Amos 5:23   Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.

     

Earlier in this chapter, Amos declares, “For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins.” (v.12). It is a chastising word and in the word that follows, he chides them for performing all their religious rites while not putting their lives right with God: “Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them.” We have spoken before of the reality that the Lord looks for in our lives and how He sees past our religious acts to the reality of what we really are.

 

So now, here in today's verse, he chides them for their apparent celebrations using music. It all sounds very good but it just covers up the poverty of their lives.  Is that how our Sunday worship times are sometimes? Do we have good music, maybe even a band of talented musicians and our ‘worship' seems very good, very uplifting and we are blessed by it. But after the Service we go back to our homes, back to our schools or colleges or places of work, and there it is very different; there our lives are not full of His love and grace, there our lives are self-seeking, materialistic and rarely thinking of God? Is that how it is for some of us?

If it is like that, it shouldn't be! God is not fooled by our Sunday worship and He's not blessed by it if the rest of the time we ignore Him and do our own unrighteous and ungodly thing! The way to correct such a state of affairs is to do what the apostle Paul suggested at communion, that "a man (or woman) ought to examine himself" (1 Cor 11:28), i.e. not merely at Communion but every time we come into the Lord's presence with worship. How often I wonder do we make the time of worship a self-centred time, a time of focusing on what we can get out of it rather than what we can give to Him? Let's change that!