Renegade

Merry Christmas Everyone,

I've really been enjoying Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart this year. I think the reason I like it so much is that his voice is so bad that it makes me focus on the words. I can't just gloss over them. Like Hark the Hearald angels sing Glory to the new born KING. We sing all these songs but do we know what they say? And if we know what they say to we know what they mean?

When the scripture calls Jesus KING OF KINGS do we have a clue how that should shape our lives?

I was thinking about the concept of spirit and truth the other day and it’s still haunting me this morning. John in his gospel quotes Jesus as saying:

"But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. "God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

Actually the thing that concerns me is our concept of worship which influences our concept of what spirit and truth are. I am amazed that in translating words in the New Testament we seek to find the truest meaning of the Greek word and so we go to great lengths to find the meaning of the word used in context in Greek literature and so we end up defining words outside the context of the scripture. In effect what we are doing is Gnosticizing the word of God in pursuit of the truth.

We miss the point in our linguistic pursuits when we don’t remember that the meaning of many of the words of the new testament came pre-defined from the old testament. The common language (greek) was used to express the meaning of an uncommon language (Hebrew). We have lost that.

And I would say we have lost it nowhere more clearly than with our concept of worship. The Greek word means to reverence or to kiss the ring of an authority and again the idea given to the word is one of reverence. Somewhere along the line we have twisted reverence to mean; have emotional feelings in favor of someone. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You revere a King by obeying him. You can say you love him all the time but if you commit treason against him you will die. You can Kiss his ring with all the emotion you can muster but if you don’t obey him you don’t reverence him. It is the obedience aspect of worship that we have lost.

In Psalm 95: 6 we read: Come let us worship and bow down let us kneel before the Lord our God our maker. What that passage says is come let us bow down and bow down let us bow down before the Lord our God. The Psalmist uses three words for bow down. I would say that this means to completely submit ourselves, not just physically but with every aspect of our being. Our hearts must bow down in submission to the will of our maker. That is worship.

When Jesus says those that worship (bow down) to God must do so in Spirit and in Truth it is a call for complete surrender. We have a lot of people in our churches who bow down in truth. They love truth. They want to pack as much truth into their heads as they can. They can spout off meaningless facts about the scripture and parse verbs and show how the words rhymed in the original languages but they have a spirit of haughtiness. They don’t bow their lives before the one who made them. They refuse to kneel in spirit.

On the other hand there are those that think that in the Spirit means in the emotion and so they will craft their worship songs to illicit a tear at just the right moment. You can see it on any of the homecoming videos. The song will do whatever it takes to make someone in the crowd wipe a tear. And that tear is associated with the Spirit. But tears don’t mean that a person’s spirit is kneeling. It means their emotions have been triggered. The same is true for those mosh pit worshippers at the other end of the age spectrum.

It is time that we leave the Gnosticism, the false religion of unbelief behind us and bow down before the law word of the great king in submission to him and his word bowing down, bowing down, bowing down before the Lord (KING and giver of the law) our God, our Maker.

You see real worship wars are not about style or form. When it comes right down to it you have to get pretty nit picky to find a worship style proclaimed in scripture. The real concern should be our lack of worship (bowing down in submission to the law of the king) while we kiss his ring with our shouts and tears and musical shenanigans.

Form rules supreme in the land but in the end traitors will still be put to death.
Perhaps we should start singing the song Renegade by Styx in our bow down services from now on:

Oh mama I’m in fear for my life from the long arm of the law. Hang man is coming down from the gallows and I don’t have very long.

If we believe the word of God is true then perhaps that would bring us to repentance. If we don’t believe the word of God is true then why are we wasting our time because all we are is Dust in the Wind and contrary to popular opinion I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Grace and Peace with perseverence,

Brad