Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

Welcome to today’s worship gathering.  Thank you for joining us for worship today.  Our Sunday worship gatherings are at 8:00 a.m., 9:15 and 11:00 a.m.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Those are kinds of phrases that we use in churches like ours.  They are common expressions.  We invite people to attend our worship gatherings, and we hope they do.  We welcome anybody who wants to come and worship with us at Atlantic Shores Baptist Church.  Our pastors, our ministry staff, our volunteers, we all put a lot of time and energy and resources into creating worship gatherings and worship experiences that are worthwhile, and most importantly ones that treasure and value and honor God above all things.  Why do we put such time and energy into something like this?  I mean, the weekend worship experience…we say, “Don’t miss a weekend.  Prioritize the gathering in a house of worship like this.”  Why do we do that?  Well, in part because we were created to worship.

0:01:27.1

Sociologists in every generation have noted that every culture since the beginning of time, human beings have been inclined to worship something or someone.  It’s not a cultural thing.  It’s a creation thing.  We were created to worship.  There is a worship instinct in us.  And that worship instinct is either going to be rightly pointed and rightly related to the one true God, as we’ll find out in a moment, or it’s going to go off in any number of directions.  What is true worship?  That’s the question we want to ask and answer in this series.  Is worship limited to that thing we do one hour a week in a house of worship like Atlantic Shores Baptist Church?  And even then, as Christians, how does the way we sing and pray and give and preach and serve…how does all that help us worship God?

0:02:34.5

We’re starting this series of messages called “True Worship.”  And I want us to explore what the Bible means by this and how we can become better worshippers of God.  As followers of Jesus Christ we say, “We’re here to worship Him.”  That word “worship” just flows right off our lips, doesn’t it? An easy thing to say.  “I’m going to worship,” you know, rather than “worship is the expression of everything I do in life.”

0:03:00.3

I thought I’d start with a definition this morning, a definition that we’ll come back to several times.  There are other definitions out there.  This is one that I carved out weeks ago, months ago when I was thinking through this series.  True worship is the joyous, effusive celebration of God in three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—in a way that touches everything we do in life, at church, work, home and play.  You can see already that I’ve exploded the myth that worship is that thing we do for one hour a week at the place where we attend a house of worship.  Now, this is something that when we really understand the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of worship, it spans all of our life.  All of life is an expression of worship.

0:03:54.9

So much for the definition.  And by the way, you may be wondering what a joyous, effusive celebration is.  If you want a picture of what a joyous, effusive celebration is, look no further than an NFL football game.  And look at those crazy, wild fans who are joyously and effusively, with great demonstrative expression, celebrating their team.  And then we come to worship, and we sing, “How great is our God.  Sing with me, how great…”  So strap on your seatbelts for the joyous, effusive celebration of God in three persons in a way that it touches, oh, not just one hour a week that you attend once in a while.

0:04:57.7

Jesus through true worship was important enough to call out those who didn’t worship well.  In fact, He took aim at the Pharisees one day.  And He called them…hang on here…hypocrites for the way their heart did not align to what came out of their mouth as an expression of worship.  I’m in Matthew 15:7. “You hypocrites!” Jesus said.  And then He quotes from Isaiah.  “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”  Oh, may that never be said to of us.  We poke fun at the Pharisees.  Listen, they were professional worship leaders.  This would be like saying to a professional football player, “You’re peewee league.”  It would cut to the core just that much.  “No, I’m a professional.  It’s what I do for a living.”  And He calls them hypocrites.  They wore a mask.  That was the hypocrite in the play was the one who wore the mask, who played a part.  He says, “I hear what’s coming from your mouth, those beautiful songs you sing, but your heart is far from Me.”

0:06:27.5

Jesus made worship a matter of the heart.  Before it’s ever a joyous, even effusive and demonstratively expressive form of worship, it starts in the heart.  And if Jesus were evaluating the Pharisees’ worship on this day on a scale of 1 to 10, He’d give them a big, fat 0.  That’s what He was saying to them.  He says, “In vain you worship with me.”  That word “vain” implies 0.  It isn’t worth anything, your worship.  Because what comes out of your lips is not matching where your heart is, and your heart is far, far from God.

0:07:08.1

You know, in today’s church world and worship environment, we put a lot of emphasis on worship music.  In fact, I daresay that for a lot of us when we use the word “worship”, we’re thinking rather narrowly.  We’re thinking about that music thing we do.  And in a lot of churches they go to war about things related to worship.  The type of music, the style of music.  Is it band or choir? Rock or Bach?  Do we have flashing lights and worship leaders with skinny jeans and guitars, or are we talking about robes and pews and somber tones and wearing our Sunday best?  And when we default into these kinds of arguments and these kinds of factions and wars, we have missed, have we not, the heart of worship.  And I don’t care what the style is.  I don’t care what your music preference is.  If your heart is right with God, you can worship in any church and any style of music, whether it’s rock, Bach, jazz, country or whatever you run into.

