Quality Matters to God

"But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him" (John 4:23)

To God quality is vastly important and size matters little.

Man's moral fall has clouded his vision, confused his thinking and rendered him subject to delusion. One evidence of this is his all but incurable proneness to put size before quality in his appraisal of things. The Christian faith reverses this order, but even Christians tend to judge things by the old Adamic rule. How big? How much? and How many? are the questions often asked by religious persons when trying to evaluate Christian things.

The Christian faith engages a spiritual kingdom where quality of being is everything.

"The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (John 4:23-24)

With these words Jesus showed how far both Jews and Samaritans were astray in their argument over the proper place to worship. Not the beauty of a city nor the size of a mountain matters to the Father; truth and spirit and all the wealth of moral qualities that gather around them: these are all in all.

Lord, deliver me from the "size matters" mentality. Renew my worship, I pray. Amen

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Divine Sacredness

"And the captain of the Lord's host said unto Joshua, Loose they shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so" (Joshua 5:15)

Do you quietly bow your head in reverence when you step into the average gospel church?

I am not surprised if your answer is "no".

There is grief in my spirit when I go into the average church, for we have become a generation rapidly losing all sense of divine sacredness in our worship. Many whom we have raised in our churches no longer think in terms of reverence - which seems to indicate they doubt that God's presence is there.

In too many of our churches, you can detect the attitude that anything goes. It is my assessment that losing the awareness of God in our midst is a loss too terrible ever to be appraised.

Lord, I pray that we might restore to our worship a real sense of the divine sacredness of Your Presence in our churches and in our lives. Amen

~A. W. Tozer~