"I am Who I am"

At Christianity Today, Mark Galli explains why "seeker friendly" services may fail to lead the seeker toward the God who is:

If you are trying to reach seekers, people who don't know Jesus and have had little acquaintance with church culture, you don't want them to feel lost and confused when they worship with you. .... So the urge to avoid "speaking mysteries in the Spirit" is understandable and intelligible. But when it comes to the worship of the Creator of heaven and earth, we've got a problem. ....

... [O]ur desire for worship that is "understandable" is, well, understandable for evangelistic reasons. But there is a less seemly side of this desire: It's sometimes about worshipping a God we can control. Just as we furiously pursue some line of study in order to "master" a subject, so we are tempted to pursue God in an attempt to master him. As A. W. Tozer put it in Knowledge of the Holy:

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get him where we can use him, or at least know where he is when we need him. We want a God we can in some measure control. We need the feeling of security that comes from knowing what God is like.

This is the sin of the moralist, who wants to box God into a set of religious rules, and of the rationalist, who imagines that God fits neatly into his systematic theology. This is the sin of the prideful seeker who wants to fit God into his preconceived notions of divinity. This is also our sin when our longing for understandable and intelligible worship masks an unwillingness to love God as he is—ultimately mysterious and incomprehensible.

Understandable worship, in the end, can become the sin of idolatry—the worship of that which is not God but a mere figment of our imagination. As Eugene Peterson says in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, "We are not dealing with the God of creation and the Christ of the Cross, but with a dime-store reproduction of something made in our image." Worship that doesn't in some ways leave a large space for transcendence and mystery is not worship of the God of the Bible, who when asked to name himself—to explain his essence—said rather truculently, "I am who I am."

Seeker Unfriendly | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction