Reverence

Continuing from yesterday's post...

I've lately heard a lot of people talking about reverence, but I don't think we always know what that means. For some, that appears to mean keeping everyone quiet before a worship service. For others, it includes doing or not doing certain things before, during or after the worship service. I remember as a kid being taught to have "reverence" for the Bible, to the point where I would carry it with my hand on the back cover, sort of like a waiter carries a tray, so as not to put anything on top of it. That was reverent, at least to my child-brain.

We often boil down reverence to external actions, and then we seek to impose those actions on others. If I think such-and-such an action is reverent, then I expect everyone else to think so, too. But the Bible focuses so much less on external actions than it does on an attitude of the heart. Certainly, there are "external actions" mentioned in tangential connection with reverence, particularly in the Old Testament. In Leviticus, revering God is mentioned in the same sentence as standing in the presence of the aged and showing respect for the elderly. But I don't think the author of Leviticus intended to imply that reverence for God means standing up. He's using an earthly example to get our hearts headed in the right direction. In Deuteronomy, revering God is described as "walking in obedience" with him—again, not a literal walking, but a life lived out, a heart changed and focused on God.

And so it goes throughout the Old Testament.

When we come to the New Testament, the word translated as "revere" is a word that means separated, set apart, or dedicated. It's used in two places in the New Testament, the clearest use in 1 Peter: "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord" (3:15a). No external actions are listed here; it's a matter of the heart. Peter doesn't even go on to describe or tell us how to revere Christ in our hearts—though the implication is we're to make sure our hearts are set first and foremost on obeying Jesus. And what did Jesus say to do? How did he say others would know we were his disciples and, therefore, revering him? "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35). We revere Christ by loving others, especially those who are our brothers and sisters in the Lord.

The other place this same word is used is in the book of Revelation (11:18), at a time when the nations (the fallen world) are being separated from the kingdom of God (the redeemed world). There will be a difference, we're told, between "the nations" and those who revere Christ's name. They are set apart; we are set apart, different from the world, because we worship him and serve in his name. We are marked by the ways we have loved the world and served as Jesus did, by the way we live reverently.

What it really means to revere Christ is to be different from the world, to love like Jesus loved, to be seen as his people in the world. It means serving and seeking to heal the brokenness, to point people toward him, to be his followers. It's so much more than what we do or don't do in a worship service. None of us are free or fit to judge another person's reverence for Christ. It's a matter of the heart, and the only one who can see the heart and knows the intentions of our heart is Jesus himself (see Matthew 12:25; see also Acts 15:8 and Jeremiah 17:10).