Editor's Note: We're excited to add our worship and hip-hop reviewer, Mark Ryan, to this column started by Sarah Fine. While Sarah will continue to contribute to this lyrics-meet-daily-life column, we'll be seeing lots of Mark in the days ahead. Please welcome Mark!

WORSHIP is reserved for one person alone. God, Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Yeshua, Jehovah-rophe, Jehovah-jireh, Jehovah-tsidkenu, Jehovah-nissi. Many names, one God. I could write about WORSHIP all day, I could live in the wondrous presence of my Lord and Saviour day and night, just giving back to Him. Worship is reserved for God and God alone. It is all He asks of us. It is the first  commandment (to have no other gods) and the second commandment (have no graven images or likenesses), as we learn in Exodus 20:3-6 and Deuteronomy 5:7-10.

 

Something has gone askew in our thinking, though. Something has gone terribly wrong in some of our churches today. Rather than worship the Man who is preached, we worship the man who preaches. We have taken honor and respect for our pastors to another level by placing them on an infallible pedestal as though to say that his or her words are the words of God himself. Rather than take the message preached and dissect it for ourselves against the true Word of God, we accept the message preached as the Gospel and do not question it.

 

I have stood in the foyer of many churches and overheard such things as, "The message today was amazing, he is so anointed, he always preaches truth." (Sorry, I haven't been to many churches where the pastor was a woman.) People exalting the words of a man without time to digest and compare to the Word of God. In an even clearer example, check the Facebook pages of pastors. Christians worship the men and women of the cloth the same way they worship celebrities. They have become our new American/Canadian Idols. They become the X-Factor. And if people aren't worshiping them, they are using all of their hatred and vileness to tear them down.

 

I listen to many of the popular pastors and teachers of today; I even follow them on Twitter. However, if their message doesn't fit with the Word of God, and leaves me with a whole lot more questions than I started with, then I will usually take a break from listening and test it against the Word. Our example for this is found in Acts 17:11 when the author tells us, "And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul's message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth."

 

An even worse phenomenon is the worship of worship leaders. These men and women who are writing the new hymns of the church end up being the reason people show up. In a conversation the other day, the topic of worship music came up and it was the names that most of us in Christendom expect to hear: Hillsong, Jesus Culture, United, Kim Walker-Smith. If your church is cool, this is what you're singing. If your church is relevant there isn't any room left for Fannie Crosby, St. Francis of Assisi or John Newton. Instead, we worship the men and women of today and think that it is the song that is drawing God in. God isn't interested in the song; He's interested in your heart.

 

Reserve your Worship for God. Don't exalt man above God; only bad things can happen. God does not fail, but we have seen evidence of men falling and failing. It isn't the man in the pulpit, it is the Man on the throne; it isn't the person who wrote the song, it is the Man who breathed inspiration into the song. Nothing that is created is worthy to be worshiped, only the Creator.

 

I am reminded in all of this of the lyrics in Jimmy Needham's song "Clear The Stage." It had been nearly a decade since Matt Redman challenged us to find the "Heart of Worship", and Jimmy released this song that tore at my heart to "Clear the stage and set the lights and sound ablaze / If that's the measure you must take to crush the idols." Jimmy even references the Bereans with the lyric, "Then read the Word and put to test the things you've heard / Until your heart and soul are stirred and rocked and broken."

 

What are you worshiping in your life? What have you made an idol of in your life? It is time to move from worship to WORSHIP.