Whenever a people regularly gather, they will fall into certain customs. Those customs, what they do or don’t do, what they say or do not say, what they enact or do not enact, will become something they get accustomed to. And once they are accustomed to it, it becomes possible for their minds to drift elsewhere while they enact the ritual.
Their minds may drift to places they shouldn’t, or their minds may seize on the central intention and meaning behind the custom. Those are the choices. To develop C.S. Lewis’s illustration, when a man is learning to dance, he is not really dancing but rather counting. One, two, three, one, two, three. Once he has learned the dance, he can do it without thinking about “the steps.” This means he now has a choice. He can now dance without counting, and focus his attention on the woman he is dancing with. But—and here is the perennial danger—he can also dance with her while thinking of another woman.
If our customs or rituals are biblically grounded, then we have a duty to learn the pattern, learn the ritual, learn the custom, and thereafter use the occasion properly—to set our minds on things above, not on things below. During a Christian worship service, all that we say, think or do must be focused on approaching God the Father through the name of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Some try to protect us from the temptation of heart-drift by constantly changing the dance. They want to make sure that we are always counting. If we are constantly counting and never dancing, we will not have occasion to think about the wrong woman. Or they ban all customs, all rituals. If there is no dancing at all, no ritual at all, nobody will ever think of anything wrong.
I am afraid this underestimates the nature of our circumstances in this fallen world. We will always be tempted to drift into the wrong patterns of thought. We can always sin with what God requires of us, but if we abandon those things for the sake of “purity,” we will just sin quicker. You can refuse to go to any dances, and still think of the wrong woman.
What we must therefore do is enact the requirements of Scripture, knowing that we will regularly be tempted to approach God with our lips though our hearts are far from Him. Knowing that, we do not lean on our own understanding, but rather on the Spirit.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.