Religious Hypocrisy + Shallow Worship | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

We're continuing on today in our series called The Prophetic Anthology.

We're looking at the six major themes of the 12 minor prophets.

The minor prophets are the last 12 books of the Old Testament.

It starts with the book of Hosea, goes through the book of Malachi.

Those are actually kind of designed to be looked at together.

They're looked at as a collective.

And when you do so, you see these six themes that emerge.

And that's what we're taking our time to work our way through.

And even though these were written, you know, 25 to 2,800 years ago, we find them to be shockingly applicable to right here and right now.

Minor prophets, I've said this each week, but for those of you that haven't been here, minor prophets doesn't mean that they're lesser prophets.

It just means that the books are a little more concise and they're shorter books.

That's what it is.

Their messages are just as important, and that's why we're taking time to look at them.

In the first week, we took some time to consider the idea that all of us, even the most sincere person, from time to time is going to need to hear a message we don't want to hear.

Just part of life.

I mean, maturity tells you that you can end up off course even if you're not trying to.

I think a great way to illustrate this is if you've ever gone to the ocean, you put your towel down, you put your stuff down, you go jump in the water, you're playing in the waves, okay, and all of a sudden you look back for your towel and it's not there.

And you look and it's like a quarter mile down the beach.

You're like, oh my goodness, I didn't even realize that the tide was pulling me.

Uh I was just sort of in the moment, and pretty soon I realized I've moved.

And so that that happens, man.

That happens in life.

You find yourself in a place where you've moved off course more than you knew.

And sometimes it takes that reality check, okay, to get yourself back to where you need to be.

So we expect that.

But the the real reality is these things are difficult.

Sometimes the message that will get me back on course makes me feel defensive.

Sometimes it makes me feel angry.

Sometimes it makes me feel embarrassed.

Sometimes it makes me want to try to disprove it and not even consider it to be true.

Especially if it comes from a source I don't want to hear it from.

And when you look at the prophets, the prophets are 12 examples of God using people that people didn't want to hear from to deliver a message they didn't want to hear.

And of course, it's easy to read about someone else, but what we're doing is taking time to search our own hearts and to say, how receptive am I?

How available am I to God giving me a message I don't want to hear, especially if it comes from someone I don't want to hear it from?

We started looking at these six themes.

Uh, two weeks ago, we looked at idolatry, we looked at the idea of syncretism, that idolatry wasn't that they stopped worshiping Yahweh, but they started adding idols, and so now their theology was a concoction that they had come up with.

And so although they were worshiping Yahweh in their mind's eye, they were worshiping Baal or Asherah.

They essentially were taking the traits and the characteristics of these other idols and adding them to Yahweh, didn't realize they were doing anything wrong, but what they were doing was uh living out these theological distortions that came through the idols.

Uh last week we looked at predatory economics.

That was the second theme that we looked at from the six minor prophets.

And we realized pretty quickly that God is concerned not just with what happens in the temple, but what happens in the marketplace.

And we see that predatory economics is essentially capitalizing at the expense of the vulnerable.

And so we went real specific as to how they were doing that.

And again, then we turned the mirror back around on ourselves and uh allowed the Lord to show us areas where maybe we're doing the same thing.

Today I'm gonna give you a two-for-one.

We're gonna look at two themes.

One is religious hypocrisy, and the second is shallow worship.

Let me define these for you.

Religious hypocrisy is external devotion masking internal corruption.

So the idea that I could be devoted outwardly.

In fact, one thing to note that while these prophets were writing these prophecies or prophesying, they were doing so during a time where people were going to the temple and they were performing the ceremonial law.

In other words, it wasn't that people stopped going to church, that's how we might put it.

It wasn't that they stopped going to the temple or they stopped making sacrifices.

Actually, sacrifices were at an all-time high.

But the religious hypocrisy was that they were making sacrifices and gaining a false positive.

Because I did the thing that the ceremonial law said to do, it somehow cancels out the reality that I'm exploiting people in the marketplace.

So the same people that were doing the predatory economics were the same people that were lighting the sacrifices, and in so doing, their religious practices were aiding and abetting their predatory economics.

So external devotion masking internal corruption.

The second one is shallow worship, which is emotion without transformation.

In Hosea 6.4, it says, your love is like the morning mist, like the early dew that disappears.

