There's an intricacy to God's Word where a lot of times, on the surface, it might look like there’s a discrepancy, but later on, when you look back from the perspective of knowing the end of the Bible, you can see the whole story.

What you realize is, “You know, there's things in this Book that absolutely require that the person who wrote all this had to have known the whole story—from beginning to end—before anything was written down.”

As my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) puts it, “One of those things about the Bible that makes it such a fascinating book to study is you see how God had to have written it. The one who wrote this Book is outside of time, and outside of the purview of time, and could see the beginning from the end, and could record things here that later on you can look back and say, 'Boy, there's something bigger there than that!’

“So never think of discrepancies in the Bible as, 'Ooh, ahh, see it's wrong!' because if you take the eye of faith, you'll find that, rather than it being wrong, it will be a pointer to some very fascinating confirmations of the truth of it.”

Jordan frequently points out that people make the mistake of emphasizing reading books about the Bible rather just reading the Bible. This is why they don’t get the same edification as someone who simply studies the Bible.

“If you're going to study geography or algebra, you study the subject, you don't study books about them,” explains Jordan. “When you read Paul's epistles, if you did nothing but just read them, that edification design would bring you through to a place of maturity. You start out reading about the believing Romans, and then about the baby Corinthians, and the foolish Galatians, and the faithful Ephesians, and you get over to the mature saints—the Colossians and the Philippians.”

The problem with Christian churches for many years now has been their almost complete focus on music, drama and cute anecdotes from short sermonettes by an entertaining preacher rather than pure study of the Bible.

“Worship is not singing; it’s not the song service at church,” says Jordan. “That's what the world does with it. Evangelical, fundamental, Bible-believing Christianity has been so permeated, and so taken over and influenced by the Charismatic-emotional-touchy-feely- experiential-based stuff, that even the music and the manner of church service has been taken over by Pentecostal-jitter-bug-Jesus kind of stuff. So much so that you don't have song leaders anymore, you have ‘worship leaders.’ And when the worship's over, ‘then we'll study the Bible.’ Words mean something and what that is is heresy. It’s the idea that, ‘We're up here singing and worshipping God and you're just studying the Bible.’ ”

As Jordan explains, the word worship comes from the word “worth,” meaning “value,” and the word “ship,” meaning “state of being.”

“When you want to demonstrate what is valuable to you, that's what worship is, and that life as a Believer in Jesus Christ is to be lived 24/7; it's not something you do going to a hootenanny on Sunday mornings. It's life, is what it is.”

Now compare this definition of worship to the one Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren, author of the mega-mega-bestseller, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” lays out in a recent column he wrote (entitled “The Evangelistic Power of Worship”) for his website, Pastors.com:

“God’s presence must be sensed in the service,” Warren advises pastors in his May 17 piece. “More people are won to Christ by feeling God’s presence than by all of our apologetic arguments combined. Few people, if any, are converted to Christ on purely intellectual grounds. It is the sense of God’s presence that melts hearts and explodes mental barriers. Worship without this yields few evangelistic results.”

Revealing his total ignorance of what Paul is really communicating to the carnal Corinthians who were hooked on faking tongue-talking, Warren writes in defense of the phony Pentecostal practice, “Because genuine worship can have such a profound impact on unbelievers, we need to be very sensitive to their fears, hang-ups, and needs when they are present in our worship services. This is the principle Paul taught in I Corinthians 14:23. Paul commanded that tongues be limited in public worship. His reasoning? Speaking in tongues seems like foolishness to unbelievers. Paul didn’t say tongues were foolish but only that they appear foolish to unbelievers.”

Under the sub-heading, “Making Worship Understandable,” Warren sums up: “Making a service ‘comfortable’ for the unchurched doesn’t mean changing your theology. It means changing the environment of the service—such as changing the way you greet visitors, the style of the music you use, the Bible translation you preach from, and the kind of announcements you make in the service.”

In bold letters, he emphasizes, “We must be willing to adjust our worship practices when unbelievers are present.”

Obviously Warren’s idea of worship is to be a hypocrite and “put on a show” in order to win converts. For him, once again, Jesus Christ is not about a personal relationship; it’s a matter of “smart marketing.”