We love the Spaghetti Factory. The thousand island salad dressing is wonderful. The spaghetti with rich meat sauce and mizithra cheese is awesome. The bread with garlic butter is heavenly. Then you top it off with spumoni ice cream. And then to make it even better, the service is great and the cost is within our budget. Wow! We enjoy the Melting Pot…it gets 5 stars. The Spaghetti Factory would get 4 stars. Don Pablo’s provides a great Mexican meal…it gets 4 stars. The Sign of the Mermaid on Anna Maria Island serves the best filet mignon of all steak restaurants…it gets 5 stars. Once we ate at the castle at Disney World…it gets 5+ stars.
We eat at Burger King, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s…they each get 2 stars…mainly for convenience. I have eaten at some 1 star restaurants…yuck and double yuck!
When we eat at a restaurant, we don’t want to be rushed. We want our beverage on time and we don’t want the glass empty very long. We want the bread warm and soft. We want a servant who anticipates our needs and delivers without interupting the flow of the meal. We want our food cooked to our liking.
When we leave the Spaghetti Factory, the Melting Pot, Don Pablo’s, the Sign of the Mermaid, and Henderson’s Catfish, we leave satisfied. It is a state of euphoria. Ending the meal at the Melting Pot with a dessert that involves dipping ripe strawberries in warm chocolate, is an indescribable experience.
However, we are not the only ones that hunger. God hungers for a feast. He feasts on the praise and worship from His children. Remember John 4:23 ”But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.” God craves for us to serve Him a feast of pure worship.
By the way, thanksgiving gets you through the gates, praise allows you access to His courts (Psalm 100:4 Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise), but worship gets you into the very presence of God. It would be beneficial to know how to distinguish between the three.
After the Sunday morning worship service at your church, does God say, “Now that was satisfying!” Would He give your ‘church service’ 5 stars or would it be closer to 1 star. Was He hurried because it was time for the sports event to start on TV? Were we, as God’s waiters and waitresses, more concerned about what we were getting out of the experience, rather than what the Person being served was getting? Let’s face it, most of our churches do not offer a satisfying ‘meal’ to the Lord. We are too busy fussing over what we are to get out of it. We want our brand of music and our brand of sermon with the right amount of humor, flowing from a dynamic, excited speaker, within the right amount of time! It doesn’t seem to matter what God wants.
Study worship. Let’s aim to give God what He seeks!
Here is something to think about that a friend of ours sent this week: God glories in hiding things. Proverbs 25: 1 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing and the honor of kings to search out a matter.” He hides treasures so those who are earnest about seeking Him will find what the causal seeker will not. Isaiah 45:15 “Verily thou art a God that hides thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.”
Could it be that God hides His actions and His reasons for doing what He does, so that we will pursue Him. In the pursuit, we focus on Him and learn to worship!
We love you.
Billy and Sheilah Daws
