It has often been said that our doxology will only ever reach as high as our theology. That is because your adoration can only reach as high as your appreciation of the one you adore. You might be tempted to think that this is not true. Maybe you think of brand-new Christians who adore the Lord and yet know very little theology. This is emphatically true. Even the youngest babe in Christ adores the Lord with a whole heart. Yet this doesn’t deny the truth that there is an intimate connection between our understanding of God and our worship.

Think about it from another perspective. If you asked a newly-wed if he adored his wife, would he not emphatically state that he has never loved and adored anyone like his wife? He may even tell you that he could never love his new wife any more than he does and cannot imagine adoring her more than he does right now. However, if you were to revisit the couple on their 20th wedding anniversary, would that same husband not declare that he loves and adores his wife more than he did 20 years ago? Why is this the case? Because their adoration and love have grown in proportion to their knowledge of one another.

Given that this is the case, if we were to measure our praise and adoration of God in proportion to our knowledge of God, how would it look? As I’ve pondered previous generations of believers in Church History, one of the things that has struck me is the depth of their devotion and love for the Lord. One of the strikingly obvious differences is that in spite of our immense blessings, our knowledge of God has shriveled to a sad state. How common it is to hear a believer say that theology doesn’t really matter, that theology is for experts, and that theology is just head knowledge. Why are we surprised that much of worship and adoration is hollow? The rebuke of the writer to the Hebrews rings true of much of Christendom today, “11 About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”¹

However, there is another error in this matter that must be mentioned. It is easy to assume that an intellectual grasp of theology will automatically produce a rich doxology. However, this is not necessarily the case. It isn’t so much a theoretical depth that will produce adoration, but rather an intimate knowledge of the one of whom true theology speaks. Has it not been your experience that the richest love and adoration you have seen in a married couple is not in the newlyweds but in the elderly couple? The reason for this is that their adoration and love for one another, what you might call rich marital communion, comes out of a deep heart knowledge of one another. They have learned not just true facts about one another, but they truly know one another through and through.

This is a reminder for us as believers to pursue a depth of theological knowledge so that we might know the God of whom our theology speaks. Only then will we truly worship the One we adore. Take up your books, attend your systematic classes, wrestle with the Scriptures, listen to your sermons, so that you might love the Lord your God with all your soul, strength, and heart.

1. Hebrews 5:11-14 ↩︎