What matters more to God than sung worship? What grieves him more than poverty?
Perhaps we’re not supposed to try and devise a ranking system for all this, but we do know that scripture speaks clearly about God’s passions.
Take a look at James 1:27:
Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Or at Isaiah 10:1-2:
Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
If we want to know what breaks—and what drives—God’s heart then these two passages will answer all our questions.
To put it another way; if we want to know what it means to follow Christ and live a life of worship, then spending the very best of what we have in life to help the poor and the oppressed has got to be a pretty good place to start.
Micah 6:8 presents the truth in an even neater package:
…what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Within these three instructions is the clearest explanation of the kind of compass we should be following in our lives; justice, mercy and humility directing lives marked by action, love and relationship with God.
We live in a world marked by injustice, a world where just 7% of the population are wealthy enough to sleep on a proper bed under a decent roof, with food in a fridge and clothes in a cupboard.
But this stat is not designed to make us feel guilty; it is meant to wake us up to our incredible potential. With at least 93% of the people on this planet poorer than us, just imagine how far our time, energy, prayers and money could go....
We don’t worship in song to distract ourselves from the harsh realities of injustice. We don’t sing because it’s more fun than real life. We sing because we want our hearts to be broken by the things that break His. We sing because He loves us, because He loves others and because we were made to respond to that love with everything that we have.