By Tom Holland
Three elderly ladies had gone shopping in a town nearby. On the return trip, one elderly lady was driving and the other two were riding in the back seat. When the driver created a traffic problem with her slow driving, a State Trooper found an opportunity to pass several cars that were behind the slow-moving elderly lady. When he finally got directly behind her he turned on his blue lights and the elderly lady pulled over. As the Trooper came to her car she rolled down the window and said, “Now officer, I know I was not speeding. I promised my children that if they would let me keep driving I would always drive the speed limit. So I don’t drive one mile over or one mile under the speed limit and I know I was driving exactly what the sign said, and it said twenty miles per hour.
“The Trooper looked at her in disbelief and said, “Lady, that’s not the posted speed limit sign. That’s the highway number! This is highway twenty.”
The Trooper looked in the back seat at two very nervous ladies. One of the ladies had her purse in her lap and she was drumming on her purse with her fingers. The other lady was repeatedly pulling a handkerchief through her hand. The Trooper looked at the two women and smiled, saying: “It’s all right ladies. I don’t plan to issue her a citation. She was just confused about the sign. She thought she was driving what the highway sign said.”
One of the nervous ladies quickly exclaimed, “But officer, you don’t understand. We’ve just come off highway 102!
Jesus once talked to some people who did not know how to interpret signs. He said to some religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, “You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times” (Matthew 16:3). What are the “signs of the times” relative to worship? “Worship” has, in many churches, become a thinly disguised form of entertainment. The focus is on people and what they like; whereas true worship is focused on God, Who is the audience of true worship (John 4:23,24).
Some churches are trying to compromise with new fangled worship services along with traditional worship services—trying to please young and old alike. Will this result in another “modern speech version of Scripture,” namely, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and two worship services”?
There are serious problems with entertainment-worship. God is not the audience and the deep longing of the human soul for fellowship with God is denied. The reaction is predictable. One reaction is the development of the dichotomy of the “spiritual” from the “religious.”
Another reaction is the “abandoning of mega-churches for mini-churches” (see Time magazine, March 6, 2006, pp. 46-48).
Why not take the New Testament Scripture, the New Covenant, (Hebrews 8:7-12), and do what it reveals to receive salvation, to worship and to live in a way that pleases God and blesses people?