You ever get up in the morning, you see the ground covered in dew, and just a few hours later, it's nowhere to be found.

It is just dissipated, gone up into the atmosphere.

And he says that's what shallow worship is like.

It's an emotional output, and yet it doesn't lead to any sustained transformation.

And so it's it's yeah, it's it's emotional.

There's nothing wrong with emotion in worship.

We're emotional beings.

Okay, it's not, it doesn't make it any more noble for you to stand there stoic before God.

Okay, but if all it is is an emotional outburst, but it's not leading to uh outward transformation of behavior and life change, okay, then it's shallow worship.

Um let me give you an example of how uh the religious hypocrisy was happening.

In other words, things that were happening in the temple, um, that how it was playing out.

Like if we could get in a time machine and be a fly on the wall, this is what we would have seen.

Uh in Exodus 22, so in the Torah, it's giving God's expectations of not only uh statutes, but embedding compassion into the law.

We talked about this a little bit last week, but look at this specifically.

Exodus 22, 26.

It says, if you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset.

You remember in an earlier passage in the same chapter, it says, Hey, if your neighbor is hard up, lend to them, don't charge interest, because you're not trying to capitalize on their vulnerability.

You want them to get out of trouble.

Okay, so let's help them get out of trouble.

Now they're gonna have to pay you back, and in paying you back, you may take their cloak as a pledge, but it says, if you take their cloak as a cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, because the cloak is the only covering your neighbor has.

What else can they sleep in?

When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

Now we talked about this uh a few weeks ago.

We brought this verse up, and the the concept is this when you think of a cloak in that time, think of a combination of like your only winter coat and your bedspread, you know, your the blanket you cover up with at night.

So if somebody is so hard up, in other words, they are doing so badly that they have to use their, they have to collateralize their cloak, they are broke, broke, broke.

Okay, they've already done the yard sale, they've sold everything they can sell, they're in a bad spot.

So it says, when you have to collateralize someone's cloak, you need to go to them at night.

So by you going to them, you're restoring their humanity.

You give them that cloak and you let them be warm at night, and then you get it back in the morning.

Okay, you remember this.

Here's what it says is going on in Amos.

Amos chapter 2.8 says, they lie down beside every altar on the garments taken as pledge.

Amos 2 · chapter mention

So not only do they not return the cloak at night, but they take it into the temple, and they lay down beside the altars and lounge on these cloaks.

So it would be like you stealing someone's winter coat slash and then wearing it into church and worshiping in it.

Okay?

So he said, so he goes, this is what's happening.

The spirit of the law, the compassion of the law has been forgotten.

And now your worship practices have just given you a false positive that you're good.

What they're supposed to do is translate into the character of God being demonstrated in the community.

In other words, community should get better as we worship, because our worship is calibrating us to what God cares about, and then we should be living that out.

So he says, something is extremely broken right now because you're coming into all the ceremonies that should be aligning you to God, and the opposite is happening.

You're taking their cloak, bringing it in, lounging next to the altar, and thinking nothing of it.

Amos 5, 21 through 24 says, This is now, this is Amos speaking under the inspiration of God for God.

He says, I hate, I despise your religious festivals.

Your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, in other words, you're keeping the letter of the ceremonial law, I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs.

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

Now, verse 24, but let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream.

Remember this, we talked last week about the idea of justice.

The word is mishpat.

Bring that back up if you don't mind the definition.

Mishpat is the practice of setting things right.

Okay, it's restorative justice.

It shows up in English as justice, but it's a bigger principle than just getting the court to rule in your favor.

It says fair and restorative justice that ensures equity, protects the vulnerable, and upholds the well-being of the community.

So if we were to think of justice in terms of Mishpat, we would think of it a few ways.

One would be how we might think about the judicial system.

Someone commits a crime, you have to go pay for that crime, and then you'll be ideally rehabilitated.

That's the should be the goal of the system, to rehabilitate people.

So once I've paid adequately for my crime and I've been rehabilitated, when I get out, it should be restorative, and that I don't go back to the same behaviors that landed me in here in the first place.

That same concept, again, would also include social justice because you would say when we are helping someone who's in poverty or vulnerable, our goal is to restore them.

We don't want them to stay in that condition.

That's why every seven years we forgive debts.

