Why Do We Worship?

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Transcript:

Well, this morning, as we continue our series on worship, if you would join me in one of my favorite chapters of the Bible, Acts 17. And we’re going to talk this morning about why do we worship. We’ve talked about what worship is, that it’s a pattern of submission to God where we humble ourselves before God.

It’s a pattern of reverence toward God where we lift him up as we bow ourselves. We lift him up at the same time we honor him. And it’s a pattern of service or obedience where we actually do what he tells us to do.

Where we know that God is our master and our owner and we act like it. Last week we talked about who do we worship. And we talked about the fact that there are only two options in the entire universe.

And that every idol that mankind has come up with, every idol that mankind has set up for himself, has ultimately just been a front for Satan to rob God of worship. And so we ultimately have only two entities in the universe that receive worship, and only one of them is deserving. This morning, we’re going to talk about why we worship.

I told you last week that God is deserving. God alone is deserving of worship. And today, we’re going to explain why that is.

In Acts 17, in the second part of it, we see Paul as he kind of strolls into the city of Athens when he’s on one of his missionary journeys. And he sees, as the Bible says, he sees the city wholly given to idolatry. That’s not H-O-L-Y, but W-H-O-L-L-Y.

Completely given over to idolatry. They had shrines up all over the city. They had hundreds of gods, if not more.

Now, one thing when it came to the ancient Greeks and worship, one place where they’ve got a leg up on us is they took their worship seriously. Now, unfortunately, they were worshiping the wrong things. But these people, for many of them, it was a daily, you know, they would go to the temple and worship.

They would set aside time out of their day. They would sacrifice of their wealth in their worship. And they made sure they were not going to miss because they believed their entire world depended on it.

You know, they had to worship the god of agriculture because their crops depended on it. They had to worship the fertility goddess because their family depended on it. And I’m not suggesting that we need to worship false gods, but one thing we could learn from the Greeks is that they took their worship seriously, a little more seriously than we do sometimes, I think.

But when Paul walks into Athens, when he walks into the city center, when he walks into Mars Hill in verse 22, it says, And Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. And some translations will say that you’re very religious. They were very religious, but they were religious about false things, false idols.

So I stand with the translation that they were too superstitious. For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, or the objects of your worship, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God. As he walks through Athens and he sees them worshiping Zeus, and he sees them worshiping Athena, and he sees them worshiping several of the others.

I don’t want to name other names because I get confused which ones are the Greek names and which ones are the Roman names. But you get the idea. As he walks through and sees them worshiping the sun god, and the goddess of the moon, and the goddess of fertility, and the god of wine, and sees them worshiping all these hundreds and hundreds of gods, they were so concerned about their worship and so fearful that they might have accidentally forgotten one that they put up an altar to the unknown God.

Now, to give you some idea of what this would be like in our society, I’m fully convinced that in many cases, sports is actually the predominant religion of our country. We saw a lot of that last week. I didn’t even know the Super Bowl was going on until it turned on the radio Friday and they were talking about it.

And I still am not sure I could tell you who won, but that’s all right. Y’all can tell me later. People just flocked to watch the Super Bowl.

And if you watch the Super Bowl, I’m not telling you you’re an idolater. But there were people whose entire year was oriented around the Super Bowl. There are people whose entire week is oriented around whoever’s throwing what ball through what apparatus.

That determines their week. I’ve heard of people back home who scheduled their weddings around the OU football schedule. Some of y’all laugh, and some of y’all are saying, yeah, I know people who’ve done that with the Razorback schedule.

And I can talk about Sooner fans because I don’t want to talk about Razorback fans and get run out of here. But I know people back home, thank you, I know people back home who are so obsessed with the sports, whatever sport it is, that they have practically made shrines in every room of their house. And some of you may have some things like signed footballs or a poster here or there.

Folks, that’s not what I’m talking about. Again, I’m talking about the obsession, the near worship that some people in our society have for sports. And it doesn’t have to be sports.

I could be talking about musicians or your favorite celebrity. We all know that people in our society worship different things. But I’ve known people who practically made every room in their house into a shrine.

Now, folks, I like OU football just as much as anybody. But there’s something unsettling to me about the idea of a poster of Barry Switzer watching me take a shower. Or the idea of sitting down to breakfast with Bud Wilkinson.

I just don’t want to do it. And yet posters and bobblehead dolls and penance and paraphernalia all over the house to where you can tell, obviously, a lot of time is spent on that and a lot of money. And again, as I said, I’ve known people who have virtually turned every room of their house into a shrine to the OU Sooners and to their players and coaches.

