The polished floor of this mosque in Malaysia gives the appearance that the people are walking on glass
religion
Hymn Devotions Day 23 – From Greenland’s Icy Mountans
DAY 23 – FROM GREENLAND’S ICY MOUNTAINS
From out of the days of great missionary endeavors comes this hymn, which captures the spirit that moved so many to proclaim the gospel across the globe. It is our duty to bring the gospel to those who have never heard its story. It is our privilege to show all people the correct God to worship as well as the correct way to worship Him.
Paul told the Greeks in Acts 17, “You worship what you do not know, in ignorance “(my paraphrase) and then proceeded to enlighten them with the truth. In the same manner, those in places without a gospel witness worship in vain: idols made by hand, false gods, political systems, etc..
One of the charges against Christianity is that we destroyed people’s religion and culture with our missionaries. Yes, we did. We sought to destroy false worship and replace it with the knowledge of the True God. Social customs, as long as they do not violate Scripture, are to be left alone. Religious and moral deficiencies are to be exposed to the gospel light so that its transforming power can set the spiritual captives free. May we never shirk from seeking to transform every culture, including ours, and having them conform to God’s laws.
May we never be ashamed of the gospel’s power. May we never apologize for loving people so much that we are diligent in showing them how God requires them to worship.
Lord, move on me to be unashamed that You have set up a narrow way, an exclusive way to salvation – through Jesus Christ. Help me to never apologize for holding fast to the truth that through Him alone salvation is found. Help me to proclaim salvation to those who have never heard as well as those who have never responded.
FROM GREENLANDS ICY MOUNTAINS – Reginald Heber
From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand,
Where Africa’s sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand,
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile:
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.
Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! O salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation has learned Messiah’s Name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, His story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till like a sea of glory
It spreads from pole to pole;
Till o’er our ransomed nature the Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator, in bliss returns to reign.
Great Quotes From Ages Past #9
Here is a great quote from the “Prince of Preachers”
If you have been truly born again you have a new and holy nature, and you are no longer moved towards sinful objects as you were before. The things that you once loved you now hate, and therefore you will not run after them. You can hardly understand it but so it is that your thoughts and tastes are radically changed. You long for that very holiness which once it was irksome to hear of; and you loathe those vain pursuits which were once your delights. The man who puts his trust in the Lord sees the pleasures of sin in a new light. For he sees the evil which follows them by noting the agonies which they brought upon our Lord when He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. Without faith a man says to himself, “This sin is a very pleasant thing, why should I not enjoy it? Surely I may eat this fruit, which looks so charming and is so much to be desired.” The flesh sees honey in the drink, but faith at once perceives that there is poison in the cup. Faith spies the snake in the grass and gives warning of it. Faith remembers death, judgment, the great reward, the just punishment and that dread word, eternity.
C.H. Spurgeon
Numbers
I wanted to share some numbers this morning that has me thinking. According to Christianity Today, the United States sent 127,000 missionaries to other countries (making us the largest sending nation) while receiving over 32,400 missionaries from other countries (making us the largest receiving country). On February 29th of this year, USA Today reported that during the last ten years (2000-2010) Islam increased 74% and Time reported on March 12th that 16% of the US population consider themselves unattached to any religion.
While many conclusions from these numbers can be drawn, here is my take. America is definitely a post-Christian nation where the churches have failed to even keep up with the population growth. While we have championed going out into the “lost world”, we have lost our own country. Perhaps we should treat the US as a foreign country and adopt the same strategies here to reach our own lost. We also must repent of the arrogance of believing that we have the answers for everyone else when we are losing our own people. Maybe, just maybe, we need to look at other countries where Christianity is growing, not shrinking, and ask them to teach us how to reach our own people. While I am grateful for those 32,400 missionaries coming here to help us, I am ashamed that we are losing so much ground.
Perhaps its time to admit that Christianity in America is cultural and not transformational. Until we repent of that and the churches get busy making disciples, we will continue to see us losing ground. We have the truth, the training, the resources – what I question is if we have the commitment, the desire, the love for Christ that will compel us to reaching the lost for Him.
What about you? When is the last time you were involved in bringing a person to faith in Jesus Christ and discipling them in the faith?
