Restoration of Worship

This morning I was reading through John 9 and was just struck by the interesting conversations reported between the religious "Pharisees" and the people who actually experienced healing by Jesus. The story is of a blind man, blind since birth who is healed by Jesus on the Sabbath. The religious establishment can't approve of the healing because Jesus don't follow the religious rules. I don't say the law, because what they were practicing at that time was a far cry fro the actual law that Moses penned at the command of the Lord. They had warped the Law into some 900+ rules and "clarifications" and somewhere lost the whole purpose of the law.

This is what Isaiah spoke of in Isaiah 29:13-14 NIV:

[13] "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. [14] Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish. ”

The Law was meant to draw the people to God, to help them understand His heart and mind towards them. It was to give them guidance as they deal with each other, and ultimately was supposed to point them towards the Messiah. Instead it had become a set of rules and regulations that became points of legal discussions and continual bickering, as demonstrated in these verses from John. They were unable to decide if the healing was from God because it happened on the Sabbath, the day dedicated to God. Talk about confused thinking, I would think that would be exactly the day God would move in their midst!

Unfortunately, we see much the same today, as brother and sisters in the body of Christ attack others over similar issues. Some churches preach healing, and signs and wonders and see them occurring in their midst, and other churches condemn them as being cults or worse. We see endless battles over interpretations of scripture and understandings of the original Greek or Hebrew. We seem to have lost our sense and are missing the purpose of the Gospel. Let us pray that verse 14 of the quite from Isaiah continues to be fulfilled in our lives, that God would astound us with wonder upon wonder and blow away the endless rules of men. We need God, and His power evident to all the world.

Let us cry out for the Lord to move in our midst, astounding us with His wonders, and cutting through all the "rules of men". Let us cry out for true worship to be restored to all peoples who call Jesus Lord. Let us cry out for our hearts to return to God and to become inflamed with passion for the Him.