The Lord is clarifying the purpose of our worship. This is not about the style or location of our worship. It’s about the substance of our worship. This is not limited to a public worship service. It affects all areas of our lives – how we lead our families, how we do business, and how we make daily decisions. This pure form of worship is not always convenient. We can be tempted to take shortcuts and miss what God intended our worship to become.

The Lord takes all forms of our worship seriously, more seriously than we can imagine. Worship is the representation of our consecration to the Lord. It is not a place where assumptions or theatrics take center stage. 

One case stands out regarding that seriousness. It happened with the sons of Aaron, who, along with Moses, were leading the people of Israel in the wilderness.

“These are the names of the sons of Aaron, the anointed priests, whom he ordained to serve as priests. But Nadab and Abihu died before the Lord when they offered strange fire before the Lord in the wilderness of Sinai” (Numbers 3:3-4).

The strange fire was something Nadab and Abihu brought of their own accord to the Tabernacle to carry out their priestly duties of lighting the lamps. Their priestly duties of lighting the lamps were supposed to be ignited from the coals already burning in the Tabernacle. It was a “strange” and unexpected kind of fire because the source was human, not from God.

God’s fire was meant to be a continual reminder of God’s presence among His people. Jesus referred to Himself as the light of the world. Anything we do in worship that is not authentic is a strange fire disconnected from God’s purposes.

God’s fire requires our dependency on Him. It should be a place where our humility and submission to the Lord are openly demonstrated. Nadab and Abihu brought human sources of fire to light the lamps of the Tabernacle, not the continuing and ever-burning fire of God represented by the coals already burning in the Tabernacle. It was a mistake of convenience that carried serious consequences.

As the world devolves into deeper expressions of evil and uncertainty, and as leaders continue to fail, revisiting what it means to worship God purely will become even more important to our spiritual survival. All human failure can be traced back to those moments when we forgot who we were worshipping.

God’s kind of fire is not born out of our assumptions and convenience. It’s birthed in our hearts, where anything less becomes a strange and unacceptable form of worship.