Whom Do We Worship?

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Transcript:

John chapter 8. There’s going to be a pop quiz. why didn’t I tell you that’s the pop part without looking at your notes from last week I want to talk about what we discussed last week because as we as we do this study of worship everything sort of ties in together and you’re saying well I wouldn’t hear last week I don’t know well that’s why we’re going over it again okay we talked about three things that are part of worship and first of all is worship just what we do here on Sunday mornings very good give yourself a point if you if you got that one right.

It’s not just what we do here on Sunday mornings. And I know I said at the beginning of the service, we’re here to worship the Lord together. We are.

We come here to the church, among other reasons, to worship the Lord together. But that doesn’t mean this is the only place that we worship the Lord, okay? Worship is something that should take place throughout our whole life.

Worship is a pattern, I said last week, of three things. See if you remember the words without looking at your notes. The first one was worship is a pattern of what?

Anybody? Remember the word that means to get on your face in Hebrew, to bow to. .

. Okay, you’re close. You said humility.

That’s one of the words I used. It’s a pattern of submission. The first part of worship is that we have to humble ourselves before God.

If we come to God and we say how great He is and we praise Him and say how wonderful He is, but we also think we’re His equal, it’s not really worship of God. We first have to be in submission to God. We have to humble ourselves before God.

The second thing is that worship’s a pattern of. . .

Starts with an R. reverence very good did you look at your notes or you just remember it’s all right if you looked at your notes worship is a pattern of reverence where we not only it’s not just enough that we get on our faces either physically or metaphorically sometimes it’s good to get on your face before god and pray but just getting on your face it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do that literally we don’t just submit ourselves to god but we actually lift him up we humble ourselves and we lift him up. This reverence is glorifying him and honoring him for who he is.

That’s an important part of worship. That’s one of the things we do here. When we come together and we sing about him and we celebrate him and talk about how great he is and how good he is, that’s praising him.

That’s showing reverence. That’s part of worship, but that’s not all of it. So we humble ourselves before God.

We honor God. We show a pattern of reverence. And then the third one was a pattern of anybody service very good and talking to Sean after the service last week he was he was talking and I got to thinking I was thinking about what you were saying I wasn’t just thinking about other things while you were talking but as he was talking I got to thinking obedience might have been a better word but it’s a pattern of service or obedience that we do what he tells us to do that we belong to him and as I shared with you that some of the words that say worship in our English Bible the Hebrew or Greek words behind them, some of those words mean to be a servant of, and some of them have the connotation of being a slave.

That believe it or not, if we are God’s worshipers, he owns us. I know that’s not a popular thing to say, but as Christians, he’s supposed to be our owner, and we’re supposed to be his slave. So we’ve got these three things, the pattern of submission, the pattern of reverence, the pattern of service.

These three things are necessary to worship. And if you’re wondering, where did you come up with those three words? If you weren’t here last week, I did a study, a quick search of every place in the Bible that it uses the word worship or some form of it, and looked at the Greek and Hebrew words behind them and what they meant.

And everything fell into one of those three categories. Those are the necessary parts of what the Bible calls worship. And I gave you three tests to tell what you’re worshiping, whether you’re worshiping God or not.

The first test with submission was what drives your decision-making? What calls the shots? When I’m faced with a life decision, do I choose what God wants me to do, or do I choose what’s going to bring me the most money?

If it’s God who drives my decision-making, odds are I worship God. If it’s money that drives my decision-making, odds are I worship money. So the question is, what drives your decision-making when you think about the decisions you make and how you arrive at them?

The second one with a pattern of reverence, do we do things to honor God? Do we do things on purpose to honor God? Do we give God the glory?

And I used money as the other example last week, just because it’s easy to think of things with that. Do we on purpose honor God, or is our life more oriented around showing off our wealth and the money and the things that we can buy with it? If we’re constantly bragging on God, odds are we worship him.

If we’re constantly bragging on our wealth, odds are that’s what we worship. And the third, the third test, the third test with service is, do you do what God tells you to do? Do you obey him?

I’m not saying we’re perfect, but do we have a pattern of obeying him? If God repeatedly tells us things in his word that we’re to do, and we repeatedly don’t do them, we can’t really claim that we’re worshipers of God. Whatever it is that we obey, whatever it is that we serve, is what we worship.

And I asked you last week to take stock, take inventory of your life, as I take stock and take inventory of my life, and it’s not a fun thing to do. But hopefully if we ask ourselves these questions and look at what worship really is, we can determine whether or not we’re truly worshiping God, and if we’re not, what do we need to do to remedy it? But by asking ourselves what drives our decision making, what is it that we honor, what is it that we obey, we can determine what we worship.

