The Nature of Worship

The Nature of Worship A Textual Sermon God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24). INTRODUCTION Not long ago, I stopped at a stop sign, and an ambulance pulled up behind me. I noticed the word ambulance on the front of the vehicle was written backwards. I wondered for a moment why that was the case. Then it occurred to me that as I looked at the word through my rear view mirror, it came out correctly. Those who prepared the word realized that it would appear correctly to the person viewing it through his rear view mirror. In writing the name backwards, they took into consideration that people from all angles need to have the proper perspective. Christians often lose sight of this same idea. Christians especially must have the proper perspective toward the matter of worship. Christians ought to look upon the times of worship as the most joyful occasions in the entire week. We should not look upon worship grudgingly, as if it were something that takes away from our vacation, our camping trip, or the time we could spend at home looking at the comic strips. Many people regard worship as something of a killjoy that keeps them from doing what they like to do. Yet, the hour of worship is a joyful hour for a child of God. He looks forward to it. He thinks of that time as a time that will bolster his sagging spirits and make it possible for him to live a happier and better life during the coming week. David must have had this in mind when he wrote Psalm 122. Verse 1 says, I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go unto the house of Jehovah. It is, therefore, with a feeling of joy that all Christians come to the time of worship. Worship has something to offer to all who are willing to receive it. William Temple, an Anglican prelate in England many years ago, made this observation: Worship is the nourishment of the mind upon God s truth. Worship is also the quickening of the conscience by means by Earl I. West of God s holiness. Worship is the cleansing of the imagination by means of God s beauty and worship is the response of my life to God s plan for my life. This observation describes the ways of worship in a Christian s life. In this lesson I want to help us to understand the nature of the worship in which God wants us to be involved when we meet on the Lord s Day. I. THE BACKGROUND OF IT I doubt seriously if anyone of us can understand the principle of Christian worship thoroughly without seeing it in the light of the old Hebrew religion which the Jewish people practiced for fifteen hundred years in Palestine. Their worship was in tune with their spiritual development; their worship appealed to the lower instincts of mankind. For example, the Old Testament animal sacrifices were a prominent part of worship. Men and women brought their sacrifices to the temple. The proper priest offered that sacrifice upon the altar to account for the sins of the people. On the Day of Atonement, one sacrifice was offered to atone for all of the sins of the people of Israel. Annually, there was a remembrance made of their sins. A continuing need for a sacrifice for those sins existed. In their worship to God in the temple, incense was burned. The burning of incense was a very sacred and meaningful part of their worship. It appealed to their sense of smell. The odor of the sweet-smelling incense went up to God as a symbol of our worship going up in a pleasing way to God. David brought instrumental music into the worship of the tabernacle. (See 1 Chronicles 15 and 16.) The instrument was not used before, but it furnished a certain kind of entertainment for the people. In the Old Testament worship, the instrument was something that appealed to the people s instincts. The Bible indicates that the type of worship in the Old Testament guided the people on to a greater age. 1

If you can take the imagery out of the book of Hebrews for a moment (see Hebrews 8 through 10), you will read of a sunlight age, an age of reality, when the world was exactly as God wanted it. Yet, that age cast a long shadow back to the past. People living in the days of that shadow could look at their worship and see an outline of the type of worship that would be characteristic of the Christian age. The writer is actually telling us that animal sacrifice of that day was but a reminder of the sacrifice that would be made by the Son of God. When Jesus sacrificed His own life, it no longer was necessary for animal sacrifices to be made each year. Jesus was perfect. Our Lord was completely without sin. In the shedding of His blood, a complete atonement was possible for the sins of all mankind (cf. Hebrews 10:14). If the Lord went on year by year sacrificing Himself, it would only indicate the inadequacy of His sacrifice. It would only be a reminder that what He did one time was not sufficient for the total removal of man s sins. The Hebrew letter reminds us that Jesus sacrifice was the real thing. The animal sacrifices before were a shadow looking forward to the sunlight age when the reality should come to pass. The Israelites sacrifices for their own individual sins were also a shadow of something which was yet to come. In the tenth chapter of Hebrews, this idea is explained. God was not particularly fond of the offering of a pigeon, dove, lamb, sheep, or goat because the animals were not important to God. The animal