One
evening, Justin returns home from work and finds his wife, Angela, all
made up and slipping into a beautiful outfit. He concludes she must have
planned something special for them and offers to get dressed up as
well.
Angela, a bit confused, responds, "Oh honey, I'm going
out with Tony tonight. We're going to get dinner, catch a movie, and
check into the Fairmont Hotel. I should be back by midmorning."
"Who's Tony?!" Justin fires back.
"He's my boyfriend from high school," she replies.
"What! You can't go out with him!"
"Why not?"
"Because we are married; we are committed
to each other. We don't date other people!" he says, stating what he assumes should be obvious.
Obviously, this is not a real couple. We can’t even imagine someone
not understanding that marriage means an exclusive relationship.
Certainly, none of us would marry someone like Angela who expected to
continue dating old boyfriends.
Yet this is how so many of us treat our relationship with Jesus.
Throughout Scripture, God compares our relationship to Him to the
relationship of marriage. It is also how God spoke of His relationship
to Israel in the Old Testament. Interestingly, every time God spoke to
Israel through the prophets about how they committed adultery against
Him, it had to do with the issue of idolatry.
We might think of idolatry as bowing down to statues, but the heart
of it is worship. God defines worship the first time we see it mentioned
in Scripture, in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Here, we see that
worship is obedience.
Worship is not some slow, beautiful song; it is obedience. No matter
how we “perform” in church, if we do not obey God in our daily lives, we
are not worshiping Him and are, in fact, living in adultery like
Angela.
How does this understanding of worship change the way you think about Christian living?

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