“‘A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am the Father, where is My honor? And if I am a Master, where is My reverence?’ says the Lord of hosts to you priests who despise My name. Yet you say, ‘In what way have we despised Your name?'” (Malachi 1:6).

EVEN IF WE DO NOT PRACTICE IDOLATRY, WE MAY STILL FAIL TO GIVE GOD THE REVERENCE HE IS DUE. We may fail to take Him seriously. And like those of Malachi’s day, we may not even admit to ourselves that we’ve not given God His rightful honor. Because of our lack of shame, our error is all the more egregious.

The modern view grants little majesty to God and evokes little awe from us. Even in prayer, we speak to God so casually that anyone listening might think we were shooting the breeze with a neighbor across the backyard fence. A. W. Tozer was not wide of the mark when he prefaced his trenchant The Knowledge of the Holy with this comment: “The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men . . . The words ‘Be still, and know that I am God,’ mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper [of our day].”

I believe at least two forces play upon us and tempt us to take a casual approach to God. First, science has demystified so many previously awe-inspiring phenomena that we’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be amazed. We’re jaded. Awe is simply not a feeling we experience much anymore, even with respect to God. But second, our age is one in which informality is the accepted style. In almost every realm of thought and action, the trend is toward ease and comfort. Is it any wonder that we’ve become more relaxed in our attitude toward God?

The fading of reverence for God is one reason our spirituality is so shallow and so weak. How can we be filled with any depth of satisfaction when we minimize the very God who is capable of filling us up? Our malady was well diagnosed by J. B. Phillips’s famous five words: “Your God is too small.” Until we realize that the self-indulgent “worship” that passes for reverence today is an insult to God, it’s not likely that we’ll seek Him as we should.

“If we haven’t learned to be worshipers, it doesn’t really matter how well we do anything else” (Erwin W. Lutzer).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3).

OUR CREATOR IS THE ONLY BEING WHOM WE MAY WORSHIP, AND WE MUST MAKE IT OUR AIM TO WORSHIP HIM AS HE TRULY IS. God is the only eternal, self-existent Being. Of all the things that exist, only He is uncreated — everything else that exists has been caused to exist by Him. Hence, if we worship anything other than God, we are worshiping a created thing, a “creature,” rather than the Creator, who alone is to be worshiped (Romans 1:20-25).

The Scriptures have a good deal to say about the danger of “idolatry.” But is it really the practical problem today that it was in ancient times? We probably don’t feel much temptation to worship anything in nature, and we certainly wouldn’t make a graven image. If we’re concerned about idols at all, we’re probably more tempted by the modern ones like money and material things (Colossians 3:5). But whether the idolatry is ancient or modern, we don’t see it as a serious problem because we are people who know that God should be our highest concern.

But suppose we’ve enthroned God in our hearts, and the thing that occupies the throne is simply a false conception of Him. Suppose the “God” we worship is not God as He has revealed Himself to be, but God as we have wrongly conceived Him in our own minds. In this case, are we not worshiping a “creature” of our own making? And are we not practicing a form of idolatry that is all the more dangerous because it is so subtle and sophisticated?

These days there seems to be a growing tendency for us to define God in the subjective terms of our own likes and dislikes. We demand that God be the kind of God we think He should be, or else we won’t “believe” in Him. But we’d better be careful. A day is coming when our very real Creator will be our very real Judge. If we’ve been unwilling to bow before the awesome truth of His reality and have concocted an imaginary “God” more agreeable to us, then the real God, the Reality that we found so unacceptable in time, will simply be unavailable to us in eternity.

“Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place” (A. W. Tozer).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him” (John 1:18).

IT IS A STUNNING FACT THAT GOD HAS MADE HIMSELF KNOWN TO THE HUMAN RACE THROUGH HIS SON JESUS CHRIST. Having been created in His image, we have a desperate, undeniable need to know the God who is our origin. We may not recognize this need for what it is, but it is there nonetheless. Without the knowledge of our Creator, we die. But sin cuts us off from Him and sets up the direst of predicaments: we must have the knowledge of God or perish, but this is the very knowledge which is impossible for us, in sin and on our own, to acquire.

Yet we were not left in our helpless state; God deigned to move toward us and make Himself known, even in our sinful condition. He has disclosed that which we could never have discovered on our own. “No one could ever have found God; he gave himself away” (Meister Eckhart).

