delightful and satisfying to believe what God says about all of these things He has given us to enjoy everything having its purpose.
Actually, the wisest person in the world is the person who knows the most about God. The only real sage worthy of the name is the one who realizes that the answer to creation and life and eternity is a theological answernot a scientific answer. You must begin with God. Then you begin to understand everything in its proper context. All things fit into shape and form when you begin with God.
I wonder if you will understand me when I say what I am going to say. Quite a few evangelical Christians have been acquiring a rather bad habit the habit of being unduly influenced by the degrees and the honors bestowed upon those whom we consider "the learned." This undue deference to intellectual knowledge and accomplishment has to be balanced out. As Christian men and women, we do respect study and research. We appreciate the long hours that go into academic progress. But we must always keep God's wisdom and God's admonitions in mind.
No matter how much education and training we may receive in a certain field of study, we will discover that we have only learned scattered fragments of truth. On the other hand, the simplest Christian believer, who may have come into the kingdom only a few days ago, has already learned many marvelous things at the center of truth. That believer is able to confess that he knows God. Knowing God is potentially more than all of this world's teachers could ever impart, because those teachers, if they are without God, are on the outside looking in.
There is a miracle involved here. That new believer, who only a few days ago was a sinner lost and unforgiven, is now by faith and through grace a child of God and on the inside looking out! We do not belittle the many accomplishments of those who are learned and able in this world's store of knowledge. But to study and toil for this world alone is not enough. The key is God. He rightfully belongs in the middle of all our endeavors. All of the doors must ultimately be opened, through faith, with the key called God.
If we are to have any satisfying and lasting understanding of life, it must be divinely given. It begins with the confession that it is indeed the God who has revealed Himself to us who is the great central pillar bearing up the universe. Believing that, we then go on to acknowledge that we have thus discovered His great eternal purpose. God made us as men and women in His own image. He has now redeemed and restored us through His plan of salvation to love Him and worship Him forever.
God said, "I have made man in My image and man is to be above all other creatures. He is to be above the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air and the fish in the sea. Redeemed man is to be even above the angels in the heavens. He is to enter into My presence pardoned and unashamed. He is to worship Me and to look on My face while the ages roll on." God is the only certain foundation. The joy of assurance belongs to believing people. I associated myself with them when I was converted at the age of seventeen. Until that time I knew nothing of love or hope or trust or faith in God. There are millions today who are just as lost as I was. They are still without God, confused about this life and lacking knowledge of the life to come. The believing Christians about whom I am talking are the saints and the mystics, the people of God, They have a simple and more beautiful view of the world than the scientists hold. It is simply this: "We know what we believe. We know we are in this world to worship and to enjoy God. We know what God is prepared to do for all those who love Him, throughout eternity." Thus, they know some important long-range things. These things are hidden from other men and women who are trying to find their answers in the store of knowledge related to this present world.
The average person in the world today, without faith and without God and without hope, is engaged in a desperate personal search throughout his lifetime. He does not really know where he has been. He does not really know what he is doing here and now. He does not know where he is going. The sad commentary is that he is doing it all on borrowed time and borrowed money and borrowed strengthand he already knows that in the end he will surely die! It boils down to the bewildered confession of many that "we have lost God somewhere along the way." What happens to people when they lose God? It seems quite obvious that they get very busy trying to find something else to worship.
Man, made more like God than any other creature, has become less like God than any other creature. Created to reflect the glory of God, he has retreated sullenly into his cavereflecting only his own sinfulness.
Certainly it is a tragedy above all tragedies in this world that man, made with a soul to worship and praise and sing to God's glory, now sulks silently in his cave. Love has gone from his heart. Light has gone from his mind. Having lost God, he blindly stumbles on through this dark world to find only a grave at the end. In a radio interview a brilliant, well-known Canadian author was being questioned about the modern world scene. He was asked a searching question: "What do you consider the most alarming error we are making in our current society and civilization?" His answer was quick and to the point: "I consider our biggest mistake to be the fond belief that we humans are special pets of Almighty God; that we mean more than other things in the world; that God has a special fondness for us as people." Oh, brother!
Man as he was originally created is God's beloved. Man is the beloved of the universe. Since I learned that Christ Jesus came into the world to be my Savior, I have based my life on God's revelation in the Scriptures. No matter how brilliant a man's mind may be, he cannot jar me as far as the things of God are concerned. He throws his objections and his earthly conclusions at me with no effect. Actually, the differences between unbelief and faith, between hopelessness and certainty, between man's point-of-view and God's, often come to light as the believer faces death. We are told that when John Wesley was dying, he tried to sing, but his voice was nearly gone. He was almost ninety. He had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on horseback, preaching three or four times daily in founding a great church. He was plainly Armenian in his theology, but as his Christian family and friends gathered around his bed, he was trying to sing the words of an old Calvinist hymn:
I will praise my Maker while I've breath,
And when my soul is lost in death,
Praise shall employ my nobler powers.
That is why I cannot get all heated up about contending for one theological side or another on that issue. If Isaac Watts, a Calvinist, could write such praise to God and John Wesley, an Armenian, could sing it with yearning and they both can meet and hug one another in glory, why should I allow anyone to force me to confess, "I don't know which I am!" Why should anyone bother me with an issue like that? I was created to worship and praise God. I was redeemed that I should worship Him and enjoy Him forever. That is the primary issue, my brother or sister. That is why we earnestly invite men and women to become converted, taking Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. God is not asking you to come to Christ just to attain peace of mind or to make you a better businessman or woman. You were created to worship. God wants you to know His redemption so you will desire to worship and praise Him.
