What makes me angry

Warning: What I am about to say might make a few people angry.  Of course, when one person expresses a strong opinion, it will tend to make the people who have opposite opinions to be peeved.  I don't believe that it should be a source for argument, but discussion.  Opinions, convictions, beliefs, whatever you want to call it (though each of those words have differing definitions in my mind), are best stuck to.  The phrase "stick to your guns" comes to mind.  If you believe something and feel that strongly about it and it is God honoring (Honoring God is most important in every conviction), then stick to it no matter what anybody says.  It's not easy, believe me.  I've had to stick to my guns a few times in my short lifetime, and it feels like a lonely, depressing road.  However, honoring what God has put in your heart will bring great rewards.  And the plus side is that people will respect  you for having a conviction and sticking to it.  Even if they don't agree.

So with that being said, here is the question for today, the 184th day of the year.  "What makes you angry?"

Lots of things make me angry: the current state of our country, the downsliding morals of the world in general, the way people handle things, the self-serving nature of people, the laziness of people, etc.  And I could probably write a good long blog post about each and every one of those things and why they make me angry.  However, the one thing that has been angering me most is the attitudes of the church.  Now, I know people will say "If you're angry with something in the church, you're bitter.  I beg to differ.  In the second chapter of John, right at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry, he got angry with the way things were handled in the church.  He even got a whip and started turning tables over.  If something in the church is not God honoring or not to the most excellent standard of worship, then it doesn't belong and we shouldn't just sit by and twiddle our thumbs waiting for the next person to say something about it.  We should be the bold voice to speak up against something we see that's not right.

That being said, here is what I am angry about.  Church has changed so much in the last hundred years.  Okay, church has changed so much since the first century churches.  However, the world has changed a lot since the first century.  In the first century, the Christians feared for their lives.  Even the Jews were out to put them in prison.  But all that aside, church has changed dramatically in the past hundred years.  Even in the past fifty years, church has changed.  It used to be the place where people assembled expecting God to come.  EXPECTING.  It wasn't an "I hope God comes today in our service."  It was "If God doesn't come, something's wrong and we need to figure out what it is."  People spent hours in prayer each week for the church services seeking for God to come.  They didn't hope for it, they expected it.  They wanted to see the presence of God every week.  They didn't care about anything else.  They didn't care if they had bulletins, the latest technology, the latest "evangelism technique," the latest anything..  They cared about the Spirit of God coming first, then about people being saved.  If you don't have the Spirit of God, how do you think people are going to see and hunger after Him?

Today, however, we are concerned about the latest programs.  Do we have junior church, do we have bulletins, do we have contact cards for the ushers to hand to the visitors, do we have technology, do we have the latest and greatest everything.  I'm not saying that junior church, bulletins, contact cards, technology, or the latest things are wrong.  They can be good things to have.  However, we tend to get caught up in it.  Do we have a snack for the kids at junior church?  I think it's just plain sad when kids walk into junior church and ask what snack they're having today.  They're not excited about what they're learning, they're wanting to have animal crackers and juice.  Are the bulletins up to date, and look pretty?  Are we making sure our service runs seamlessly?  Now don't get me wrong, I'm afraid people are going to take this as me bashing all of this stuff, and I'm not.  I'm saying that we get so caught up in the aesthetics that we're not worried about people having a true deep down salvation.  We're not worried about people seeing the presence of God.  We think we have the answers to the perfect church service, that we're not willing to just throw away the bulletin and let the Spirit of God lead the service.  We feel we must have things just so or else.

If your church is one that's slipping on this, be the voice to speak up.  However, don't just speak up and expect everyone else to change.  It's just plain hypocritical to say "I think we should spend time in prayer each week for God to come in our services" and then don't do it yourself.  Get down on your knees and start praying.  People keep talking about getting outside of their comfort zone while sitting in an air conditioned building in relatively comfortable pews just twiddling their thumbs wondering if God's gonna show up today.  It's time to get active, to get on your knees and weep before God begging to see Him.  God wants to come to our worship services.  I don't think people realize that.  God wants to be at their church every single service.  We just get so caught up in doing the right thing at the right time that we don't give Him room to just come and be with us.  We tell God when He can come.  We think God can come only when we tell Him to come.  We say "God, you come when we're singing this song."  Or "God, you come when we're praying."  Or "God, you come when the preacher is preaching."  We don't say "God, you come when you're good and ready to come, and we'll be here waiting for You and when You do come, we'll obey what the Spirit tells us to do.  No matter what."  Nowadays, if someone gets blessed and says "Amen" during church, you can almost hear the collective gasp and heads swivel to see who in the world just said that.  If someone starts to listen to the Spirit, we wonder what show their trying to put on.  If someone starts to follow what God is telling them, maybe running the aisles even, we just want to tell them to sit down so we can move on to the preaching and maybe get out at noon today so we can go home and eat.  Oh, we would never say it.  We would never tell someone that they couldn't get up and run the aisles.  If someone did, we wouldn't tell them to sit down.  But we would be thinking it.

