The Lord establishes the calendar for worship of the people,
beginning with the Sabbath each week. From
the beginning that rule of life was to govern the people. The law against working on the Sabbath was
also for foreigners. No commerce was
intended to be transacted on the Sabbath by anyone. The Lord has always intended that a day be set
aside completely from work in the trust and belief that all would be well even
without that workday. The feasts all commemorate
the Lord's provision, either in deliverance from Egypt, Passover or the harvest
festivals of firstfruits and weeks. Those
feasts were dedicated to the Lord and provider of the feast. We need to take regular times to step away
from work to remember who has given us work and all that we have and return
praise and thanks.
Does the church have a problem with being judgmental? I think we have a problem in that we tend to
judge certain sins more seriously than others.
We have tended to focus on sexual sins and single them out for attention
and we ignore things like gossip, covetousness, gluttony, jealousy and envy,
consumerism, and a great many other things.
The answer isn't to give up judgment on sexual sin, it is to honestly
look in the mirror and deal with the sin in our own lives first, understand why
the world sees our hypocrisy, ruthlessly work to rid our lives of those things,
and then we will have humility in our judgment.
Sometimes I believe God's most difficult work is convicting religious
people of sin, we like it less the more we have been following Jesus. He is calling us to perfection. We will never reach that state and we will
never make any progress without continuing conviction and repentance. The more we recognize our own sinful and
broken state, our constant need of grace, the more we become like Him in being
dispensers of grace. We are more like
other image-bearers than we are Him and we need to keep that truth in mind at
all times.
Paul's man of lawlessness would be difficult to ignore. He "opposes and exalts himself against
every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the
temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God." There is no deception here, this man is like
the beast in the Revelation. We were
made for worship, we will either worship idols or we will worship the true and
living God, it is as simple as that. We see
in the church that we can worship pastors or teachers or other leaders and
allow them to come between us and a right, unmediated relationship with God
through Jesus Christ. Protestants do no
better and perhaps sometimes are worse about this than they believe Roman
Catholics to be. I have seen too often
my friends following after this or that teacher as though they alone had the
word of God, quoting that one constantly and neglecting the work of the Holy
Spirit in themselves to discern the Word.
Let us this day spend some time worshipping Him without any aids other
than the Holy Spirit within us, ascribing Him the honor due His Name.
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