And we’re going to talk this morning about whom do we worship? Who is it that we worship? And we begin looking this morning at John chapter 8, starting in verse 31.

Now, Jesus has already been speaking to the, it says the Jews here, it means the unbelieving Jews. Some of the Jews that he talked to had already, even in this crowd, had already believed in him. But there were some that were just obstinate and stubborn, and they didn’t believe in him, and they were going to critique him and criticize him and do everything that they could to try to destroy him.

And it had started, well, one of the things that had started it was his preaching on him being the light of the world, him bearing record of himself, him judging, him forgiving sins, those sorts of things that we talked about a moment ago. In verse 31, Jesus said to those Jews, then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, if you continue in my word, then you are my disciples indeed. and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

So he’s speaking in this crowd to the people who have already believed in him and says, if you’ll continue in my word, you’re my disciples. In other words, if you’ll obey me, if you’ll do what I tell you to do, you’re my disciples and you’ll know the truth and the truth will make you free. And the truth does make us free.

And they answered him, these are not the people he’s speaking to, but the others in the crowd hearing him who are not believing on him, So they answered him, we be Abraham’s seed, and we’re never in bondage to any man. How sayest thou, you shall be made free? So the question to Jesus is, who are you to say that we can be made free?

We’ve never been in bondage. Don’t you know we’re the descendants of Abraham? Don’t you know who our great, great, great, great grandfather is?

I’m sure there were a few more greats in there than that. But don’t you know who he was? Don’t you know where we’ve come from?

How dare you say that we’re in bondage to anything? How is it that you can say you’ll be made free by believing in the truth when we were never in bondage? And Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.

And the servant abideth not in the house forever, but the Son abideth forever. If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. So he tells them that if you’re serving sin, you are the servant of sin.

Pretty easy stuff. If you’re obeying sin, sin is your master. And what he tells him is that the servant doesn’t abide in the house very long.

And what I understand that to mean is he’s saying, you know, for now, sin is your close buddy. And it’s fun and it’s something you enjoy, but eventually that sin rears its head. The mask comes off the monster.

You see it for what it really is, and it has enslaved you. And no longer are you living in the house with the master, but you’re out back in the servant’s quarters. So he says, the servant doesn’t abide in the house long, but the son abideth forever.

Talking about himself. If the son, therefore, shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. So he says, when I set you free from sin, you really are free.

Now he’s not promising them sinless perfection. What he’s promising them is that sin is not going to rule over them. They’re not bound to do the things that sin compels them to do.

And we think in this world that not, the world thinks that not to serve Jesus is to be free. That not to be a Christian is to be free. Because you can do whatever you want.

What they don’t realize is that there are, as we’re going to see here in a moment, there are no free agents in this world. Everybody is serving something. Everybody is worshiping something.

As I told you last week at the beginning of the message, everybody worships. Man was designed to worship. And everybody worships something.

We can’t help it. Now, some people worship themselves. Some people worship money.

Some people worship scholarship and intellect. Some people worship pop culture. But make no mistake, everybody worships something.

There are no free agents. And this idea that not to be a Christian means you’re free because you can do whatever you want. They don’t even realize they’re in bondage to sin.

This morning, if you’ve never trusted in Christ, you’re in bondage to sin. And there’s no freedom in that because you think, I can do whatever I want. but you don’t realize that you sin because you can’t help it.

That our human nature, and I’m not just pointing the finger at you out here, that’s true for me as well. Born in that sin nature, I sin because I can’t help it, couldn’t help it. And yet the Bible says he makes us free.

For the first time as a believer, you have the choice to do the right thing. For the first time you have a choice. Does that mean that we no longer sin as believers?

No. But it means we are made free to do the right thing. We’re made free to follow God.

So he says, If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. I know that ye are Abraham’s seed. I know you’re Abraham’s descendants, but you seek to kill me because my word hath no place in you.

I speak that which I have seen with my father, and ye do that which ye have seen with your father. So he tells them, I know who you are. I know you’re the descendants of Abraham, but that apparently doesn’t mean anything.

As I explained to you when we studied the book of Galatians on Sunday nights, they were so concerned with descent from Abraham because they thought that made them righteous before God. In this time and later on in Paul’s time, they thought that being a descendant of Abraham made them in righteous standing before God, meant that they were acceptable before God. What they didn’t realize, they were so hung up on Abraham, but they had missed the message that Abraham’s life taught because even in Genesis it says that Abraham was justified by faith.

and I told you at that time when preaching on that I have an ancestor a few generations back who was a Wesleyan circuit writing preacher in Missouri and I didn’t know this until I went on ancestry. com and that’s not a commercial for them by the way I’m just telling you what happened I read an obituary for him where they were talking about what an incredible man he was and preaching the gospel and and faithful in his ministry and and I thought that man had a wonderful testimony and back then, you know, they said he preached the gospel. It wasn’t just a feel-good, do-better, live-your-life kind of message.

