Well, what about today? Here are the church borrowing from the world wholesale. They are using its music, its rhythms, its dress, its rap, its culture. What are the words they are singing in their worship services? Sacred words, good words, words of adoration to God. But God says here, he won't listen to it, because of what accompanies the good words. Israel could pray good words and acknowledge their sin, but while they were still involved in idolatry God would not listen. It wasn't acceptable. Now we cannot say exactly what God will do, because in his mercy and in his amazing patience, he will even to a great degree listen to his true children when they are in the midst of wrongdoing. So we cannot say – this would be an oversimplification – that God never listens to his people while they are employing worldly worship and all that sort of thing, but they are obviously not going to get the blessing they would like.
The same is true with us as individuals. If you have still got a lot of the world in your life, God may not altogether reject you at once. He may hear your prayers to some extent, but you won’t know anything like the closeness, and the blessing, and the usefulness in the service of the Lord as you would if you properly jettisoned anything which was contrary to his will and his word. So following this, the appeal continues in verse 22. It isn't good enough.