Circumstantial Living Leads to Circumstantial Worship
by Pastor Shannon 10/25/2006
Living Springs Church
Bandera, Texas
www.lsagbandera.com
Job 13:15
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him…”
Job, having suffered incredible loss and enduring terrible circumstances declares that He will continue to trust God!
In the first Chapter of this book we find Job loses everything.
1. His oxen and donkeys are stolen away from him.
2. All his sheep are dead.
3. All his camels are stolen.
4. All his children are dead.
Verse 20 gives the key for this lesson.
“Then Job arose, and rent his mantle and shaved his head and fell down upon the ground and worshipped.”
As I think of this verse and the actions of Job I wonder, how many would respond in such a manner? To get the news that you just lost everything, not some, not part but everything. You get this news and you set your heart to worship?
Isn’t the first reaction and reaction of anger? Don’t you shake your fist at heaven and declare an answer for this apparent abandonment of God? Don’t you ask the question of why? Why me? Why my children? Why my livestock? Why all of it at once?
Can you sense the grief, the confusion, the uncertainty that Job must be going through? Even in the mix of these powerful emotions, Job finds better comfort in worship than questions.
He finds a greater desire to worship than to understand. I think this is because job understood the difference in circumstantial living and true praise.
True praise is not offered to God just because things are going as planned and I couldn’t be happier with the results. True praise is lifting my heart to God in praise when things aren’t going as planned and I couldn’t be more confused or more hurt.
This is the lesson of Job 13:15, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust him…”
I wonder how many of us would express the same thoughts given the same circumstances.
Or for us do we live circumstantially to offer circumstantial praise?
Here’s my point. Job had no circumstantial reasons for which he should praise God or even trust God. There is no evidence that God is working on Job’s behalf. It is as if God is on extended vacation. It appears that God is totally disconnected from Job at this point in his life. Could God really be nearby and allow all of his animals to be stolen and killed? Could God really be a involved in Job’s life and allow all of his children to die? I mean if God were there, wouldn’t he have done something to stop all of this?
I’m afraid that many would not do as Job did. They wouldn’t first seek to praise God given the circumstances but would rather begin to bombard heaven with a verbal assault of questions and accusations. Of course this is what the devil was counting on Job to do.
Satan speaking to God in verse 11 of the first chapter says, “But put forth thine hand now and touch all that he has and he will curse thee to thy face.”
You see, Satan had all confidence that Job was a circumstantial worshipper. Satan’s argument to God was that you’ve pampered this guy. You’ve allowed everything he does to prosper. You’ve increased his house, you put a hedge about him, and you’ve placed him in this protective bubble. Remove the blessing of your hand and he’ll curse you to your face!
Well there is only one reason Job would do such a thing; if he was a circumstantial worshipper.
A circumstantial worshipper gives praise to God bases solely on how good their circumstances are at any given point in their life. If I’m happy with my circumstances, I have no problem praising you. If I like my current set of circumstances I’ll lift my voice to the heavens with shouts of adoration! But let those circumstances change for the worse and the worship ends.
We tag our prayers with words like this, “God if you do this for me, I’ll give you all the praise. If you do this for my family, you’ll be worthy of every bit of praise.”
Well, what if He doesn’t? Does that mean God is no longer worthy of our life’s praise? Does it mean that God is somehow reduced in power and sovereignty?
No! It means we are circumstantial worshippers! We worship based on circumstance. If I like it, you’ll like the praise I give to you God. If I don’t like it, you get nothing. Learning how to praise God through any circumstance strengthens our relationship with God. Because we don’t automatically assume that this negative thing in my life is God’s punishment on me for something instead it is God’s means of strengthening me.
God uses unique situations and circumstances to teach us valuable life lessons. Not to destroy our faith in him. How we react to any given situation is purely our choice. We choose the attitude we take on everyday. That attitude will either develop in us a pure desire to worship God because he is God or not worship God because of our negative circumstances.
Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor writes about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. He says, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Many days of our lives are categorized as “bad days” simply because of negative events that happened in that day.
Someone asks you how your day is going and it’s but 8:00a.m. and your response is, “not good…I woke up late and didn’t get my full cup of coffee.” Already we’ve chosen our attitude for the day based on an unfinished cup of coffee. It’s so easy to do, to label a day as bad because someone on the freeway cut me off, or the clerk at the convenience store where I get gas was rude to me, or my wife asked me to take the trash with me on my way out this morning.
We must be careful because anything can set us up for a negative attitude for the rest of the day. When that happens, any negative circumstance that occurs throughout the course of the day adds to the problem and by mid-day, we’re fighting to even stay in the game.
What’s important to remember in times like these is that God is working behind the scenes. Job wasn’t aware of the fact that Satan had made a bet with God that He would crumble the moment God took his hand off of him. Worship in any negative situation takes faith, faith to believe that God is seeing this situation from all sides. The limited view I have isn’t the same view that God has. My limited perspective isn’t the same perspective God sees from.
