“…Men… I see that you are fearful of gods in everything. For as I passed by and saw the things you worship, I also found an altar with this inscr i ption: ‘TO THE UNKNOWN GOD’. Not knowing then whom you worship, I make Him known to you.”     (Acts 17:22-23)

            “Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you shall neither worship the Father in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know, we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the TRUE worshipers will worship Him in spirit and in truth,  for the Father seeks such to worship Him.’”                                 (John 4:21-23)

            As a long-time minister of music and praise leader, I have been asked over the years to teach workshops and seminars dealing with the musical aspects of praise and worship. In so doing, I have often taught on the passage in John 4 where Jesus deals with the woman at the well in Samaria, particularly dealing with what it means to worship God “in spirit and in truth”. But I have to admit that I’ve been guilty of doing sometimes what I’ve often accused others of doing, and that is trying to go so deep into something that you sometimes miss the obvious, which was brought to my attention, and led to this blog: do I personally know the God that I worship? My saying this is significant because it will lead me to the very point of what I want challenge us to do at the end of this teaching…

            You’ve often heard me say here that “The Praise Party” is not a place for religious discussion, and that one of the things that I hate most of all is religion. And why? Because Jesus hated religion most of all! In fact, the one group of people in the Bible that hated Jesus most of all were the religious scholars and leaders of the day, because He would continually expose their lives and practices for the lies that they were, while all the time they professed to know and worship God. And yet, they rejected the very Son of God simply because they did not know who He was… One of Jesus’ greatest condemnations of the Pharisees and other religious leaders can be found in Mark 7, where we read this:

“…How right Isaiah was when he prophesied about you! You are hypocrites, just as he wrote: ‘These people, says God, honor me with their lips, but their heart is really far away from me. It is no use for them to worship me, because they teach human rules as though they were My laws.’ You put aside God’s commands and obey human teachings… You have a clever way of rejecting God’s law in order to uphold your human teaching.”

(Mark 7:6-9, GNB)

            Jesus regularly avoided getting into religious discussions with these people because He knew they were only asking questions trying to trap Him with His own words, instead of honestly seeking to try to get closer to the God that made them; in other words, because Jesus did not fit into “their traditions” of their interpretation of the laws of Moses, He couldn’t possibly be who He said He was, could He?  I, however, sometimes wonder if we, who claim to have relationship with Jesus, aren’t also sometimes guilty of worshiping God our Father based on what we’ve been taught through our own upbringing, whether we grew up in the church culture or not,  and follow in the “traditions of our fathers…” We get up early Sunday morning, we get dressed, we go to Sunday School or early morning service, we do praise and worship, we pray, we sing, we give offerings, we listen to the sermon, we give the invitation, and then we go home, only to do the same things again and again, and have we stopped to ask ourselves, “Why do we do this?”

            In both the passages listed above, Paul and Jesus are focusing in on the same thing: trying to guide the people listening to the real heart of the matter, knowing Who it is, that you worship. As Paul addresses the Athenians in the Areopagus, he uses the opportunity to direct their attention from the worshiping of dead idols and man-made gods to getting to know the one true living God who created them by telling them that they were sincere in their worship, but ignorant of what it was they were truly worshiping, and directing them and their culture of “seeking after the truth” to begin to seek and pursue after the living God through getting to know Jesus, “the Man whom God has raised from the dead.” When Jesus was talking to the woman in Samaria, He does the same thing in response to the woman’s reaction to His “calling her out” about her marital situation… (Isn’t it funny that whenever one of our “hot buttons” is pushed, we react by getting either really angry or really religious, or both?) The woman challenges Jesus by saying that “I see that you are a Prophet… Well, tell me this: our fathers worshiped here on this mountain, but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship. Tell me, who’s right, and who’s wrong, Mr. Prophet?” Jesus, in His own inimitable way, shifts the main focus onto what it should be all along, not on how and where you worship, but on whom you worship. Jesus tells her clearly, “You worship what you do not know…” The reason He could say this so emphatically is because the Samaritans only subscribed to the first five books of the scr i ptures, in other words, only the Mosaic law. They rejected the books of wisdom and prophecy, and although they worshiped the one true God, they did so out of ignorance (from further revelation) and traditions passed on down to them from their ancestors. (Before I make my final point, let me ask this question: “When we take God ‘out of the box’, is it only to put Him in a bigger one?”)

            What the real heart of the matter is, (and the real heart of God is,) is that we passionately pursue Him to get to know Him better, because the more we know of Him and about Him, the more we can truly worship Him in spirit and in truth. Where do we start? Simply by reading His word every day; find out how He operates, find out how He thinks, find out what He says about you in His word… Secondly, talk to Him! All prayer is is simple conversation with God, not begging, not pleading, not vain repetition that means nothing to you as you say it (and certainly doesn’t mean anything to Him…) And as you talk to Him, expect Him to talk back to You! No, not necessarily in an audible voice, but He will answer through His Word (His primary instrument,) through men and women of God, and sometimes, even through means like this broadcast here! (Let me add this as a pastor: your local fellowship and body of believers, if you have access to it, is your primary family that God intends for you to receive His blessing through; however, I am thankful for other means, such as this social network, where we can continue to strengthen and encourage each other in the faith as an extended family, which you all have truly become to me!) The bottom line is this: God loves being pursued, and He is a rewarder of those that diligently seek after Him…

            I know this is already long, but let me say this in closing: my personal salvation verses were Matthew 7:21-23, where the implication was that although you did all this “religious” stuff “in [My] name, …I never knew You!” At that point in time, I had been in church all of my life, but had never pursued trying to get to know Him on a personal and intimate level. All I can say is that ever since that time, and I haven’t always been that good about it, but I couldn’t think of any other opportunity that I’d rather have than getting to know God better. That’s what I try to show you on “The Praise Party” and through my web page, and my prayer for you is that He becomes as real and as tangible for you as He is to me!

Still running after Him,

(Cedric) Pastor Ced