He was preaching the cross and the blood. And I thought, how foolish would it be if I thought that being descended from a preacher, circuit rider, somehow bought me any favor with God while ignoring his message that it was through Christ alone that we have salvation. I mean, that would be absolutely foolish.

Every week I give an appeal at the end of the message to trust Christ, to trust his sacrifice, his blood shed on the cross for forgiveness of sins. And it would break my heart if someday my children and grandchildren thought, ah, my dad, my granddad, he was a preacher. That must bring me some good standing before God.

That must make me all right with God and completely ignore, you know, be so hung up on their descent from me and ignore what I preached. Folks, for them to say, we’re the descendant of Abraham and our entire relationship with God depends on that fact, and yet ignore what Abraham was all about, was a terrible, terrible mistake. He said, I know you’re Abraham’s seed, but yet you want to kill me, the Messiah you’ve been promised all this time, you want to kill me because my word is not in you.

In other words, you profess to be descended from Abraham, but you are nothing like him. I speak that which I’ve seen with my father, and ye do that which you’ve seen with your father. He says, the words I bring and the actions I do come from my father and yours come from yours.

And by the way, he’s not talking about Abraham as we’re going to see in just a moment. They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. And Jesus saith unto them, if you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham.

In other words, if you were Abraham’s children, you would obey God. If you were Abraham’s children, you would trust God. If you were Abraham’s children, you would have faith in God instead of being hung up on your biological descent and your traditions and all these things that you’ve added.

If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill me, a man which hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God. And this did not Abraham.

He said, you would have done the works of Abraham if you were really his children, and yet now you want to kill me for telling you the truth. That’s not what Abraham would do. In other words, he makes up the WWAD bracelet, hands it out to him, says, What would Abraham do?

Yeah, the things you’re doing, that’s not it. That’s not it. What would Abraham do?

Exactly the opposite of what you’ve been doing. This did not Abraham. He says, again, you do the deeds of your father.

Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication. We have one father, even God. They’re still not getting it.

Every time he mentions their father, they think it has something to do with their lineal descent. Again, when he says, you’re not from Abraham, you do the works of your father, Abraham’s not your father, they think he’s talking about them being born outside the family of God. We’re Israelites, we’re descendants from Abraham.

Abraham’s our father, God’s our father. We’re not illegitimate here, were part of this. And Jesus said unto them, If God were your father, you would love me.

For I proceeded forth and came from God, neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Okay, you profess to love God. If you loved him, if you were one of his children, you would love me as well, because he sent me.

Why do ye not understand my speech, even because ye cannot hear my word? They had closed their minds to the point where they were not even willing to hear, they were not able to hear the preaching of the truth that Jesus brought to them. He said, why do you not get it?

It’s because your ears are closed. We are of ye, I’m sorry, not we, that would completely change the meaning of the text. He says to them, ye, unbelieving Jews that have come trying to kill me, ye are of your father the devil.

My goodness, what a bold thing to say to people who already want to kill you. Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father you will do. Not just the works of your father, but the lusts of your father.

In other words, he says, you are of your father the devil, you’re just like him, and the horrible wicked things that he’s put in your mind to do, that’s exactly what you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it.

Wow. He tells them that they were just like their father, the devil, that everything, and then calls out all the, in general, all the things that he’s done wrong, that he’s a murderer, that he’s a liar, that he’s not willing to abide in the truth, that he’s actually the father of lies, and he tells these people, you are just like him. I can’t imagine a more scathing indictment on anybody.

And because I tell you the truth, you believe me not. Which of you convinces me of sin? And by the way, I want to point out here, they’ve been talking about Abraham being their father.

And he turns around and says, you’re of your father the devil. He doesn’t mean that the devil was their biological father. I understand there are some people who misinterpret, not here, I don’t think, but I understand there are people who misinterpret the early chapters of Genesis to believe that demons can father children, and that’s not what I read in the Bible.

He’s not talking about the devil being their biological father, but their spiritual one. And he says, which of you convinces me of sin? Which of you, that word also means convict, which of you brings a credible accusation of sin against me?

And if I say the truth, why do you not believe me? None of you have been able to prove that I’ve sinned or that I’ve broken the law or that I’ve lied, and yet when I tell you the truth, if I’m not lying, I’m telling the truth, and yet when I tell you the truth, you will not believe me. He that is of God heareth God’s words, Ye therefore hear them not because ye are not of God.

