This sermon explores the essence of true worship, emphasizing that it is the most essential aspect of the Christian life. It delves into the nature of God, the impact of sin on worship, and how Jesus Christ restored our ability to worship God in spirit and truth, as prescribed in His Word.
Transcript
The Nature of True Worship
If you would open your Bible to the Gospel of John chapter 4, we will look at Jesus’ words to the woman at the well. In particular, we are going to look at verses 20 to 24, but I will go ahead and begin in verse 19 and we will read 19 to 24. The story is familiar to all of you, but we are going to focus on this instruction that Jesus gives concerning our worship.
So the woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such people the Father seeks to be his worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.’
Let’s ask God to bless his holy word. Father, we thank you for this wonderful instruction from our Lord Jesus, teaching us the nature of worship and how to worship. We pray, Father, as we reflect on this and on many passages from your holy word today, that you would guide our hearts and instruct us. Please bless us, Father, so that we may be faithful to you in every way. Thank you for your care and blessing. Help us today in comprehending these truths. Father, change our heart and that we truly seek you, seek to desire you, seek to know more about you and seek to truly worship you. Bless us, Father, in these things, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Over the past few weeks, we have talked about worship. We have talked about the glory of God. We have talked about what the glory of God is. One of the things that we said is that God is beautiful, and that God created man in the first place with the capacity, he is made in the image of God, with the capacity to recognize his beauty, the elements of the beauty of God, to take delight in God, which is to worship God. When we recognize something true of God, our heart should be stirred in order to worship him. The problem with worship is God created Adam and Eve in a perfect fellowship with him, truly perfect worshipers. They were to worship and serve him. But that relationship was broken by sin. The human heart was darkened. The human intellect became myopic and blind. Instead of coming to the light of God, people sought out and delighted in the darkness and in ignorance. They rebelled in their sin. That was the very world that Jesus entered into. Jesus Christ was born into this world, and the very reason he came was to deliver us from that bondage of sin that kept our soul in captivity so that we would be able to be free once again to recognize and to know and to worship God the Father. We would be able to do that through the redemption that we have in Jesus Christ and through the enabling grace that comes to us by the Holy Spirit. So that’s what we have spent our focus on. God is glorious, and we are to give him glory. God is glorious, and we are to glorify him by focusing on the things that we know about him, learn about him in the natural world, but particularly in the Scripture. We are to recognize his goodness and praise him for it, and our soul should resonate with thanksgiving and worship with God.
As I was looking at my sermons and things that I have preached over the past few years, I happened to notice that quite a few of them are on the attributes of God and on worship. Usually about this time of the year, I focus on worship. I did not realize I did that, but apparently I do. Back there is a history of it. And you know, a lot of time I have spent on who God is, what he is like, and why we are to worship him. I suppose that people might be thinking, ‘Why don’t you focus on something more practical like Christian life?’ And so I was thinking about that, and I thought, ‘Well, what could possibly be more practical than worship?’ Worship is the Christian life. The most essential thing in the Christian life, every day life of a Christian, is for us to focus on God and live the moments of our life to the glory of God. That’s what the Christian life is about. Jesus Christ saved us. The reason he saved us is so that we would be made right with him so that we could worship the Father through him. So that we could worship God once again. That was broken off. If you want to grow in the Christian life, grow in your knowledge of God and your worship of him. And the other things will fall away. You do not want to sin. You do not have the desire to sin. You will sin, but you do not have the desire to sin because it interrupts and breaks the relationship that we have with God. And so life, Christian life, is all about, all about worship.
