When God Rejects Our Religion

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Transcript:

Amos chapter 5. What we’re going to be talking about this morning, there are really times when people outwardly look like we’re serving the Lord, when outwardly the things that we do make us appear to be good Christians, make us appear to be righteous, but there’s nothing of that sort going on on the inside because our hearts are not right with God. This was the case in ancient Israel so many times.

It’s the case in America today, now, I mean, every time, ladies and gentlemen, every time I see a politician, Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter, walk down the stairs of the Capitol or walk out the doors of a church with the giant Bible, the family Bible tucked under their arm on Sunday because they’re off to church to show America what great Christians they are, or they get up and make speeches and try to get people to vote for them because of what great Christians they are, and then in their personal lives, in their voting, in any other thing, there’s no evidence of that anywhere. It bugs me, and it should bug all of us. When they have the Oscars or the Grammys, and I don’t watch any of these award shows, not because, well, they may be evil for all I know, but it’s not because they’re evil that I don’t watch them, it’s because I could not care less if I tried.

But I hear later on, oh, did Did you hear so-and-so thanked God in his speech and talked about how God is his inspiration? No, I saw the previews for that movie he won the Grammy for. You don’t win Grammys for movies.

What do you win for the movies? Oscars, yes. See, I’m completely ignorant of pop culture.

I saw the previews for the movie he won that Oscar for, and I can tell you, if God was his inspiration for that movie, it’s not the same God I pray to. But we live in a society where it’s considered normal, socially acceptable, even praiseworthy to get up in front of the cameras, whether you’re a Hollywood celebrity or whether you’re a Washington politician, and flaunt your religiousness, if that’s the right word, to flaunt your love for and devotion to God when in regular life there’s no evidence of it whatsoever because the heart is not where it needs to be. The heart, what is going on in the heart is not the same thing that is displayed on the outside.

And we fall into this trap too. It’s easy for me to stand up here and gripe about politicians or gripe about movie stars, but we do some of the same things. I won’t say that as people who are here involved in church, we are probably not as bad as the examples I’ve given, but that’s really not an excuse because not as bad as the person next to me doesn’t equal righteous before God.

See, we’ve all fallen short before a holy God and we’re all just as worthy of condemnation. But we fall into this too, that we can appear outwardly righteous. We can appear that we’re here on Sunday serving God, loving God, doing what we’re supposed to.

We talk to people about going to church and then our lives on other days don’t necessarily meet up with that. Folks, we have got to be on guard against that kind of thing. Not only because people view us rightly so as hypocrites when we behave that way.

But folks, also because it doesn’t impress God in the slightest. when we are outwardly religious and our hearts are not what they need to be before God. And folks, I’m not necessarily talking about the times that we’re thinking, I don’t really feel like going this morning, don’t really feel like going to church, don’t really feel like reading my Bible, but I’m going to do it anyway. There’s been a debate that I’ve heard rage for years about, well, if I don’t feel like going to church, I know I’m supposed to go, but if I go, am I not just going for the wrong reasons?

because I’m going because I feel like. . .

Folks, when God tells us to do something, I don’t feel like it is not an appropriate reason for not doing it, okay? And I’m not going to attack you and make you feel bad if you don’t feel like coming to church and don’t come, okay? That’s not what this message is about this morning.

But, you know, I have said to people as a pastor, well, yeah, you don’t want to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and there’s something to that. But I will say also, you know, I don’t want to stand before God and say, well, I didn’t read my Bible, I didn’t go to church because I didn’t feel like it and didn’t want to do it for the wrong reasons. You know what, I told my son to do some things yesterday, and he kept telling me, I don’t want to do that.

Well, what I want and what you want are not the same thing, and guess who’s going to win here? Guess who’s in charge? Folks, there are times, I understand there are times that there are things that God has called us to do, and we don’t want to do it.

Not because we feel like, not because God, I don’t care what you say, not because I’m feeling rebellious, but God, I just don’t feel like it. I just don’t feel like getting up and going to church this morning. God, I don’t feel like putting the energy into reading my Bible this morning.

God, I don’t feel like praying this morning. Folks, we’ve all had those instances. We just don’t feel like it, and we do it anyway, and you know what?

What I’ve discovered is that when I do what God has told me to do, even when I don’t feel like it, I end up being glad that I did. There are times, preacher telling you this right here, there are times I don’t feel like going to church. There are times that I’m on Wednesday night going, is my headache bad enough for me to stay home?

Do I really want to get Benjamin out and deal with taking him to church? And you know what, even if I don’t feel like going, I go and I end up being glad that I did. Sometimes there are Sunday mornings.