sacrifices did mean that the people were being obedient to God. God was concerned with the spirit of obedience. In Hebrews 10:5 God said, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not. God did not want the sacrifices to continue forever, but God did want the spirit of obedience to continue forever. Then, further in the tenth chapter of Hebrews, the writer points out that in the day of sacrifice, God does not want the shedding of an animal s blood, but the sacrifice of a broken spirit. God wants a man who is humble and whose life is a living sacrifice before God. This is the real thing; this is what God wants. God s desire to be worshipped according to the old law was suitable for the spiritual development of the people in that time. The day was coming when God wanted a different kind of 2 worship. God did not mean for His worship to remain as it was in the past. For that reason, you and I do not offer sacrifices of animals. Christians do not go back to the Old Testament and copy the burning of incense as a part of worship; they do not copy the use of instrumental music that has a similar kind of appeal. When we come to worship God, we realize that we are living in a higher age. God wants us to use our higher instincts, making our worship much better than worship in the old Hebrew times. We are living in a remarkable age. The old age is long gone. God did not intend for it to be forever; God wanted us to worship Him in a different way with a greater motive. Our motive should be to do everything we do to please God. We are to be obedient to all of God s commandments. As we look at worship from that point of view, we are able to see what Christianity should be like. II. THE NATURE OF IT Do you remember the conversation of our Lord with the Samaritan woman? (John 4:1-26). As our Lord sat at Jacob s well in Samaria, He opened up a Pandora s box of questions. The Samaritan woman saw Jesus as a Jew, an individual traveling through her country. She knew of the age-old antagonisms that existed between the Samaritans and the Jews. She remembered, for example, that at Mt. Gerizim, in the heart of the land of the old tribe of Ephraim, there was a mountain on which the people of Ephraim had built a temple more than seven hundred years earlier. The Jews temple was at Jerusalem; the Samaritans had their temple at Mt. Gerizim. For many centuries, the Jews and Samaritans had quarreled. The Samaritans said that they had to worship God at Mt. Gerizim. The Jews said that they had to worship God at Jerusalem. They had argued back and forth, and neither one had done much to convince the other. The Samaritan woman brought up the old argument. She thought, perhaps, that she could get an argument out of the Lord because Jesus had just told her that she had lived with several husbands and the man with whom she was now living was not her husband at all. When someone tends to get too close to our sins, we would rather talk about something else. The minute the Lord got on that subject, she said,

Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship (John 4:20). Our Lord wanted the woman to know that a new horizon was before her. He wanted her to understand that neither in Mt. Gerizim nor in Jerusalem does God want to be worshipped. In that golden age which was about to dawn, God would want to be worshipped in spirit and truth by all of those who would worship Him. Let us look at worship s two aspects, spirit and truth. First of all, to worship God in truth means to worship God, in reality, in the way God wants to be worshipped. Very few in the world give much consideration to worshipping God the way He desires. How many times have you thought when you attend worship service in another town, I don t like the way these people worship? Our opinions are not important. What is important, however, is whether or not God likes it. If God likes it, then I am supposed to like it; that is, I should, if I am planning to be in harmony with God. We often say, I don t like this man s message or I don t like the way the songs are being led. The point is this: For our worship to be in truth, it must be carried out in the way God has commanded. Thousands of religious people might all meet and say that there are certain ways to worship, but what is most important is that we worship in the way God desires us to worship. On one occasion, Paul went into the city of Athens (Acts 17). When he arrived, he went down through the agora, the marketplace in the main part of the city. Paul looked around him and saw that the people worshipped countless gods and goddesses. Juvenal, a Roman writer, said that in Athens, there were more gods than men. Athens was the birthplace of philosophy. We look back with great admiration toward these great thinkers Aristotle, Plato, and a host of others who have made a contribution to the realm of human thought. However, with all of their philosophy and wisdom, they believed in polytheism. Although they were wise, they were not able to find God. