Worship That Looks Nothing Like Mine

She has never said a word against them. Not once, not to anybody.

If you asked her she would say they love the Lord and she is glad they exist. She would mean it. She is not a woman who runs other people down and she would be genuinely upset if you suggested she was.

And she has a shelf.

It is in the back of her head and it has never had a label read out loud, and on it go the people whose worship looks nothing like hers. The ones who are too loud. The ones who are too quiet. The ones who read it out of a book. The ones who never sit down. The ones who cry too easily and the ones who never seem to feel anything at all.

She does not despise them. That is what makes it so hard to see. She just files them, quietly, under a heading she would deny having if you named it.

Not really.

Not really worship. Not really the Spirit. Not really the same thing I am doing.

She found the shelf on a Thursday, at a funeral, standing next to a man who wept through a hymn she had always thought was sentimental, and she watched him and understood, with a kind of horror, that he was further in than she was.

Now put her down a second, and let me ask you.

Whose worship have you quietly decided does not count?

Different kinds of working, one Spirit doing all of it

Paul wrote a sentence to a church that was pulling itself apart over exactly this, and he wrote it three times in a row because he knew nobody hears it the first time.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.1 Corinthians 12:4 to 6

Three sentences, same shape, hammered. Different, but the same. Different, but the same. Different, but the same.

He is not saying everything is equally true. Paul spent his life saying the opposite about things that mattered. He is saying that the variety in front of you is not evidence of two Gods, and that the Spirit is the One distributing it, and that when you file a brother under not really you are filing a distribution decision the Holy Spirit made.

And I want you to hear where you actually stand in this, because it is better than you think.

You are not a hard-hearted person. A hard-hearted person does not notice a shelf at a funeral. The word says it is the same Spirit at work in everyone, and the fact that you can feel the shelf at all is the Holy Spirit already at work in you, on you, this week. That noticing is not condemnation arriving. That is the Helper doing exactly what He was sent to do.

This house honors the founding fire and it never prosecutes a reader, so hear me clearly: nobody is telling you your tradition is a corruption of something purer. It is not. What you were handed is a real inheritance and you are right to love it.

The only thing being asked is that you stop treating your inheritance as the measuring stick for everybody else's.

Because that is what the shelf is. It is not hatred. It is a ruler, and you have been holding it up against people you have never spoken to, and the word says there are different kinds of working and the same God at work in all of them.

Look at what happened in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, since this house is named for it. What the witnesses could not get over was not the volume. It was who was in the room. Men and women who had been raised to worship in completely different ways ended up on the same plank, and nobody had negotiated a compromise style first. Something fell on the room, and the sorting could not survive it.

That is the Holy Spirit's habit. He does not settle these arguments by ruling. He settles them by falling on both sides while the argument is still going.