Randy's Blog

A man woke up one Sunday morning and just lay in bed. His wife encouraged him to get up. It was time to get ready to go to church, but he continued lying there. He complained, "I'm tired. I want to sleep in. Everybody else does - why can't I?" His wife looked at him and told him, "It's Sunday, and we're going to church. Being tired is no excuse. Staying away because others do is no excuse. And besides...you're the pastor and you have to be there!"


Yes, I've felt that way a time or two, and probably just about every pastor and even dedicated Christ follower has, too. In my early years in the ministry I met a retired pastor who was quite "colorful". There were so many stories about him. He was never afraid to speak his mind, and he did it quite bluntly at times. 


One Sunday evening, when Sunday evening services were still quite common, his wife walked into the living room to find him sitting in his recliner, in his pajamas, watching television. The front door was open, so that anyone could see in through the screen door and see him sitting there. Let me add that their home, a parsonage provided by the church for their pastor, was located right next door to the church. So, his wife was concerned that as church members walked by the parsonage to the church they would see their pastor lazily sitting there in front of the television in his pajamas. She encouraged him to get up and get ready to lead the evening's worship service, but he refused to get up. Finally, he said, loud enough for anyone outside to hear, "Only a handful of our folks come to the evening service, so I decided to stay home tonight and see what the attraction is!" I've heard this story enough times, including from him, to believe that not only did it happen, but he meant it!


Worship seems to have become a very personal activity, subject to our feelings and whims. It's easy to decide not to attend a weekly worship service because we don't feel like it. And everything about our culture encourages that consumer approach to worship. If it's not convenient, if it doesn't meet all my needs, if I have other things I need to do, if it goes a few minutes long, then I think I'll pass. But there's a danger to this understanding.


From Genesis to Revelation we see a pattern of God's people coming together to offer Him praise and thanksgiving (and I don't mean just the one day a year holiday). The word "worship" comes from an old English word that essentially means to assign worth to another - worthship! Jesus tells us to worship in spirit and truth. Nothing in all these understandings begins with what I am feeling or whether it's convenient or not. Worship is an act of offering up a sense of worth to my God. It is a choice to affirm He is worthy of worship, in spite of what the world around us says or how I'm feeling today. Worship is first and foremost about God rather than about me! True worship is not about what I get out of it but what I put into it!


So, we make the choice to come to worship not because we have to or even because it's our tradition. We make the choice to worship because God is worthy of our worship, and I choose to worship Him. We make the choice to worship because as human beings, we were created with the need to recognize Someone beyond ourselves - God Himself, as definitively revealed in Jesus Christ. 


Yet, the reality of sin in our lives corrupts this desire to worship God into worshipping not Someone but someone(s) or something(s) else. All too often this isn't God, or at least not God exclusively. That's why God proclaimed that we are to have no other gods but Him, and we are not to worship idols (First and Second Commandments, Exodus 20:3-6). 


We take on the characteristics of that which we worship. And since we were created in the image of God, it is His characteristics we were created to take on. But the enemy from the very beginning (Genesis 3) has attempted to corrupt us by encouraging us to put something other God first in our lives; by assigning value and worth to another thing or being or idea rather than the Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.


Of course, worship isn't limited to something we can or should do only once a week in a worship service with other followers of Christ. In fact, worship should become a part of our lifestyle, of living in the constant awareness and awe of God and often throughout our day in informal or quiet ways offering Him praise and gratitude. 


The practice of the early church was to gather together on the first day of the week - in remembrance of that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave - to offer God thanks and praise for all He had done, is doing and will do. There is power when the body of Christ unites together with the purpose of worshipping God together. It's an outward and visible act of assigning worth to God, of reminding ourselves what and Who ultimately matters, and it's something we're called to do in spite of our feelings or even our convenience. 


In fact, worship can and should fly into the face of any consumer orientation that life and faith are all about me. Only life that begins in God, that loves God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loves our neighbors as ourselves is a life rightly ordered. Anything else harkens back to the serpent's first temptation and lie - to try to be like God or replace God with something or someone else.


Over the years I've heard the oft-repeated statement that we can worship just as well on the golf course or out on the boat as a justification for not attending corporate worship. And it's certainly true to a degree - we can worship on the golf course or out on the boat. The question, though, is - do we? And is this a replacement for corporate worship? A life of worship means we should worship in those places, but we should also choose to be a part of the body of Christ's regular corporate worship, too. 

