Would you like cheese with your doctrine? December 10, 2005
Posted by Patrick in : Christianity, Reading , trackbackDoes doctrine produce cold, stodgy people? Alissa quotes a good passage from John Piper. And he confesses that it does, if it’s divorced from emotion. Which I guess springs from an understanding of God’s grace. However, he also suggests that emotion without truth is shallow worship at best. This last part touches on a thought I’ve been chewing on for a few weeks now. I don’t want to write it about it now, but I may revisit it in the near future.
Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
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I knew the songs in the songbook and I sang my heart out before I “officially” gave my heart to Christ. I think worship is a way to get to God, unlike any other way–I became a Christian in the background of a study on God’s names in the Old Testament and Sunday worship at Bellefield and Wednesday worship at Cornerstone. I didn’t understand the songs, but they got into me…I’ve never been the same. I didn’t know what I was signing on to, but I knew it wasn’t shallow or stodgy or only emotional. I grew up in the church, but coming to Pittsburgh I met real worship and worshippers.