This is such a challenging question to answer, what is the essence of who we are?  Some churches strive to be known for inclusion, some for social activism, others for the broad impact on culture…we desire to be known as a congregation which experiences the God of truth and the truth of God.

In my studies in 2 Samuel, I have been edified by Friedrich Krummacher’s David: King of Israel where he gives expression to this experiential religion on page 233,

Yes, the lovely reflection of the life from God, which only deserves the name of life, appears to them as hypocrisy and a pretense.  The region in which faith presents to the Lord its spiritual burnt-offerings, meat-offerings, and drink-offerings, where love anoints His head and His feet with its most precious ointment, and where hope in the apprehension of an invisible and an imperishable inheritance soars away above the earth, is to them an altogether concealed and unknown world. We may therefore well feel compassion for such persons, thus, rather than burn with anger against them.  According to the Scriptures, the “natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, because they are spiritually discerned.” The life which is from God and in God, is and remains to everyone a mystery, till, by his own experience of it, it is unsealed to him by the Spirit of God. (italics mine)

This quotation is from his sermon on 2 Samuel 6, which is the ark of the covenant’s entrance into Jerusalem and David dancing before it.  The holiest of affection for the things of God, the power of God’s claim upon the totality of our being should lead us to live ultimately before the face of God!