That's why every 50 years they get the land back, because the whole goal is restorative.

So this idea of, again, it shows up here as justice, but the idea of Mishpat is this idea that it's our job to bring God's Mishpat, God's restorative justice into the world.

And this is why God uses this provocative language, like, you know what, this stinks in here.

You're making sacrifices and it stinks.

And your music, it's like nails on a chalkboard to me.

Please stop.

If we can't get the two working together, I'd rather you not even do it at all.

Um it would be like, think think think of this in our terms.

It would be like if I went to my wife and I was like, hey, our anniversary's coming up, Shaylin, and I'd love to throw a huge party with all of our friends and just let's just pull out all the stops and have a big party.

And she's like, Greg, open your eyes, dude.

We we our marriage is not good.

Our marriage is not good.

Last thing we need right now is some big party.

You know what we need?

We need counseling.

You know what we need?

We need to talk through some really hard things.

We need to have some crucial conversations, dude.

You've got your head in the sand, dude.

We we this has not been good.

In fact, this is indicative because I've been trying to talk to you about these things, and your eyes glass over and you blow me off.

And every time I try to talk to you about this, you ignore me and you go distract yourself with something else.

And the fact that you're coming to me now saying you want to party, I would rather not spend one penny on a party.

I would rather go talk to someone who can help us.

I'd rather deal with our issues, I'd rather us find intimacy.

This has been going on a long time.

You've been paying no attention to me, you don't seem to care anything about me.

Our intimacy's been gone, our relationship's been gone, our marriage is a shell.

No, I don't want to party.

And then I go throw a party to surprise her.

And then she shows up to this party, and you're all there.

And I invite the whole church, and I invite all of our friends and our family, and everybody's there, and she walks in and I'm like, surprise! And then I and then I spend the whole night just working the room.

What's up, everybody?

Everybody's like, Greg, this party's amazing.

You must really love your wife.

And I'm like, Yeah, you know, good old me.

I do love her, you know, she's incredible.

And then I just go around working the room, and then pretty soon I ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

Everybody looks over, and I just go waxing poetic about what an amazing wife she is.

And I go, you know, and I've written a poem.

And I and I read this sappy, crappy poem that I wrote about, you know, you're my sun and moon, and you're the stars in my earth, and you're the cream in my coffee, and you're the peanut butter in my jelly, and all this garbage, okay?

And and and everybody's like, oh, that is so sweet.

And the wives are elbowing their husbands, like, why don't you write me a poem?

Greg's such, I wish you were a good husband like Greg.

And everybody's all about me and what a great husband I am.

And the whole time my wife is standing over on the side wanting to puke.

This is gross.

Your poem is like nails on a chalkboard, dude.

You're not listening.

You have no idea what I want.

This whole thing was a smoke screen.

This was all about you, dude.

Here's another example.

Imagine we start a business together, that business takes off, it turns into a corporation.

We have a corporation, our corporation's making money hand over fist, our margins are getting bigger and bigger, but in the process of doing that, we are dumping toxic waste into the water source.

And we know it, but we're doing it anyway.

And our margins are getting big because we're utilizing sweatshops to exploit vulnerable people for us to get our margins bigger so we can make more cash.

We know we're doing it.

And we throw a gala for charity.

Gala, gala, whatever it is, banquet.

Okay, we have a banquet, and we've got the finest wine, and it's a high dollar ticket, and we've got the best steak and the best whatever, and we're all in black ties and suits, and and and we're all talking about what great humanitarians we are, and we get this huge check that we're writing for charity, and we make sure to have a press release, and we make sure for the photo op, and and so we're up there in our tuxedos, and give this big check to charity, pat ourselves on the back and pat each other on the back, all the while knowing that we've ex that we're poisoning the water well and that we're exploiting vulnerability.

This is the spirit of what God says.

Look, it's not that I don't want worship, it's that I want true worship.

And if it were true worship, it would align me to you and you to me in a way that would show up.

And the diagnostic, the proof, is that somehow you can participate in predatory economics, come in and make sacrifices, and not have your conscience provoked.

Look what it says in Zachariah 7, 4 and 5.

It says, Then the word of the Lord Almighty came to me.

Ask all the people of the land and the priests, when you fasted and mourned on the fifth and seventh month, in other words, you you fasted, which again would be a religious ritual, for the past 70 years.

