God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
Your obedience is not the bedrock of your assurance. Given the remains of sin within us it can be profoundly difficult to give a clear measure of our own spiritual growth. In fact I have been known to argue that the better we get the worse we seem to ourselves. That is, as we grow in grace we grow in our capacity to see our own sin more deeply. Which the devil delights to use to discourage us. It is Christ’s obedience that secures for us our eternity.
Our drive to evangelize and our desire to grow numerically have led us to “use” worship as a tool to reach the lost. We have gone so far as to turn our worship services, as opposed to evangelistic services, into "seeker-friendly" meetings, so the world will feel at home when they come into the house of God. We should always be sensitive to the unsaved, but nowhere in Scripture are we told to accommodate the world in what God calls the believer to offer to Him.
