Love and Worship

I am one of those C-type personalities. That means that I spend a lot of my time analyzing things to death. Unfortunately, one of those things that I tend to analyze to death and the analysis that I do is hardly constructive. I am also the one who is my own worst critic, which is another aspect of the C-type personality.

I was pondering today that I could spend more time thinking about more important things if I wasn’t so much thinking about myself. Now we have to think about ourselves to some extent. I have to pay my bills and buy my groceries and things of that sort, and I don’t see any wrong in looking for pleasure and looking for a wife as well. However, we can put ourselves first and Christ second too often. In fact, I would say every sin does just that. (Have we ever sinned to please Christ? It’s nonsense to even think of such a thing.)

Thus, while walking around tonight, I saw a beautiful lady on a music video at work and thought of that with the nature of beauty. Have you ever been in love? I have been in love once and lost it and it indeed was and is one of the most painful events of my life. However, that love is always focused on that which we find to be beautiful in some aspect.

I find this incredible about beauty. Beauty is always something that makes us lose ourselves. The most lucid man in speaking when confronted by a beautiful lady can find himself tripping over his sentences. Those who like to speak the most can be just awed in silence at the sight of an eclipse. Beauty is an enchantment that casts a powerful spell on us.

When you are truly in love though, you do lose yourself. You are so in awe of the other that you are willing to surrender your own personal problems in order to focus on the situation of the other. Could it be that this is why love transforms us so much? It doesn’t change the problem usually. It changes our perspective. Our problems are a trifle and we are focused on what matters to the other.

I think this is the same also with worship. I don’t believe worship changes our problems. I believe it changes us and our perspective. When we see God as he is, we can only worship him and we are in awe of his greatness and love then. We are also in awe of his intense beauty and we have the most powerful spell cast on us of all.

You know, this could lead to a great suggestion. Maybe we ought to worship God more? Maybe we ought to live our lives in such a way that we focus more on him. He must increase and we must decrease. We were created to worship him and when we do so, we are living the way that we ought.

To do so though, we must love God. To love God, we must know him. I believe this is where doctrine comes in. We need to know why the great doctrines about God matter. Can we know God entirely? No. We can love what we do know about him entirely. If you are married, you don’t know your significant other entirely, but you do love them. I don’t know any of my friends entirely and they don’t know me, but we share a mutual phileo love with each other.

Augustine once said “Love God and live as you please.” I think that’s a good point to close on. People often worry that the second part will get out of hand, but if the first is in the right, the latter will follow. Keep it simple. Love God.

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