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1:21, The world through its wisdom knew not God. The Mediterranean world was the birthplace of paganism; the Romans did not originate paganism. They borrowed most of their gods from the Greeks whom they had conquered, and they simply gave the Greek gods Roman names accommodating them to their own lives. Acts 17:6 says that Paul s spirit was provoked within him as he beheld the city full of idols. As Paul looked at all the heathen gods, he realized that these people, with all of their wisdom, did not know the one God whom they ought to have known. An early Christian writer named Athenagoros wrote that Antigorus at one time suffered at the hands of the Athenians for being an atheist. He had taken a wooden statue of Hercules and chopped it up. He used the wood to boil his turnips; the people said he was an atheist because he had done so. As Paul roamed around the agora, he came to a god that struck his fancy for just a moment. He saw an altar that had the inscription, To an unknown god. Greeks had images of every god they could imagine. Juvenal tells us that there were 330,000 gods worshipped in Athens alone. The Athenians reasoned, If we have 330,000 objects built in honor of all of the gods that we have ever heard of, maybe somewhere there is one god that we haven t heard of. Maybe he will be angry with us if we overlook him. Thus, they built an altar, and underneath it, they dedicated the altar to any unknown god that might exist. I can imagine what went through Paul s mind. As he stood and looked at that object, he must have thought to himself, There is one God and only one. These people have never heard of the true God. He is the God who has made of one blood all the nations of the world. Paul knew that they had unwittingly made this object in honor of the one true God without being aware of it. When Paul stood upon Mars Hill to speak, he said, Ye men of Athens. I perceive that in all things you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To an unknown god. What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I declare unto you (Acts 17:22, 23). Paul went on to describe what God said to these people. You and I need to know the truth if we are going to worship acceptably. We cannot worship just any god. God expects us to know Him, the only true and living God. God expects us to know how He wants to be worshipped, to know His nature, and to know the method by which we are to worship Him. 3

Many times even the very spiritual have accentuated the wrong aspects of worship. Would you worship God if you did not have a nice building? Some people believe they need to go into the most magnificent cathedral in the world to worship God. But there is not a lonelier place in all the world than a gigantic cathedral. When I was in Vienna, I visited Saint Stephen s Cathedral. Many people were gathered around the statue of the Virgin Mary. I saw a solitary little old man sitting all by himself, far away from the crowd, trying in his own way to worship God. He looked lonely and forlorn, without much knowledge of who God was or how God Almighty really wants to be worshipped. In the history of our brotherhood, there have been many instances where a few people have met in someone s living room to worship. They have carried on the worship of God as God wanted it to be done. They could have gone into different buildings of the town, but they didn t. They found that it was far more acceptable to God to worship with a smaller number in one s living room, if necessary, than to go somewhere else to worship unacceptably. It does not take a cathedral to make a place of worship. I sometimes meet people who say to me, I can t worship at that church because of one man who worships in that church; I am not going there as long as he worships there. I think to myself, How deceived people are especially people who claim to be following the New Testament. Your worship does not depend at all on the caliber of the man or woman who sits in the auditorium with you. That individual sits there to worship; his relation to God is a personal one. However, God is not going to look down upon you, put His finger on you, and say, Now, look, even though you have gone through the act of worship, I want you to know that I do not accept it because so-and-so was in the audience, and he is not a very good man. When you come to worship God, you must realize that you, too, are a sinner. Your worship to God does not depend on what any other person in the auditorium is like. Worship must be in truth; that is, according to God s plan. The way we know God and the way we worship God is stipulated in the Bible. The Lord also stipulates that He wants to be worshipped in spirit. The Lord is not referring to the Holy Spirit. He has only reference to your 4 attitude, your frame of mind. In Revelation 1:10 John said, I was in the spirit on the Lord s day. What did he mean? John was on the Isle of Patmos all by himself, but his frame of mind, his attitude, was right on that day. John was spiritually in tune with God on that occasion. Read Psalms 51:7. David said, Create within me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. I don t believe that David was talking about the Holy Spirit. David was referring to a frame of mind, an attitude of worshipping God that was true even in that day. Have you ever noticed that your spirit has a great deal to do with the way you perform your various activities? If your wife says to you, I want you to get up on the roof and fix it today, you will say, Honey, I m not in the spirit to do that today. But you are in the spirit to go fishing, and you do a better job of that than you could have done on the other. God expects us always to have within