Dennis Abernathy

Have you seen the little religious comic strip showing a man saying: “I’ll never attend another baseball game because they always ask for money, the seats are hard, the umpire says things I can’t agree with, the place isn’t even air conditioned, the players do the same thing every time I go, sometimes the games are longer than I expected, there are hypocrites there who are more interested in soft drinks and hot dogs than the game, they didn’t make me feel welcome, and the manager never came to see me.” Well, of course, the point of that little religious comic strip is to show how silly those excuses are for not attending church services.

You see, those are actually the reasons some people give for not worshipping God. They complain that the seats or pews are uncomfortable, the preacher sometimes says something they don’t agree with. They say the services are boring and always the same, or that they are sometimes longer than expected, or that there are hypocrites in the audience. Or they say they no one ever visited them or that they weren’t made to feel welcome.

You probably never heard a sports fan say he wasn’t going to a baseball or football game for any of those reasons. And the real truth is that they’re not the real reasons the overwhelming majority of people who won’t attend church worship services do not attend. The real reason they don’t attend is because they don’t want to attend. All those reasons are smoke screens hiding the real reason: THEY DON’T WANT TO WORSHIP GOD!

Well, Hebrews 10: 25 tells us “Not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together,” and generally speaking, people who WANT TO attend will be there, and the real reason people don’t attend isn’t because of the silly reasons sometimes given. They don’t attend because they DON’T WANT TO ATTEND, and they don’t want to attend is often because they lack love and gratitude for GOD! Someone said: “A religion that won’t take you to church services on Sunday certainly won’t take you to heaven when you die.” Think on these things.