I have lots of friends from my childhood who share a very special spot in my heart. Some of them I haven’t seen for years (or even decades) and yet I still consider them friends.
What’s ironic about this is that if you asked me about what they’ve done or where they’ve been or about what excites them about life I would have to say, “I don’t really know.” If we got together today we would spend most of our time talking and laughing about things we did forty years ago.
These are people that I am more comfortable talking about in the past tense. I still think fondly of them but I can’t really say that I know them anymore. We have spent too much time apart.
There are many people who would have to describe their relationship with God in a similar way. They know about God and they have memories of events or celebrations that focused on God but if you asked them to talk about what God is like or what God desires they would be lost. For many people Easter is one of those moments that is more about memories of celebrations past than it is about a present, living savior.
This is a critical discussion for those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus because we are called to be His witnesses. It is our job to share with the world what God is like and share what we know to be the Good News of forgiveness and eternal life. But, in order for this to happen we need to know the God we represent. This means we need to be serious about all of those ancient Christian disciplines like Bible study, prayer, meditation and worship.
Many people have been raised believing that these holy practices are akin to spiritual caster oil; unpleasant concoctions that are somehow supposed to be good for us but we want to keep at arms length.
What people need to understand (believers and the simply curious) is that these Christian practices are actually more like bridges that bring us closer to the God who came close to us in order to draw us close to Him.
This image is built into the messages of all of our special days. At Christmas God became a human being. He got close. At Easter Jesus invited us to share in His death so that we could share in His life. He invited us close. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit came to fill us with His presence and to write God’s laws on our hearts. He came even closer.
Worship is the thankful celebration of this ongoing relationship. This is what being Christian is all about.
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