Was it really for me that you fasted?

Was this party for me?

Was this fasting for me?

Was this action?

Was this about me or was it about you?

It says in verse 8.

And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah.

This is what the Lord Almighty said.

Administer true mishpat.

Show mercy and compassion to one another.

By the way, another vocabulary word that if you've been around, you'll recognize.

We'll bring it back.

And if you're new, this is new for you, is the word Hesed.

So we have Mishpat for justice.

Again, a broader definition of justice here.

The word that shows up for mercy is the word Hesed, and bring up that definition.

Hesed is the loyal, merciful, faithful love that keeps showing up because of a committed relationship.

It's a steadfast covenant love.

Now, the word his sed is the word that God uses in the covenant to talk about his love, his his sed, which again, a lot of times it shows up as unfailing love or mercy to his people.

So God's faithfulness to the covenant is then calling for our faithfulness to the covenant.

But notice he says, look, I don't even want you to fast anymore.

Just quit the fasting, quit all of the activity.

And he says, What I want is Mishpat, look at this.

And Hesed, show mercy and compassion to who?

To one another.

Now think about this.

God is saying, I wish you would stop fasting as a ritual to me, because the point of why you're worshiping me is so that we align ourselves so you'll treat each other better.

So I would rather you stop fasting to me and just go show unfailing love to your neighbor.

Do not oppress the widows or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor.

Do not plot evil against each other.

The issue they had was not an absence of worship, it was an abundance of worship with an absence of obedience.

They had an abundance of worship with an absence of obedience.

Hosea 6, 6 says, For I desire Hesed, mercy, not sacrifice, and the acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.

Leave that verse up.

This is a great example of how translation can cause meaning to get lost a little bit.

So when you translate from one language to another, you're trying to find the best word, best word to go in the translation, but you might miss the concept.

So when we see acknowledgement of God, we think of like a tip of the cap, like I acknowledge God, or like I win an award, and you're like, you know, I just really want to thank God.

You're you're acknowledging God.

Some of your translations say the knowledge of God, which is kind of confusing too, because knowledge of God sounds like I have the best doctrine, or I could answer uh questions on an exam about God and be able to pass.

Sounds like a head knowledge of God.

But the the word, the Hebrew word that's translated for knowledge of God, is a relational term of intimacy and closeness.

So it would be like think of like uh my daughter is 17 years old.

She's been alive 17 years, and she's been with me all of her life, and my daughter, I'll bet 95% of the time.

If you put her in a situation and you go, what would your dad say?

What would your dad think about this?

How would your dad respond to this?

What would your dad do?

What would your dad want you to do?

I'll bet she'd get 95%, maybe higher, probably not lower, because we've had such a connection that she knows.

Now she's going to decide what she's going to do, but she knows what I would do.

Worship is designed to connect you to the character of God in such a relational way that when you go out into the marketplace, into the world, you don't compartmentalize and go, cool, I went to church and did the thing.

Now I go out here and do my thing.

We're doing God's thing both places.

So I do God's thing here.

I connect to God, I know God, and when I go out in the marketplace, I go, what would God do?

What would God want me to do?

And so he says, What I'd like you to do is Mishpat and Hesed.

Okay, that's what I want.

Obedience, okay.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God, or in fact in the NLT, it says, I want you to know me more than I want burnt offerings.

That's how it says it.

Um, by the way, this verse is quoted by Jesus in Matthew 9.

Matthew 9 13.

Look at this.

It says, but go and learn what this means.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

For I've come not to call the righteous but sinners.

This is great.

What is he talking about?

What's happening here?

Okay, so this.

This is where it gets good.

Because Jesus is a prophet who's quoting a prophet all these years later.

And he's in a situation to apply this in a relevant context.

So he why does he pull this out?

Well, it's in the book of Matthew, and in a few verses before this, Matthew, who writes the book, is a tax collector.

What is a tax collector?

But someone who is in constant violation of predatory economics.

So he's exploiting vulnerability for his own personal gain.

And Jesus sees him.

Okay?

A few verses before this.

And he walks up to him and essentially says, Stop! Come follow me.

You're better than this.

Come follow me.

And Matthew goes, You got it.

