Word of Salvation – Vol.42 No.25 – July 1997

 

Worship Our Response to God

 

Sermon by Rev W Wiersma on Lord’s Day 35, Q&A 96

 

Dear Brothers and Sister in our Lord Jesus Christ, young and old.

You must have big and awesome thoughts about God if you are ever going to worship God properly.

You see, it is what we think of God, it is how we see God that will determine the way we worship God, the way we adore and serve Him.  So as we worship remember who it is that we do worship.  God Himself said to his people of old, the people He redeemed for Himself – I am the Lord your God who has brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.  In other words, that is how God wanted to be seen by His people Israel.  That is how God wanted to be remembered.  As the Lord God, ‘your God’, who has saved you, who brought you out of the house of spiritual bondage.  Worship is part of our covenant obligation.  It is our holy calling to worship God.

And I think the apostle Peter expresses that beautifully in his first letter where he writes to the church: “You are a chosen people, you are a royal priesthood, you are a holy nation, you are a people belonging to God so that you may declare the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His wonderful light.”  This is our holy calling.  This is what we are called to do.  We are a royal priesthood, belonging to God to declare to God and to each other and all the world, the praises of Him who has brought us out of the darkness of our own sinfulness into the light of His grace and life.

A holy nation – a royal priesthood.  That suggests that all of our life is a calling in the service of our great and merciful God.  Our whole life is to be a worship of adoration and thanksgiving.  Worship is to admire God, worship is to declare God’s praises.  We are to praise God for what he is and for He has done.

So the question I want to put to you is this: Do you admire God, do you think lovely thoughts of God, good thoughts of God?  Are you grateful, thankful for what God, through His Son, has done for you?  Do you give God regular thanks for Jesus?  Do you thank God for the gift of forgiveness and for the privilege and honour of being, in Christ, a child of God?

What I am getting at is that our worship of God is actually determined by our faith in God.  Our worship is determined by our knowledge of God and our acceptance of God’s grace in Christ.

Let me put it this way — you will not give God thanks for His tremendous kindness without accepting that kindness and enjoying God’s mercy through faith in Jesus Christ.  How can we thank God and sing His praises if we don’t and if we can’t appreciate God’s concern and love for us; if we think awful thoughts about God?  How can we love God unless we have first tasted something of the love of God for us in Jesus Christ?  How can we rejoice in the Lord unless we realise that all God’s blessings are given to us in that one gift, Jesus Christ, our great mediator through whom we are made friends with God; through whom we are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, belonging together to God?

Yes, it is through faith in Jesus that we truly get to know God, as God wants to be known.  There is no other way to know God truly, adequately, except through faith in Jesus Christ.  And so, it is through Jesus that we truly begin to worship God.  Without faith in Christ we cannot worship in spirit or truth.

So, what are some of the things we learn about God from Jesus and from the Bible (the Word of God) in general.  We learn that God is the mighty Creator by whose decision and power everything that exists does exist.  The appropriate response on our part is that we worship God humbly, knowing that we depend on Him for everything.  That we live by God’s will.  Even the nations are to God like a drop in a bucket.  It is God who raises one nation and brings down another.  It is God and God alone who has the whole world, and all mankind, every one of them, in His hand.  Nothing happens outside the control of God, nothing!

Our God is an awesome God.  And I want to use that word, and I want you to think about that word, in its true meaning.  Because words have a way of being debased.  Awesome used to be an awesome word, now it is trite.  For instance, I was approached by a girl who wanted to know how to get to a particular street, and I gave her directions.  When I had finished she said, “Awesome!”  I suppose she meant to say something like, “That’s good, thank you very much.”  But she said, “Awesome!”  Rubbish.

God is AWESOME.  That means, God creates awe in us.  And awe is something like a holy terror.  When you stand in awe of someone, you stand like a little child before a very important person.  And you tremble, wondering what you are going to say, wondering how you are going to behave, wondering what that person will think about you and say to you.  That is awesome, frightening.  That is how we ought to stand before God.  We should not approach God as if we have a right to stand in His presence and that there is nothing to worry about anyway.

We should approach Him only with the greatest respect.  Do we realise that flippancy with regard to God is totally out of place.  Do we realise that?  Jokes about God are a mark of disrespect – a denial of the fact that God is totally different, totally above all and beyond all we are able to think.  And we dare to joke about Him?  Isn’t it precisely because God is so different that He has forbidden us to make images of Him?

If we would want to make images of God where would we get our image from?  Where would we get our information – and even more importantly – on what basis, and for what reason, would we choose any particular image?  What would be our bias?  And what effect would such an image have on our worship?  Let’s try to answer some of these questions by relating them to an incident in the life of the Israelites.  I am referring to the construction of the golden calf by Aaron.  You know that amazing thing that happened while Moses was up on the mountain, receiving the ten commandments from the Lord, one of which says, You are not to make any graven image of anything in heaven above, or the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth, and worship it.

What were some of the moving reasons behind this calf which was supposed to be a representation of the Lord their God who brought them out of Egypt?  You know, don’t you, that that is how the golden calf was presented.  Aaron told them, “Here, oh Israel, is the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt.”

Why did the Israelites want an idol like that?  Well, first of all they wanted a god they could see.  Moses, God’s spokesman, had been away on the mountain for weeks.  He had been a very strong leader, conveying the word of the Lord to the people.  But now he was gone and they wanted direction.  They wanted a sense of God’s presence.  They wanted to see something.  I mean, how can you believe in a God you can’t see?