0:08:21.9

So with that in mind, I think it would be good for us to go back to the beginning.  To begin our discussion not all the way back to Genesis 1:1, although we kind of already went there by saying that we were created for worship.  But I’m talking about let’s go back at least 3000 years ago.  Let’s all, if we can in our mind’s eye, stand at the base of Mount Sinai for just a moment.  When Moses came down Mount Sinai with two clay tablets, the Ten Commandments.  And those Ten Commandments were a summation of the covenant relationship that God was offering was to His people Israel.  And what I find very interesting and a bit convicting is that the first two commandments have everything to do with worship.  And the phrase “no other gods” rings and echoes through the hallways of history and through the scriptures all the way from Exodus 20.

0:09:29.9

Let’s read beginning in verse 1.  “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.’”  Commandment number one.  He goes on to commandment number two.  “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

0:10:19.5

No other gods.  Let’s start there.  That’s the first commandment of worship.  And this one tells us that we should worship God exclusively.  Now, we need to go back and understand the culture out of which the Israelites came to understand the full impact of what the Lord was saying and why.  The first one out of the shoot had to do with worship and the exclusivity of worshiping the one true God.  For more than 400 years the Hebrews lived in Egypt as slaves and among the gods of the Pharaohs.  Egypt was one of the most polytheistic cultures ever.  They made a god out of everything.  They had this penchant for creating deities to worship.  They made gods of the fields and the rivers, the son and the moon, the light and the darkness, love and war, even storms.  And they even molded their gods into the forms of humans and animals.

0:11:18.9

Moses returned to Egypt after 40 years of self-imposed exile.  Do you remember the life of Moses?  He lived to the age of 120, and his life can be broken up really nicely into three segments of 40 years.  The first 40 years in Egypt, he was really being groomed to be the next Pharaoh.  And then he took matters into his own hands one day when we saw one of the Egyptians kind of bullying a Hebrew buddy of his.  And he killed the Egyptian.  And when word got out, Moses panicked, and he fled into the Midian Desert.  And for the next 40 years of his life this guy, who was trained in all the wisdom of Egypt and went to the equivalent of a Harvard education, groomed to be the next Pharaoh, he became a sheepherder on the back side of the desert for his now father-in-law.  And at the age of 80 God reached out to him again at the burning bush.  And it was there at the burning bush that God called Moses to take a stand against the so-called gods of Egypt and against Pharaoh himself.  And through a series of ten plagues that devastated the land and devastated the people, God made His point clear.  He said, “Let My people go,” through His servant Moses.  And the plagues and the Exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt demonstrated in dramatic ways that the gods of Egypt were no match for the one true God.  Plague after plague after plague after plague, it was a shot in the heart of idolatrous Egypt.

0:12:58.3

But up until that time and over time, the Hebrew slaves began worshiping the gods of Egypt.  They were now free from the rule of Pharaoh, and the Hebrew people must renounce polytheism, the worship of many gods, and now embrace monotheism, the worship of the one true God.  And the God of heaven made a covenant with His people.  And that covenant was summarized in the Ten Commandments.  And the first one, the first commandment about worship was about loyalty to the one true God, exclusively worshiping Him.  Much later, the Lord would say through Isaiah the prophet, “There is no other god besides me, a righteousness God and a Savior.  There is none beside Me.”

0:14:02.1

Well, things went well for the Hebrews at first.  They accepted the terms of the covenant relationship.  They worshipped the one true God.  However, as we all know and as the Old Testament records and even as the New Testament reflects, Israel returned to the gods of Egypt.  They even expanded their polytheism and embraced the Canaanite Baals and practiced all kinds of idolatry, including gluttony and drunkenness and child sacrifice and ritual prostitution.  Eventually God had to discipline His people.  “You’ve broken the covenant relationship.”  And He sent them into Babylonian captivity for 70 years for breaking covenant with Him.  But in the midst of that He says, “I know the plans that I have for you, plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”  He wasn’t giving up on His people.  “But, you know, you’re not maintaining the covenant agreement here.”

0:14:56.5

By the way, a biblical covenant works like this- “I keep My end of the bargain whether you keep your end of the bargain or not.”  It’s not a contract God was signing with His people.  No, He made a covenant with them.  He is faithful to His covenant.  And He was faithful and is still faithful to His chosen people Israel.  But they broke covenant with Him and went back to their old ways, their idolatrous ways.