Let me talk about what worship really is as we are looking at this this morning. You know, we learn as we have just been describing it over the past weeks, you recognize something true of God. You recognize that God is almighty. He is all-powerful. And that resonates with you, and so your heart stirs with that. You recognize that even though you are vile and he is perfectly holy, and you cringe in your unworthiness, you see the beauty of the love of Jesus Christ in coming to save you. And that stirs your heart to thanksgiving. You have to thank him and praise him and extol his name. Talk to other people about how glorious he is. So worship is the activity of a life, of a person who has been born again, a person who has new life in Jesus Christ. And so he recognizes the truth of the fullness of the Godhead as manifested in Christ by the power of the Spirit, and so his heart resonates with God. He glories and reverences and honors and gives God his due, which results in spiritual service. It results in us doing things in obedience to God. So God is glorious, and we are to give him glory. God is glorious, and we are to recognize that and give him glory in every circumstance of life. It is not easy, is it, to think about that, but it is our calling. It is the very nature of these, the many verses that we have looked at over the past few weeks. It is the very truth of Scripture. Worship begins with the individual and the individual heart. It begins in a redeemed heart of a Christian who wants to please God. It flows from recognizing God’s worthiness. Psalm 7:17 says, ‘I will give thanks to the Lord according to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised.’ God is worthy of praise. When you see something that is true about God, when that is revealed to you through the word of God, through the word of God as you live it out in this world, something true of God is revealed to you. In this case, the psalmist recognizes that God is righteous. He is perfectly righteous in all he does, and so his heart is stirred to praise God. You have to know something about God and have a relationship with God in order to worship God. And so if that fails anywhere, then that leads to a false worship. Misunderstanding God’s character, thinking something about God that is not true of God, brings about a false type of worship. God is worthy of worship. So it begins with a relationship. It begins with you as an individual knowing God and why he is to be worshiped. All these verses, we read these often as calls to worship. The scriptures that are many that I read and so many more, ‘Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.’ Why is the person praising the Lord there? Because he has received something of the goodness of God. And when he recognizes that what he has received is God has blessed him, he has been good to him, and so his heart resonates with praise to God. That’s worship. That is what worship is. Christians worship God because they recognize that he is worthy. He alone is worthy. There are lots of the verses like the text I read in the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, where God is not to be compared with anything else in this created world, particularly not with false gods, and he alone is to be worshiped. And so we are to worship him. We are commanded to worship. The most important activity that you will ever have in your life is to worship God. The most important thing you will ever do, of all the important things that you do in this life, is to worship God. And you are to do that through many means, through all sorts of things that you are to do for the Lord, but the end result of all your actions is to bring glory to God. You just see that everywhere, all over Scripture. In the New Testament, Romans 12, that familiar passage, ‘I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.’ ‘I will sing to the Lord all my life. I will sing praises to God as long as I live. I will extol the Lord at all times. His praise will always be on my lips. Let the name of the Lord be praised both now and forevermore.’
Corporate Worship
We are to worship begins with us individually, but it finds its greatest expressions when we gather together. That’s when we can experience something true of God in a way that is not possible privately. We are to worship God with every part of our life. We are to worship the Lord as we seek him in our daily Bible readings, as we seek him as we come to him every day in prayer. We are to worship him in all these ways, but particularly it is right and important for us to worship him corporately as his people, to come together as the people of God. Old Testament, ‘Glorify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together.’ There is something about being together and praising the Lord that is greater than praising the Lord privately. As we praise the Lord together, we are magnifying his name and sharing his glory with those around us, and God loves that. God loves that. There is a verse in Psalm 86:2, and the psalmist says, ‘The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than the dwellings of Jacob.’ What does that mean? God is worshiped in each of the houses of Jacob. God is worshiped individually, and God delights in the worship of individuals and families. He loves that. But even more, when they gather in Jerusalem, when the congregations gather and they gather corporately, God loves that even more than when they gather in the houses, when they worship him in their homes. There is something special and unique about corporate worship. So that’s why we gather. That’s why we come together to worship. We come together to worship in order to be instructed in his word, to learn something more about him and to be guided together so our hearts together, united, resonate with the Lord.
