Sunday MattersSample

Corporate worship is designed to combine knowledge of God with knowledge of self, so we’ll know who we are, what we all desperately need, and who alone can provide it for us.

During my years of sitting in a counseling office with people who were dealing with situational, relational, or emotional difficulty of some kind, two things struck me again and again. First, it was quite regular that the people I was seeking to help had distorted views of themselves. I don’t mean that they were intentionally crafting a false persona, but that they didn’t know themselves as well as they thought they did. A primary part of my work with them was to bring them to a higher, much more accurate self-knowledge. Since we all are in a process of God’s work of personal change, self-knowledge is essential. All of us need God’s work of personal transformation, but it’s hard to be committed to change if you are unable to see where change is needed. If you have an inaccurate view of yourself and someone points out to you a place where change is needed, you will be offended and resistant, even though that person may have a more accurate view of you than you do. Inaccurate self-knowledge will keep you from benefiting from the sight-giving, change-producing ministry of the body of Christ that is one of God’s good gifts to you.

A second thing concerned me even more deeply. Many of the people I counseled had a less-than-accurate knowledge of God. Even though they professed to be Bible believers, they had developed a view of God that was formed more out of their interpretation of their experiences than from the pages of Scripture. It is always important to make sure that the Bible’s theology interprets your experiences for you, rather than your experiences shaping your theology. None of my counselees had intentionally abandoned biblical doctrine for some other worldview, but experiential corruptions had altered their view of God and his truth. As I would listen to them describe God, what He was doing and why He was doing it, I would immediately understand why they struggled to trust him. As I listened, I would think, “If I thought this is who God was, I wouldn’t trust him either.” The God they described was not the gloriously wise and powerful God who offers us his boundless love, amazing grace, and mercies, form-fit for our moments of need.

If you have begun to conclude that God is not good, then you will not go to him for help, because you never seek the help of someone whom you’ve concluded does not have your best interest in mind. The opposite is true as well. If you are fully persuaded that God is good, in every way and all of the time, then you will be able to follow him even when He leads you through things that are hard. You are able to follow him, because you are fully persuaded that He knows what is best and calls you to what is best, precisely because He is good.

God designed us to live our lives at the intersection of knowledge of God and knowledge of self. Inaccuracy on either side will produce a harvest of bad fruit in your life. It is vital for all of us to be willing to humbly admit that some inaccuracies in both our view of God and our view of ourselves remain. By grace, we are all in God’s school of knowing, and none of us have graduated yet. We all need a deeper, fuller, and more accurate view of God, one that produces a heart at rest and a joyful willingness to surrender our lives to him. Because we are growing to know him more, we will be more and more free of doubt and fear. Part of the curriculum in God’s school of knowing trains us in self-knowledge. For this God has given us the perfectly accurate mirror of his word. We can look into his word and see ourselves as we truly are and, because we do, we seek the help from our Savior and his people that we actually need. In a moment of crushing personal trouble, King David said,

“One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.” (Ps. 27:4)

All of us should want this as well. David understands that he will accurately understand the ugly things of life in this fallen world only when he looks at them through the lens of the stunning beauty of his Lord. When you see God accurately, you are overwhelmed with his beauty, and when you are overwhelmed with his beauty, you have an entirely different attitude toward and response to the hardships of life between the “already” and the “not yet.”

So, again and again, we run to the “temple,” not just because it is our duty to do so, but because we know we need to see God for who He truly is and, in seeing him, be able to see ourselves with humility and clarity. All of this should result in progressive surrender to this one of such beauty and a deeper and more joyful celebration of the generosity of his grace. God designed corporate worship to be vision-correcting, as our sin-weakened and blinded eyes are given gospel glasses once again. Because sin is deceitful and Satan is the ultimate deceiver, as we bump our way through this groaning world, we develop eye problems. We don’t see God in the expanse of his glory, and we don’t see ourselves with our ongoing need for grace. Our vision problems then begin to shape the way we live. We question God’s goodness and the reliability of his word, which makes it hard then to follow him by faith. Before long, the joy of our salvation is gone, we no longer hunger for the nourishment of God’s word as we once did, and we have less joy in the gathering of his people.

So we need to run, run, and run again to his “temple” and, through word and song, gaze upon our Lord’s beauty once more, thankful that He has given us the gathering of his church to help us to truly see and, in seeing, to know him more fully and ourselves more accurately.

Reflections:

Have you ever thought of living life according to this statement: “God designed us to live our lives at the intersection of knowledge of God and knowledge of self”? What does this mean?