0:15:20.4

By the way, the covenantal demands that God laid before the Hebrew people are not unlike…well, let’s just say a marriage covenant.  When I have the privilege of bringing together a husband and a wife, a bride and groom in marriage, I always emphasize the fact that this is not a social contract we’re making in the presence of our peers and before the state magistrate or something like that.  This is a covenant that you’re making before God.  Husband, you keep your end of the covenant whether she keeps her end of the covenant.  Wife, you keep your end of the covenant whether or not he keeps his end of the covenant.  That’s the commitment that you’re making to each other.  And maybe you remember this declaration of intent in your marriage ceremony- “Do you pledge to live together with her in the covenant of marriage before God?  Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”  That’s the covenant of marriage.

0:16:32.0

By the way, if I said to my sweet wife, “Honey, I love you, and I want to be married to you.  But I’d really like to date other women.  Is that okay?”, faster than a lightning strike in Texas, you know what would happen, right?  “Not in this marriage, uh uhn.  Not in this house.”  Every bride has the right to demand exclusivity in the relationship with her husband, and every husband has the right to demand the same.  That’s what a covenant relationship is all about.  And God was establishing this right out of the shoot in Exodus 20.  The first of the Ten Commandments—I call it the first commandment of worship—“No other gods before Me.”  It’s like the wife saying to the husband, “No other women.  Your days of playing the field are over,” or vice versa, the husband saying that to the wife.  And God was saying to His chosen people, “Your days of flirting around with all these other deities are done.  Worship the one true God.  Worship Me.”

0:17:44.2

Now, why are false deities such a threat to us and to our relationship with God?  Philip Ryken, the president of Wheaton College, wrote on the Ten Commandments.  And he says, “The answer is that even false gods hold a kind of spiritual power over their worshipers.”  I mean, to call them the gods of Egypt is really…Well, they’re really not gods at all.  They’re false gods.  They’re no gods at all.  And maybe this is why the apostle Paul, when he was writing to the Galatians, he says, “Formerly when you did not know God…”  Remember those days?  Maybe you’re here today, and you’re in the midst of those days.  You really don’t know God, and this describes you.  But, “Formerly when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods.  You worship them as though they were gods.”  You worship them because you gave them the highest value, the highest treasure, the highest esteem you could give anything in life went to this, not to God.  And that is the heart and the essence of idolatry.  The joyous, effusive celebration (0:19:00.1) of your life was about some football team and not the one true God.  I’m not saying don’t get excited about the Dallas Cowboys, and you should. (Laughter) Glad you’re listening this morning.  But there can only be one God you worship.  And the God of heaven drew the line right at the start.  He said, “Listen, if we’re going to be in this relationship together, no other gods.  You worship Me, and Me alone.”

0:19:42.0

About a generation later, Joshua drew the same line in the sand.  Now Moses is at the end of his life, and he didn’t lead the Israelites but to the edge of the Promised Land and the edge of the Jordan River.  Joshua would take them in across the Jordan into the (0:20:00.0) Promised Land to take possession of the land.  It was now a new generation.  These were the kids and the grandkids of the generation that came out of Egypt.  And in Joshua 24, Joshua says to them, “Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the river and in Egypt and serve the Lord.”  Their tendency, their fallen worship default was already going back to Egypt and to those false gods.  Joshua goes on to say, “Choose this day whom you will serve.”

0:20:39.3

Sometimes following Joshua, Elijah the prophet comes on the scene.  And you remember the rumble in the jungle, the showdown on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the one true God and the 400 prophets of Baal?  And Elijah says in 1 Kings 18, “How long will you go on limping between two opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow him.  But if Baal, follow him.”  Even back then the prophet Elijah is saying, “Stop doing the religious hokey pokey- one foot in and one foot out and doing it all about.  Stop doing that.  Listen, if Baal is the one true god, worship him.  Be all in with him.  But if he’s not, then Yahweh is, then worship Him.  Stop vacillating and flirting between two opinions.”

0:21:33.9

Even Jesus said in Matthew 6:24, “You cannot serve God and money.”  Back up a few verses in Matthew 6 from verse 24 where he said that to verse 21.  And Jesus made money the heart of the matter in worship.  He says, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is also.”  You want to know why Jesus spoke so much about money and material possessions?  Because He made money and the things that money can buy and all those shiny things that we are joyously and effusively celebratory about, like the new car or the new house or the new whatevermajig you bought.  It’s because where your treasure is, that which you value and esteem the most, that’s where your heart is.  And you can’t serve God and money at the same time. There is only one seat on the throne of your life.  And you can’t keep vacillating between two opinions.  You’ve got to decide which you’re going to worship and which you’re going to serve.