The Danger of False Worship
The woman in John 14 perceives that Jesus knows more about her than anyone would expect him to know. And so she says, ‘I perceive you are a prophet.’ And then so she has a question. She is a worshiper of God. She worships God. She goes to that mountain that she is asking him about because she is a Samaritan. She says, ‘You people say that in Jerusalem is the place that men ought to worship.’ She was a Samaritan, and Samaritans are the descendants of roughly of the ten tribes of Israel. And so when Israel divided, Jeroboam took the ten tribes, ten of the tribes. Benjamin stayed faithful to Judah, and then some of the people in all the tribes went with Jeroboam to the north. Jeroboam was worried about them being obedient to the word of God and going to Jerusalem to worship because he thought he would lose his kingdom that way. If they had to go to Jerusalem to worship, they would eventually be reunited and centered under the king in Jerusalem, Rehoboam. And so he set up a false worship. He set up a different mountain to worship on. He said, ‘Here is your God. Let’s worship God here.’ It was absolutely disobedient to the word of God to do that. And so she is worshiping God there, and Jesus, part of his instruction here, is to correct that in two ways. First of all, he is saying, ‘In the Old Testament, worship was centered in all sorts of things, in the way that we come to God through the sacrificial system, and there was a place that you would go, the temple of God, to meet with God. But that’s changing now,’ he says. That’s the first thing he tells her. ‘The time is coming and now is,’ he says, ‘when those who worship God will worship God in spirit and in truth. You are not having to go to a particular place.’ But then there is something else that he says. That’s important. I may get back to it. Something else he says. He says concerning their worship practice. He says, ‘You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is of the Jews.’ He is saying that God has revealed himself to the Jewish people, and the whole sacrificial system, the provision that results in Jesus Christ coming into the world, all of that comes through the Jewish line and through the revelation of God. And so he says, ‘We worship what we know.’ That’s a crucial element. There are two ways you go wrong and end up with false worship. One way to end up with false worship is when you are worshiping God and God is misunderstood. And so you are worshiping something that is not true of God. So you are worshiping a false god. Jehovah’s Witnesses deny the Trinity, deny the true nature of God. They deny the person of Jesus Christ and who he really is. It’s a false religion because they misunderstand who God is. They do not know God. They misunderstand who God is. But there is another way we can go wrong. And that is when we practice something that God does not tell us to practice in our worship. When we come to God in the way that the Samaritans did, when they are practicing something willfully in order to worship God. God gives us, tells us what we are to do in worship, but we want to worship God in our own prescribed way. We want to worship God in a way that is comfortable to us. And so we worship God, and we do the things in our worship that we decide would be good for worship in our worship practice. That’s the other way you can go wrong in worship. And there are countless, particularly in the Old Testament, countless examples of it. Some quite clear and some apparent. All through the Old Testament, it’s the way it began. At the very beginning, you have Adam and Eve in fellowship with God. They sin. God casts them from the garden, but before he does that, he gives them some prescriptions. He gives them some hope. He tells them that a redeemer will come. He tells them that through the seed of the woman, a redeemer will come. He tells them, he takes an animal and kills it and clothes them, removes their fig leaves and clothes them with an animal skin. And they began to learn that God is only satisfied with a blood sacrifice. They have children, and it is possible that Eve thought that Cain was the Messiah. He wasn’t. In that account with Cain and Abel, they both come to the altar. They come to the same altar. They offer their sacrifice. And Abel’s sacrifice is accepted, and Cain’s sacrifice is rejected. What’s wrong with Cain’s sacrifice? He was religious. He offered a sacrifice. It was sacrificial. He was probably quite sincere in what he offered. He would not have been so angry if he had not been. What was wrong? The only thing that can be wrong is that he did not come in the prescribed way that God gave him. It tells us in the book of Hebrews that Abel’s offering was an offering of faith. Do you know how you get faith? Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. There is a revelation that you are responding to and become obedient to. You are obedient to it because you believe it. You do it. Abel offered a blood sacrifice. It makes sense that God would come and teach them to sacrifice in this way. Abel offered a blood sacrifice. Cain offered an offering of the soil to the Lord, and God rejected his offering. He said, ‘You can still come.’ And he grew angry, and you know the rest of the story. He did not come God’s way. Cain offered a worship without a blood atonement. Later on in the New Testament, God gives the law to Moses, and on the mount, he tells him, like when he is giving him the instructions for how to build the Tabernacle, he says, ‘Do not vary from what I am telling you. It is my plan. You do not vary from the plan.’ On the very first day of worship, his brother, Moses’ brother Aaron, is the high priest, and he is conducting the worship service for the day. His two sons are priests, Nadab and Abihu. And Nadab and Abihu were offering the first sacrifices to the Lord, the first worship that has been prescribed by God. And in Leviticus 10, verse 1, they offer, it says, ‘strange fire.’ And that next phrase is important. That’s the purpose, the reason this happens. They offered strange fire, ‘which he had not commanded.’ God did not command it. God had told them what to do. Nadab and Abihu did something else to worship God. You know what happened? God struck them dead. That’s the next verse, God strikes them dead, 10:2. 10:3, this is the takeaway from the story. ‘By those who come near me, I will be treated as holy.’ God prescribes the way. He tells us what to do. And so when God prescribes the way, we are to do what he says. Saul’s rejection as king comes about in a similar way. Saul offers a sacrifice that is not in accordance with God’s instructions, and he is rebuked with ‘to obey is better than sacrifice.’ He loses his office as king. David and Uzzah and the ark. David is going to bring the ark into back into Jerusalem. And so he is going to move the ark. He at this point, maybe he did not know what to do. He probably did not know what to do. He has the ark put on a cart. But God has given exact instruction on how the ark is to be moved. And so when the ark is being moved, it begins to rock back and forth. Uzzah reaches out to steady the ark, and he is struck dead in the moment. Why? Because this is not the way to do it. Later on in that same chapter, David has the ark carried in the proper way, and he is offering sacrifices immediately before the ark. It shows he goes back to the prescribed way. And so it is through all Scripture. This is the way it runs, New Testament and Old Testament. God prescribes who he is, tells us who he is, and we are to worship him, and he tells us how we are to worship him. He gives us instruction. In the New Testament, there is that struggle with the Pharisees, with all of their laws and the things that they are doing. They want to please God. They want to be holy. And so they are instructing everybody in how to be holy. You remember the conflicts that came up. We saw them in Mark’s Gospel, and you see the same story in Matthew 15. They are correcting Jesus and his disciples. They are not living, his disciples are not living according to the laws of the traditions of the Pharisees. And so he is correcting them. You know what Jesus says to them? He does not say, ‘Your problem is that you are so rigid in your understanding.’ That’s not the problem. The problem is not that they are too exacting in being obedient to the word of God. That’s not the problem. The problem is not, they were unloving, but that’s a secondary focus. You know what Jesus says to them about what they are doing? He says, ‘You are not being obedient to God’s word in your worship practice.’ This is worship for daily life that they are prescribing, and it’s wrong. He says, ‘You invalidate the word of God for the sake of human traditions.’ That’s the quote. And then he says, ‘Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. In vain do they worship me.’ We are to be careful to be obedient as we worship God. We are to worship God in the way that he prescribes us to. The disciples, on that occasion, the disciples say to Jesus, ‘You know, they were offended when they heard what he said.’ They did not like it. You know what Jesus said? He said, ‘Every plant which my heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted.’ And they said, ‘Let them alone. They are blind guides of the blind. If a blind man guides a blind man, both shall fall into a pit.’ Those are terrifying words. It tells us we should get our worship correct because if we do not get this right, we are not worshiping God in an acceptable way, and he is not going to receive it. He is going to hate it. We have to get our worship right. This is important because we are living in a time when people want to worship God in any way they imagine. They want to do whatever they want to in worshiping him. They want to make the church as attractive as possible to the unregenerate heart so that they will feel comfortable when they come. That’s one of the things they do. There is nothing, nothing in the Bible that would suggest that anything like that is something that God wants. So we are to come and engage with God on the terms that God proposes and in the way that he alone makes possible for us through Jesus Christ. Most of the things we do in worship, pretty much all the things we do in worship, is because of what God clearly tells us in the word of God. That has to be it, either directly. Directly, just about everything we do is a direct statement of what God tells us to do. That’s why we preach the Gospel in a worship service because God instructs us to. It’s because when we praise God in psalms and hymns, it tells us to do that in Ephesians and Colossians. We have a direct commandment to do that. When we serve God and worship him through prayer because we are instructed to do that. We baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit because we are instructed to do that. We keep the Lord’s table because Jesus instituted it, commanded us to do it. These are things and practices of worship that we are to do because we are commanded to do it, and it is the order that he has prescribed for us, and we cannot let a lot of things come into our worship practice that push those things out. We are to worship him in the way that he prescribes.
Worship Not Tied to Place or Shadows
So it’s not the place. Jesus says that one of the things that takes place in his coming is that he fulfills a lot of the Old Testament practice. He becomes the sacrifice. He becomes the great high priest. And those things in the Old Testament fade away because they have been fulfilled, and we have them perfectly in the person and work of Christ. That’s what all the book of Hebrews is about. And so we are not tied to worship in a specific place. We do not have to go to a temple in Jerusalem to meet with and worship God. It tells us that, in the London Baptist Confession of 1689, it says, ‘Neither prayer nor any other part of religious worship is now under the Gospel, tied unto or made more acceptable by any place in which it is performed, or towards which it is directed, but God is to be worshiped everywhere in spirit and in truth, as in private families daily, and in secret, each one by himself, so more solemnly in public assemblies, which are not carelessly or willfully to be neglected or forsaken when God by his word or providence calls thereunto.’ So we are to be obedient to God, and we are to follow him. Paul corrects the Corinthian, whoever it was that was causing the disturbance in Corinth. And he tells the Corinthians that no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or festival or new moon or Sabbath day. He is saying that these Old Testament practices, nobody is to judge you on these things. These things have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, even the Sabbath day. They are shadows of what is to come. The substance belongs to Christ. Jesus is the substance. He is the real thing, and we are to not pass over the real thing in order to celebrate the Sabbath.