When God disclosed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, that was the completion of a process begun long before. “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son . . . [who is] the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person” (Hebrews 1:1-3). “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Jesus Christ is God “explained” in human terms. He is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15). When Philip asked to be shown the Father, Jesus replied, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:9). As Augustine of Hippo wrote long ago, “Christ as God is the fatherland where we are going. Christ as man is the way by which we go.”

What if we neglect this declaration of Himself that God has made? Then we die. Ultimately, there is no alternative. Jesus could not have said it more clearly: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6).

“Christ is the aperture through which the immensity and magnificence of God can be seen” (J. B. Phillips).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“Therefore Eli said to Samuel, ‘Go, lie down; and it shall be, if He calls you, that you must say, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.”‘ So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood and called as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel answered, ‘Speak, for Your servant hears'” (1 Samuel 3:9,10).

AS WE SEEK GOD, WE MUST KEEP OURSELVES OPEN TO HIS WORD. Like rich, fertile soil ready to receive the sower’s seed, our hearts must be receptive to the word which God intends to plant there. Although marvelous good things can come from God’s word in our hearts, this word can’t even take root in our hearts if they are hardened or unhearing. We must be ready to listen.

To be ready to listen means that we’re ready to receive whatever God wishes to say. Yet our hearing is often hindered by presupposition and prejudice. We already have fixed ideas about what God “must” say, and there are limits to what we’ll listen to, even from God. But if we limit ourselves to what we want to hear, not many of us will hear what we need to hear. It is critically important that we move past our personal preferences and allow God to say to us whatever He wills. After all, a servant is in no position to dictate to his master what instructions the master is allowed to give. As those who would serve God, we have not been asked to serve in an “advisory capacity.” It is our role (and our high privilege) to wait upon His word and do His bidding, whatever that might be. “Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.”

The gift of language has been vouchsafed to us by God. But the gift was not given just so that we might speak; it was given that we might hear when our God speaks to us. Great issues hinge upon our choice in this matter. Readiness to listen is no accident of personality, randomly possessed by some people and not by others. It is a deliberate decision we make to open ourselves to God’s word. James encouraged us to do this: “Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:21,22). If we can honestly say what Samuel said, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears,” then we have a maturity that can take us toward an even greater maturity in the things of God.

“One of the highest and noblest functions of man’s mind is to listen to God’s Word, and so to read his mind and think his thoughts after him” (John R. W. Stott).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

Give unto the Lord the glory due to His name;
Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
(Psalm 29:2)

GOD IS TO BE WORSHIPED IN THE “BEAUTY OF HOLINESS,” BOTH THE BEAUTY OF OUR GRATITUDE FOR HIS HOLINESS AND THE REFLECTED GLORY OF HIS HOLINESS IN OUR OWN LIVES. We were made to experience beauty, and the highest beauty available to us is the beauty of holiness.

Unfortunately, holiness does not have the best of reputations. Those who strive for it are thought to be anxious, repressive, and slightly neurotic. Yet however many unhealthy people there may be in the world, such an image is an unfair caricature of the genuine seeker of God. If we do fit the stereotype of the emotionally strung-out saint, we’ve probably not made our way very far down the path of real sanctity. Far from being incompatible with health, holiness may be defined as wholeness and health in the most comprehensive sense, as is indicated by the very etymology of the words. “The old word for holy in the German language, heilig, also means healthy. And so heilbronn means holy-well, or healthy-well. You could not get any better definition of what holy really is than healthy — completely healthy” (Thomas Carlyle).

But if the holy life is not below the level of normal, there is also a sense in which it is not above. We don’t help ourselves by thinking of holiness as an extraordinary state of being, a state not meant for most of us. In the Scriptures, obedience is presented as the ordinary thing. It is simply the intended, normal mode of human living. If anything is to be called extraordinary, that would be unholiness. To be holy just means that we’re living a life where all the parts of our being are in their proper, normal place. Holiness is quite ordinary in that it is “the symmetry of the soul” (Philip Henry). And what a beautiful symmetry it is!

The human spirit was created to thrive on God’s beauty. When we long for our God and reach for Him, when we devote ourselves with a whole heart to showing forth His goodness, we come closer to a beauty that from the beginning was meant to surround us and delight us.

