Daily Devotionals

Devotional: February 7th

FALSE WORSHIP

They worship the work of their own hands, that which their fingers have made. - Isaiah 2:8

A MAN’s true worship is not the worship that he performs in the public temple, but that which he offers down in that little private chapel where nobody goes but himself. Worship is the attribution of supreme excellence to, and the entire dependence of the heart upon, a certain person. And the people or the things to which a man attributes excellence, and on which he hangs his happiness and his well-being, these be his gods, no matter what his outward profession is. You can find out what these are for yourself, if you will honestly ask yourself one or two questions. What is it that I want most? What is it which makes my ideal of happiness? What is it which I feel that I should be desperate without? What do I think about most naturally and spontaneously, when the spring is taken off, and my thoughts are allowed to go as they will? And if the answer to none of these questions is "God!" then I do not know why you should call yourself a worshiper of God. It does not matter, though we pray in the temple, if we have the dark subterranean pit, where our true adoration is rendered. I am afraid there are a great many of us nominal Christians, connected with Christian churches, posing before men as orthodox religionists, who keep this private chapel where we do our devotions to an idol and not to God. If our real gods could be made visible, what a pantheon they would make! All the foul forms painted on that underground cell would be paralleled in the creeping things - which crawl along the low earth, and never soar nor even stand erect, and in the vile, bestial forms of passion to which some of us really bow down. Honor, wealth, literary or other distinction, the sweet sanctities of human love dishonored and profaned by being exalted to the place which Divine love should hold, ease, family, animal appetites, lust, drink- these are the gods of some of us.

"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone." What a contrast between that condition of mind and the gentle, gracious power which, like the dew, is distilled into the soul by the influences of the Spirit of God. The one is like the frowning cliffs which front the wild Polar ocean, white with ice and black with barren rock; the other like the limestone walls that keep back the Mediterranean, green and flowery to the water’s edge - a barrier as complete, but all draped with beauty, and fruitful and sunny.

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