0:22:49.1

The first commandment of worship- no other gods.  And I hope you’ve already made the transition in your mind’s eye and built that bridge from 3000 years ago to today.  Because the idolatry of our day…maybe it looks a little different.  But anything which receives that joyous, effusive celebration, the highest esteem and value that we place on anything, something or someone, if it’s not God, it’s idolatrous.  And our worship is in vain, Jesus would say.  Ouch.

0:23:32.3

Well, let’s move from the first commandment of worship—no other gods—to the second commandment of worship, which talks about no carved images.  And here is where we go for…and I’ll use a baseball analogy.  We from a 95 mile-an-hour fastball right down the middle of the human heart—no other gods—now to…And you’ll love this, baseball people…A filthy slider.  Just catches the corner of the human heart.  And here is how the Lord says it through Moses.  Now back to Exodus 20, middle of verse 5.  “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.”  Again, He is telling them now the right way to worship.

0:24:32.8

Now, again, 3000 years ago the most creative people living at the time of Moses were artists who fed the religious imaginations of people by sculpting images of the gods.  And this was especially true in ancient Egypt with its many, many gods.  Artisans would make big money by carving the likeness of the gods into small idols and selling them to the people.  When God called His people out of Egypt and spoke to them, He put a stop to the use of their imaginations, their artistic imaginations in worship.  And He basically said to them not only, “Worship Me exclusively,” but now…and this is a part of the covenant relationship, the terms of the covenant…“You are to worship Me in response to My revelation of myself, not in response to your imagination.”  In other words, “Don’t worship Me by saying, ‘Oh, I kind of imagine God to be like this.’”  That is the beginning of idolatry, friends.   Whether it devolves into the carving of an image that is like what you believe to be Godlike and you set that up and worship that, or you just allow vain imaginations in your own mind to say, “This is what I think God is like.”  And I hear it often, “My God would never do this or this.”  And I know that is the beginning of idolatry if what you’re talking about does not align to how God has revealed Himself in the pages of scripture.

0:26:15.2

What about the human imagination corrupts our worship of God?  A.W. Tozer once remarked, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”  And he is spot on.  That’s why awhile ago I did a series of messages titles “What is God Really Like?”  And we studied, not in an exhaustive way, but we studied eight or nine or ten of the attributes of God as He has revealed Himself in the pages of scripture, because worshipping Him begins not only with a commitment to exclusivity…that He alone is the object of my worship.  He alone gets the most joyous and effusive celebration in my heart.  He is the object of my most treasured possession, the highest thing that I value.  It’s not only that, but it’s also worshiping Him in response to how He has revealed Himself in the pages of scripture.

0:27:14.9

J.I. Packer picks up on this idea.  He’s a great theologian.  And he says, “How should we form thoughts about God?  Not only can we not imagine Him adequately since He is at every point greater than we can grasp, we dare not trust anything our imagination suggests about Him for,”—and listen to this—“the built-in habit of fallen minds is to scale God down.”  That is what idolatry ultimately does.  That is what a worship instinct that has gone awry does.  It scales God down to a size that we can either control or be comfortable with.  I imagine God to be like…

0:28:04.1

J.D. Phillips years ago wrote a book called Your God Is Too Small.  It’s a classic, just a short little book.  But he began to imagine and talk about all the ways we imagine God to be like and how we scale Him down to something we can either understand or something we can control.  For instance, “I imagine God to be like a policeman that rules my life with His laws.”  Is God like that to you in your mind and in your imagination?  Or Phillips says, “I imagine God to be like a kind old man who says boys will be boys.”  Can you just picture God in His white beard and rocking in His rocking chair?  Is that the picture you have of God in your mind?  “I imagine God to be like a corporate CEO that manages and directs my life.”  How about this one?  “I imagine God to be like my earthly father, good or bad.”  How easy it is to take our experiences, good or bad, with our earthly father and say, “Well, that must be what God is like.”  And some people who have a difficult relationship with their earthly father have a difficult time praying, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and cultivating that kind of relationship with the perfect Father God that He is.  How about this one?  “I imagine God to be like Santa Claus.”  No, not exactly.  No, that’s not who He is.