God is Not a MacGuffin
And it’s so easy to do that. In storytelling, Alfred Hitchcock, whatever you think about Alfred Hitchcock, I am going to bring him up right here in the middle of this. It’s kind of startling. Wake one or two people up anyway. Alfred Hitchcock. One thing that was true of Alfred Hitchcock was that he was quite a good storyteller. He knew how to move a plot along. He studied that, and he invented some of the things. There is a principle in storytelling and plot, like if you are writing a movie script or a plot or a novel. He had this term that he created. It was called a MacGuffin. He called it a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is an element that is in a story that moves, that causes the action to take place. And the MacGuffin really does not do anything in the story. Just about every story that you watch on television, most of them are action stories, and they often, almost all of them, have a MacGuffin in the story. There is a thing that drives this whole story, and yet it is really of no consequence to the story. Little consequence, it just drives the story. In lots of stories that you might, in The Maltese Falcon, the Maltese Falcon that drives the whole story is of no real consequence. In the end, it’s not even worth anything. In the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I do not recommend you watch. For one thing, I make it a practice, I watched that movie years ago, I saw the movie. But I make it a practice if I know ahead of time not to watch a movie where the name of God is denigrated or blasphemed. Why should I be entertaining myself with somebody who is blaspheming the name of God, whom I should be glorifying? It does not make any sense. But in that movie, it is about the Ark of the Covenant, the ark in the Old Testament that Moses put his Ten Commandments in. That’s what the movie is, that’s the center and focus of the movie. The storyline is that the Nazis have learned about this treasure, the Ark of the Covenant, and they were seeking it because they think it has mystical powers that they can turn into a weapon. And so our hero, Professor Jones, goes and follows, pursues the thing ahead of them to discover the ark, to find it, to recover it before they can get it, and there is the big conflict between them, the struggle back and forth with the Ark of the Covenant. And then the ending eventually. So the ark drives all the action in the story. What’s the ark actually worth? What is it really the value of the Ark of the Covenant in that story? In the end of the story, the ark of the covenant is packed up in a crate and hid away in a US warehouse where it remains. It is of no consequence. It just drives action. It’s a means to tell an action story. God is not a MacGuffin. God is not an object just to drive our actions. God is not the excuse that we come together and sing songs and have fellowship. God is the focus of our worship. God is the focus of our worship, and we must worship him personally and real. He is the one that we celebrate and glorify. He is not something that’s just an excuse. In a lot of worship practice, you could come together. They are there for the music, and they do this, ‘What a great worship we had today. My soul was thrilled.’ God is not a MacGuffin. He is real. He is holy. He is the most worthy thing that anyone can, greater than anything anyone can imagine. And he is worthy of our worship. He alone is worthy of our worship. And he is the focus. He has to be the focus. God is not a MacGuffin, and he is not a tool that we use. He is not just something that we are to use in order to experience, have some experience. He is not, if you say, ‘I was reading my Bible, but I am not really getting anything out of it.’ So I stopped. ‘Or my daily prayers, my time with the Lord slips away because I was not really getting anything out of it.’ The focus is not on you. The purpose of this is not on you. The purpose of this is to worship God. We do not come together here in order to get something. We should get something. There are blessings here. But that’s not the focus. The focus is that we are to be worshipping God. He is not a MacGuffin. He is not something just a tool for us to use. He is the God of the universe. Jesus Christ is the savior of the world. He is glorious and wonderful, and he is to be the focus of our worship. He is not, we have to focus on him. We have to truly be worshipping from our redeemed heart, the God who is the only one who is worthy of our worship. I am going to close with that. Father, we thank you for your incredible grace to allow us to worship you. You created us to worship you, and everyone in this world worships something because you are created to worship. And yet hardly anyone in this world, except those few that you have saved, really a tiny minority of the world, truly worship you. What a privilege it is to worship you. What grace. How undeserving we are. Father, we are ashamed of ourselves and our heart and anything that pulls us away to sin or a distraction that keeps us from you. We pray, Father, that you change us. Give us a heart that is so strong that it continues to seek you, to know more about you, to learn more so that we can worship better and love you more. Please shape our hearts in this way and guide us, teach us. Father, correct us in our thinking so that we would be the worshipers that you are seeking. Help us, Lord, to be those who truly seek and worship you in the way that you prescribe. We ask this blessing in the name of our Savior, for his sake. Amen. Please stand as we close with the doxology.