There are Sunday mornings, I think, not necessarily now, but other places that I’ve pastored, I don’t feel like going. Nobody likes me there. You’ve probably seen the cartoon, if you’re on the internet at all, where the man is telling somebody, covered up with covers in the bed, get up, it’s time for school, and you see the speech bubble that says, I don’t want to go.

I have no friends there. Everyone hates me. I don’t like it.

And he says, but you’ve got to go. You’re the teacher. Okay, there are some times the pastor feels that way.

I don’t feel like going. Nobody likes me. Nobody listens to me.

But we go and we do what God’s called us to do. Whether you’re the preacher or you’re somebody sitting in the pews, we go and we do what God has called us to do, even if we don’t feel like it. And what I have discovered is once I get there, I’m glad I’m there.

I’m glad to be with God’s people, glad to be worshiping God. Thankful that I, you know, and feel better leaving. Glad that I came and did what God told me to do.

That is not what I’m talking about this morning. Okay, please understand. When I talk this morning, when the passage we look at this morning talks about the heart not being right before God, I’m not talking about those times that God has told us to do something and we know it’s the right thing to do, and maybe we even want to do it because it’s right, but we just don’t feel like it.

What I’m talking about is an instance where we get into a mindset of saying, you know what, I really don’t care what God wants. I want to do what I want to do. There’s a big difference between saying, God, I want to be obedient, but I just don’t feel like I can do that, and saying, God, I really don’t care what you’ve told me to do.

And a lot of times I feel like that’s where our nation is today, that outwardly we want to appear religious. Outwardly, we want to appear as though we are a country that seeks God’s favor and has God’s favor, but inwardly our hearts are far from God. I have become fascinated with the minor prophets of the Old Testament in the last few years, and it’s not because I want to preach about doom and gloom all the time.

Are you kidding me? Nobody wants to. That’s not fun to be the guy who comes in and preaches on judgment.

Several of you told me last Sunday that was a great message, and I thought, really? Because I felt awful after preaching about God’s impending judgment. But it’s there.

We’ve got to talk about it. But folks, what fascinates me so much about the minor prophets of the Old Testament, these little books at the back of the Old Testament that seem to get very little attention parallel so closely the situation that goes on in our own country. The way that people behave, the way that people live, the way that people treat God.

And in Amos, it was no different. God sent Amos to the northern kingdom of Israel. And if you know much about Amos at all, well, I should say, And what little we know about Amos from his book is that he probably came from the southern kingdom.

I’ve told you before, the two kingdoms split after Solomon died, and they sort of had this love-hate relationship like a brother and sister. We hate each other, and we can fight, but anybody else messes with the other one, and they have to deal with us. So they were rivals, and they were friends, and it was a complicated relationship.

For somebody to go from the southern kingdom to the northern kingdom and say, hey, king, you’re not doing it right, God said so. would have been an affront to them. It would be like somebody coming down from, quick, think of some northern state that we don’t look too kindly on.

It would be like somebody coming from New York City or from Massachusetts or from Southern California and saying, hey, Oklahoma, you’re not doing it right. We’d say, who are you to come and tell us what we’re not doing right? Who do you think you are?

God sent Amos, who was, he said, I’m not a prophet. I’m not a son of a prophet. He was wrong.

God called him to be a prophet. But he said, you know, I’m not from this priestly lineage. Who am I to be a religious leader?

He was a fig farmer and probably raised goats too from what we can piece together. He was not somebody that you’d look at and say, that’s the guy I’m going to follow. And yet God calls him from this rural part of the southern kingdom and says, you go to the northern kingdom and you tell them that they have disobeyed me, that they have been wicked and that I’m going to deal with them.

Because the southern kingdom at times had good rulers who would point them in the right direction toward God. A lot of times they had bad rulers who would point them in the wrong direction. The northern kingdom, not once did they ever have a king that we can look at and say, oh, he was good, I’d like him to rule over me.

Every one of them were awful. If you’re familiar with the story of Ahab and Jezebel and Elijah, What does it tell you when King Ahab was the cream of the crop as far as the northern kingdom was concerned? Awful, awful people.

And Amos was sent from the southern kingdom to go to the northern kingdom, not just to the country as a whole, but to go into the royal court and say, You have led God’s people astray. You have led the country to reject God. You have tried to appear righteous outwardly, but God says, I know what’s in your heart.

