Passion And Intimacy In Valentine's Day

"The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught." (Isaiah 29:13 NIV)

As I write this, Valentine's Day is fast approaching. Hopefully, for those of you who have a significant other, I hope that doesn't come as to much of a surprise to you. But naturally, at this time of year our hearts do turn to thoughts of love. We take time to let those we love know how much we care for them and how precious they are to us. And hopefully begin to set a pattern for how we live outside of the Holiday.

And its a good and right thing we do. It's reflective of how God loves us. We often make God's love a very sterile thing, when the Bible show us it full of passion and intimacy. The passion and intimacy we show each other is

Experience is about us. It's about what We feel, what we come away with. When we come to church looking for an experience our litmus test becomes our won emotions and feelings. We find ourselves asking, "What did I get out of this? Did I like it? Did it touch me? And it's not that those aren't legitimate questions. But when they are the only questions we ask we can find ourselves slowly slipping into the center of things. So in a very real way, it's still worship. It's just the worship of the self.

Real worship clearly puts Jesus into the center of all things. It's about adoring, thinking and centering ourselves upon Him. The more we truly worship the less the "self" matters. And yet ironically its when we worship and are allowed to let go of ourselves that we find our true self emerging. We were created not for the experience, but for worship. Worship is freeing. Living by the experince and needing to be slef satisfied is a terrible burden.

If I have to choose between worship and experience, i want to choose worship every time.

In