“These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.” (Matthew 15:8-9 NLT)
We worship what we love! Yet far too often what we worship reflects a greater love for ourselves than for God. In Romans 12:1 Paul zeros in on what acceptable worship of God should look like. He writes: “And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice – the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him.”
Do you find it odd that Paul would plead with us to give God our bodies? Our bodies are designed by the Lord to become His Temple, His dwelling place on earth. But beyond even that, our bodies house our mind and heart, the proverbial “control centers” of our lives. They can be compared with a cockpit on an airplane. For all intent and purpose, our bodies are powerless to act except as the mind directs them.
Think of an airplane at 40,000 feet going 600 mph with no one at the controls. Am I hearing “recipe for disaster?” Yet, that’s actually a very good illustration of our lives when Jesus isn’t guiding our heart and mind and governing the use of our body. Paul’s plea to give our bodies to the Lord is his effort to help us understand the vital relationship between our mind, heart, soul, and body.
When you want to pursue a wholesome and God-honoring thought, how do you do that? You can think about it for years without significant change, but once you decide to act on it, you have only one option – to involve your body. Your hands, your voice, your legs. It’s similar when we offer God our worship. We can read God’s Word all day long, but unless and until what we’re reading is set in motion by our mind, heart, and feet, very little if anything of eternal value happens.
Kevin DeYoung wrote: “There is a gap between our love for the gospel and our love for godliness. This must change.” We can know all the right words, but if our lifestyles, governed largely by the investment of our body, are “preaching” a different “gospel” we’re going to be very ineffective for the Lord. If we dress immodestly, use inappropriate language, are flirtatious, or in other ways violate the clear teachings of God’s Word, we cease to act in loving and God-honoring ways.
If Jesus is a means to a more effective way of exalting ourselves, we cheapen the Gospel and put a knife in the heart of God. We seek to honor what we love, so we manipulate the Gospel to point people to ourselves rather than to Jesus first, thus dishonoring Him with our lips and offering an unacceptable offering to the Lord.
The Psalmist gives us an effective strategy to enable us to worship correctly, when he writes in Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends You, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.”
If we want to quickly identify what we love, all we need to do is ask ourselves: “What do I think about most?” “What do I spend my time doing?” “On what do I spend my money?” If we love God, He will fill our minds, our hearts, our desires, our aspirations. We’ll give generously to further His eternal purposes, and we’ll devote our time reading and studying His Word, and serving in ways that exalt Jesus and help others to see Him more clearly.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 