In Spirit and In Truth – Excerpt from A Heart Hungry to Worship
Worship is not about us and how we feel; it is about giving God the honor due His name. His Word, not our feelings, define that “honor”, which is due Him.[1]
In Spirit and in Truth
At the end of the second chapter, a question was raised: “What does it mean to worship God in spirit and in truth?” Subsequent chapters have helped to lay the foundation for the answer to that question, which we will now consider. We will look at each of the terms Jesus used: worship, spirit, and truth, in order.
Worship
The word Jesus uses for worship in John 4:24 is proskuneo in Greek (or shachah in Hebrew). It means to “bow down” or “prostrate” oneself. The connotation is to engage in an act of humility, submission and reverence toward God.
In His conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus pointed out to her that the Samaritan’s idea of worshipping God was wrong. “You worship what you do not know, we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.”[2] The Samaritans worshipped God through ritual. For them, God was not personal. He was viewed as the Creator but not as their Father. Jesus was very deliberate in addressing God as Father (3 times in a row) emphasizing the personal nature of the relationship. He was trying to show her what was missing in her worship – a personal touch.
The only way true worship of God can take place is for a person to enter into a personal relationship with Him. God has to become their Father and they His children. The Samaritans knew God’s name, but not His character, personality or purposes. This is true of many people today. They know of God, but they do not know God personally for they have never experienced His salvation.
Unless a person accepts God’s salvation, he or she cannot enter into a filial (family) relationship with Him. Without this personal relationship, one cannot worship Him correctly. “In other words, one can know and worship God by experiencing His salvation which is in Jesus and which enables the worshipper to call God “abba”, Father.”[3]
This is one reason why Jesus Christ came to Earth. He came to personalize God and to model the type of relationship with Him that God desires.
In Spirit
Christ, in the statement He made to the Samaritan woman, makes worship a matter of the heart, not ritual or tradition. Worship has sincerity at its core. It is the response of one’s spirit to the Spirit of God, a communing of one to the other. While worship can be planned, most often it is spontaneous, a response to proximity with God.
The New Testament uses different phrases to illustrate what it means when a person submits their life to the Lord Jesus Christ. Phrases such as “born again”, “born from above,” or “becoming a new creation” serve to convey the idea of what it means to become a child of God. The language of adoption is also used, with God the Father shown as adopting sons and daughters into His Kingdom, out of the kingdom of this world.
Those who have experienced this adoption, this being “born again”, are the only ones who can worship God in spirit because the spirit now in them is the Spirit of God. You see, at the moment of salvation a wonderful event occurs. God recreates us spiritually (we are born anew) which allows us to interact with Him intimately. This is what Jesus was telling the Samaritan woman. She did not need to worry about where to worship. She needed to understand how to be able to worship. She needed to experience a rebirth, spiritually. Jesus had a very similar conversation with a man called Nicodemus in John, chapter 3.
Intellectual, erudite, skilled in rhetoric and theology, Nicodemus came to Jesus seeking answers. Nicodemus was “the” teacher of Israel, their premier religious instructor. He had heard Jesus speak, he had seen the miracles Jesus had performed, and he accepted the truth that Jesus was a man sent by God, yet he was not a Christian. He did not accept that Jesus was more than a man sent from God, that Jesus was God in the flesh.
When Nicodemus approached Jesus, he gave him a very sincere compliment. He was met by a very confrontational reply, “Unless you are born again, you will not see the kingdom of God.” Jesus tells the premier religious teacher in Israel that he is not going to be in God’s Kingdom unless he experiences a spiritual rebirth. The word Jesus uses for rebirth means a transformation so complete that it will allow a person to enter another world and adapt to its conditions. He is telling Nicodemus that he needs to undergo a complete metamorphosis in order to enter the Kingdom of God. He is saying to Nicodemus, “Unless you allow me to spiritually transform you, you will not be able to survive in the kingdom of God.”