Imagine these people who worship football, so to speak, and they worship the players and worship the coaches, being so concerned in their worship that they might have left somebody out that they actually had a pennant or a jersey up there with a question mark for the number, and it says to the unknown player, to the one we might have accidentally forgotten, that guy that, you know, he was in the pictures back in 1908 and nobody remembers his name. It sounds silly to us, but they were so given to the worship of all these gods that they thought if we miss one, we’re in trouble. And so they had put up a shrine to the unknown God.

And Paul walks in and says, there is a God whom you don’t know. You’ve been worshiping him all this time and you don’t know him. Let me tell you about him.

And Paul begins to explain to them about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He begins to explain to them who the true God is and why He and He alone, standing in stark contrast to this pantheon of all these other gods, why He and He alone is worthy of worship. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning. As we talk about all the things that this world can worship, and all the things that this world does worship, all the things that vie for our attention and our affection that belongs only to God, on a daily basis, why is it that we should choose just this one God and give all of our worship and devotion to Him?

He tells them, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God, that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is the Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Now, for starters, what he’s saying here is he’s talking about the power of God.

Their gods were not all powerful, just as the gods that our society worships today are not all powerful. People are looking to all the things that they worship to bring them happiness and fulfillment and joy and power and whatever else, and they’re not going to find it in these false gods of our world. He points out that it was God who made heaven and earth.

In contrast even to the king of the Greek god Zeus, Zeus was limited somewhat in his powers, in his authority. And yet he speaks of our God and says it was him who made heaven and earth. And on top of that, he says, the true God does not live in temples made by human hands.

Now, it’s true that even at this point, there was a temple standing in Jerusalem dedicated to the worship of the one true God. And from time to time, the Spirit of God would come into the Holy of Holies and meet with the high priests. And that had gone on for centuries.

But still, it’s not as though God were contained within that stone box, as though God lived there and He was only there. And that was the only place he could go. To hear them tell it, you would think that their gods lived in these temples.

And the implication there was that their gods could only be in one place at a time. And Zeus could only be here. So if he’s here in the temple, he can’t tell what’s going on with you over here.

If he steps out of the temple to deal with you over here, then he doesn’t know what’s going on with your friend on the other side of town. And the idea that these gods dwelt, that they lived in temples made by human hands, indicates that they were not omnipresent, they were not omniscient, they were dependent on people to provide homes for them and to take care of them. But he says, the God, the unknown God, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, he’s the master of heaven and earth, he’s the one that made it, he does not dwell, he does not live in temples made by human hands.

Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, although he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things. In other words, he tells them the worship of the unknown God is not something that you can come and do like you do with all these other gods and you bring an offering, you bring some fruit, you bring some wine, you bring something and you set it there for him and you worship him with the offerings you bring with your hands. He doesn’t depend on that.

And as we’ve seen already the last couple weeks, biblical worship is not just a one-time thing, something we do for God and then we move on and forget about it. Worship is a pattern and a lifestyle. And if we think, I’m coming here today to worship, this is my worship, then we’re not worshiping.

What we do together as a so-called religious exercise, when we come together and worship, it should be, it must be just the culmination of what has gone on throughout the week individually as we serve God individually. We come here to humble ourselves and to reverence Him and to serve Him together as the culmination of having done so through the week. We don’t merely bring him an offering and set it on the table and forget about it.

Nor is God dependent on us to take care of him. For all their concerns that their gods could harm them or could help them depending on how they worshipped. For all their concerns that, hey, if I don’t bring an offering to Zeus today, he could strike my cattle with lightning.

For all their concerns about the power of their gods, their gods were pretty powerless to take care of themselves. We see even today in other countries. I’ve heard stories of temples in India where the priests go in every day.

Sometimes even in parts of Southeast Asia, people have idols and things in their homes. And the priest or the people that live at the house, depending on whether we’re talking about a temple or we’re talking about a shrine in somebody’s house, they’ll go in once a day or so, and they’ll take a cloth and a basin of water, and they’ll wash down the idol, and they’ll clean it up. Sometimes they have different houses.

They have a little box that the statue sleeps in and another one that they move it to during the day. And what we’re talking about here are powerless, impotent gods who are completely dependent on the people who worship them for anything. The people bring them food.

The people clean them. The people move them to the right box. The people put them night-night, as my son would say at the end of the night, at the end of the day.

