You are to seek the place the Lord your God will choose...
Deuteronomy 12:5
Lately, I've been reflecting on a passage in Deuteronomy that initially seemed to be about places of worship. Yet the more I sat with it, the more I sensed it was asking a deeper question.
God tells Israel not to worship Him in the way the surrounding nations worshipped their gods. Instead, they were to seek the place He would choose.
At first glance, this may sound like a discussion about sacred locations. But beneath it lies something profoundly relational: worship begins with God's invitation, not our initiative.
The temptation for Israel was not necessarily to abandon God altogether. It was to mix devotion to God with the patterns, practices, and assumptions of the cultures around them. To take what was familiar, admired, or widely accepted and weave it into their spiritual lives.
I wonder if we face a similar temptation today.
We live in a world saturated with frameworks for self-improvement, spiritual growth, and personal development. Many of them are genuinely helpful. But there is a subtle danger in allowing those frameworks to become the primary lens through which we approach God.
When we do that, we risk turning worship into a technique. Prayer into a productivity tool. Scripture into a self-help manual.
The passage in Deuteronomy is a reminder that God is not a resource to be accessed. He is a Person to be sought.
Seek the place He chooses. Not the place that is most convenient. Not the place that fits most neatly into our existing frameworks. The place He chooses.
That requires a kind of surrender that does not come naturally. It requires us to hold our own preferences and assumptions loosely. To remain open to being led somewhere we did not expect.
But I have found that the places God chooses are always worth seeking.