What If We Came to Church Knowing God Was There?

I am disappointed when we come to church without a sense of God or a feeling of humble reverence. I am not talking about creating an emotional atmosphere or trying to manufacture some kind of spiritual experience. I am talking about something much more fundamental. Do we actually believe that when we gather together as Christians, God is among us?

There are false religions, strange religious movements and religious groups that have built their understanding of God around places, objects and rituals. They may believe that something sacred is contained in a particular place or represented by a particular object, and when they approach it, they respond with awe. As Christians, we understand that God cannot be placed inside a box, confined to a building or reduced to something we can see and touch. He is not contained by our buildings, our traditions or our religious practices. We do not need an object to make His presence real.

But that should cause us to look at ourselves.

We can rightly reject false religion and still lose our own sense of reverence for God. We can become so familiar with church that we forget what we are actually doing when we gather. We know the songs. We know the order of service. We know when to sit and when to stand. We know the language. We know what is expected of us. Yet familiarity with the things of God can become dangerous when it causes us to lose our awareness of God Himself.

Jesus said, “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” That is not a statement that should become so familiar to us that we stop hearing it. Christ did not say that He would be represented by an object or confined to a particular sacred place. He said that where His people gather in His name, He is with them.

Paul gives us another picture of this in 1 Corinthians 14. He describes an unbeliever coming into the gathering of believers, having the secrets of his heart exposed, and responding by falling down and worshipping God, declaring, “God is really among you!” What an extraordinary response. The person recognized something about the gathering that went beyond the people in the room. There was an awareness that God was present.

I wonder what would happen if we approached our gatherings with that same awareness.

Would we listen differently? Would we worship differently? Would we speak differently to one another? Would we be more careful about the condition of our own hearts? Would we take the Word of God more seriously if we genuinely understood that we were gathering in the presence of Christ?

I am not suggesting that every church service needs to feel dramatic or emotionally overwhelming. That is not the point. Our feelings are not the measure of God's presence. We do not need lights, music, technology, performance or emotional manipulation to convince ourselves that God is there. He does not become more present because the service was moving, and He does not become less present because the service was quiet.

The issue is our awareness of Him.

There should be something deeply humbling about knowing that we are coming together as the people of God. We are not gathering around a personality, a performance or a religious tradition. We are gathering around Jesus Christ. He is the reason we are there.

That should produce reverence.

Not the kind of reverence that comes from being afraid of a building or an object, but the kind that comes from knowing who God is. Reverence that causes us to examine ourselves. Reverence that makes us less concerned with being entertained and more concerned with being changed. Reverence that reminds us that worship is not about giving God an hour of our week while keeping the rest of our lives for ourselves.

There is also something else worth considering. If we truly believe Christ is among His people, then the way we treat one another matters. We cannot separate our worship of God from the way we conduct ourselves toward the people He has placed around us. Humility, forgiveness, patience, truthfulness, love and repentance are not side issues to Christianity. They are evidence of what is taking place in our hearts.

Perhaps we have become too accustomed to church and not accustomed enough to God.

Perhaps we have learned how to attend without learning how to approach Him.

Perhaps we have become comfortable with the language of Christianity while losing the wonder of the God that Christianity declares.

I would love to see a company of believers who are so conscious that God is with them that humble reverence becomes a natural response when they gather together. Not because they have put God into a box, but because they know He cannot be contained by one. Not because someone has created an atmosphere, but because they know who is in their midst.

That is a very different thing from religion.

It is the awareness that the living God is actually there.

And if we really believed that, perhaps we would never walk into church the same way again.