Do We Come to Worship God, Or To Feel Good About Us?

Too many people who come to Church on Sundays  are looking  for the Worship leaders to make them feel good.  They desire that they receive something out of the worship service.  They want the pastor to say things that make them feel good about themselves.  The idea of church is no longer about coming to worship God but is about making oneself feel good, we hope that songs will bring a good feeling to us and we do not even take time to notice the words we sing.  We wage wars inside the church about how to worship forgetting what true worship is all about.  As I was reading one night I came across this thought: “We [Americans] interpret everything through a lens of pragmatism, through a transactional understanding of the world.  Many of us come to church Sunday after Sunday with the expectation of receiving something … But God does not exist to be useful.  God exists to be adored, simply because of who He is. True worship is, at its core, an act of senseless , wasteful, indulgent beauty.” (Skye Jethani)

              How many of us fall into this trap of thinking that we come to church and it is not our responsibility to be prepared to worship?  We come but we are not prepared. We believe that the worship leader should come and be passionate and make us ready to worship.  We serve a God who does not take orders from anyone, who created the universe and sent His son to earth to die on a cross for our sins, so we could be saved and have true life.  Yet we cannot come into His house of worship and be ready to worship Him.  We have the mindset that if we do not like what is happening or we aren’t moved enough it is someone’s fault but not our own.  King David said; “The one thing I ask of the Lord—the thing I seek most—is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord’s perfections and meditating in his Temple. Then I will hold my head high, above my enemies who surround me. At his Tabernacle I will offer sacrifices with shouts of joy, singing and praising the Lord with music.”(Ps 4,6)

I want you to think about this when you come to church each Sunday, have you prepared yourself to come and to worship.  Have you like, King David said, today I want to go and seek God, I want to delight in His word, I will sacrifice with shouts of joy, singing and praising the Lord with music.  You see we mistakenly think that church is about us, but it is not about us at all it is all about God, we are called to passionately love God with everything we have and we are to praise His name.  Church is all about God and we must come prepared to worship God.  Think about what Peter tells us, “get rid of all malicious behavior and deceit. Don’t just pretend to be good! Be done with hypocrisy and jealousy and backstabbing. You must crave pure spiritual milk so that you can grow into the fullness of your salvation. Cry out for this nourishment as a baby cries for milk, now that you have had a taste of the Lord’s kindness. Come to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God’s temple. He was rejected by the people, but he is precious to God who chose him.  And now God is building you, as living stones, into his spiritual temple. What’s more, you are God’s holy priests, who offer the spiritual sacrifices that please him because of Jesus Christ.”(1^stPeter 2:1-5)  We are to no longer live as we did before we must live to please and to worship God, we are to do without expecting anything back.  We are to crave God’s word.  We are to come and be passionate in our worship of God.