So he leaves behind his predatory economics to help Jesus build the kingdom of God.

Jesus is like, that's why I'm here.

This is it.

So he says, Hey, get all your predatory economic friends, and we're coming to your house for dinner.

So Jesus is sitting at dinner, which is the ultimate like human connection.

This is where we we bond at the table.

They're eating at the table.

So it's Jesus and the predatory economic violator who just repented, and then his buddies.

And they're sitting there, and the people who are the most pious, according to the worship laws, see this going on, and they say, How could Jesus hang out with such scum?

How could Jesus hang out?

Why would Jesus, if he's so good, would be hanging out with these people with the predatory economics?

And Jesus says, I want Hesed or mercy even more than sacrifice.

In other words, as bad as these guys have been, this guy repented, which is what I came to do to get him out of.

He's already turned from predatory economics, and I've got his buddies here, and they're next.

And yet you're worried that we didn't keep the letter of the ceremonial law, and you're ready to condemn the whole thing, you've missed the heart of God.

Matthew 23, 23, Jesus says, Woe to you, caution to you, careful to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

Again, these are the people who would have been the most consistent in the ceremonial law.

He says, You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, cumin, but you have neglected the more important matters of the law.

Some of your Bibles say the weightier matters of the law.

So you keep the ceremonial law, but you neglect, look at this, justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

In other words, God's saying, if I can have your songs, your communion, or your rituals, or I can have Mishpat and Hasid, I'll take Mishpat and Hassad.

These are, he says, the weightier matters, the heavier matters of the law.

He said, you should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former.

In other words, he's saying, I don't want less worship.

I want true worship.

I don't want less worship.

I want true worship.

He said, Yes, you should give.

Yes, you should sing.

Yes, you should sacrifice.

Yes, you should serve.

Yes, you should do all of these liturgies, these rituals.

Yes, you should do it, but not at the expense of the former.

He says, you blind guides.

You strain out the gnat, but swallow a camel.

Woe to you.

Teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside are full of greed and self-indulgence.

Just to be clear, God is not suggesting that we not worship.

Alright?

The issue is when religious activity becomes a cover for disobedience.

So I want to ask you a question to wrestle with today.

The question is this Am I using spiritual activity to avoid spiritual transformation?

Am I using spiritual activity to avoid spiritual transformation?

Worship is not a substitute for righteousness.

It flows from it.

It flows from it.

You put a question like that up, it's supposed to, that's the kind of question that's supposed to stay open.

It's supposed to stay open.

We keep asking it.

You know, I was I was thinking about, you know, how does this happen?

Because I I'm not here wagging a finger.

I I've done the same thing.

I I've allowed my morality or my worship or my faithfulness or uh whatever, again, liturgies that I do sometimes probably to mask or to cause me to be blind to and miss something that's unsubmitted to God.

So I get it.

I was thinking about how does that happen?

And I was thinking about how much we desire, especially on important questions, to be able to have metrics that prove and give us peace of mind that we're getting it right.

I read a book a number of years ago called The Advantage.

It was by Patrick Lencioni.

He was talking about uh businesses and organizations that essentially are uh healthy organizations and ones that aren't.

And so he talked about when it comes to organizational health, it's kind of elusive.

It's hard to prove it.

You know, you can put out surveys, you can get some kind of qualitative metrics, but he said, you know, business owners or managers or executives, people running the organization love spreadsheets and data that is hard data that can prove something.

And he goes, when it comes to something like organizational health, you can't prove it with a spreadsheet.

You can't prove it with a number.

And so a lot of people just go, you know what, we're not even gonna waste time on that because all we'll do is just go round and round on conversations about whether you think we're healthy or whether you think we're, but I don't or I do, and so it's just all this opinion stuff.

So he said, for years, people didn't even have those conversations.

So what you had was organizations who had really good spreadsheets but toxic cultures.

And he said, because the the you can't resolve that question like you can with a number that you go, okay, we can prove this.

But this over here, you can't, but it's so important that it's mission critical.

Otherwise, we just have killer spreadsheets and toxic water holes.

And so he encouraged leaders to start doing this.

Now I started to think about that as it relates to faith.

You know, I like to have a metric to present to God as to why I'm pious.

It could be how much money I've given, it could be my attendance.

Lord, look at my attendance record this year.