“Holiness has love for its essence, humility for its clothing, the good of others as its employment, and the honor of God as its end” (Nathanael Emmons).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).

GREAT SPIRITUAL PROGRESS OCCURS WHEN WE LEARN TO DO WHAT IS RIGHT FOR REASONS HIGHER THAN THOSE THAT HAVE MOVED US IN THE PAST. The very act of doing the right thing is important, of course. But even more important than that is our motive for doing it. Jesus repeatedly emphasized the importance of the heart. And we must get to the point where we do the right thing not just for good reasons but for the higher reasons — the highest of all these being the pure love of God Himself.

It is not an easy thing to wrestle with the question “What are we to do?” and keep the focus on God. Even as we consider what God’s will might be from a theoretical standpoint, it’s hard to keep our thoughts from being overpowered by the more immediate concerns that relate to ourselves. How will this or that action affect our feelings? What will make us happy? What will others think of us? What will we think of ourselves? What’s our best strategy? All this fretful self-concern about the pros and cons of human behavior makes it appear that life is about us. But life is not about us; it’s about God. All the self-centered questions in the world matter very little next to the question of God: what does God desire? And we are never in more danger of acting selfishly than when the thing that God desires happens to be a thing that also accrues to our advantage. It’s hard to keep from wrapping plain old self-will in the mantle of “God’s will.”

At some point we must learn not only to do what’s right but also to do it for God’s sake. Whether obedience seems advantageous or disadvantageous to us personally can’t be allowed to dominate the discussion. Many good things do come to the obedient, and it would be naive to suggest that we shouldn’t be drawn to these. But they can’t be our primary concern. Jesus taught that we get the good things God has for us only by forgetting these things and keeping our focus on Him. We find ourselves only when we lose ourselves, and life is gained in the act of giving it up.

“‘Not as I will, but as thou wilt.’ To be able to say these words and truly mean them is the highest point we can ever hope to attain. Then, indeed, we have broken out of time’s hard shell to breathe, not its stale air, but the fresh, exhilarating atmosphere of eternity” (Malcolm Muggeridge).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart” (Psalm 119:2).

THE TRUTHS THAT OPEN UP OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD ARE WON NOT SO MUCH BY THE CLARITY OF OUR INTELLECT AS BY THE PURITY OF OUR HEART. The doors of wisdom, through which we must pass to see God, are not broken down by the brute force of a strong mind alone. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10). The intellect must be in good working order, of course, for its work is indispensable. But it is the pure heart that opens the door and keeps us on the path to God. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

Let’s be careful, however, not to diminish the importance of rational thinking where God is concerned. We dare not de-emphasize the intellect, for there is no such thing as a right relationship with God except on the basis of propositional truth. The God of the Scriptures is always the “God of truth” (Psalm 31:5). But what determines whether the intellect gets the information it needs to make its approach to God? More than mere curiosity to know about Him, is it not the sincerity of our desire to serve God?

Many are the reasons why people might be interested in religion and pursue the idea of God intellectually. Entire lifetimes have been spent in this study by people who never came to know Him in the here and now, and will not see Him in the hereafter (Matthew 7:21-23). The truth is, diligent study only becomes the diligent seeking of God when the intellect is driven by a pure heart. And whether we’ve actually sought God or not is evidenced more by the tokens of discipleship than those of scholarship. As Elbert Green Hubbard said, “God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.”

We know these things, of course, but we forget them. We need to be reminded that seeking God is not an exclusively intellectual endeavor. Perhaps because it is easier just to think about God than to be an actual disciple, we need to be warned that God is more than an idea.

“At the day of judgment we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done” (Thomas à Kempis).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

IF GOD IS THE GOD HE REVEALS HIMSELF TO BE IN THE SCRIPTURES, IT IS NECESSARY THAT WE MAKE A DECISION EITHER FOR HIM OR AGAINST HIM. One way or the other, we must decide. To default on this question and simply let our lives unfold haphazardly is the ultimate foolishness. Weeds love an untended, neglected garden.

A human being will serve something. In the end, it will be seen that something was the primary principle of each person’s life, even if it was nothing more than the principle of laziness. Joshua’s challenge to the people of Israel took it for granted that they would serve some god. The question was only which god it would be. He called on them to make their choice, if not wisely, at least decisively: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.”