"And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near." Heb. 10:25 NLT

I love the story about the elderly gentleman who showed up to church every week and sat on the front row. Over the years his hearing had almost completely failed. It required almost shouting into his ear for him to hear anything, and he certainly could not hear the message or the singing around him in worship. Finally, one day a young man asked him why he kept coming to church when he couldn't hear, and the wise old gentleman replied, "Because I want to show everyone Whose side I'm on!"


Worship shows Whose side we're on. It's an act of the will to offer worth to God, even when we don't feel like it. Sometimes it penetrates our souls and raises us to heavenly heights, and sometimes we may feel little. But that's not ultimately the point! It's not about me - it's about God!

I admit that reading in Leviticus isn't always at the top of my list. Leviticus and Numbers, the third and fourth books of the Bible, can seem long, repetitive and even irrelevant. But what I have discovered is that sometimes we have to pull back from the details of a particular passage to see the big picture and the accumulated weight of all that is being said.


That's what helped me this morning as I was reading my Life Journal readings of Leviticus 4-6. The sub-headings in my Bible title sections with things like, "Procedures for the Sin Offering" and "Sins Requiring a Sin Offering." Who wants to read about sins and the incredible amount of detail spelled out for these offerings, often repeated multiple times?


But then I back up and look at the bigger picture, and several things come into focus. First, these procedures for sin offerings all revolve around unintentional sins: "'If any of the common people sin by violating one of the LORD's commands, but they don't realize it, they are still guilty.'" (Leviticus 4:27) 


Think about that for a moment. We often think of a sin as intentionally doing something that goes against God's laws. But here God tells us we can sin unintentionally, but it is still a sin. It still hurts our relationship with Him, and it often hurts others and/or ourselves. Ignorance doesn't diminish the effects.


If we understand this and take it seriously, one of our prayers needs to be, "God, show me where I have sinned and did not even realize it." That's not necessarily a fun prayer, but if we're serious about our spiritual journey, this passage shows us this needs to be a part of our prayer life. We need to become aware of our unintentional sins, in order to be forgiven, but more importantly, so we can discern how to stop doing them.


The second thing I notice in this section is that the value of the offering for someone who sins unintentionally becomes higher the more prominent their leadership is in the community of faith. The high priests sacrifice for an unintentional sin is a young bull with no defects (4:4). The sacrifice for the a sin by the entire community of faith is also a young bull (4:13). The sacrifice for one of Israel's leaders is a male goat with no defects (4:23). The sacrifice for the "common people" is a female goat with no defects or a female sheep with no defects (4:28, 32).  However, if a person cannot afford a goat or sheep, two turtledoves or two young pigeons can be substituted (5:7), or if even that is too much, two quarts of choice flour (5:11) can be offered as sacrifices.


There is always a cost for redemption, and generally, it is the blood of a sacrifice. But the varying levels of sacrifice also recognize that because a high priest has so much greater visible leadership, his sin, though perhaps not seeming any worse than any others, affects more people and the witness of the faith. An Israelite leader's sin affects more people. 


In God's eyes, sin is sin, but the effects of sin vary depending not just on the sin itself, but also on the position of leadership or authority one holds in the community of faith. I remember hearing leadership guru John Maxwell say that the higher we go in leadership in the Christian community and the church, the fewer options we have. Our witness is more visible, and our failures affect more people, even when they are unintentional. So, we have to be more careful, for the sake of our witness to Jesus Christ. The Bible shows that leaders are held to a higher standard.


Finally, I see in this passage that not only must we seek to discover our sins and seek forgiveness for them, but we need to make restitution where possible, plus some more. Leviticus 5:16 (NLT): "'You must make restitution for the sacred property you have harmed by paying for the loss, plus an additional 20 percent.'" (also 6:4-5)


Where we have cost another something through our sins, even unintentionally, it's not enough to seek forgiveness. God calls us to offer restitution above and beyond the loss that another suffered because of our sin. Just covering the cost of what was lost doesn't recognize that our sin created other problems for that person, including just having to deal with all this in the first place.


When I zoom out to look at the big picture in this section, it becomes very clear to me that God wants us to often examine our lives for unintentional sins. Even when we didn't mean for it to happen, there is a cost, and we have to pay it. Perhaps the extra restitution is enough of a penalty to encourage us to be proactive in seeking to identify unintentional sins and avoiding them. God takes sin very seriously, because ultimately it brings death and destruction. Even unintentional sins.