Basics – Worship ~ 20120108 ~ Pastor Rodney Zedicher ~ Ephraim Church of the Bible ~ www.ephraimbible.org

01/08 Basics - Worship

We are looking at the basics of what we believe. Last week I asked the question “if you were to choose just three words that would most accurately sum up what it means to be a Christian, what would they be and why?” I'm picturing these three words as categories or buckets whose contents sum up what Christianity is all about. This question does not necessarily have a right or wrong answer, but I pray that the contents of our buckets are roughly the same. The three words I chose are believe, love, and worship.

Last time we looked at what it means to believe – to believe the gospel, or the good news of Jesus Christ crucified for sinners. To believe means to entrust ourselves to the faithfulness of another. We put ourselves in the hands of Jesus and depend on him to carry us safely to the other side. The bible frequently calls the followers of Jesus simply 'believers'. Believing is the opposite of earning. Belief is the door through which we enter into a relationship with God.

John 6:47 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.

Belief is also the lifeblood that sustains and energizes the Christian.

Galatians 2:20 ...the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

So the first and most important part of being a follower of Jesus is believing. I must depend on the good news of Jesus' sacrificial death for my sins as my substitute. Then, the Christian life is a life of believing, depending, trusting; walking by faith.

My second word is 'worship'. Today I want to consider what it means to worship as a Christian. Not all worship is Christian worship. It has been said that we as humans are worshiping creatures. The question is not if we will worship, but what or whom we will worship. We were created to worship. All of life is worship. We worship without realizing we are doing it. Worship is choosing to spend our resources – like time, energy, money, attention, affection – on the things or people we categorize as valuable or 'worthy'. This is why Jesus had so much to say about money – because it reveals what it is that we treasure. A simple evaluation of how we budget these various resources will prove very revealing of the true condition of our hearts. Some worship things like leisure or pleasure or learning or power. Some worship people, like parent or spouse or children or hero. As Christians, we believe that there is only One who is truly worthy. How we live our lives – how we choose to spend our time, into what we pour our energy, what we do with our money, to what we give our attention, what it is that we delight in – these things will reflect and reveal what we believe about who or what is worthy of worship.

Today I want to glance quickly at some of the biblical data that demonstrates that we were created to worship God. Then we will look at worship in four categories:

1. a gospel relationship with God – the prerequisite for worship;

2. fear of the Lord – the root of worship;

3. knowing God – the fuel for worship;

4. prayer, song and drink – expressions of worship.

Created to Worship

We were created to worship. Isaiah 43 speaks of:

Isaiah 43:7 everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

We were created to worship and bring glory to God. One day all people will fulfill their purpose and bring the worship to God that he deserves:

Psalm 86:9 All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. (cf. Ps.22:27,29; 66:4; 102:22 ; Is.66:23...)

When asked about the most important commandment of all:

Mark 12:29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

What you love is what you worship. In another context, Jesus said:

Luke 4:8 And Jesus answered him, “It is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”

Our bodies are meant to worship God with.

1 Corinthians 6:19 ...You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

Our gathering together as believers is for the purpose of worship.

Romans 15:6 that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 7 Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

God alone is to be worshiped. His wrath is revealed because:

Romans 1:21 ...although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. ... 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. ... 28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up …

We were created to honor God as God, to give thanks and glory to him, to worship and serve him, to acknowledge him. Failure to do this is falling short of doing what we were created to do, and incurs the just penalty of the wrath of God who must defend the honor of his great name.

A Gospel Relationship with God – the Prerequisite for Worship

And we all fall short of giving God the honor and glory that he deserves. We worship self as God and ignore the all-glorious Creator of all things. This is why a gospel relationship with God is the prerequisite for worship. We have brought shame and dishonor to God's name and we cannot make that right. God had to take action himself to clear his character from the reproach that we his creatures caused. God sent his own Son to pay the infinite penalty we owe and to demonstrate his own righteousness (Rom.3:25-26). The cross was a display of just how infinitely evil our God-belittling God-dishonoring attitudes and actions are. The good news gospel message is that Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin” - our sin of dishonoring and disregarding God - “and live to righteousness” - the right valuation and regard for the infinite value and worth of our great God (1Pet.2:24). “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Is.64:6) in God's sight because our good works are intended to make us look good. Worship is designed to bringing honor and glory to God; to make God look good. To worship, we must turn away from our own righteousness and pursue God's righteousness, which comes only through faith in the finished work of God for us. A gospel relationship of being “reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom.5:10) is a prerequisite for any kind of worship that is acceptable to God.

The Fear of the LORD – the Root of Worship

The author of Hebrews exhorts us to gratefulness that comes from receiving a gift; he says:

Hebrews 12:28 Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, 29 for our God is a consuming fire.

Acceptable worship, coming out of a gospel relationship with God through the finished work of Jesus for us, is worship with reverence and awe. These terms, 'reverence and awe' and the reason given 'for our God is a consuming fire' point us to the fact that the fear of the Lord is the root of acceptable worship. If I understand the gospel – that I am saved from God's wrath that I have earned by a costly gift that I did not deserve freely given to me – that should stimulate in me the proper awe and fear of God 'the Consuming Fire'. We are told throughout the bible that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is also the beginning of all true worship.

