daily java

Daily Java: "I will not enter my house or go to my bed – I will allow no sleep to my eyes, no slumber to my eyelids, till I find a place for the LORD, a dwelling for the Mighty One of Jacob." (Psalm 132:3-5)
In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. (1 Corinthians 11:1)

King David of the Old Testament loved God. The psalms are full of his praise and worship. He wanted nothing more than to build a house of praise for the Lord. He could see it in his mind: a place where all the world would come to see the glory of the Lord, where they would see a beautiful monument to the Lord’s goodness and generosity.

But he couldn’t do it. In I Chronicles 22, God told David that he couldn’t build him a temple because he had lived too violent a life. It was for his son, Solomon, a man of peace and wisdom, to do. Even though he was a “man after God’s own heart,” he was not equipped nor qualified to do so.

But he wanted it. And he made a temple in his heart, anyway. The worship of God was strong in David’s heart. Even though he couldn’t build any monuments to the Lord, he still worshipped.

The Corinthian church did the opposite. They had a church that was a good one, but it seemed they were doing everything they could to tear it down. They were arguing, and fighting over positions in the church.

When they had dinner, some would come and eat it all leaving nothing for those who came afterwards. The Lord’s Supper had become a travesty of what God had intended. Worship became a travesty. Everything turned bad.

Church had become ugly. Something that David was not allowed to have had become something that no one wanted.

There is a desire to worship that is built into each of us, that cries out for release. When God made us, he made that desire to connect with him. He hard-wired us to want to worship. Nothing else will take its place.

You see that desire in workaholics and sex-addicts, in overeaters and drug users, in Dead-Heads, in everyone who pursues anything in an overboard way. They are channeling the natural desire to worship that Romans 1 talks about and turns it into something else. They pursue things instead of God.

Those things are not wrong in and of themselves; but when they take over the natural worship, they become wrong.

It is when we begin to realize the need to worship that we begin to be happy. When we allow no sleep to come to our eyes, when we see worship to God as more important that even going home or to bed, when it supercedes everything else that we are satisfied.

And when it turns ugly, as it did in the Corinthian church, it is so sad. It becomes like a marriage that turns out to be a jockeying for power, children trying to find ways to dump themselves of their parents, Christians who see the kingdom as a means of power.

From David’s entreaty to God that he build him a place of praise to a church’s demand to God that he give them stuff. It is a long way from one to another.