But that is exactly what God expects us to do, to live by faith in God whom we cannot see, because He is too big to be seen – too big to be confined to any space that we could clap our eyes on.  The Israelites wanted visible evidence – they wanted a visible focus for their worship.  But that wasn’t all.  Where did they get the idea of a young bull?  That’s what it was, a young bull.  They got that from the Egyptians.

So, rather than learning about their covenant God from His word, the Israelites wanted to be like their pagan neighbours, just like the people in Ezekiel’s day, later on.  They took their ideas about God from the religion and culture of the people they had grown up with, from the world in which they lived.  The whole history of the people of Israel is witness to the difficulty of being separate – of being holy, of being the distinctive people of God.

Even today it is not easy to separate ourselves from the culture that is fundamentally opposed to God and opposed to God’s good and holy will.  The world has a way of creeping into the church.  And the church has a way of giving up its distinctiveness and surrendering to the world.  The church has a history of thinking it will have greater success when it conforms to the culture and patterns of the world.

One of the great struggles of the church throughout the ages, even in Israel’s time, has been how to move with the times – without moving from the Word, which is the source and foundation of our knowledge of God and religion.  The images and ideas of the world about God are always a denial of the heart of God’s being and of His virtues.  The images of the world will always lead their worshippers away from God.

Take the golden young bull – what was it a symbol of?  It was a symbol power, but also of virility and fertility.  It was – in a modern phrase – a young stud.  That’s what it was, that was its image.  A young stud!  And that this was actually the case is clear from the way they worshipped God around the golden little bull.  In Exodus 32:6 we read, “So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings (pretty religious stuff).  Afterwards they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.”  Now, that this was not an innocent bit of fun is clear from verses 25-28, where we read the following [quote Exodus 32:25-28].

If we let go of the Word of the living God, who is too great to be described by an image – if we let the world determine our ideas about God – our worship will become blasphemous idolatry.  And that is what I understand a lot of worship is these days, blasphemous idolatry.  Now such idolatry might be very successful in terms of getting the crowds in.  But don’t be fooled.  Don’t take the line which we hear so often, “Ah, there is growth in numbers, therefore it must be of God.”  ‘Sounds convincing to some.  But it is no proof of God’s involvement at all.

How many movements are there not in the world which have nothing to do with God but which have tremendous growth?  Should we say of them, it must be the Spirit of God which is giving them that growth?  Just because it has a religious flavour to it, it doesn’t mean that it is of the Spirit of God.  I mean this idol worship, this worship of the golden calf with all its revelry, and with all its pious words, was not of God, was it?  It was very popular.  And if someone had said, “We’ve started a new movement among the people of Israel, a new way of worshiping God, that is more congenial,”  he could have said, “we’re having great success.”

But what did God have to say about it?  It grieved the Lord to the depth of His heart.  God’s people have always had a tendency to join the world – in religious garb, of course.  Who of us has not read what is going on in Holland where everything seems to be going crazy?  They now have, as I understand it, a course for ministers to dress up as clowns, because that is the only way they are going to be heard.  Using clowns is going to be very effective, you see.  Why?  Because that’s the way things are going.  I was looking at a programme for children the other day and I have never seen anything so wild and excessive as the way these people were communicating with the children.  And I thought to myself, this is the way it is going, all stimulus, no content; all feeling and immediate reaction but no thinking.

And anybody who has read his Bible (and Brave New World), knows that the evil one is always trying to manipulate people and break down their defences; to get them in a position where they can be bowled over by any theory and by any ideas, so that they lose all their critical faculties.  That is what is happening in our culture today.  And the church wants to join that approach.

I have heard about clowns of ministers going down a steel cable from the galleries to come down on the podium with a thud.  Apparently the people love it, they clap.  You can almost hear someone saying, “That’s the church to go to.  They are with it.”  And the crowds come flocking in.  But who is worshipped?  Who?

When people want to see something, when they want a show, when they want fun, excitement and entertainment, then watch out!  Watch out for the churches where the leaders rely on gimmicks to draw the crowds.  Watch out for churches where the preaching of the Word of God is exchanged for slick psychology.  Watch out for cathedrals where the death of Christ for sinners is never mentioned and where the preacher, by the name of Robert Schuller, says that the teaching about the vicarious atonement for sins by the death of Jesus is one of the most wicked teachings that has ever been around.

I hear of members of our churches listening to this clown and they cannot discern that this man is not bringing the Word of God.  They cannot see that he is simply stroking the fancies of his hearers.  He goes right along with the world saying, “You know what you need is a good self-image.  You know what I am here for, to give you a high opinion of yourself.  You don’t need to repent, you don’t need a saviour.  You just need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.  And worship yourself!”  Of course, Rev Schuller does not say it in quite those words.  But in effect it comes down to that.

I am reminded of the words of Psalm 115 and I want to read the first eight verses with you.  Psalm 115, in which God’s people pray that they will worship not themselves but the living God only [quote Ps 115:1-8].

Throughout the centuries, God has called His people to serve and worship Him with due reverence and awe.  Our world wants none of that – our world wants equality.  NO authority figures.  NO words of restraint.  Everybody wants to be happy without being stopped.  But God’s true people want to be holy first and foremost.  They hunger and thirst for righteousness.  They want to worship God in Spirit and in truth.  They want to seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness and for that they are willing to deny themselves and all their selfish lusts.  That is the Spirit of true worship.

What do you think of God?  How do you see Him?  I want to close with a few short quotes from Ephesians [quote Eph. 5:1-6, 15-21].

Amen.