I did look how many times I read my Bible this year.

Lord, here's my Spotify playlist.

Look at all this worship music I listened to this year.

I want to have these performance activities that I can present to God so that I know that my worship is right or pure.

And yet the reality is it's a question like this.

It's these types of open-ended questions that cause me to ask God to search me, to call me out, to help me see if there's anywhere that I have allowed my religious performance to become a false positive that I think somehow offsets this attitude or this action or this thing that I'm perpetuating.

And here's the reality: when you open that question to God, you may not resolve it today.

And you should ask it again next year, and you should ask it again next month, and you should keep asking it because Lord, I don't want any way to live in this blindness, this spiritual blindness that would cause me to declare victory based on my activities at the same time that I neglected something that really mattered to you.

I don't want to waste any time with that.

I don't want to perpetuate that sin.

I don't want to, I don't want to be stuck in that, and I don't want anyone suffering, myself or others, because of that.

Therefore, I'm gonna leave this question open, as confusing as it might be, and here's how it works for me.

When I open that question, sometimes I feel something, and I'm not sure if it's conviction of the Holy Spirit or condemnation from my skeletons.

I don't know.

There's sometimes I don't know, and I don't know that I'll know today.

But if I trust God and ultimately my desire is to align to Him, I'll keep that question open.

Because I know there's no condemnation of those who are in Christ Jesus, but also I don't want to avoid conviction because I call it condemnation.

I don't like yucky feelings.

If I need to feel what I need to feel, Lord, do it.

But Lord, help me to see.

Is this something that I'm just allowing myself to get stuck in cycles of shame and guilt?

Okay.

No, I don't want to do that.

Well, if it's that, Lord, then help me to let go of it.

But Lord, if you're trying to convict me so that I can see something, so that I can purify my worship, connect myself to you, then let me see it, show it to me.

Ask those questions, sit in the discomfort, work your way through it, trust the Lord, and keep moving through those questions.

The prophets expose hypocrisy, but they don't heal it.

Jesus does.

Jesus doesn't just call out hypocrisy, he creates people who can live whole.

If you remember, I end with this Matthew 4, in the book of Matthew, or I'm sorry, John, John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

Jesus goes to the woman at the well, she's a Samaritan woman.

The conversation starts personal and it becomes about worship pretty quickly.

And so she says to Jesus in verse 19, Sir, the woman said, I can see that you're a prophet.

Our ancestors, speaking of the Samaritans, our ancestors worshiped on this mountain.

But you Jews claim that the place where we must worship, the only right place to worship, is in Jerusalem.

Woman, Jesus replied, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

Jesus is saying, look, you think it's about the liturgy, about the ritual, about the temple.

He says, it's not about that.

He says, in fact, if you stay on this mountain and I stay in Jerusalem and we think that's what God really wants, we're both going to miss the point completely.

Verse 23 says, Yet a time is coming and is now come, is here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.

God is a spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

Jesus takes a woman who had far different liturgies, far different religious activities, and said, the point here is to connect to the heart of God.

And Jesus, again, as God manifests, he came and ultimately helped this woman find wholeness and truly understand worship.

So the prophets exposed hypocrisy.

Jesus heals it.

The solution, friend, is not try harder to be sincere.

The solution is a transformed heart and a reordered life through the Spirit of Christ.

Amen.

And I've asked Blaze and Josh to sing a song that is on topic.

Give us a chance to reflect.

And as they do, I'm going to put four questions on the screen for you to open up with the Lord.

And again, let him take the conversation where he wants it to go.

And I would encourage you to maybe record these and come back to them.

First question is this where is my worship disconnected from my life?

Two, am I using spiritual activity to avoid hard obedience?

Is there anywhere in my life that I have allowed what I'm doing for God to cause me to miss what God is trying to do in me?

Number three, is there any air is there an area I keep off limits from God?

Again, I think sometimes we're so quick to give a testimony of how God did this in my life and how God did that in my life, and the whole time God said, Oh, I'm so glad I did that, and I'm so glad I did that, but I keep nudging you here and you keep pushing me away.

Come on, sir.

Is there anywhere that I have have an area in my life that's too irritating, it's too off putting?

I keep off limits, even from God.

And number four, would my private life confirm or contradict my public faith?

Let's take a moment and reflect.