“But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24).
Our relationship with God tends to focus on what He has done for us; His mercy, compassion, grace, love, redemption, forgiveness, justification; all of these things are things for which we are properly thankful. But to a certain extent, they put man in the centre of things, not God; they are all things that we love Him for, because He has done them for us. That is an understandable and natural response from our hearts, when we come to an apprehension of God’s great gifts to man.
That is no place for us to stay in relating to God, however; He desires more than that; He desires a relationship with those who love Him for Who He is, rather than for what He has done for us. True worship means to be drawn to God by His inherent qualities; those divine characteristics that have nothing to do with what He has done for man, but are part of His true nature.
His absolute sovereignty over all that exists; His supremacy, majesty and power; these are all marks of what He is and deserve our respect, honour and awe. But His character, too, rightly understood, will invite our admiration and love. His faithfulness, His trustworthiness, His justice, truth, goodness, holiness and steadfastness; all these things draws us nearer to Him because they are all parts of Who He is.
We are made in God’s image and likeness and, as we look upon Him and learn to know His character, we realise that we, too, were meant to be as He is. All of these characteristics we admire and yearn to have in ourselves, but we don’t. But to see these divine qualities that were meant to be ours too, we can only weep in repentance that we are not as we should be and this, in turn, leads us to worship Him in spirit and in truth; for the truth is, He is holy and we are not.
For many Christians, faith has become dry and lifeless, lacking moral imperative and spiritual authority, bogged down in the routines of religion. There is no longer any sense of wonder or capacity for astonishment in their hearts; to them, Christ has become a figure of either the past or the future; He seems to belong to yesterday or tomorrow; there is no today.
This is spiritual torpor, where there is no spiritual struggle, hence no spiritual victory and no spiritual peace; just religious comfort in which we look about us and see everyone else doing the same thing. Our flesh loves religion because it allows the flesh to survive; indeed, religion feeds the flesh and makes us proud and puffed up and self satisfied; but it somehow obscures our vision so that we don’t see that we are one of the many on the broad path that leads to death (Matthew 7:13).
The problem in that the presence of God is missing; the Head has been separated from the Body and the Body has become, instead, the Church, which is something else. The voice of the One Who Is cannot be heard amongst the carnal cacophony of worldly religion. This, in turn, is the consequence of modern evangelism which teaches us that God exists to give us what we want and that this is His desire and purpose. Thus, God becomes a means to a desired end rather than the desired end Himself. This sort of faith is faith in faith, not faith in God and the perfect work of Christ Jesus; but Jesus urges us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, not so that we will be able to get something that we want, but as an end in itself.
God will not be one of many possessions, or even the most treasured of possessions; He will be all or nothing. The overwhelming need for Christians today is to recapture that holy presence of Christ; to have ears to hear the One speaking to us from heaven.
“Beware that you do not refuse the One speaking” (Hebrews 12:25); the One speaking is Jesus the mediator of the new covenant; “refuse” here is the translation of the Greek paraiteomai, and comes from para “aside” and aiteo, “to ask” and has the sense here of begging off, or asking to be excused, as in the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14:18-19, where many made excuses why they could not attend.
But none of those who were invited and made their excuses were able to taste of the banquet; and, Hebrews 12:25 goes on to warn of the same fate awaiting unfaithful believers; “for if the ones refusing the warning on earth did not escape, how much more we, the ones turning away from the one speaking from heaven?”
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