And these gods they worship, they were so concerned about the power that they had over their lives and their destinies. And yet these gods, these idols, weren’t living beings. They were inanimate wood and clay and stone and gold and silver that was completely dependent on the people to move them around or to wash them or to take care of them.

Folks, I’m so thankful for a God who takes care of us instead of relying on us to take care of Him. Neither has He worshipped with men’s hands as though He needed anything. And there’s an important point, too.

God doesn’t need us. God doesn’t need anything from us. There are things that God desires from us.

A good question was asked of me a few weeks ago, why would God create us? Or why did God need to create us? And the short answer was God didn’t need to create us.

Within the Trinity, within the Godhead, there was perfect fellowship and unity. It’s not as though God was lonely. It’s not as though God even needed worship.

It’s not as though God had to create us to prove that He was worthy of worship. He’s worthy of worship had He never done anything for us at all. simply because of who He is.

God desires certain things from us. God desires our worship. God desires fellowship with us.

But it doesn’t mean He needs it. It doesn’t mean He needs us. Sometimes we get the idea that, well, God needs me to do such and such.

God needs me to help Him out with this. Folks, God doesn’t need anything from us. And God doesn’t need us.

On one hand, that sounds sad. God doesn’t need us. That sounds like He doesn’t care about us.

But the fact that God created us because He chose to and not because He had to or because He needed to, the fact that God loves us because He chooses to and not because He needs to, should make us feel even better. That what God does for us, that God’s creation of us, God’s care for us, God’s love for us, even God’s provision of salvation for us, comes because He desired to, not because anybody twisted His arm or He had some need that He had to fulfill. Neither is worshipped with men’s hands as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things.

See, their gods, many of their gods even had to be created. There’s a bizarre story. I can’t remember all the names of the gods, but there’s a bizarre story where a couple of the gods, in order to be born, they were located in somebody’s skull.

And not to be graphic or anything, But instead of just always existing as our God has, or even being born as gods, one of the gods had to go and split another god’s skull with an axe and get the miniature gods out of there. I mean, it’s bizarre stuff. How do gods who have not always been in existence, who were created themselves, how could gods who were created give life and breath to everything else?

The answer is they can’t. Their gods were powerless over life and death and breath. In contrast to the God of the Bible, who wasn’t caused by anything.

Nobody else made him. Philosophers have called him the uncaused first cause. He just always was.

There’s never been a time or anything before time when God wasn’t. God always has been. And so God in a unique way, our God in a unique way, has control over life and breath.

because only he was around in the beginning to give those things to everything else. And hath made of one blood, verse 26, all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth, on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation. So not only did he create all living things and give breath and give life to them, but it says he created mankind and he created all of us of one blood to dwell on the whole face of the earth.

He made the earth for us and then He made us to dwell all over the face of it. And it says He determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation. He drew the lines of where kingdoms and empires would meet.

He set in place where we could go, who would live where. That’s quite a bit of control, isn’t it? The times before appointed.

He not only determined who would live where, but He determined when they would live there. Now, I’m not saying God built your house and signed the deed to it, but as far as peoples and nations, God has had a plan from the beginning of who would be where and when and for what purpose. If you think that’s crazy, no, He didn’t do that.

Well, not only does it say that, but God chose a nation early on, early on in human history and said, you’re going to be my people. And God kept His hand on the Israelites for thousands of years when everyone else around them hated them and wanted them dead. God protected them.

God gave them a land. God appointed where they should live, all for the purpose of bringing the Messiah into the world. So God definitely has a plan for nations and peoples, all for His glory.

That they should seek the Lord, verse 27, if happily they might feel after Him and find Him, as though He be not far from every one of us. And so He points out that as God has worked human history, He’s done so in such a way that men might seek Him. Now it’s true the Bible says that there are none righteous, none who seek after God.

And it’s true. On our own, we don’t seek after God. On our own, we’re lost and sinful and we like it that way.

And yet God took the initiative of enabling every man to seek Him. God took the initiative of making Himself known and found to mankind. It says He’s not far from every one of us.

What a contrast between a little gold statue and the God of the universe who’s near to every one of us. There’s a restaurant that Christian and I love to eat at when we go back home, a little Thai restaurant. And it was about the third or fourth time we’d been in there that I noticed they had a little, looks like a birdhouse, in one of the corners of the dining room.

And in it, there’s a little gold statue, and I think it’s supposed to be Buddha. And I thought about that little statue the last time we were there eating lunch back around Christmas time. That these people, I guess, have at least some thought that the statue brings them some fortune.

