Worship: Obeying God

I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD (How God commands us in worship)

God saves. Only God saves. And God is not only an answer to “Help me”, He is the answer. It is the answer to a cry to defeat those who would beat me down. When times are tough. (2 Chronicles 20:6-27). When I like Manasseh in 2 Chronicles 33:13, 19 face the Hagarites, and I destroy all idols that might distract me from what God intends for me to be pure worship, God will save me. He is waiting to do so. But it will only work if I give Him my devotion, and I do destroy the idols. God brings me from captivity of my sins as he returned Ezra and His people to Jerusalem (Ezra 8:21-23; Ezra 4:12-15). As long as I rebuild His temple in my heart (I Cor 3:16), He will help me for He knows, as any good parent understands, I am ready to use what He gives me. And once I build His temple in my heart, I am ready to speak to Him and pray to Him and confess my sins, as Daniel. (Daniel 9:20-23) He will show me the way through the darkness. But I must be willing to use the flashlight He gives me. And I must come to know that He is the only being I must worship, and nothing else, not even if I think it looks like Him. (Rev 22:9)

Don’t misunderstand me; God is always and ever present. He will never be separated from me. But He knows that I will misuse and am really not listening to Him when He tells me what to do, not really, and so basically He gives me what I want once and for all for His purpose. Why? So that I learn humility. Because in the long run, what I want is not what I need, whether I want to admit that or not. What I think is a strong desire to do, what I believe is a yearning need, is really something else to build a protective wall around. It just an onion skin because I would rather hide than actually be honest with God and say to Him, “OK, God. This is what You get.” What I don’t realize is that unless I truly talk to Him, how will I expect to come before Him honestly? How can I say that I really care and love Him? Until I am honest with Him and do come before Him, it doesn’t matter to me what He thinks, even if He has told me over and over and over again. He through Jesus beckons me, in Mark 1:40-43 and in Luke 5:12.13. He simply beckons with “Come”. When I was twenty-three, and still in college, I dreamed of many things, but most startling, was a dream of Jesus knocking at a wooden door and simply saying, “Come”. About 6 months later I “obeyed the gospel” but more importantly, I obeyed God, what God said about Jesus, when He told Him “This is my son in whom I am well pleased” upon His baptism. When I was an infant, I was baptized as a Catholic, being from New Orleans among a very Catholic city. As I grew up there was always something missing, and I had to find it. Regardless of the ridicule I would face by not being true to the family religion. And so that dream I had stuck in me, as it does now, and my search was on. And I found Him, at first in the dusty pages of a rather unused version of my mother and father’s bible. But then I found Him in my own bible. The baptism I had to go through was something that I had to decide upon, not to have someone else decide for me. I had to decide to follow God and only God and to be called a Christian and only a Christian. To have no other name that was carved by man but to have His Name, a follower of His Son. Christ decided for himself, all those in the bible decided for themselves. I had to make that decision as well. I fell at His feet like the one grateful leper that knew and lived as though He knew the Lord. And I hungered and thirsted for His word and learning of Him. But you see there is much much more to learning Who He is than reading. And that is where prayer and worship come in. I was and I am ready for Him to rule me. He could make me follow Him, but His power and strength is echoed in my choice. My choice determines God’s best use of me. (I Kings 3:1-13) The thing that is frightful is that He could make the choice for me, but there is that free will and He wants me to make up my mind that He is King, Lord, and God.