1. Is it right to worship God for your own personal pleasure?
2. Are we to worship God out of duty -- because He said so?
3. Should we ever pursue pleasure of any sort? Why or why not?
4. Should we enjoy His presence, but not be motivated by our pleasure?
5. Did God create you for His glory or for your joy? Please explain.
6. Does God want you to be happy?
The third question is the one that really got to me. I'll talk about that one here but I want to hear your imput on everything else. So here is mine.
Should we ever pursue pleasure of any sort? Why or why not?
Some verses I found are:
Hebrews 10:25 "Not forsaking the assembling or ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching."
I don't see that this is limited to church. This is fellowship with Christians. This could include Singles groups, Movie nights (w/ Christians), etc.
I Timothy 5:6 "But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth."
Obviously we are not to live for pleasure there is more to it than that.
Ephesians 5:10 "Proving what is acceptable"
We are supposed to prove what is acceptable but that really leaves a lot to be said.
Ephesians 5:29 "For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:"
Obviously God does not expect us to forsake 'fleshly' pleasures.
Duet 28:47 "Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee . . . Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;"
I just found these to be interesting. What do you think??
1 comment:
1. Is it right to worship God for your own personal pleasure?
If one's primary motivation for participating in worship is selfish, i.e. one's own personal pleasure, then one is not truly worshiping God. Worship springs from inside; it is Christ inside us welling forth and urging us to praise Him. It is right to enjoy it, and it can be right to be motivated to do it because you know it will be enjoyable or pleasurable, but once in the act of worshiping, the motivation should be glory to God, and it is that which will be bring us true pleasure.
2. Are we to worship God out of duty -- because He said so?
Yes and no. If we are having trouble obeying of our own volition, it is not wrong to remind ourselves that we are, as Christians, not only ordered to worship God, but designed for worship of God. If, once we worship, we are still doing so only out of a sense of duty, we are missing the mark and not truly worshiping God, but engaging in a ritual or performing a task.
3. Should we ever pursue pleasure of any sort? Why or why not?
Pleasure was created by God. If we had no pleasure, we would become moribund, curmudgeonly malcontents. What life would be in us, in a world of nothing but sadness and duty? There is a time for mourning, and time for rejoicing. We are warned not to pervert the pleasures, as the world does, but to enjoy them in light of who God is, and who He is to us and in us.
4. Should we enjoy His presence, but not be motivated by our pleasure?
Tricky wording. It is right to enjoy His presence, but the second part implies an emotional state fed by 'praise and worship'. Again, we are not to worship Him for the sake of pleasure, but pleasure will often result from worshiping Him. As with many things, motive is the heart of the matter.
5. Did God create you for His glory or for your joy? Please explain.
We are created for His glory, which if we are faithful in glorifying Him (i.e. worshiping, obeying, following, etc), joy will be ours. One leads to the next. This does not, of course, mean Christians will not suffer hardship. Quite the contrary, actually, but we can remain joyful in spite of our trials in light of who God is, and who He is to us.
6. Does God want you to be happy?
Ultimately, yes. This life is not HIs goal. He will chasten us and encourage us, often in difficult ways that do not make us happy, with the end of making us more holy and thus closer to Him. In other words, it will make us happier in the end. It has been said that "God's will is what we would choose for ourselves if we knew what God knows". That may seem a tad idealistic, for we still wouldn't have the wisdom or insight that God has, but there is truth in it.
Also, a relevant excerpt from C.S. Lewis's "The Problem of Pain", Chapter 3:
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all'....
As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
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