Ezekiel 33:30-33: When God gets left behind week 2

Have you ever been struggling, and tried to hide it? Maybe you had a physical injury or health problem, and you kind of acted like things were normal--you didn’t really want anyone to know. Or perhaps you had a financial burden--a bill that was crushing you, but you pretended like things were normal. Or thing were really hard at work, maybe you even wondered if you were going to get laid off, but you kept that burden from your spouse or your family. Ever try to be tough on the outside when you’re hurting on the inside? Sometimes we might try to do this. And at times it can be a good thing to protect those we love. But often times we are hiding. Trying to mask or disguise ourselves on the outside so that people don’t really know what is going on inside. . . I think the same thing is true of us spiritually, in our spiritual lives. It can be really easy for us to have what appears to be a spiritually healthy lifestyle when we are not really spiritually healthy. We are so good at putting on a show and making everyone else think that we are spiritual and living rightly and right with God when in reality we are not. And if we are not careful, we can leave God behind in our spiritual lives. This can be a specific problem in our worship. We come to worship God, maybe it’s at a church service, and our hearts aren’t right. But instead of taking care of things, or maybe we have been denying what’s there, we just come and we sing and we listen to the word from the Lord and we do the “Christian thing” and act as if everything is ok and our lives are doing fine. And we walk away from the church, maybe we greet the pastor at the door “great message today pastor”, but we don’t do anything about it. It can be so easy to leave God behind in our worship. And this is not a good place to be, because we turn God into something he is not. In essence, God kind of becomes entertainment to us, and spiritual things or church worship can easily turn into something only for the purpose of amusement. You don’t want to go here in your spiritual life, but it can be such an easy path for us to travel down! And so today we’re going to talk about what it looks like when God gets left behind in our worship. And we’re going to look at a passage in Ezekiel 33 where we see Israel leaving behind God in their worship. And from their example, we will see to illustrations—two cautions for us about what it looks like when God gets left behind in our worship. BIG IDEA: A spiritual lifestyle does not always make you spiritually healthy