Flesh worshipper

When I share my testimony, it's usually about the BYG Christmas service during my senior year. An event where I felt like I met God. Truth is, I probably wasn't saved until last semester - or at least when I was assured I was saved.

The year after my first church experience was a rollercoaster. Being identified as a Christian was something I could get behind because all my cool friends were also Christian. I took it seriously sometimes too; coming into Penn freshman year I had a 95 theses ready to combat the evils of evolutionary Inner Fishes. Pretty sure that stigmatized me as the preppy churchboy. In the mean time, my life was marked with constant fights with my family in addition to leaving two embittered pseudo-girlfriends in my wake. Is this the picture of 1 Thessalonians 5:24?

The question is: Did I love Christ? I really liked the worship songs that declared God faithful and loving and awesome, but all the songs and messages about Jesus' sacrifice I came to find... dull and offensive. Used to elegant theorems dictating universal truths, I could glean some faith in a powerful Creator that devised the Big Bang and brought forth the millions of solar masses and quasars chewing through each other for survival. But to make the story ugly and unclean by something as local as the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was cringe-worthy. So unfulfilling, so undramatic, so anticlimactic.

I could have literally attended a synagogue or mosque those couple of years and my worship would not have been different. What was actually happening? I thought I was worshipping the LORD. but lo! I was bearing no fruit and living in sin. I was learning a bucketload of material on God's commands but I did not feel God's presence, and when I did it was His anger at my continual disobedience. My heart would be continually ridden with guilt and discouragement.

Fast-forward to Fall 2010 and you see a Willis that is, well, different. He knows Christ and obeys Him. He's not afraid to die for Christ, break up with his girlfriend for Christ, or drop out of school for Christ. What changed? The Spirit pointed me to things I once overlooked (John 16:13). My knowledge of the law no longer became a stumbling block, but rather was redeemed in coming to know grace in a fuller sense. Writing my "testimony" in preparation for baptism led me to reevaluate the origins of what caused my soul to stir that one BYG service: Ephesians 3:19 talks about whose love? Christ's. Christ is the lover of my soul!

Thank God Jesus acted so locally, so personally! Theocentricity without Christcentricity is judgement. Worshipping the LORD without praising Christ is worshipping one's own flesh, merely worshipping the potential happiness that this LORD could provide. Worship like this will lead to "dryness," and Christians should never be dry. If one is to worship in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24), they are to know the law, know the punishment for breaking the law, then be secure in the law fulfiller. May preaching be dispensed with 90% law and 10% grace, so that people may be first terrified of their disease and recklessly seize the cure without argument.

"Blinded men are ever prone to imagine that they have religious feelings because they have sensuous animal feelings in accidental juxtaposition with religious places, words or sights. This is the pernicious mistake which has sealed up millions of self-deceived souls for hell." - W. Robert Godfrey

"No Christ in your sermon, sir? Then go home, and never preach again until you have something worth preaching.
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And I mean by Christ not merely his example and the ethical precepts of his teaching, but his atoning blood, his wondrous satisfaction made for human sin, and the grand doctrine of ‘believe and live.’" - C.H. Spurgeon

"Terror accomplishes no real obedience. Suspense brings forth no fruit unto holiness. No gloomy uncertainty as to God’s favour can subdue one lust, or correct our crookedness of will. But the free pardon of the cross uproots sin, and withers all its branches. Only the certainty of love, forgiving love, can do this." - Horatius Bonar

For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! (1 Corinthians 9:16)

What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. (Philippians 1:18)

Guys, do not seek an experience but seek Christ.

2 Peter 3:18, Titus 3:4-8