Tommy Tenny in his book, Worshipping your way to a higher perspective talks about a little boy being with his Father in a massive crowd and only seeing the backs of the legs of grown men. He pulls on his daddy’s arm and says, “Daddy pick me up so I can see.” His daddy picks him up and now he is able to see what his father is seeing. Being picked up changed his perspective to match that of is father. He was now seeing what the father is seeing.
In the same way when we worship God, we’re saying “Daddy, pick me up so I can see better what is going on in my life. I don’t understand all of this, help me see it better.” Worship is the elevator that lifts our perspective.
God is on the outside looking in…we’re on the inside looking out. He sees what we’re going through without the haze of confusion. It really comes down to a matter of trust.
When life is bringing certain events my way that I don’t understand and I can’t wrap my brain around am I going to worship God still or focus on the problem? Will I trust he has the better view of it all and simply place myself at His mercy?
That’s what Job is saying in our text, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust him.”
That, my friend, goes beyond circumstantial worship. That is saying regardless of the circumstances I face in this life, good or bad, profitable or depleting, great or terrible, I will trust God and I will worship Him still.
Mark Batterson says, “Worship is forgetting about what’s wrong with you and remembering what’s right with God. To be able to worship God when I don’t feel like it says my worship isn’t circumstantial.”
If nothing is going right and I can still praise God is testament to the fact my worship isn’t circumstantial. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect to worship God. I think the opposite of that is the idea we create many times. For God worship to happen, everything has to be flowing just right, my life has to be perfect, my problems have all been dealt with successfully, the sun is shining in my life, my kids are all acting as they should, my bills are all paid, my career is set, my bank account is full,…etc.
Nothing could be further from the truth! If everything had to be perfect, if my life had to be in complete harmony with outside issues or circumstances, I’d never worship God. So instead, I worship God in spite of my problems, in spite of my issues, in spite of my weaknesses, in spite of my money dilemmas, I worship God in spite of all those things that give reason NOT to worship Him. This is the attitude I choose to take. The great thing is, that trough my willingness to praise him and focus on what’s right with him, God lifts my perspective. Now I’m not on the same level as my problems, God has lifted me to a higher perspective. His perspective! God gives me a glimpse of what it really means to worship beyond circumstance and situation. And it’s a great place to see the view from!
Here’s the big thought…
Circumstantial Living leads to Circumstantial Worship.
I base my identity on my circumstances. If I like my circumstances, I like me. The better they are, they more I like me and the more I like me the more I can worship God.
There are several problems with this.
1. Basing your identity on your circumstances is dangerous because that means with every circumstance change, you’re identity changes to match the nature of the new circumstance. This is incredibly risky not to mention exhausting! As often as our circumstances change in this life, we can’t afford to be so attached to them as to stake our identity on them.
2. If you like yourself the more you like your circumstances, does that mean when you hate your circumstances you hate yourself? It’s the risk we run with this type of attitude. Our circumstances are to never serve as the barometer by which we measure our self-esteem. God is!
3. If your love for God is in direct proportion to how much you love yourself, you’ve got issues. God is worthy of my love and affection even when I don’t feel worthy enough to give it. Even when I can’t look in the mirror and love that person peering back at me, I owe God my love. When circumstances tend to make me not like me, it should never change what is truly due to God from my heart, pure love and adoration.
If you live circumstantially, you will likely offer equal worship. God deserves so much better than that!
Mark says, “Most of our problems are not circumstantial. Most of our problems are perceptual. Our biggest problems can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of who God is. Our problems seem really big because our God seems really small. In fact, we reduce God to the size of our biggest problem.”
A.W. Tozer said a “low view of God…is the cause of a thousand lesser evils.” But a person with a high view of God “is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.”
I think circumstantial worshipers tend to think of life’s problems in degrees of difficulty which ultimately results in the loss of pure worship that God is due.
Which is harder for God, to feed the sparrows or to feed five thousand? Which is harder, to say your sins are forgiven or take up your bed and walk? Which is harder for God to do, walk on water or allow Peter to walk on water? Which takes greater ability, to make an axe head swim or to part the Red Sea? Does God work within a range of pre-defined difficulties? NO! There aren’t some things that are harder for God to do and others that are easier for God to do. God isn’t stretched or maximized on certain things. God is God, he has no slow days, or low strength day. God is able to heal or speak peace in any situation at anytime, perform a miracle or provide simple truth to a question we have. None of these things cause God to exert more power than any other. To God, all of these things are the same.
We have to remember that God is all powerful, omniscient and omni-present. He’s never stumped or stupefied. He’s on top of all things at all times, even when we’re not. There was not a moment in the afflictions of Job that God didn’t have a close eye on him…and Satan!
He was mindful and watching his servant, cheering him on, giving him silent strength to get through the terrible ordeal of losing everything including his health.
So it is with you, God is in the mix. He’s not a far off spectator, he’s
right here, behind and before us to help us through these circumstances we go through. We have to resist the urge to become circumstantial worshippers who only praise God when the events of their life agree with them.
But in all things giving praise to God who is worthy, now and forever!
Rule your circumstances with praise rather than letting your praise be ruled by your circumstances!
