Weekly worship on the Lord’s day isn’t only hard, it’s impossible for those who aren’t spiritual. In order to worship the true God who is spirit, we must worship in truth and in spirit. We too often assume that we can worship Him in truth and in flesh.

Take confession of sin for an example. We absolutely must acknowledge and confess our sin, as well as seek forgiveness and cleansing from our sin if we would draw near to the holy God. We need to confess and we need to want to confess, otherwise we’d merely be going through the motions. But we can’t comprehend our sin, let alone want to confess our sin without God’s help, namely without God’s Spirit.

We assume that we have the ability to repent whenever we want. We assume that we have access to forgiveness whenever we want. We act as if we can decide to flip a worship switch on Sunday and make it happen. We act as if we can do spiritual activities without the Spirit.

The assuming mindset is an unbelieving mindset. We do not believe God’s Word to us about the deceiving and enslaving power of our flesh. We do not believe God’s Word to us about the illuminating and delivering power of the Spirit. We do not believe God’s Word to us about the personhood of the Spirit, that He is a person that blows where He wishes, not a power outlet passively waiting for us to plug in whenever we wish.

We assume we get can ready and do this worship thing on our own. We need to confess our fleshly, unbelieving independence from Him who is our life and from the Spirit who gave it to us.