Isaiah 29:13-14 – God loves honesty, sincerity, and integrity

One thing God detests is deceit and insincerity. When we approach Him, He expects us to be sincere and wholly present. In these verses, God accused the people of approaching Him with their lips, but their hearts would be miles away. True worship must be offered in spirit and in truth, in sincerity, and in the right attitude. Jesus insists that when we pray, we should let our yes be yes and our no, no. He also insists that we should not come to God with vain repetitions that mean nothing to our hearts. God does not want us to only pay lip services but with no heart desire to fulfill what we say.

God wants us to love and worship Him with all our heart, our mind, our soul, and our strength. Here the people in Isaiah’s day failed the true test of worship. So they were chided for their irreverence and insincerity when they approached Him. They would come to God physically present but mentally absent. They would come based on ideas that man had taught and not on the unfolding of God’s revealed truths. Sarcastically, Isaiah said that God would deal with them wonderfully. In other words, God would use the foreign forces to discipline them. They were earlier told that the literate would find the book sealed and the illiterate would not be able to read it. So they all alike would stumble when it comes to divine revelation. Hence, true wisdom would dissipate among them and they would find it hard to understand what God would be doing.

Psalm 32:2 tells us that blessed is the man in whose spirit there is no deceit. God does not want us to project what is false when we come before Him. Jesus also said we must worship God in spirit and in truth. And in 1 Timothy 1:5 Paul suggests that the goal of godly instruction is to ensure that we have love which issues from “a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” We need to remember that nothing is hidden from the eyes of God with whom we will have to deal with. So learn to relate with God honestly, sincerely, and faithfully, for they will enable us to have a blessed life in Him.