Enjoying God in Worship and Work

[An] example of our wrong thinking about God is the attitude of so many that God is now a charity case. He is a kind of frustrated foreman who cannot find enough help. He stands at the wayside asking how many will come to His rescue and begin to do His work.

Oh, if we would only remember who He is! God has never actually needed any of us—not one. But we pretend that He does and we make it a big thing when someone agrees “to work for the Lord.”

We all should be willing to work for the Lord, but it is a matter of grace on God’s part. I am of the opinion that we should not be concerned about working for God until we have learned the meaning and the delight of worshiping Him.

A worshiper can work with eternal quality in his work. But a worker who does not worship is only piling up wood, hay, and stubble for the time when God sets the world on fire.

I fear that there are many professing Christians who do not want to hear such statements about their “busy schedule,” but it is the truth. God is trying to call us back to that for which He created us—to worship Him and to enjoy Him forever!

It is then, out of our deep worship, that we do His work.

I heard a college president say that the church is “suffering from a rash of amateurism.” Any untrained, unprepared, unspiritual empty rattletrap of a person can start something religious and find plenty of followers who will listen and pay and promote it. It may become very evident that he or she had never heard from God in the first place.

These things are happening all around us because we are not worshipers. If we are truly among the worshipers we will not be spending our time with carnal or worldly religious projects.

All of the examples that we have in the Bible illustrate that glad and devoted and reverent worship is the normal employment of moral beings. Every glimpse that is given us of heaven and of God’s created beings is always a glimpse of worship and rejoicing and praise, because God is who He is. The apostle John, in Revelation 4:10–11, gives us a plain portrayal of created beings around the throne of God. John speaks of the occupation of the elders in this way:

The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”

I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.