In childhood, many people memorized the text at John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Do we really believe this? If we do, how can we fail to decide what we’re going to do about this truth? Could there be any greater insult to a God who gave His Son for us than simply to say that He is not even important enough for us to deal with right now? When Elijah found the people of Israel vacillating between the worship of God and that of Baal, he explained to them that it was time to get off the fence. “And Elijah came to all the people, and said, ‘How long will you falter between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; but if Baal, follow him.’ But the people answered him not a word” (1 Kings 18:21).

The question of God is no small matter. Indeed, it is the most basic of life’s issues. Whatever we do when confronted with this question influences our character at its deepest level — and what we do about God is also indicative of what our character already is at its deepest level. One cannot be a quality person and not deal in a quality way with this issue. We are what we choose.

“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes . . . In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility” (Eleanor Roosevelt).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:9,10).

DEEP WITHIN US THERE SEEMS TO BE A NEED TO MAKE PROGRESS. We appear to have a basic, built-in drive to get to higher and higher levels of quality — and we’re unhappiest when our lives have come to a standstill. The word “frustrated” means that we’ve stopped, we’ve been blocked in our effort to move toward something that’s important to us. The things that frustrate us are often obstacles of our own making, but even so, frustrated people are unhappy people. When we’re not getting better and doing better, we don’t like being a human being.

From the standpoint of spiritual realities, sin is obviously the root of the problem. It is the fundamental explanation for both our failure to grow as we need to and the feeling of frustration that inevitably follows. When all has been said and done, it is God our Creator toward whom we must move and in whom we must grow. Apart from a right relationship with Him, no progress we can make will mean anything in the end. “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it” (Psalm 127:1).

Yet even when we acknowledge the primary role God must play in our progress, we sometimes still don’t move ahead. We fail to see the need on our part to take the spiritual steps we could take and to make the progress that is available to us each day. We can’t, in this life, be perfect. But we can make progress. We can improve. We can make each day better than the last. We can make the conscious decision to upgrade something about our character and conduct every day. We can reach forward. We can determine that the grace God has shown us will not have been in vain.

One way to understand the corruption by which sin destroys the human spirit is to think of it as a “stagnation.” When we cease to move toward God, we stagnate. When we’re not improving and making progress, we decay into a motionless death. To be delivered from this stagnation means that we are given God’s help to get up and get going again — toward Him.

“Holiness is not the end of progress, but deliverance from standing still” (G. Campbell Morgan).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have” (2 Corinthians 8:12).

STRANGE AS IT SOUNDS, WE ACCOMPLISH THE GREATEST THINGS SPIRITUALLY WHEN WE LEARN TO WORK WITHIN OUR LIMITS. If we expend our energy fretting about our obstacles and complaining about our limitations, we’ll do little lasting good; yet when we accept our limits and get busy gratefully doing what we are, in fact, able to do, productive things start to happen.

On one hand, the realization that God doesn’t expect of us anything we can’t do should relieve us of a great deal of stress. But on the other hand, the realization that God does expect of us what we can do ought to be a stimulant. When the time for judgment comes, our Judge will be concerned with what we’ve done with our abilities, the possibilities He placed before us. Even now, we can already see the harm that has come from failing to do little things in a timely fashion, things that were certainly doable at the moment we chose not to do them. A human lifetime eventually accumulates from these moments, and eternity will be the ultimate outworking of all these choices we’re making right now.

If we’re serious about making spiritual progress, one of the most helpful things we can do is meditate on the virtue of “resourcefulness.” One old-fashioned definition says that resourcefulness is “figuring out how to do a lot with a little.” In regard to spiritual things, we surely do need to be more resourceful, don’t we? Teddy Roosevelt used to say, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Applying that good advice to our spiritual lives, we can learn to grasp the simple, doable things that lie right before us and resourcefully squeeze the maximum good out of each moment. We grow toward God by just such steps.

British writer Lawrence Durrell once said in an interview, “It’s idle to strive for things out of your reach, just as it’s utterly immoral to be slothful about the qualities you have.” This principle is as true in the spiritual life as it is in the craft of writing. If a thing is not possible, neither is it necessary. What is necessary is the doing of what we can do.

“I am only one, but I am one. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. And what I can do, I ought to do. And what I ought to do, by the grace of God, I shall do” (Edward Everett Hale).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com