60 Seconds – A Frivolous Spirit (Part One)

A veteran pastor once expressed:

“I met a man, and the music of God had gone out of him. With great honesty he told me how the glory had departed. First, he had disliked a preacher’s style of preaching. Then, he grew to dislike the preacher himself. Irreverence for the minister and his message expanded in the man’s heart. Finally, he found himself feeling irreverent toward the church where the man spoke Sunday after Sunday. You see how it is? It is all a sad pattern. We cannot lose reverence for things spiritual, without losing reverence for the Author of spirituality – God. The road to irreverence usually does not begin with disrespect toward God, but disrespect toward the things of God.”

Jeremiah wrote of those who cause God’s people, “to err by their lies and recklessness” (Jeremiah 23:32). The word “recklessness” can be translated “lightness,” meaning froth or frivolity. He is saying that they laugh at, and are frivolous towards, those things that are to be revered, respected, and viewed with awe.

In 2 Samuel 6, we read where Uzzah tried to steady the Ark of God, and he dropped dead. This must have been rather serious for God to strike a man dead. A closer look at Scripture reveals that he was the son of Abinadab, and all his life the Ark had been in his home. It became a familiar piece of furniture, and after seeing it all those years, it had become just a box. He had lost his reverence for the sacredness of it as a symbol of God’s presence among His people. Alexander MacLaren added, “It was a low sense of awe in the case of Uzzah.”

Vance Havner wrote, “Nothing is more delicate than the sense of awe. Trifle with it ever so little, and it speedily disappears. Watch the average Sunday morning congregation. You don’t see much awe there. What you see is not awe, it’s awful. Relevance has become more important than reverence.”

“Loose talk about the things of God proceeds from loose thinking about the same.”