James Mercer from The Shins and Danger Mouse got together and made some music. Apparently they called it Broken Bells. And it was very good.
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In addition to the stuff I typically post on this blog, I also want to start writing some brief reflections on Scriptures that I am reading. My typical Bible-reading practice is to follow the Daily Office Lectionary from the Book of Common Prayer. I don’t turn it into a Bible study, but as I read I jot down what God seems to be impressing on me through the texts.
A couple weeks ago I read Psalm 50, where God is pictured as the judge of the earth. He gathers Israel before him and says that he finds nothing wrong with their practice of worship, but does find something lacking: there’s no heart of worship behind their practice.
God tells them he doesn’t really need their sacrifices anyway. “If I were hungry, I wouldn’t ask you for a hamburger, because I own it all!” We don’t do God any favors with our worship, because he really doesn’t need it. The problem was people who were mouthing the words of worship with no intention of living in a covenant relationship with God. They thought if they could just do their “religious duty” they could go on stealing, slandering and generally living for their own pleasure and glory.
Against this kind of “worship,” God commands them to “sacrifice thank offerings.” Living in a covenant relationship with God starts with a basic posture of “thank you” toward him as the giver of all good things. True worship starts with a thankful heart. Going through all the right “worship actions” without a Thank You heart at the center is just noise. It doesn’t impress God nor does it do anything for you.
“Great!” some will say, “I can sleep in on Sunday mornings! God doesn’t care about that stuff!” Well, that’s not exactly right either. God didn’t tell the Israelites to stop worshiping in concrete ways, just that merely going through the motions without a Thank You heart didn’t mean much to him.
It doesn’t mean we stop our activity and just walk around with thankful hearts. Worship is not just a posture of life, it is also embodied in concrete practices. Gathering together with the Body of Christ to eat together, listen to God’s Word together, pray together and encourage one another are really important.
God demands that our worship go deeper than merely jumping through the “correct” hoops. It must extend into a Thank You Life. But neither is it enough to simply have a thankful attitude “in your heart” without actually practicing worship in observable ways.
The bottom line is that faith without action is dead, and so is action without faith. But together they form the foundation of a Thank You Life that embodies true worship and brings growth and transformation because we are living interactively with God by His Spirit.
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Just a quick thought today.
I was reading the other day in 1 Corinthians, and in response to the divisions and strife that are taking place in the Corinthian church, Paul says he can’t exclaims “Since there is jealousy and quarreling among you… Are you not acting like mere human beings?” (3:3).
If Paul could accuse the Corinthians of acting like “mere human beings,” then apparently his assumption was that they were, in actuality, not mere human beings. For Paul, a Christian is something more than a “mere human being.” And this is what Jesus seems to have had in mind, too. He talks to Nicodemus in John 3 about being “born from above,” and it’s is not a clever euphemism for becoming an adherent to the Christian religion or believing a few interesting facts about God. It means that we have been born into a new kind of life that goes beyond “mere” human life, in Paul’s words. It means that something about our nature has changed on a fundamental level.
So the challenge is to learn to become what we are. Now that we have received life “from above” we ought to learn how to “walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4), to actually live out this “more-than-human” life. I am believing more and more that this is to be our primary witness to and evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. The question people ask is, “Does becoming a Christian actually do anything good for a human being?” If our lives aren’t displaying that, our message is hollow.
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