And he tells them, if you were God’s children, if you were God’s children, you would hear and listen to his words. He said, but you don’t hear, you don’t listen to God’s words because you’re not of God. Then answered the Jews and said unto him, Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil.

Apparently they’d been going around and critiquing Jesus by telling the people that he was a Samaritan. And if you recall much about this time period at all, they hated the Samaritans. absolutely thought they were less than the dirt that they walked on.

Because these are the descendants of the people, the Israelites who had intermarried with the pagan countries around them when God said, don’t do that. And they’d had generations and generations of descendants, and the Jews looked on them and said, these people are absolutely terrible. They’re absolutely worthless.

Unless it sounds like I’m being too hard on the Jews, the Samaritans felt the same way about them. There was no love between these people. And so when they couldn’t convince people that Jesus was wrong, they started a little whisper campaign to attack his character and tell people, oh, he’s just a Samaritan or that he has a devil.

And so when he says all this about being from God and them being from Satan, and if they were really God’s people, they would hear him because God sent him. They say, say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil? In other words, don’t we have good reason to tell people that you’re a Samaritan and that you have a devil?

Because, see, they admitted that there were miracles in his ministry, but they had the idea that when he knew their thoughts or he was able to heal people or any of these things, they thought, surely the devil, surely the devil did it. See, it didn’t enter into their mind that God could be working through him. So don’t we have a reason?

I mean, listen to the things you’re saying, Jesus. Don’t we have every reason to believe these things about you? Jesus answered, verse 49, I have not a devil, but I honor my Father, and ye do dishonor me.

And based on everything he said up to this point in dishonoring him because he was sent by the Father, they dishonored the Father as well. And I seek not mine own glory, there is one that seeketh and judgeth. And everything about Jesus’ ministry, everything we read about Jesus, he came here to honor his Father.

He came here to do the will of his Father. He came here to see his Father glorified. Now that’s not to say that he’s not equal to the Father, but when he came in human form, he was here to honor the Father.

That was his mission. And we see repeatedly Jesus submits his will to the fathers, we see repeatedly where he shows reverence to the Father, honors him, glorifies him, and we see repeatedly throughout the scriptures where Jesus obeys the Father, where he serves the Father. And what we see is that Jesus, God in human flesh, worships God the Father.

Now that doesn’t make him a separate God or a lesser God. I still believe what the Bible teaches, that there’s one God in three persons, and yet somehow God the Son worships God the Father. He’s worthy of it.

I can’t argue with it. And when he talks here about seeking the honor of one, and there being one who seeks and judges, he’s talking about God the Father, and he’s talking about a worship of God the Father. And what we’ve talked about up to this point has been their attitude toward Jesus Christ. And because of their attitude toward Jesus Christ, what we can tell about their attitude toward God the Father.

See, the Pharisees and the unbelieving Jews had at that time no real reverence for God. Now, they might have had some outward reverence. They might have even thought that they honored God.

But when you got right down to it, their traditions were the most important things to them, their traditions and their rules. And it really didn’t come from a love for God. It came out of a love for the traditions and the rules.

And these, by the way, not being the law of God even, but extra rules that they had set up. And everything that they had done, Jesus calls them out for hypocrisy and pretense and show, and everything was ultimately for their own glory, to let everybody see how good and how religious and how right they were. And we know that if they were open to correction from God the Father, if they had hearts that at all were sensitive toward God the Father, they would have been more receptive to the message of God the Son.

You know, sometimes there are people who are wrong but are sincere in their love for God and are open to correction. I think of Apollos, Later on in the book of Acts, where he was teaching the baptism of John. And Paul, or I can’t remember if it was Paul, he’s asked if he’s heard of the Holy Spirit.

I’m sorry, I’m mixing up two stories here. He was preaching an incomplete gospel because all he knew was John’s baptism. And yet he was not a heretic.

He was not somebody who was out to try to deceive people. When Christian believers came and said, let us explain this to you more fully. and they taught him about Christ, and they taught him about the Holy Spirit.

What we see from then on is Apollos being an incredible preacher, an incredible teacher of the gospel, somebody who led people to Christ and did amazing things in ministry. Sometimes there are people who are wrong but open to correction. Now, that’s not to say that it’s good that they’re teaching wrong things.

Not at all. But these men had no love for God in their hearts because if they did, in their wrong teaching and in their wrong behavior, when God had sent somebody to speak to them about it, they would have been receptive to his message. And yet the Son of God, sent by God the Father, comes to them and preaches what God had been talking about already for 4,000 years throughout the Old Testament, that he would send a Messiah to deal with the sins of the people.

