Worship Gone Wrong!
Worship Gone Wrong
Nadab, Abihu, and the strange fire — and the Lord's Prayer as a calibration tool.
Worship Gone Wrong
Nadab, Abihu, and the strange fire — and the Lord's Prayer as a calibration tool.
A few months back I was in a worship setting where the worship pastor stepped up to define worship for a roomful of new faces and said this: these next 20 or 30 minutes are all about you. Bring your emotions, bring your burdens — God just wants to surround you with His love. This is your time.
I wanted to sink into the floor. Because what he was describing isn't worship. It's the polite, well-meaning, almost exact opposite. And before I could pile on him, Leviticus 10 stopped me. Because if I'm honest, I've been on the same end of that mistake plenty of times myself.
Leviticus 10 opens with two of Aaron's sons — Nadab and Abihu, brand new priests — walking into the tabernacle and offering up something God hadn't asked for. The text calls it strange fire. The Hebrew word is zara, the same adjective God uses elsewhere for foreign gods. So picture it: Nadab and Abihu are worshiping Yahweh, but doing it in a way that looks too much like the pagan neighbors down the street. If a stranger had wandered in off the road, they'd have walked away picturing the wrong God entirely.
That's the question Leviticus 10 puts on us: if somebody new walked into our worship and all they had to go on was our liturgy and our words — what kind of God would they be picturing?
Three things show up in the text about what Nadab and Abihu got wrong. First, the strangeness. Pagan-shaped worship of the right God still gives people the wrong picture. Second, "the Lord did not command them." The whole thrust of Leviticus has been God moving first — God initiating, God prescribing how we draw near. Nadab and Abihu cooked up something fresher. Maybe (I'll be honest) some ego too: Moses and Aaron got a lot of attention in chapter nine, and these two younger guys decided it was their turn to be seen. Worship had quietly become about them.
Third — and this is the verse doing the most work in the whole chapter. Verse 3: "Among those who are near me, I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified." Sanctified there is the same word Jesus uses in the prayer He taught us — hallowed be thy name. We're not making God holy; He's already holy. We're praying His name would be revered as the holy thing it already is. So verse 3 really reads: when you draw near to me, I will be hallowed.
Drawing near to God is all about grace. There's no entrance exam. No life you have to perfect first. But it's also not casual. We don't treat the holy God flippantly. Nadab and Abihu treated the holy God flippantly. The consequences were severe.
I've been sitting with this all week, asking the hard question: how often do we bring strange fire and call it worship?
A pastor went viral on TikTok recently, bragging that in her church they never even use the word sin. We just want you to feel loved. That's strange fire. The God of Scripture wants to convict us — to call out patterns and make us more like Him. Strip that out and you're pointing people somewhere else.
The other side of the room is just as off — settings where grace went missing entirely, replaced with shame and works and a never-good-enough scoreboard. That's strange fire too, pointing to a different God altogether.
And then there was that worship pastor I started with — this is all about you. The word worship literally means giving worth: putting our worth in God. Worship is about God and God alone. Full stop. The healing and intimacy and being-surrounded-by-love are real byproducts of true worship — but they aren't the reason. God is the reason.
I'll confess: I've walked out of a worship service before and the first words out of my mouth were, that worship just didn't do much for me. Which is another way of saying I had quietly made the whole thing about me. Strange fire shows up in our hearts before it ever shows up in our microphones.
So here's the gift I think Jesus already left us as a calibration tool. The Lord's Prayer is linguistically tied to Leviticus 10:3 — same word, hallowed. And it functions like a lens you can lay over your worship and your week.
This week, my invitation: pray it every day, slowly. Let each line interrogate your day. Is His name being revered in how I live? Am I asking for His kingdom or mine? Am I trusting Him for daily bread, or running around frantic? Am I letting His grace convict me, and am I extending it to others? Am I trusting Him to lead me and deliver me?
That's the lens. Lay it over your worship and your Tuesday. See what shifts.
I don't want to be Nadab and Abihu. I don't want to bring strange fire to His altar. I want my eyes — and our worship — fixed firmly on Him.
