Worship in Spirit and Truth

Ironically you will find no greater controversy within the church world today than worship. Isn't it odd how deception comes from something that should be sacred and precious rather than something dark and unrighteous.
I have heard debates over everything from the style of music, the time alotted, conservative versus progressive and the list goes on. We complicate something that God desires from us so greatly. We spend more time analyzing worship than practicing it. It is a natural river that should flow from us without reservation. And it is a practice that should exist as much outside of the walls of a church as within them.
Worship can not exist with out a worshipper and an object of affection or adoration. Outside of that simple formula the rest is really natural. It is what we were created to do. If we were honest I think we would admit that we worship constantly throughout our daily lives. We magnify and exalt the things that are precious to us. Whether they be self, career, family or our relationships. We give honor and glory to the things in our lives that matter the most to us.
Yet when it is time to honor and exalt our Creator (the one who deserves our worship above all others), we complicate it with the things we think necessary to pay Him the greatest honor. All the while He is wanting only our hearts. The place, the sound, the style are of little consequence to Him.
He wants our hearts. Not part but the whole. We can not share our hearts with other gods and experience the blessings that come from pure worship. Sometimes we use the phrase "Spirit and in Truth" so loosely. What does it really mean. To worship in Spirit and in Truth? (John 4:23-24)
The scriptures about Spirit and Truth are not within the step by step plan of how to worship God or which song service works best. No these scriptures are within the story of the woman at the well. Jesus is telling this lost and searching woman. "but the time is coming AND IS ALREADY HERE, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for ANYONE who will worship him that way. For God is Spirit so those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth."
He was wanting her everything. He was trying to tell her that He already knew her. I mean really knew her. He didn't want her rituals and offerings and traditions of worship. He wanted HER! In spirit and in truth. Not just the parts she wanted to offer but the ugly and the attractive. The hidden and the revealed. Until we offer all the chambers of ourselves to Him, we will always be left with the grasping for True Worship from a far. Desiring it, yet never experiencing it. He longs for us to worship Him and we were created to do so.
I think the controversies of worship come from the fact that we know within ourselves that something is still missing. So we complicate it with strategies and formulas that we have heard will work in our favor. We make it even more difficult when we take the simplicity and the beauty of Worship away.
Earlier I stated that the simple formula for worship is an object of affection + a worshipper. Who are what will you worship today?

Deeper

I am learning new things. I am thinking too much. I am trying to catch up for the years I didn't think enough. So many things I just accepted. I thought I was full of discernment. Yet all I knew was how to surround myself with people like me. Then there is nothing really to discern.
Oh but how subtle the sway is. It comes over you slowly until you are covered in the very existense of it and it is you and you are it.
Church has always been so very important to me and I have always respected my leadership so much that I have never taken advantage of my right to question them. To question things that did not add up. Todd is just the opposite. He questions everything. I used to get so aggravated that he could not close his eyes and just walk blindly into something without examining and understanding it first. Oh to have taken the time to question and to understand and to learn beyond my own small experiences. What it might have saved me.
Now at thirty with over twenty years of knowing the Lord. I am realizing that so much of what I have seen was not TRUTH. My love for the Scriptures is stronger and deeper than ever. And to think that my desire to be "normal" by the standards of my peers, even Christian peers, has taken me to this place of such inner turmoil. To realize that man has made a business and a career out of the things God calls Holy.
Ministry. Ministry lets you see a side of people that not everyone sees. You know the whole story when the rest of the world knows only the half. You begin to see the clear politics of it. The compromises and campaigning for agendas. You begin by trying to fight it. To conquer, To make a difference. Then one day you wake up and you realize that you are just the same. You are compromising, you are campaigning and you have your own agenda. What is most upsetting is that you are making a difference. But what kind?
The results of mans agendas lead to emotionalism and hype and production and conducting. Until you realize that you really are just leading your own personal army. I don't want to lead any armies. I don't want to have an agenda. I don't want to search after some "fresh word", or "new revelation".
Instead of searching for more. I want to be stripped away. Stripped away of all that I have seen and of all I have heard. I want to lose the knowledge that I think I have until I am totally ignorant of anything but Him.
Then and only then will I be ready.