|
THE NORTHERN KENTUCKY SEARCHER VOLUME 1, NUMBER 7, MARCH 18, 2001 What Am I Supposed To Think?
On a Wednesday evening I arrive for bible study and am standing right at
the door greeting the brethren and visitors as they come in.
You walk right by me, ignoring my out-stretched hand and my words of
greeting. What am I supposed to
think?
My child comes home from bible class and says, “Mommy, my teacher was
mean to me today.” What am I
supposed to think?
For a couple of weeks now I have been sick and my name has been included
in the announcements as being ill. I
have not been able to attend the services, really haven’t been able to do much
of anything, yet you have not visited me or called me or sent me a card.
What am I supposed to think?
You were at services on Sunday morning, but got up and left midway
through the sermon. What am I
supposed to think?
I heard in a round-about way that you said something about me that was
not very kind. What am I supposed to
think?
You were pretty gruff when you expressed an opinion that differed from my
opinion in a discussion about a particular passage of scripture and you made it
quite clear that you disagreed with me. What
am I supposed to think?
I’ll tell you what I am supposed to think in situations like these and
any one of a hundred others that we could probably come up with; I am to think
the very best of you until irrefutable evidence demonstrates otherwise.
My first thought, my initial reaction, should not be negative.
I should be positive about you and you should be positive about me.
In 1 Cor. 13, Paul was discussing the “more excellent way”, the way
of love. As he gave various
characteristics of love, he wrote in v. 7, that love, “bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Two phrases in that verse are particularly applicable to this article.
The first is that love “believes all things”.
That is not to say that one who has love is gullible or stupid, but it is
saying that when there is no absolute evidence to the contrary, love believes
the best about its fellowman. If I
have love I will not give in to unfounded suspicions and doubts.
I will give you the benefit of every doubt because I want to
believe the very best about you. And
if I need to know the whole story, I will come to you to find out.
The second phrase is that love “hopes all things”.
What this means is that when there is evidence of a negative nature, love
goes the extra mile. It hopes for
the best in its fellowman even when the evidence indicates otherwise.
Putting the two of these phrases together we can say that love, when it
has no evidence, believes the best; and that love, when the evidence is adverse
or negative, hopes for the best. If you walk right by me at services without saying hello or acknowledging my presence, it could very well be that you received some bad news right before coming and your mind is 1,000 miles away. You don’t need a negative reaction from me or hurt feelings, you need my concern that everything is O.K. If you don’t call me when I am sick, maybe you just forgot – because I sure have before. Let’s always give each other the benefit of the doubt and never jump to conclusions that could be unwarranted. Love demands no less. g.l. HOLY AND REVEREND IS HIS NAME”
The book of Psalms is filled with exuberant expressions of praise to God. His various attributes are exalted and his wonderful works and blessings are gratefully acknowledged. Along with the recognition of His majesty, the book of Psalms exhorts to practical application of that recognition. Let’s look at an example of what I mean.
Psalm 89:5 – 8, reads as follows, “And the heavens shall praise
thy wonders, O Lord: thy faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints.
For who in the heaven can be compared unto the Lord?
Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the Lord?
God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be
had in reverence of all them that are about Him. O Lord God of hosts, who is
a strong Lord like unto thee? Or to
thy faithfulness round about thee?” The
underlined portion of the passage is the practical application of the words of
praise and glory that surround it. Yes,
God is all those things and more: worthy of praise, incomparable, strong and
faithful. Our acknowledgment of
those attributes demands expression. In
view of all that God is, HOW REVERENT OUR WORSHIP SHOULD BE!!!!
I think of Isaiah when he recognized that he was in the presence of
Deity. He said in Isa. 6:5, “Woe
is me! For I am undone; because I am
a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”
I am reminded of the reaction of the children of It is a glorious and wonderful blessing to be able to worship God. What a privilege to be able to join our voice together in “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody” in our hearts to the Lord; to sing “with grace in your hearts to the Lord”. We talk to God together and know that He is listening to our prayers. Each Lord’s day we commemorate the greatest manifestation of love the world will ever know – the death of the Son of God, in our partaking of the Lord’s Supper. We also freely, and with joy in our hearts, give for the work of the Lord as we have been prospered. Together we study and seek to learn more fully “the engrafted word, which is able to save our souls.” Is there a danger that familiarity can dull the sense of awe, reverence and wonder, when we come before the Lord to worship? Is there a danger that this incredible privilege might become commonplace? Truly, the more we worship the more we should come to adore Him. The better we know God, the greater should be our sense of awe and holy fear. But I fear that in many cases, familiarity breeds a diminishing of the sense of reverence, wonder, and holy fear when we come together to worship God. Thus, the worship service becomes just something else we do during the course of a week, another part of the routine that we live, and it should be every thing but that! Please, don’t misunderstand me. I do not believe that a single one of us seeks to be disrespectful to God and His word on purpose. I believe it is something that folks just fall into without thinking, and that can be a problem. If we truly think about our worship and Who we are worshipping, we will humble ourselves and with awe, devote our full attention to what we are doing. Something else
along these same lines that needs to be considered by each of us and answered by
each of us came up recently. In our
last “topical Bible study”, the question of how we dress at worship was
discussed. Let me just add something
else to think about along those lines. Could
it be that our dress at worship might be an indicator that familiarity has
diminished our personal sense of awe and wonder, holy fear and profound respect,
that we feel toward the very One that we have
come together to worship? I am just
asking and trying to provide food for thought.
But when we come together to worship, should not our dress manifest the
sense of reverence, respect and awe that we have for God?
Indeed, shouldn’t that be in our minds as we open those closet doors
and decide what we are going to wear?
|