Has God Been Rejecting Our Sunday Worship?

People often leave the Sunday service and say something like, "Worship was good today!" but what do we mean by this? Typically, this means we thought the music was good or that something spoke to us or that we enjoyed it, but do you notice the recurring theme here? Each of the statements are reflections of our opinions. It's as if we are the judge of worship. Shouldn't we be asking, "God, were you pleased with our worship today?"

A couple Sundays ago, I challenged our gathering to wrestle with the concept of biblical worship. I asked the question, "Could God be rejecting our so called worship every Sunday just as He often rejected the sacrifices of the Israelites in the Old Testament?"

In the OT, the people had the routine of sacrifices down pretty good. However, what they continued to miss,  just as we still do today, is that God ultimately isn't after our acts of obedience and religious routines; He wants our lives. He wants our hearts. Because of this, He often rejected their sacrifices, asked them to stop giving them, and even asked the priests to close the doors to the temples. Check out these passages... Isaiah 1:13-19, Malachi 1:10-11

Fast forward to the New Testament. Read what Jesus says in John 4:19-24 and what Paul says in Romans 12:1. What about the reference to our bodies being the temple/place of worship in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20? What do these passages mean? Essentially, they reveal to us that if we aren't worshiping God throughout the rhythms of our daily lives, our worship on Sunday means nothing because it's not even biblical worship.

Now, let's think about this from the positive perspective. What if we truly began to worship God throughout our week? What if His presence in our lives was a daily experience? Can you imagine then what our Sunday gatherings would be like? Instead of waiting until Sunday to "worship," we would be gathering together to collectively continue the worship we've been experiencing all week.

Evaluate your worship by His standards, and let's stop assuming we're doing what God wants simply because this is what our American church culture has trained us to do!