As our Pastor begins a series on The Ten Commandments, I began thinking about those commandments and worship. We talked a little about reverence in the last blog. The very foundational principle of the Ten Commandments is reverence for God. Jesus reaffirmed this quality in indicating man's approach to God in the first petition in the Lord's Prayer. "Hallowed be Thy Name." We live in a day where people are too flippant about the name of God and use it in a trivial way.
We also find that any sort of idolatry is absolutely forbidden by God. These ten commandments were the basis of the Hebrew Law and Covenant. Four of them have to do with our attitudes and relationship to God and six of them have to do with our attitudes and relationship to our fellowman. Jesus gave us a "cliff notes" version of all of them in two commandments - "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with All thy Heart and Soul and Strength and Mind; and thy Neighbor as Thyself."
When we believers look at contemporary idolatry we usually bring up money, status, sports, man-made heroes and celebrities, etc. But, as believers we forget some of the idols we tend to carve out in our own image, minds and hearts, especially those having to do with worship. We have lived through a time where believers have literally had wars over styles and practices of worship and styles of music, allowing our own cultural or sub-cultural biases and personal tastes to make worship about us rather than about Him. Is your worship idol . . . traditional, modern, blended, classic, evangelistic, contemporary, southern gospel, ancient, . . . all of these ideas and words conjured up by us in trying to describe "my" kind of worship? May we be reminded again - that this is just another form of idolatry. Worship is not about me or my personal likes or dislikes, ever - it is about Him! May we extol and lift Him up in Worship! Nothing belongs in place of Him. mjm