Have we become so like the Pharisees of Jesus' day who had to have the worship of God just so, down to how far you could travel on the Sabbath?  Have we become so formal that we create a box to try to shove God in.  Have we come to the point where we try to force God to come at a certain time?  Have we gotten out of touch with the true meaning of worship?  Do we even realize that when we worship, we worship a Holy God who is much bigger than we our that could snuff our lives out quicker than a candle?  Do we even realize how huge it is to have the Creator of the universe to come and grace OUR service with His presence?  Do we care?  We say things are better now.  We think we're winning people to Jesus.  But are we just winning people to our program?  Do people feel good about the praise music we sing?  Do they feel that God is their friend who will put up with their sin and maybe overlook something here or there?  Do they feel that God is what they want Him to be?  And are we giving people these ideas?  Are we watering down the image of God so much that people don't have a reverent fear of God?  Are they not awed by the thought of God?  Are WE not awed by the thought of God?  Think about it.  We go to worship in the presence of God, the creator of the world.  There are over 7 BILLION people on this planet.  The universe is infinite.  The sun is 93 MILLION miles from the earth.  There are things we've never seen in the universe.  Things are bigger than we can imagine.  And God created ALL of it.  He could destroy it all with the snap of His fingers.  All He had to do was speak and the universe was created.  All He has to do is speak and it's destroyed.  That should put some reverent awe in people, but it doesn't anymore.  We have God sized down to this little thing that we can put into a box and carry where we want and when we want God, we open the box and say "You can come out now, God" and expect God to come.  Do you think God is going to follow what you say?  God doesn't come to us on our terms, we go to God on HIS TERMS.  Are we trying to put God and our Christian lives into a little briefcase to carry around with us to use when we need it?

If we are, God help us.  We are so pitiful and depraved to think that we are smarter than God.  We are the scum of the earth to think that God obeys us instead of us obeying God.  We wonder why things go so wrongly.  It's because we're trying to control everything ourselves.  We try to tell God what to do.  We kneel down to pray and say "God, thank you for doing this, but you forgot to do this other thing.  Hurry and do it so we can get on with our lives."  We are pitiful.  We are like tiny bugs, tiny ants trying to take control of the universe.  We are so arrogant to think that we have control over God.

How do we fix it though?  I believe that through prayer....lots of prayer, lots of humbling ourselves, lots of seeing who we truly are compared to who God truly is, we can turn things around.  But that requires a commitment, one that we don't stress enough anymore.  Loving God is a commitment, but we act like loving God is just another thing to be thrown around according to our whims.  We need to be so committed to God that NOTHING can rip us away from Him.  God is to be our number one priority.  Before everything else.  That's hard for us to do, for some reason.  We let our lives get in the way of daily worship.  We end up right before bed reading a Psalm then praying a couple sentences and laying down and forgetting about worship till the next night right before bed.

I'm not just saying this to everyone else, I'm saying it to myself, too.  I seem to struggle with finding time to worship God, but I can find time to do everything else I want to do.  I forget about keeping in contact with God through my whole day and just think about it when I have nothing else to do.  I think we should make a commitment.  A true commitment.  A commitment to daily worship.  Not just daily worship, but hourly worship.  If I could make up a word, we should be committed to secondly worship.  That's worship every second.  Could we make every second of our lives about worshipping God?  I don't mean every second you should be on your knees praying or singing songs or anything.  I mean, everything you do, whether you're at work writing a report, on the phone with someone, resting at home, at the grocery store, even while doing recreational activities, it should be to the glory of God.  Our lives should be a direct worship every second, no matter what we're doing.  If we can do that, if we can get back to worshipping God every day all day, then we will see results.  Great results.