“This generation has no reverence for God” - Lots of older Christian people

I hear this a lot, and when I hear it I don’t even argue with it because I know it’s true. I know that my generation (Gen-X) and the generation behind me (Millennials) are some of the most arrogant, self-absorbed, rebellious, disrespectful people to ever walk the planet. We are the very definition of sacrilegious and uncouth. In fact, much of our entertainment even touts itself as "irreverent".

Within the church, how did my generation earn such a bad rap? We wore jeans to church, drank coffee in the sanctuary, exchanged hymnals for projection screens, introduced “online giving” and use our Bible on our cell-phones instead of a paper book. We need to be spanked.

I have absolutely no doubt that my generation has a huge deficit when it comes to honoring and revering God. But here is where I get hung up; did the previous generations actually have more reverence for God, or did they just behave better?

You might demonstrate reverence by wearing a suit. David demonstrated it by stripping down to his underwear. I always found it strange that coffee wasn’t allowed in many sanctuaries, but gossip was.

Are we going to call people back to reverence or are we going to call them back to a dress code and a list of external behaviors? Do we want to confront sin or style? It seems like in the past to be reverent meant to dress nice, sit down and shut up. Anything out of the norm was considered irreverent. I’m not sure that’s a Biblical concept of reverence.

I'm also not sure that any of us has even been privy to a generation that truly feared God the way He deserves to be. My generation struggles with reverence because we didn't believe what we saw modeled. The fear of God might be missing from the church, but let me tell you something, it's been missing for a while.

The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines reverence as “honor and respect”. I can agree with that, but it’s not very practical. And it’s in the practical application that we’ve gotten caught up in this conversation.

Lately I have been fascinated by how people in the Bible respond to God. Some respond well and some respond poorly. Sometimes you have both good and bad responses in the same story. I would like to propose that we begin to define “reverence” as “responding to God well”.

When we respond to God well, we honor and respect His Presence. We don’t need to demand that it always looks the same, because He’s not always doing the same thing. The measure of reverence in a church does not have to be in dress or manners, but on how willing they are to respond to God when He is doing something.