When is the last time you walked into a worship service or prayer meeting with fear and trembling? How many times have you seen a pastor or leader hesitate to speak after God has blessed a worship time with His presence?

When I was young, we entered church in silence, whispering if we had to speak at all. We greeted each other with nods and glances, saving small talk until after the service. Women wore hats out of respect, men took theirs off for the same reason. We acted this way because we knew we were coming into the presence of God. Of course, none of us expected God to really manifest Himself, except through the Word, but nonetheless, we believed He was present among us.

I fear that we, especially those of us from charismatic backgrounds, have through familiarity with God lost our respect for His presence. We love to quote verses about "boldly going before His throne" and look forward to various experiences of the moving of God's Spirit, but I think we have to some extent lost sight of who exactly it is that we are dealing with.

The "Familiarity Principle" is not new, by any means. It is obvious from reading the Gospels that it also affected the disciples, the ones who knew more than anyone the reality of who Jesus was.

Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head, as he sat at table. But when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, "Why this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for a large sum, and given to the poor." But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, "Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me.  Matthew 26:6-10

The disciples, bless their hearts (you could sometimes get the impression that "disciple" means "clueless"), had been "behind the scenes" with Jesus for 3 years. They had seen many things, including some things that no one else had seen: Jesus controlling weather, cursing the fig tree, walking on water, raising the dead.

On the other hand, they had also become familiar with Jesus. They were Jesus' buds. They had eaten with him, traveled with him, camped with him. He gave them "inside" info. There had probably also been many quite common days - even healing and deliverance possibly became fairly common to them, especially after Jesus commissioned and empowered the 70 to do the same things.

So when Jesus and the disciples were at Simon the Leper's house (how'd you like to be known for eternity as Simon the Leper? It's actually a very positive thing - but that's a topic for another article), they were probably in one of their "common" moments. They were probably tired from traveling, and possibly hungry. So, when this woman suddenly shows up, breaks a jar and pours possibly $70-80,000 worth of perfume on Jesus' head, they responded with, "Why this waste? You could have sold that and fed the poor." In other words, "Why Him?" 

Oops...

As I was writing this, I thought, "Boy, I sure am glad I didn't say that." But how many times have I said or done something the equivalent of "Why Him?" In fact, how many times today?

In considering the history of man's relationship with God, we will notice a definite trend - we don't seem to be able to maintain a sense of God's holiness. How many times did God have to do something drastic in order to remind the Israelites of who they were dealing with? A pillar of fire by day and a cloud by night becomes "old hat" after a while. Sometimes it takes an earthquake or a massive defeat to remind us of who we are dealing with.

So, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews states, "See that you do not refuse him who is speaking."