That this idol they worship brings them some fortune. I don’t know that they pray to it and wash it every day, but they think it does something for them. And I sat there and looked at it and thought, right now, Buddha is very near me.

At least that one is. But we walked out and got in our car and left to drive home, and Buddha wasn’t there in the car with us. And that statue is not with them, with the owners of the restaurant, when they go home at night.

Now, for all I know, they may have another one at home, but that one, at times, is not very near them whenever they walk away from it. But, folks, we serve a God who’s omnipresent. He’s everywhere.

He’s everywhere. Able to be everywhere at all times. I can’t wrap my mind around that, but I know it’s true.

He’s able to be everywhere at all times. And so while they can walk away from their God and He’s powerless to follow them and He’s powerless to do anything, well, folks, He’s powerless to do anything even when they’re in His presence, but even more so when they’re out of His presence, He’s not there with them. Our God is near to each one of us, not very far from each one of us.

Verse 28, For in Him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are His offspring. And he’s quoting here the Greek writers Epimenides and Aretas, and using quotes from their own pagan worshipers, talking about, using them to explain the truth about who our God is. It’s in Him that we live and move and have our being.

It’s by Him that we exist. It’s by Him that our life is sustained. He says, for we are all His offspring. We are all here because He put us here.

He is responsible for each of us being here. now that sounds strange to say at first that he’s responsible for each of us being here but if you think about it going back however many generations it is we all eventually are descended from one of Noah’s sons going back to that we’re all descended from Adam and who put Adam here unless you listen to the crazy people on the History Channel who put Adam here? pop quiz God, thank you brother Daryl gets the gold star today ultimately God is responsible for each of us being here we’re all his offspring not in a biological sense but in the sense of him being responsible for us in our existence.

Their gods hadn’t created a single one of them. Verse 29 says, For as much then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man’s device. In other words, not only do we not serve an inanimate God, not only do we not serve a God who is dependent on us, but we also do not serve a God that we can manipulate and change and reshape according to our imagination.

And anytime man has, this is not specifically about the prohibition of making statues, but anytime man has tried to make some kind of image of God to help him in his worship, it has always led astray. Now I need to go back and double check this again, but I’m fairly certain as I read through the story of the Exodus the last time, It sounded to me as though when the Israelites told Aaron to make the golden calf, that they were not necessarily wanting to worship pagan gods. It sounds to me, and again, check this out for yourself, but it sounds to me like they were wanting Aaron to make this golden calf as something that they could look on as a symbol of God.

Again, go check that out for yourself. And yet it led them astray, because God had said he couldn’t be represented by statues and graven images. He told them, thou shalt not make any graven images, or bow down to them, or worship them.

And he tells us in Romans, Paul tells us in Romans, that mankind began to go astray when they thought God could be represented by birds and animals and fish and things. That they could have these images of God and look on them and worship Him. And pretty soon, before you know it, they began to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.

We don’t have a God who we can reshape after our own imagination and our own design. That’s what society likes to do, by and large, even in Christian circles. We have people, and this is one of the first messages I ever preached to you.

It was about the article in Christianity Today from a few years ago called The Divine Drama Queen, where they tried to reshape God into what they called an unreasonable Italian woman who throws things when she doesn’t get her way. I don’t know why some Italian group didn’t protest that, but it was just cranky fundamentalists like me who were opposed to that article, I think. Even in Christian circles, we have people saying, well, God is like this.

And the man went on to say that he wished he had a more reasonable God. And I wanted to answer and say, the God you worship is very reasonable. The God you worship is very tolerant and understanding, but the problem is the God you worship is not the God of the Bible, it’s a God of your own design.

And the world wishes that we had a God who could just ignore sin. The world wishes we had a God who was just like a Santa Claus that sits up in the attic and gives us whatever we want. But all the things the world wishes God was are not necessarily things He is.

They’re merely gods of their own imagination. And we don’t serve a God like that. We ought not think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

When you make an idol, you can make it look like whatever you want to. And yet he says we ought not to think that the Godhead is like that. And he tells them in verse 30, In the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent.

In the times of this ignorance God winked at. Now, it doesn’t mean God winked at it and he, oh, it’s all okay. It means God overlooked it for a little while.

See, God can’t overlook sin. He can overlook it for a little while. He can be patient.

He can be merciful in not giving us immediately what we deserve. I’ve told you before that none of us deserve the next heartbeat we have. We’ve all sinned against God.