0:29:27.0

Politicians, you know, like to jump on the religious bandwagon.  I can imagine up in our nation’s capital someone saying, “Oh, I imagine God to be like a white, middle class republican.”  Or, “I imagine God to be like a poor, black democrat.”  No, you don’t have the right to hijack the revelation of God and say He is like this or like that.  Now let’s go one step further.  “I imagine God to be like me.”  That’s where New Age philosophy goes.  New Age theology or New Age philosophy, which is prevalent in…media outlets like Oprah and her spirituality movements and all the gurus that she brings on, they’ll borrow a little bit of language from orthodox Christianity and twist it.  Give it new meaning and new understanding.  Yes, we are created in the image of God, but that doesn’t mean God is like me.  It means I’m a little bit like God.  And there is a Grand Canyon difference between those two statements.  God is never like me.  He created me in His image.  Ultimately, New Age theology and New Age philosophy wants us to say, “I imagine God to be me.  And I am god.”

0:30:57.8

And now we’ve come from the idolatry of 3000 years ago—which we really can’t sometimes identify with because we don’t carve little images and put them up in our homes and worship them—to, oh, in the selfie generation we’re just worshiping self.  Anything we can do.  The most joyous and effusive celebration is me and what I’m all about is the culture of our time and the culture of our day.

0:31:28.3

Exodus 20, middle of verse 5 and further, the Lord finishes out these first two commandments of worship, interestingly enough, with a little revelation of Himself.  Now, the human mind, the fallen human mind is not even able to fathom and encompass who God is.  Oh, we have the revelation of God in scripture.  And we are to worship Him in response to that revelation, not in response to our own imagination of who we think He is or want Him to be, but in response to how He has revealed Himself.  And that in and of itself is an exhaustive study.  You know, you spend a lifetime learning who God is and what He is like from the pages of scripture.  But here even in the decalogue, the Ten Commandments, God drops a little bone there for the Israelites.  He says no other gods, commandment number one, and no carved images.  “Don’t worship Me out of your imagination.  Worship Me for who I am.  And by the way, here is a little bit, just a little bit of who I am.”  Middle of verse 5, “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

0:33:17.0

What did God just say about Himself there that we should respond to in worshiping Him?  First thing He said was, “I’m a jealous God.”  Now, not the kind of pitiful jealousy that hurts a relationship.  Think again of the marriage relationship.  This is kind of jealously that protects.  That guards and protects that precious relationship for any outside influence that might destroy it.  Every bride should jealously guard her marriage relationship.  Every husband should jealously guard.  Every husband and wife should jealously guard any destructive outside influence that may damage the relationship.  God is the same way.  He calls Israel His bride in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament, the church is the bride of Christ.  By the way, marriage was God’s idea.  And He takes the imagery of marriage and that picture of marriage which is an incredible picture of so many things, and He says, “Listen, I’m like a jealous groom, and I want to jealously protect that relationship.”

0:34:36.9

But He also says that He’s just.  And I get that from that expression where He says, “I’ll visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but I’ll show steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”  The God of the Bible is a God of justice.

0:35:00.9

Now, those are just two things you could mediate on and kind of go deeper on as to who God is.  He is telling them, “Listen, don’t worship Me in response to your own wild imaginations of who you want Me to be.  Worship Me in terms of who I’ve revealed Myself to you.”  And then He just drops in little nuggets of revelation.  “I’m a jealous God.  I’ll always protect.  That’s why I have these covenant terms.  To protect, to protect our relationship and to protect you.  But if you step outside of that protective canopy, I have no other choice but to act in justice.  And I’ll punish those who hate Me.  But I’ll be incredibly gracious to those who love Me.”  And it goes on for generations to generations.  And you say, “Well, my God would never do something like that.”  That’s the beginning of the path toward idolatry.  We worship God for who He is.  And, again, this is just a small little smidgeon of who He is.

0:36:04.7

We’re asking the question, what is true worship?  And before we get into various places in the scripture and expressions and different types of worshipers in the scripture, I think it’s important for us, again, to come back to the base of Mount Sinai, where so much began, and to understand the two commandments of worship.  It starts here.  There are no other gods.  Scan through your life.  Be ruthless about anything or anyone that receives that joyous, effusive celebration in your heart, anything that is your most prized and treasured and valued thing or relationship.  It all comes in second place to the one true God.  Everything else in life falls into place when you put Him first, right?  But that’s where worship begins- exclusively worshiping Him and worship Him who is truly Him as we understand Him through His primary sources of revelation, which are the Word of God, the written Word, and the Living Word, who is His Son Jesus Christ.  You get to know God through this book, and your worship will be targeted like a laser.  If you stay focused on Jesus Christ, the real Jesus of the Bible, your worship will be focused like a laser.  And then jealously guard any influence that may compromise that in any way.  And we’re on our way to truly, truly worshiping God.

0:38:12.5