[It’s good to be back in the States after 6 days in Mexico. I didn’t have any opportunities to blog, or even to check emails during the whirlwind trip. I’m in the States for 10 days now before I leave for Ecuador, and I’ll try to make up for lost time!]
After putting in print a challenge to think about how well we Christians are advancing God’s purpose, it seems a propos that I report in and share how I decided to meet the challenge and try to communicate God’s will and purpose in the presentations I shared in Mexico.
Sunday morning, I spoke on the theme, “Encounter with God.” My point was that only in genuine encounter and presence do we meet God and join him in his purpose in this world. That lesson was presented primarily to Christians in the local church. I followed up with a lesson, “Portraits of Jesus.” Several visitors were present for the second lesson. My purpose was to communicate some of the many pictures or descriptions the Bible gives us as we try to understand Jesus.
If one of the primary desires of God for his creation is that we recognize him, that we come to know him and understand his nature, understanding the living Word who came to show us God is paramount. The problem of worship is a problem of knowledge. We cannot worship that One whom we do not know. We will not honor anyone or anything that we do not understand. A beginning point in returning the church to alignment with God’s purpose is to “preach Christ.” We must do a better job of telling the story. We must tell the story again and again. We must know the story, share the story, let the story form us and transform us. The recognition of who God really is–his nature, his actions, his character, his emotion–is essential to worship.
Worship (honor, respect, revererence) precedes desire for relationship. The church has busied itself too often trying to get people into relationship with God before those people know God, desire God, respect God. People are baptized with no desire or intention to connect with God, except selfishly seeking salvation as an escape hatch. People are baptized with no desire or intention to worship, no desire or intention to connect with the body of Christ in relationship. We can blame others, but we could as well point the finger inward and say, “Shame on us!” We have misused Christianity, we have miscommunicated God’s purpose and desire, and we ourselves have evidenced selfish motivations. We pay the price in the relationships of our life–both vertical and horizontal.