Recently, I started a series on worship and argued that why we do things often matters as much to God as what we do. God wants our love and worship, not just outward conformity. Today, I want to explain how this realization has impacted my life and my understanding of what church should be like.

A bit about my story

Partly because of natural inclinations and partly because of my particular church background, in the first decade or so of my Christian life I focused far more on what I was doing than why. Sure, I could give all the right answers about how important it was to obey for the right reasons – but that didn’t mean I paid that much attention to my motivations. I’m naturally someone who likes checklists and organization, and I carried this mindset over to my Christian life, focusing on Christian disciplines and trying to conform. I sought to conform both to what the Scriptures seemed to teach, and to the lives of apparently strong Christians around me. In other words, I put a lot of emphasis on doing, but my motivation for doing so was often soemthing like, “because it would displease God if I didn’t do this” or “because this is the right thing to do”, not out of worship to God.

This began to change for me, and for my wife, when we moved to Louisiana and joined a Biblical but very heterogeneous church there. In contrast to our previous church, people made very different decisions about how they ought to live out their faith, which meant conforming to the people around us wasn’t an easy option. When faced with decisions – what we ought to do about Halloween, for example – other church members we highly respected had diverse views and practices. This forced us to begin searching our own hearts and making our own decisions on what we thought God was calling us to do and how best we could worship him. In a way, it felt like God was asking us to grow up and learn to rely on him for direction rather than our surroundings and church culture. This was challenging – but in hindsight it also brought great growth.

Still, that didn’t entirely snap me out of my focus on externals. Rather, God used it to help me start to see that in many areas, there’s no single “right answer” about how best to worship and serve God. Before that, I’d thought there was just one Biblical way to approach many life issues; but now I realize there are many areas where strong Christians can make dramatically different decisions. (Again, I’m not talking about decisions where the Bible does give clear commands or guidance, such as sin issues, as noted in my prior post.)

God began working more directly to help me in this area after we moved back to California and joined our current church. Some time after we joined, I began to realize that, while the teaching and preaching was sound and Biblical, people’s lives didn’t necessarily match up. Teaching frequently dealt with the importance of church, church community, serving, etc., but attendance of church events wasn’t as good as we’d seen in our other churches, and if people were needed to serve in some way, it seemed like only a few people would sign up. People weren’t disagreeing with the church’s teaching in these areas – but they were too busy or had other priorities, it seemed.

This caused me considerable frustration, some of which I described in my post on “church as family”. I wondered if I really belonged in a church where people were content listening to its teachings but not really trying to live it out, and wondered why the leaders didn’t address problems more directly. I wondered, “Why don’t the leaders just TELL people they need to serve in (area X)?” The leaders should tell everyone to serve more, and to be more consistent in attending church events, I thought. Ultimately, though, I concluded that I did belong in this church, and God wanted to use these struggles to help me grow. He has done so, and he’s also shown me how my views and my heart were wrong.

My pastor spent a good deal of time going through some of these issues with me, on multiple occasions – both personally and from the pulpit – and eventually I started to realize how wrong I was when I thought the leaders should just tell people what to do. In fact, my views pointed to problems in my own heart. Specifically, I apparently believed that obeying God superficially was enough – otherwise I wouldn’t think that it was wise for the leaders to encourage superficial obedience. If someone – including me – serves the church simply because the leaders told them to, rather than out of love and worship to God, it’s not a good thing. It doesn’t please God, and may be downright sinful, especially if it’s done in bitterness. Now, as I wrote previously, this doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do what the leaders tell me – I should try to both obey and ensure my heart is right. But it does mean that superficial obedience is not enough. Yes, other people’s lives didn’t match up – but neither did mine, because my heart wasn’t in the right place.

Then, I gradually started to see the leaders’ wisdom in not telling us, and me, what to do but instead laying out Biblical principles. This gave me an opportunity to focus on how God wants me to worship him and serve him from the heart, rather than focusing on superficial conformity to what another person is telling me to do or what people around me are doing. My superficial conformity never pleases God, so I needed to – and always need to – repent of that and serve him from a right heart. And I shouldn’t want superficial conformity for others, either!

God is spirit, and he seeks worshippers who worship him in spirit and in truth – not merely externally – so I now see the great wisdom my church leaders exercise in preaching the Word, giving us the key principles, and then letting the Holy Spirit work in us to convict us of sin, challenge us, and spur us on to obey.