Prof Zebulon No E14

F) Christian Living (Acceptable True Spiritual Worship Explained)

When it all boils down, there are only two ways of worshiping the Lord: acceptably and unacceptably. The early Jews learned this lesson the hard way. When they were waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain with the law, they grew impatient and created an idol; well, technically it was an idol but their intention was to create an image of the One that brought them out of Egypt (Exod 32:4). They worshipped the true God, but in the wrong manner. Another occasion is when Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu burned incense that was not commanded by the Lord on the altar and it is called in verse 1 of Levitcus 10 : "strange fire". They worshipped the true God but in a self-styled manner. One last example is where the Jews were offering sick sheep or lame ones and had taken worship to be something of a ritual (Malachi 1:8). They worshipped the true God but with a bad attitude.

In our last study on this, we looked at several verses in the New Testament that gave ways of worshipping the true God in an acceptable manner. All these verses basically spoke of meeting people's needs and offering this to God as acceptable true spiritual worship. Could we ever be accused of doing these things, say: in the wrong manner, or in a self-styled way, or with a bad attitude?? This is a rhetorical question, of course, but nonetheless, it needs to be asked.

If we want to worship God in a true, spiritual and acceptable manner we must worship Him with what He gave us when He created us. We learn how to worship God by reading His Word (our intelligence); we choose to worship Him (our wills) and because of what He did for us and because He loved us first, we worship him by our love (our emotions). God created us in His image; we resemble Him by our minds, our wills and our emotions.

L) Religions of the World (Islam)

Islam is well known to all because it is in the news almost every day. The word Islam means submission. Movies have been made about it such as: Not Without My Daughter and Delta Force, just to name a couple. Of course, in both these movies and basically what we read about in all the newspapers is that Islam is bad and extremists run it. Unfortunately, in our Western culture, we do not see the good side of this religion. I am not condoning it; I'm just saying that we only see the bad parts on our TV screens when there are several truly good points.

Islam was founded by Muhammad around the year 610 AD when the whole of Arabia was in total idol worship and in chaos. He began preaching about there being only one God (Allah), and that he (Muhammad) was his prophet. The adherents to this religion are called Muslims, which means "those who submit to Allah".

Islam has two holy cities Mecca and Medina (both in Saudi Arabia); every adult Muslim must, if possible, make a voyage to Mecca at least once in his lifetime. They (the Muslims) are very strong believers and adhere, to the laws that are described in their sacred book of writings, the Koran. This book was written in the original language and only until very recently (1900) was it translated into other languages. Some Muslims have learned the whole book by heart.

This religion in its purist form, in very moral, protective of their women, and punishes sin very severely. An example is if someone is caught stealing, his or her hand is cut off. Guess what, no one gets their hands cut off in those countries. You know why? Because they know axiomatically, that if they steal, they lose a hand. What do we do with robbers? We give them community service to perform or send them back out on the streets on parole. You decide which system is better.....

In the end, however, we all know that we don't get to heaven because of our merits or because we didn't steal; we get to heaven because some one paid the price for our sins, once and for all; Jesus Christ who is sitting at the right hand of God at this very moment and is interceding for us (Romans 8:34).

One last thing about Islam: They worship the true God but in a self styled manner