us the right kind of spirit when we worship Him. Many times we leave the service saying, The worship service did not mean very much to me today. Do you know why? There might not have been anything wrong with the message or the way that it was delivered. What was wrong was inside us. We did not come to worship in the spirit, and during the service, our minds were far away from what was being said. We were thinking about the stock market or the afternoon s problem that would soon face us. A thousand and one things came into our minds. We were not in the spirit of worship. It is not enough to say that we worship in truth. Our attitude is very important. What frame of mind do you possess during worship? How much you get out of the worship depends entirely upon your spirit. What frame of mind does God expect us to have when we come to worship? First, God expects us to have an attitude of humility. All through the Bible, humility is stressed. David says, The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalms 51:17). Isaiah said on one occasion, To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembleth at my word (Isaiah 66:2). If your spirit says, I have done no sin; I am a very great and powerful individual, you do not have the right attitude with which to come before God. It does not

matter how great you are; you are serving God who is infinitely greater, who spans the ages of time, who is from eternity. It does not matter how successful you are; you are to come before God in humility, the Bible says. When you worship God, you should realize the absolute need you have for God. In our materialistic world, few people feel they need God. Because we have good jobs, much money in the bank, nice homes in which to live, and two automobiles to drive, we think we are doing all right. All of us need God every hour, as we sometimes sing. You cannot do much with your life without God. You cannot make your life conform to the principles that will make it beautiful and worthwhile without God. You and I need God. There is no finer reminder of that truth than when we come on the Lord s Day and participate in the Lord s Supper. The Lord s Supper reminds us that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. When you think about His death and the shedding of His blood, you have the feeling that God did it for you and me. I need God because I cannot save myself. The Lord s Supper is a humbling reminder of our need for God. But you need the guidance of God, do you not? How many times have you asked yourself, What direction ought I to go? Where should I turn? What do I do now? When you come to worship, you expect to find the Word of God taught, not the opinions of a man. It is not an hour of joviality. It is a time of sober thought when every Christian thinks, How does God want me to live my life? What can I learn that will make me more acceptable to God? As you worship, you should have a certain sense of joy intermingled with sobriety. The promises of God are joyful promises. When you come to worship, it is wonderful to know that through the death of Jesus Christ, you can have the promise that your sins are forgiven. Isn t it marvelous to know that God has promised that He will never forsake you and that He is your refuge and strength in all the problems you face? Isn t it marvelous to know the wonderful promise of eternity, of heaven with all of its glittering gold and glories? When you think of worship from this point of view, you know that the worship of God has brought into your life a certain kind of satisfaction. If you do the will of God, He will approve of you. God made these promises to you, and He will keep them in His own way. No wonder a Christian faces the hour of worship with joy! CONCLUSION Worship is meaningful. It is a part of being a Christian. Do you remember having an appointment with someone and that person not keeping the appointment? You waited an hour; he still didn t show up. Do you remember how you felt? You were probably downcast, dejected, or possibly angry because the appointment was not kept. If you are a Christian, you have an appointment with the Lord Jesus Christ every Lord s Day. You cannot ignore that appointment, and nothing in this world should ever keep you from it unless it is sickness and you cannot go. God never expects the impossible from us. A Christian who has the proper perspective will not stay at home on the Lord s Day (Hebrews 10:25). When you are on vacation, you do not have a vacation from God. The Lord s Day is the time for you to meet and worship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a great hour, a wonderful moment, to worship God in this way. Worship can be a meaningful experience to every Christian. Worship is an experience that needs to be included in all of your plans in every aspect of life. The time of worship is the time for you to become attuned to God. Even though John was cast out on a lonely island in the Aegean Sea, the Lord s Day still came. John must have thought, I cannot be back in Ephesus with my brethren to worship today. But John did the next best thing: He was there in spirit, worshipping God the way God wanted him to worship. John could not let that hour go by. It would not have been right for him to have neglected worshipping God. Copyright, 1984, 2004 by Truth for Today ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 5