In his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul expresses his sorrow about some people who were zealously religious yet tragically misguided. “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God,” he says, “but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2).
Though these people were acting in ways that seemed to mark the very pinnacle of religious devotion, they were actually acting in ways that were contrary to God’s Word. Why? Because what they believed to be true about God was actually false. For that reason the actions they took out of devotion to God actually contradicted the will of God. They were zealous but ignorant. And what was true of them can be true of us.
We, too, can serve a God of our own imagining rather than the God who actually is. Thus in order to rightly worship God, we must first rightly know God. We must apply ourselves to knowing God as he reveals himself so our zeal for him is based on knowledge rather than ignorance. For, to echo Jen Wilkin, the heart cannot properly and truly love what the mind does not know.
