Lip or heart worship

Mark 7 : 1 - 13

This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

The songs at the evening service of the Methodist church I now attend are of the traditional sort. None of the lively contemporary praise and worship songs. In fact, sometimes I find that I am not familiar with those hymns!! So worship for me is sometimes "quiet" as I try to meditate on the words of the songs (and the old hymns usually do have very profound meanings). Perhaps it is sometimes good not to be too familiar with the songs - for when we are - the words may be sung without deep meaning.

There is a contemporary song "The heart of worship" which asks us to ponder what happens "when the music fades".......does worship still happen in our hearts and lives? This is what Jesus confronts the Pharisees about. For them it was the rules and regulations that they began to 'worship', above and beyond God. Jesus, the Son of God was there before them, yet they quibbled about the hand washing rules his disciples broke.

Jesus of course knew their hearts and knew how their traditions ('precepts of men') had become their master, rather than God himself. He challenged them with the words of the prophet Isaiah (29 : 31).

It is not easy to remain with hearts always aligned to God.......there are many distractions, even religious ones that take us away from him. The church today is particularly prone to fall into the attitude of the Pharisees, religious do - gooders. But Jesus tells us that he reads hearts, not just what the lips proclaim. Spiritual life is more, much more than religious piety.