More often, whenever I am
disappointed in others it is I perceive that because they didn’t listen to me.
How dare they not listen to me? Why, don’t people understand I have the truth?
I know of people that come up with the most ludicrous reason to be involved in
worship and yet I am unwilling to hear them explain why, because I believe I
know the truth and I don’t want to hear anything else. What a shame! What am I
giving up, just so that I can be right? (2Thes2: 4) My intelligence, my ability
to put two and two together and still come up with four precludes me from
hearing those that say in other universes two and two equal five or three or
even zero. It is the ethelthreskeiaf, the worship of the will, that Paul
speaks against in Col 2:23 and in Rom. 14. Who am I to judge another man’s
servant? What I am doing is precisely what I am accusing the Jews of doing in
the early church. They persecuted Christians. They stoned Stephen (Acts 7:59,60)
among others. All because this was something new. I do this every time someone
introduces a new thought into the congregation and I dismiss it. Or when
someone has done that to me. But that is a symptom of what must be happening
when I normally sit down to worship, otherwise it wouldn’t rear it’s ugly head.
It is when my view becomes horizontal rather than vertical. Am I looking out
among the congregation counting who is there? Or am I asking myself why they
aren’t there and missing those people and the fellowship in the Lord that I
have had with them? This is worship to God. Not attendance, but love of God.
And realizing that I and the person in the next pew and the next and the next
are His. (Whether they are truly or not is up to God to decide, as with me) It
is the heart of the Father I seek after when I worship, whether with people or
alone. It is the God in Exodus 20:3 and Deut 5:7 that shall be above all other
gods and before Whom comes nothing else, regardless. It gives me the ability to
withstand temptation in the desert of Matt 4:10 so that Christ, through me and
my surrender of my will, can say, “Get thee hence, satan, for it is written
thou shall worship the LORD thy God and Him only shall thou serve.” That to God
is as pleasing as the sacrifice that Abel made of his first fruits of his
flock, because I am worshipping God and only God, and that is all that occupies
my thoughts. It is the sweet aroma that he smells in Gen 8:21 of Noah’s altar
that leads God to say He will never destroy the earth in the like manner of a
flood again. And it is the sweet aroma that leads Him to cover me with His
Son’s blood so that nothing can sever me from Him and there is no condemnation.
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