I say that with myself included. I don’t deserve the next breath I take, and yet God is merciful to give it to me. He said the times of this ignorance and this idolatry God overlooked for a little while, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.

He commands it. God expects all men everywhere to turn from this idolatry and turn to worship Him and Him alone. Because he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men that he hath raised him from the dead.

Now this man that he talks about is Jesus Christ. And he goes on to speak of the resurrection. And some of the Greeks mock him because the idea of this resurrection was just bizarre to them. And yet some people believed as he talked about this.

But we can leave off from here because this pretty well summarizes what we’re going to talk about this morning in just the next few minutes, of why we worship the God that we worship. Why is it that the God of the Bible and Him alone is deserving of our worship? We see about five principles.

I know I normally try to do three because it’s easier for you to remember three things than five when you walk out of here, but some days you just can’t put God in a little three-point box. So I see about five principles in here that tell us why we worship God. Now the first is we worship God because He is the almighty creator of the universe.

It’s the first blank in your bulletin. He is the almighty creator of the universe. He is the one, our God.

Not Zeus, not Apollo, not evolution. I guess evolution has more to do with living things. Not some random chance occurrence, but our God.

is the one who formed the planets. It’s our God who formed the sun and the moon and the stars and formed all of these things into galaxies. It’s God who wrote the laws of physics.

It’s God who set up the laws of gravity and inertia, holding those things together, chemical bonds. Think, where does it say that? When it talks in the beginning chapters of Him creating light and Him creating time and space and matter and energy, They’re all in there in the beginning chapters of Genesis, all the things that you need in physics to have a universe.

He created all of them. All of these things, it was God. It was the God of the Bible.

To the people of Athens, the unknown God, who set these things in motion. No one else. If I were going to try to make a planet, if the people of NASA were to try to make a planet, they’d have to start with dirt or material somewhere that God already created.

I’m not sure of all the theological implications of it, but I remember hearing a joke when I was younger about a scientist getting into a contest with God. Now, it’s kind of absurd on the face of it that God would enter into a contest with us as though we’re his equals or he has anything to prove, but still a good story, I think. A joke about a scientist getting into a competition with God about creating life because the scientist said, you know, I can create life in my laboratory.

I could create a fully living organism out of non-life in my laboratory See, one of the laws of science is that life doesn’t come from non-life. And so I’ve never understood how by random chance life could be created. But the scientist said we could create life in the laboratory, and there are people who work on those kinds of things.

He said, and God, for whatever reason in the story, agrees to the wager, and God goes first, and he gathers up a clump of dirt, and from it creates a man and breathes life into the man as he did in the book of Genesis. And so God created life. And the scientist said, well, that was good.

And he starts with a clump of dirt, and God said, no, no, no, get your own dirt. Folks, even if we were to try to create a planet, even if we were to try to create a planet, we would still be using the dirt that God created or the gases that God created. Folks, there’s everything that we see.

Ultimately, it’s dependent on the fact that God is the almighty creator of the universe. And from nothing He spoke into existence all that there is. And at the very sound of God’s voice, light was created.

At the very sound of God’s voice, planets came into existence. At the very sound of God’s voice, mountains separated and the seas formed. Folks, there’s nothing that our God cannot do.

People want to know why we would want to take Sunday and come together and worship. Why we would want to orient our lives around a God who, as far as they are concerned, It spoils our fun with His rules and regulations. Reason number one why we worship God is because He is the almighty creator of the universe.

If somebody can look at an entity, at a being with that kind of power and not tremble a little bit, there’s something wrong with them. Something wrong with them. And as it says in verses 24 and 25, He made the world and all things therein, and He is the Lord.

He’s the master of heaven and earth. We worship Him because He’s the almighty creator of the universe. Reason number two, why do we worship?

We worship God because he is the sovereign ruler over the affairs of men. He’s not just the ruler, but he’s the sovereign ruler over the affairs of men. The difference between the ruler and the sovereign ruler is, I guess, sometimes a regular ruler can be overruled.

The governor is, in some senses, the ruler of the state, and yet, in certain instances, the president can overrule them. Now, I know that’s a simplistic view of it. That’s not most things.

We have the legislature and Congress and all those things working. But for example, in a military situation, the governor is the commander of the National Guard, and yet the president can overrule him and call them up for his own purposes, as far as I understand it. So the governor is a ruler, but he’s not a sovereign ruler.

God cannot be overruled. Now, God may at times allow people freedom to do things that are not in accordance with what he wants, but it’s in order to work things