by Stan Mitchell

"God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24).

One bright Sunday morning, a church in Pretoria, South Africa, had a visitor. He was a mild-looking man in his mid-twenties, a lawyer with wire-rimmed glasses. But he wasn't impressed with what he saw. He recalls seeing church members dozing in worship, and he wondered how serious they were about Christianity.

"They were not an assembly of devout souls," he writes in his autobiography. "They appeared rather to be worldly-minded people, going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom."

What is stunning is not only how true this evaluation was, but also how widespread. Frankly, it baffles me how casually Christians take worship. I wonder how those who make fun of the "Five acts of worship" concept would feel about the following worship activities: balancing the checkbook; discussing the weekend's events with a neighbor; transitioning from a momentary doze to outright, open-mouthed, coma.

And despite the jokes about the level of interest the sermon might deserve, the real problem is our abysmal lack of respect for what is taking place.

Here we are in audience with the one great God, an encounter like none other. The regularity of our doing so should not diminish the power of its impact. We might never get an appointment with the President or a film star, but we can meet with the ruler of all the earth any time! Nothing you do this week will be more important than worship. Nothing. By the way, would you like to know who the scholarly lawyer was who went to church one Sunday in South Africa? His name was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who would later liberate a billion souls from British Colonialism in what is now India and Pakistan. How would the world have changed if Gandhi had become a Christian?

Not only did that church miss an opportunity to convince a great man of the truth of Christ. They did something much more serious. They demonstrated a lack of respect for the God they worshipped!