Jesus is insisting that Nicodemus undergoes a spiritual change from who he is currently, to what he needs to be. To Nicodemus, this statement is staggering. He understands what Jesus is implying, that his religion was futile. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Pharisees tended to be hyper-legalists who externalized religion. They pursued a form of godliness that had no basis in reality. They were fanatically religious, striving to obey over 600 laws. For a Pharisee, salvation was obtained by works, doing things that they believed were pleasing to God. Being born again is something Nicodemus cannot do. Being born is something that happens to you, not something you do for yourself.
Nicodemus and Jesus did have something in common. Both were Jewish teachers. Jewish teachers taught spiritual truths in symbols. Nicodemus understands Jesus’ symbolism and answers back in kind. “How can a man, whose habits and ways of thinking have been fixed for so long, really be expected to change radically? Physical rebirth is impossible so is spiritual rebirth any more feasible? I can’t start over again. It’s too late. I’ve gone too far in my religious system to change now. I’d have to start all over again. My case is hopeless.”
Many people feel that way. Unlike Dinah, from chapter 3, they are too steeped in their religious tradition to be willing to change. They feel trapped and hopeless by beliefs that they have held all their lives and yet they are unwilling to change. It is not that they cannot change; it is that they will not change unless they allow God’s Spirit to convert them.
In order to satisfy the hunger of their hearts, in order to worship God correctly, they must allow God to transform their life spiritually. The new birth must come from the Holy Spirit of God. A person needs to be spiritually purified and spiritually reborn, and only the Spirit of God can only accomplish this.
We aren’t told how Nicodemus reacts to what he is told. He understands that Jesus is telling him that the new birth must be experienced in order to be understood. None of his scholarly wisdom will explain it. Only by immersing himself in Jesus will he be able to understand salvation.
Nicodemus knew about Jesus, had listened to Jesus, admired Jesus and complimented Jesus, but he did not know Jesus. He needed Jesus to transform his life through being born again.
Those whose hearts hunger to worship God must allow God to transform their life first. Then, they will be able to worship Him spirit to spirit. They will be able to hear Him and understand Him when He speaks. They will experience closeness, a sense of belonging, a kindred-ness with God that surpasses anything they could have imagined. This is what Jesus means when He tells us we have to worship in spirit.
In Truth
The second criteria Jesus says is necessary to be able to worship God is found in the phrase, “and in truth.” Knowing whom to worship, Jesus, is of supreme importance. To worship in ignorance makes a sham of religion.
Truth, in biblical terms, is whatever is in harmony with the nature and will of God. The essence of true worship must be on God’s terms and He has revealed that the only worship He will accept is that which is based through Jesus Christ. The revelation of God in Christ is absolute truth.
The issue is not where a person worships, but how they worship and whom they worship. The how is in spirit. The who is Jesus. Worship is more than just emotion. Too many people confuse the terms praise and worship. Praise is rooted in emotion. Worship is grounded in knowledge – the knowledge of God’s Word and the knowledge of God’s Son.
By gaining a proper understanding of what Jesus said to the woman at the well, a person can come to worship God properly. A person can no longer sustain the argument that the format or form of worship does not matter. Jesus clearly states that it does. It must come from the spirit and it has to be rooted in God’s revealed truth. Not truth as a person feels it should be (subjective), but as it actually is, measured by divine revelation via the Bible (objective). When knowledge of God is deficient, worship of Him will also be deficient.
Since God has decreed that He will only accept worship that is grounded in and which flows through Jesus, this makes Christianity the only religion accepted by God. No other form of worship is accepted. A person cannot decide to worship God in whatever way he or she wants to. They did not make the standard. No religion can develop rules that make worship to God possible, because worship is rooted in and through the person of Jesus. Truth cannot be found in the Koran, Baghivad Gita, Pearl of Great Price or other religious works, because they do not contain the historical record of Jesus Christ and the truth of His life. Truth is not perception. Truth is an absolute.
To worship God in spirit and in truth requires a person to come to God on His terms, surrendering their life to His Son Jesus, accepting His forgiveness and cleansing from sin. At that moment, the heart is renewed, God’s Spirit comes in, and fellowship begins with God that will last for an eternity.
It is a wonderful thing to experience the transforming person of Jesus Christ. Just ask the Samaritan woman and her neighbors.
A Heart Hungry to Worship is available in print or Kindle editions from Amazon or from the author at http://discernmentministries.webs.com
ta ethne 