Worshipping God and loving God are similar in that neither one can be excessively premeditated. And we love and worship best when we do not claim to have the Object of our admiration all figured out.
To love Christ is to delight in the genuine reality of His greatness. He is who He is, purely, unassumingly, all the time. If we try to imagine Him as someone other than who He is, then we are neither loving nor worshipping Him truly. Therefore we worship Him not because He meets our expectations, but because He exceeds them marvelously.
Christ is who He is not for our amusement but for our pure childlike acceptance and unassuming enjoyment. He doesn’t reveal Himself so we might compare Him with others and then maybe approve if we feel like it. He already has His approval from the Father and is therefore perfectly content to dwell with the Father just as He is. Christ has already accomplished perfect fullness and perfect sufficiency. His Divinity is unshakable.
God warns us repeatedly not to liken Him to any part of His creation, nor to allow our understanding of Him to resemble that of the Godless masses. Therefore, we mix up our priorities when we undermine our reverence for God in order to “meet lost people where they’re at” or to be “seeker friendly.” While this may be well-intentioned, it oftentimes betrays our calling to set our sights on heaven.
If we start to think like the world in order to quantify the Lord to the world, then we are only misleading ourselves and the world. I’m not talking about conceited elitism. I am talking about a firm respect for God's holiness.
It only kindles God's anger when we try to put pieces of His creation together into some man-made things so we can call this thing “God.” This is the opposite of worship and it has the opposite effect of worship.
If any of us have tasted the fullness of Christ's Divinity, then we are also blessed with the inability to settle for any imitation. There is no way, and indeed we do not want any way, to get around the holiness (the set-apartness) of God.
This is an excerpt from To the Church of the West, Scattered Throughout the World. Find this book and similar articles at www.BooksByPatrick.com
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