Jan 31, 2011 4
How to Worship God Today-Part 1
Worship: From Slaughtering Lambs to Shirts and Ties
In college I used to dress up for church with a shirt and tie. Every Sunday I pulled out my tie rack and matched a tie with a shirt. I never had to match my pants to anything since eighty percent of my pants were khakis. That’s a long story.
Actually, it isn’t. I didn’t want to match my tie with my shirt AND my pants.
Somewhere in my conservative Christian brain, I knew I needed to dress up for church. However, I became a little wrapped up in my church dress code. I was dressing up to project a certain image of myself.
One time God convicted me to give my favorite tie away. It was a little awkward to explain over breakfast with my friend on Sunday morning as I handed the tie over, but I’ll bet you anything that he’s still wearing that tie to this day.
Dressing up for church is fine, especially if you feel that you’re honoring God in some way by it. As for me, I’ve “graduated” to sandals, cargo shorts, and a polo shirt. As I read the Bible, I’m convinced that worshipping God has a lot more to do with actually loving God at a heart level and the forms we use are interchangeable depending on our cultures.
God is really flexible. No tie? No problem! No ox to slaughter? How about a dove? No dove? Well, he’s just glad you came to offer your love to him.
When God began to shape the Israelites into his chosen people who would act as a light to the nations, he first addressed the particulars of how they should worship their Lord. I’ve been reading Deuteronomy lately, and it’s striking to see God basically starting over again with Israel after the first generation died off in the wilderness.
While Moses is walking the Israelites through the particulars of how to worship God and God alone, he regularly hammers home the same theme, “Love the Lord your God.” The word love comes up over and over again.
If we fast-forward to the prophets, we may recall that they often criticized the Israelites for honoring God with their lips, while their hearts remained far from God. They delighted in the forms of worship, but failed to actually love God.
On one occasion, God said through the prophet Isaiah that their burnt offerings were useless because they failed to love and obey the Lord (see Isaiah 1). He wanted their whole-hearted devotion.
It’s particularly telling that even though God made his requirements for worship known in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Psalmist picked up on the central goal of our worship when he wrote in Psalm 40:6-8:
Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—
but my ears you have opened—
burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.
Then I said, “Here I am, I have come—
it is written about me in the scroll.
I desire to do your will, my God;
your law is within my heart.”
It strikes me that God chose animal sacrifices and a temple because they were culturally significant at the time of the Israelites. They were vehicles or tools they could use to show their devotion to him.
They sacrificed animals because they were agrarian people who relied on animals to survive. They worshipped in a temple because that’s how people connected with deities then. God mercifully met them where they were and used familiar forms to teach them the importance of worshipping them with everything they had.
The basics of worshipping God remain the same—love the Lord your God. However, the particulars tend to be more flexible than we would imagine.
Tomorrow’s Post: Is the New Testament the Last Word on Worship?
