Today’s Reading: 1 Chronicles 23:1-31; 24:1-19; 25; 26:1-11

Let me guess, your eyes are tired from reading all those difficult Hebrew names! Many they are indeed, but insignificant they are not. It had been many generations since the time of Moses, and they still knew their family background and the significance thereof!

While my wife, Tammany, and I were in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia this past weekend, I took the opportunity to visit the graves of two of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers (7th great grandfathers), Johan George Eisenhauer and Peter Zwicker. I know I am descended from them, but I have little to no knowledge of their lives. So, apart from knowing that they were Lutheran Christians from what is now Germany who moved to Nova Scotia long ago, and that I’m their descendant, their lives have little bearing on me. I don’t farm or fish as they likely did; I don’t even live anywhere near to where they lived and died! Things have certainly changed over the centuries for my family.

The Levites, however, were given the Lord as their portion forever, and thus it had rightly remained. They were still doing in David’s time what Moses had commanded to their great-great-great-great etc. grandfathers in the wilderness! When David, the king after God’s own heart, changed the way Israel worshiped God (with His approval), he did not dispossess the Levites from their inheritance and service, but rather gave them different tasks in service of the Lord.

My thought is this: though times and circumstances may (actually, will) change, our responsibility and calling to serve and worship the Lord does not. We, like the Levites, have been called to praise God by what we do and what we say, every day. Our church, the songs we sing, they way we pray, and so on may change, but our right (as His children) and responsibility to bring honour and glory to our God does not. Our focus should not be fixed on the form our worship takes as much as the fact that we worship. Form (tabernacle vs. temple or, singing in German vs. singing in English) is not more important than actually worshiping God.