When Praise Becomes Noise

Take away from me the noise of your songs! – Amos 5.23, CSB

“Away with your noisy hymns of praise” (Amos 5.23, NLT). Noisy hymns? How is it that praise of God turns into nothing but noisy hymns? The band is playing. The worship leader is leading the people in praise of God. People respond even with hands raised and eyes closed. And yet, to God, it’s nothing but noise. Why? Because religious rote is not true worship of God. To go through the motions of cultural Christianity while not surrendered to Christ is not Christianity. To claim to follow Jesus while not following Jesus is not true discipleship. To actively and intentionally practice sin throughout the week and then to sing some songs in a worship service on a Sunday does not make one right with God. God is not interested in monotonous and soulless singing. He’s not interested in religious hypocrisy.

The people of Israel practiced mechanical religion before the Lord, yet they didn’t surrender to Him or seek Him in any way. They practiced idolatry, worshiping the gods of other nations, while also presenting sacrifices and offerings to God. They didn’t live out righteousness or justice. Instead, they threw righteousness to the ground and turned justice into something that was harmful (Amos 5.7). God knew what they were about. “For I know your crimes are many and your sins innumerable. They oppress the righteous, take a bribe, and deprive the poor of justice at the city gates” (Amos 5.12, CSB). Even with their religious rituals, they did not fool God.

So what’s the remedy to pointless praise? 

“Seek the LORD and live” (Amos 5.6, CSB). It’s that simple. Seek the self-existent, covenant-keeping God of all things, and you will live. And when you do, you will find him (Jeremiah 29.13). That’s the point of it all. Religious traditions and rituals that are not connected to a true desire of the heart to seek the Lord are futile. “Fake it till you make it” is not worship that’s holy and acceptable to God. What is holy, acceptable, and true worship of God is the presenting of one’s body as a living sacrifice (Romans 12.1). But even before that happens, one must surrender to Jesus as Lord, receiving his gift of salvation and forgiveness, and being imputed with the righteousness of Christ. Presenting my body as a sacrifice to God while bypassing Jesus is to move, again, into religious works that are filthy before a holy God. “All of us have become like something unclean, and all our righteous acts are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64.6, CSB).

We are invited to seek Jesus and live. We are invited to remain in him constantly, obeying and loving him out of a heart’s desire to worship and love our God. And as we do this, living out our faith with fear and trembling as well as joyful shouts of praise, we truly worship him, and our praise has a point. Let the psalmist remind us of this.

Let the whole earth shout triumphantly to the LORD! Serve the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Acknowledge that the LORD is God. He made us, and we are his— his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name. For the LORD is good, and his faithful love endures forever; his faithfulness, through all generations. – Psalm 100, CSB