For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. (John 4:24)For years I worried about whether or not I was worshiping the right way. Was I singing right, in the right manner, using the right method, singing the right songs even in the right key. It consumed me and it consumed those I was in fellowship with.
It consumed our thoughts constantly. What if we were singing wrong. We were worshiping God and trying our best but we were doing it wrong. We would be singing and when we got through, God would say, “I wanted it another way. The way you were doing it was sinful.”
And it would be frightening. If we sang the wrong way without knowing it, what if we prayed the wrong way, or preached the wrong way, or took the Lord’s Supper the wrong way. Even if we used the wrong translation of the Bible or thought the wrong way. Our whole life would be based on fear. What if we were wrong?
What if we were wrong and God was mad at us instead of liking what we did? Our worship was bad, our singing, our praying, our thoughts even.
Instead of standing and basking in the grace and love of God, we were sinning. We were wrong and didn’t even know it.
What would we do? One thing is we would get frantic, afraid of doing the wrong thing even by accident.
What kind of god would that be? It couldn’t be a loving, grace-filled god because he was demanding and harsh on those who couldn’t read his mind to know what he wanted, or who were not smart enough in the original Greek and the Hebrew languages of the Bible to be able to decipher the proper format of things.
This god would be a god who would have to be appeased, that would have to be constantly checked to make sure he wasn’t mad. And he would be capricious enough that you would never be sure.
Is this the god you worship? One you live in constant fear of?
Jesus said that God is a Spirit, so those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Which means what? He is some vague, amorphous being that we have to cast about , looking for something that makes him happy?
Or does it mean that he operates on a different plane than we do? Is he a god who exists only to make everybody worried every time he is around? Or is he something greater?
Could it be that he looks deeper than the stuff we do and looks instead at the heart within us? Could it be that he looks at our motives and our reasons for doing things? And if he does, does he recognize that we do not always get everything right? That sometimes we worship with gladness of heart, but may do it in a weird way?
That would be a God, not a god, a little capricious being that gets mad at the drop of a hat when we don’t do things exactly like he may want. Or even maybe just the way we think he wants.
It could be that he doesn’t care how we do it. That would be radical. What if he just likes it however it is done? If our spirits are right, if our hearts are good, if we are just doing it out of our hearts, then he likes it.
It surely would remove the fear. And what is more, the truth would come.
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