As one looks at the religious landscape, it can be confusing. One may ask, how did religion get in this position? There are over 33,000 different churches within the United States today. All teach different doctrines and worship God in different ways. Just looking at it all makes one’s head spin. However, this was not God’s plan at all. Jesus stated that “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23-24). And when one looks at worship as a whole; church A worshipping one way and church B worshipping a different way and church C doing things differently than A and B, one may wonder “what does God want?”
Let’s say that the game of baseball is immediately outlawed. No one can play it any longer, nor talk about it. Let’s say that this stands for 150 years. There no longer lives anyone with firsthand knowledge about the game of baseball. One day, someone runs across something that mentions the game of baseball. They are intrigued and decide to start up baseball again. How would they go about it? Would they make up baseball again to their own liking, or would they search out a baseball rule book and see how it was played in its original form? Of course, for it to be baseball, true baseball, we would have to go by the rulebook and see how it was played in the beginning.
The same applies to worshipping God. If I truly want to worship God how He desires and demands, I too must go back to the rule book and see what He demanded. The only place I would go is the Bible, specifically the New Testament as that is the time that we are living under today (Hebrews 9:15-17). I would begin in the book of Acts and see how the first century church worshipped God, when they worshipped God and how they lived daily for Him. I would look at the letters the inspired Apostle Paul wrote to the churches of the first century.
What would I find? It would take a lot more paper to write everything you would find than the paper that you have in front of you now. Let me be the first to invite you to come and see what first century worship looked like. Please join us for worship this Sunday at the Rabun County Church of Christ as we worship God in spirit and truth. I would be happy to sit down with you, one on one, and study the Bible with you so that we both can make sure that we are worshipping God in a way that pleases Him. Be our guest this Sunday and let’s get back to Bible!