“Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.” Ecclesiastes 5:1
It’s that time of year when most of the Western World reflects on the birth of Christ. While the ‘radical anti-Christians’ would seek to remove Christ from Christmas, I am not as concerned with them as I am the ‘semi-religious’.
The ‘semi-religious’ are those people who only go to church around Christmas and Easter who also profess to be Christians. Throughout the rest of the year they appear to demonstrate very little interest in spiritual matters. They consider it a small matter to forsake their spiritual duties; not that they admit it, but it is what they live.
I was thinking about this when I read Ecclesiastes 5:1 during family devotions the other night. What a little view most professing Christians in our culture have of God. God fits somewhere in between all of the other things in their lives, but is not at the primary core of their life’s calling. When Christmas rolls around they do their religious ‘duty’ and go to the church they have forsaken for the rest of the year.
This is no more than the ‘sacrifice of fools’ spoken of in our verse. What generally draws such people is tradition (because that is what a good moral person does at Christmas), not a passionate love for God. They think they go to worship but what they need is repentance and a life changing, saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Then all but the greatest hindrances could possibly keep them away from God’s people every Lord’s Day for the worship of God. Then they will want to carefully ‘listen’ and learn ever more about our great God and king. Then God will be the reason not only for the season, but the reason for their lives.
Final thought…I have been writing about ‘them’…could it be that I have written about ‘you’? Do not be deceived, Christ desires all of you or none of you (Luke 14:26,27 & 33, Revelation 3:16).
