Real worship produces real change.
When we remain blind to our guilt we seek God (if we seek Him at all) for our purposes. And we call it church. But our gatherings are a club of self-seekers. We are subsisting on spiritual cotton candy, thinking it is food.
Worship that leaves unchanged the way we relate to Him and to others is false worship. God will not cooperate with any pursuit of spiritual maturity that leaves unrecognized and undisturbed our hidden energy of self-protection and self-enhancement.
When we want our life to go well more than we want to know and please Him, we are in relational sin which destroys relationships and eliminates the source of identity and joy.
The famine of God’s Word is here.
Current Christianity leaves people satisfied with surface morality designed to secure God’s favor and diminishes our felt need for grace, and has freed us to live a self-pleasing life with no inclination to tremble at all.
Book Name: AMOS – God doesn’t Play Favorites
Click here for entire Bible Summary from Ray Stedman
The message of this book is basically to declare the impartiality of God.
He makes no allowances for one person that he will not make for others as well.
So the worship of these twin calves made of gold was essentially symbolic of the people’s worship of materialism and sex.
And the prophet’s word to this people was that because of this kind of worship, the nation of Assyria was being raised up by God to come sweeping down from the north to carry Israel away into captivity. Now, in the patience of God it was almost two hundred years before that took place. Yet God announced it this early so that the people might have space to repent. And he declared that this was certain to come unless they turned to him.
In Chapter 4 we read of five different times when God had sent something to wake them up, to make them think, to jar them, to arrest them, and stop them in their downward course.
For God, in great patience, is constantly trying to make us see things the way they really are.
What is the answer to the wandering heart? The answer isn’t just to clean up your life. It is tocome back to God. It is to repent and to think again.
Now here are two quite distinct views among the people.
• Some were wringing their hands, going through all kinds of rituals and religious ceremonies and saying, “Oh, there is no hope for anything. Oh, if God would only come at last, thatwe could go home to be in heaven.”
And the prophet thunders: “Woe to you that desire the day of the Lord.”
• Then there was another group that said, “We are not concerned about these things. Let’s eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.” And the prophet says, “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion,”
The message of this book is that God is relentless when he begins to deal with man. He will not make peace. He will not compromise:
• When he begins to deal with a nation, he insists on absolute values.
• When he begins to deal with an individual, he deals with absolute values.
• Just the fact that we are Christians does not mean that we escape the condemnation of the judgment of the Word of God in those areas where we are attempting to compromise.
• Just because we have been Christians for 40 years doesn’t change the relentlessness of the Word of God as it searches and probes our hearts and lives. God doesn’t change.
The word of this prophet is that we are dealing with a God of righteousness and of unbending, in flexible zeal who will not compromise in any way, and yet, our God is a God of patience and of love.
AMOS – David Jeremiah (Understanding the 66 Books of the Bible)
Key thought: God hates oppression. His Justice will roll down like a river, and his righteousness like a mighty stream (see Amos 5:24).
Key Verse: The days are coming, says the Lord, when… I will bring back the captives of My people Israel… I will plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God. Amos 9: 13-15
Key Action: Our religious practices are worthless unless we treat others with integrity and compassion.