They wanted to kill him. These people had no love of or fear for God. So what we see is when he’s talking about their obedience toward God, when he’s talking about the fear or the reverence that they clearly don’t have for God, or the fact that they’re not submitted to God, All of these things coincide with, incidentally, what the Bible teaches about worship.

And we see a clear contrast here between what they were worshiping, their traditions and their ideas and themselves and their glory, versus what Jesus is worshiping when he says, I haven’t come to seek my own honor, but my father’s. He talks about there being one who seeks and judges, worshiping the one true God. And we see a contrast here between those worshiping God and those who are not worshiping God.

And I told you this morning that what we’re going to talk about, and I know I haven’t started even the first point, but we are almost through. Sometimes I like to go through the passage and set the stage and explain what it’s talking about and then come back and apply it. In the question, whom do we worship?

Everybody is worshiping something. And God’s children worship Him. If you’re following along in the bulletin with the blanks, that’s your first line of blanks.

God’s children worship Him. As God’s children, if we belong to God, we worship Him. It says in verses 38 through 41, Jesus is talking and says, I speak that which I have seen of my father.

You do that which you have seen of your father. If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which have not heard of God.

This did not Abraham. And he was talking about if they were God’s children, they would serve him. They would obey him.

They would fear him. In other words, if they were God’s children, they would worship him. If they were God’s children, they would worship him.

Jesus, in a way that nobody else can claim to be, was and is God’s child. He is God the Son in a unique way. And he came and talked about seeking only the honor of his father, only serving the one, the one who seeks and judges.

If we are God’s children, we worship him. All the things we talked about last week, what is worship? How do I know what I worship?

If we are God’s children, our answers should indicate that we worship God. Now, I’m not saying if last week you took the test that we talked about and came to the conclusion, I’m worshiping my money or I’m worshiping my job. I’m not saying that that means you are not saved.

What I’m saying is that means if you are saved and you’re worshiping something other than God, if we’re saved, if we’ve trusted Christ and we belong to him and we are worshiping something other than God, we need to knock it off. Because God’s children worship him. That’s the goal. God’s children worship him.

Second, we see that the world worships Satan by default. Oh, but the people we know outside these four walls aren’t Satan worshipers. You may know some.

I don’t know any offhand. The nice people who live down the street and don’t trust Christ, I mean, they’re nice, good people. They don’t have pentagrams on their driveway and slaughter cats.

I don’t know what Satan worshipers do. But how can we call them Satan worshipers? I’m not saying this morning if you’re sitting in this room and you’re not a believer, I’m not saying you do any of those things.

But what he tells them, he’s looking at these Pharisees, these outwardly religious people, and telling them basically, in essence, they worship Satan. They are of their father, the devil, and they obey him, and they do the things that he does. There are other places in the New Testament the Bible identifies all the idolatrous systems of the world as basically front organizations.

And we talked last week about all the things that people can worship, money and relationships and jobs and all these things. They’re really all idols, and all idols are fronts for one thing. 1 Corinthians chapter 10 says, What say I then that the idol is anything, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is anything?

But I say, this is Paul speaking, that the things which Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God. I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. And what he’s talking about, Nobody in Corinth thought that they were worshiping Satan, that they would come to sacrifice to the idol of the sun god or the moon goddess or any of these things.

And Paul’s saying when they sacrifice to those idols, what they’re really doing is sacrificing to Satan. See, Satan doesn’t come at us so overtly and say, here I am with red scales and a pitchfork, bow down and worship me. No, Satan’s more subtle than that.

And he knows that, I believe he knows that in a place like, especially a place like we live, most people are not going to be pulled astray if he came to us very clearly showing who he was and said, bow down and worship me. And yet he can say, you can worship your job, you can worship money, you can worship television, you can worship the celebrities. It’s all right.

See, we don’t have to specifically worship him to be drawn away from the worship of God. And any idol that we worship, We’re indirectly giving worship to Satan, according to what I believe the Bible teaches. When he says the idols that the Gentiles sacrificed were to Satan.

Now, again, nobody is going to say, well, very few people are going to say, I want to go bow down in the middle of a big star and sacrifice animals. But it’s a lot easier for Satan to say, don’t worry about God, come over here and do this. See, Satan often comes in a clean-cut form, looking respectable, looking religious.

And yet it’s empty worship, worship of a false God because it’s not worship of the true God. And the Bible makes it clear that there are only two people, if I can use the word people loosely. There are only two beings that are worshipped.

The Bible talks about people belonging to God or talks about