Love-at-first-sight reality TV shows like “The Bachelorette” can be entertaining, but their lack of logic can cause eyes to roll. Are two people truly in love and in tune after spending limited time with one another on a TV show? It certainly seems unlikely they would know the true heart of a person enough to vow their life to them.

Often such relationships go the wrong direction because each person assigns traits to their prospective spouse that actually don’t belong to them. They envision their perfect mate and then place those characteristics on the person standing in front of them – even if it’s based more on desire than reality.

Strangely enough, we often make the same mistake as Christians in pledging our life-long devotion to the Lord. We sometimes create a God that we want based on our own misguided desires and then assign those qualities to the one we claim to worship rather than relying on his supreme guidance already given to us in his Word.

Paul encountered this in Athens, where he found they worshiped an “Unknown God,” whose powers and standards were dictated by men’s own imagination. He told them “the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).

Similarly, Jesus pointed to the danger of worshipping in ignorance when he encountered the Samaritan woman at the well. “You worship what you do not know,” he said. “… True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:22-23).

It was akin to the charge made to the Israelites when they abandoned the “law of your God” for their own brand of behavior: “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge … Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you” (Hosea 4:6).

Is our devotion to the Lord based on his own Word, or to the God that our ever-changing culture creates?

We listen to friends, co-workers or talking heads on TV reference a snippet of scripture both out of context and full of ulterior intent, and we don’t bother to examine it for ourselves. We proclaim “What Would Jesus Do?” as if our Lord can only be examined in a hypothetical sense rather than the detailed description he has already given to us.

English translations of the Bible contain more than 800,000 words. That’s a year or two of deep daily get-to-know-you time available to us. Yet somehow we treat our Lord as if he’s a mere blind date – a companion falsely imagined and inaccurately described by others.

In Proverbs, God said true love for Him is shown by those “who seek me diligently.” Get to know your Lord.

– Adam Sparks