In Revelation 14, the content of the eternal gospel proclaimed by the angel is:

Revelation 14:7 And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”

Fear God, give God glory, worship God. These three descriptions of our right response are also linked together in Revelation 15:

Revelation 15:4 Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.”

Fear, glorify, worship God, because God is holy, because his acts are righteous. God passionately defends the honor of his great name. The question is rhetorical: who will not fear and glorify you? The answer: all nations will come and worship you. There is an attractive awesomeness about God that compels us to worship him when we see him for who he is in all his rugged power and blazing glory. This brings us to our next point; knowing God is the fuel for worship.

Knowing God – the Fuel for Worship

A child has no fear of falling because he is ignorant of the effects of gravity and the consequences of falling. That's why parents hold their children's hands tightly when visiting the Grand Canyon. As we grow in our understanding and experience of the power of gravity, we gain a healthy respect and fear of falling, and we hold on tightly. This is how it is with God. If we are ignorant of him, we have no fear of him, we don't realize the danger, and we cannot worship him. Getting to know God is the fuel for worship. Is you passion for worship cooling off? Here is the diagnosis: you have turned your eyes away to look at other things. Here is the sure remedy: study God. We get to know God by listening to him tell us what he is like. He communicates to us through his word, the bible. Take up and read! Study! Meditate! Memorize! Scrutinize the text. Jesus said we must worship God in spirit and in truth (Jn.4:23). Pursue a deeper, more comprehensive, more intimate knowledge of God by listening carefully to what he has said. Spend your time and energy and money and attention pursuing God, and your affections will be stirred, and you will worship. To experience the exhilaration of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, you have to get yourself there. That takes time and energy and money. You can read a book about it or look at pictures, but it's not the same. That's second-hand. If you want to enjoy the majestic precipice, you personally have to go. There are lots of good books that will point you in the right direction and give helpful advice. They are useful and I praise God for them, but they are not enough. You have to go. You cannot have a second-hand relationship with God. You have to get to know him yourself.

Let me say just one thing about corporate worship; worship as the church, the body of Christ. So easily we can slip into the mode of critics rather than participants. How was the worship today? Good? A little off? Disappointed? I wish they would... I like how they do it better... It is so easy to become a critic. Corporate worship is the sum of all the parts. Corporate worship is a gathering of believers who worship together. Worship is a verb. It is what we do. And it starts long before Sunday morning. If knowledge of God is the fuel for worship and corporate worship is the sum of all its parts, then in what way is my personal study of God, my understanding and awe and appreciation of God contributing to our corporate experience of worship? If I just couldn't 'get into worship' today, then I need to go home and get on my knees and open my bible and let God open my eyes afresh to who he really is!

Prayer, Song and Drink – Expressions of Worship

This brings us to our final category, expressions of worship. We often think of and even refer to the singing that we do in church as 'worship', and it is. But worship is not limited to what we call 'worship music'. The singing we do in church should be worship, and it can be a direct form of worship. The songs we choose to sing together are expressions of worship directed to God, or songs that declare awesome truths about God that we sing to each other and to ourselves to stimulate us to worship. This can be worship, but it can also be what Jesus condemned when he said:

Matthew 15:8 “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; 9 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’” (Is.29:13)

It matters that we choose doctrinally sound theologically rich gospel centered expressions of worship to sing together, but it also matters where our hearts are at when we sing them. In singing together we can choose to worship God, or we can offer lip service and allow our affections to drift to other things. When we see this, when we realize that worship goes beyond and behind the outward forms and is about what is in our heart, then we can see that worship extends to so many other areas of life. As we already saw, knowing God through bible study is fuel for worship. Hearing the bible preached can be an experience of worship, as we come to God expecting him to speak to us, giving him our time and attention with hearts eager to obey. As he unfolds to us new truths about himself, we find ourselves celebrating and glorifying him in our hearts. Prayer is another direct form of worship. When we talk to God, our conversation should be saturated with praise to him for who he is and what he has done for us. But even the asking part of prayer can be worship. When we come to him with our emptiness and our brokenness and our needs, we worship him as the all-satisfying one, the one who is able to fix us, the one who is able to do something about our situation, the one who hears, the one who cares deeply, the one who is wise and will do what is best for us. When we come to him with our questions and our frustrations, he is honored, because we come to him as the one who holds the answers. When we really get hold of this truth, we can begin to see that for the Christian all of life is worship.

I Corinthians 10:31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

Even menial ordinary everyday repetitive tasks can be turned by the believing heart into worship. Eating, or drinking, or whatever else you do can be done to bring glory and honor and praise to our great Creator and Redeemer and Friend. Every moment of every day can be spent doing what we were created to do as we saturate our hearts with the truths of our gospel relationship with God, as we deepen our fear of the Lord, as we permeate our minds with a bible saturated intimacy and knowledge of God, we can acknowledge and honor him with grateful awe-filled worshipful hearts in all things. Eating, drinking, all of live as worship!