And so we go through five chapters of this, and this brings us to Amos chapter 5, verse 21, where this is God speaking through Amos, and he says, I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. And I read that first verse, and that just sounds like an awkward phrasing. I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

What he’s talking about here, he says the feast days. The days that got, these were not just parties that they had set up. There were feast days that the Jews were expected to perform, like the Passover, like the Feast of Tabernacles, things like that, where they were supposed to be mindful of certain things that God had done throughout their history.

That God had said, you’re going to prepare a feast, you’re going to sanctify this day, you’re going to set it aside as a day of celebration, of mourning, of repentance, yes, and all those things can go together, and a day of worship. And so they would prepare these feasts. And what he says here is when you do the Passover, when you do the Feast of Tabernacles, when you do the Day of Atonement, yeah, you’re out there doing these days, you’re out there having these celebrations and times of worship that I’ve commanded you to do.

You may be doing them the way that I told you to do them, but I hate it when you do it. The reason for that is because they were doing it outwardly. Outwardly, they were doing it correctly, but their hearts were not in it.

Their hearts were far from God as they were doing this, and we’ll see why in just a minute. And he says, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. When they would gather together to worship.

It’s been said in other places that the praises of God’s people, the worship of God’s people, are like a sweet aroma to him. And what he says basically when he says, I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. When they would come together, when they would gather together to worship, God was not going to be pleased.

As a matter of fact, it was going to be an offensive thing to God. When they would come together and say outwardly, we’re going to praise God together. We’re going to worship him.

and talk about how he rescued, how he preserved our nation during the time of the Passover. When the angel of death came to take the firstborn of every household in Egypt and those who were told by Moses to mark their door frames with the lamb’s blood, the angel of death passed over them. That’s where Passover comes from.

And we celebrate that every year to remind us of God’s redemption. We’re going to come together and praise God. But by the way, they’ve got something else going on the side.

And God says, I am not going to take any pleasure in these gatherings that you have, in these feasts, in these festivals. It’s going to be an offensive thing. It’s going to be an offensive thing to me.

Another way of phrasing this, another way of translating the Hebrew here, when it says, I will not smell in your solemn assemblies, is that I will not take any delight in your solemn assemblies. He says, though you offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them. Well, wait a minute.

God is the one who told them to offer the burnt offerings and the meat offerings. And folks, I’ve tried. I need to study some more on it.

But what I have tried to study in the past, I lost count at how many different kinds of offerings as far as animal sacrifices that they were supposed to participate in. But they didn’t just get together and say, hey, why don’t we spill some blood to make our God happy? God told them when he handed down the law that these are the sacrifices you need to make.

You need to make a sin offering. You need to make a burnt offering. You need to make a this or that.

And God told them exactly how to do it. God’s complaint here in verse 22 was not, you’re not doing the sacrifices right. And believe me, he does point out to people in other places in the Old Testament that they were not doing the sacrifices correctly.

His complaint here is not, you’re not going through the proper steps, proper channels, you’re doing something wrong. But he says, you’re offering me burnt offerings. You’re offering me meat offerings.

You’re putting these animals on the altar and offering them for your sins, just as I’ve commanded you to do, but I do not accept the sacrifices that you’re giving me. Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. And again, it was because even though they were bringing their fat beasts, ladies and gentlemen, they weren’t bringing God the scrawniest cows in the herd.

In many cases, they were bringing him the best they had to offer. I mean, what we would expect somebody to do, what we would hope they would do, what we would maybe hope we would do and don’t always do. They were bringing God the best they had to offer, and they were laying it on the altar as he had commanded them to, and God still says, no, I’m not accepting that.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy vials, your harps, your stringed instruments. Folks, I cannot imagine. And it’s hard to see that the kingdom of Israel, that the king of Israel at this time cared much But it’s hard for me to imagine that anybody who cared what God thought at all would not be horrified at being told, don’t you sing praise to me anymore.

Get your songs of praise away from me. They’re offensive to my ear. I don’t want to hear it.

I’m not going to listen to your words. I’m not going to listen to your hearts. Get it away from me.

Folks, we come together and we offer God praise and we offer worship. We sing to him and we sing about how great he is. We sing about the great things that he’s done.

Hopefully we praise him throughout the week, and I’m not just talking about singing. Hopefully we tell other people how great he is and how good he is. And the distinction being there in my mind, how great he is, the awesome things that he’s done, and how good he is, how amazing his character is.

Folks, we don’t just praise God for the things that he’s done for us. We praise him for who he is also. Because I maintain, I’ve said many times over the last few years, and I still maintain it to be true, that even if God had never given us any good thing, if God had never blessed us with anything, just because of who he is, he would still be worthy of all the praise and worship that we could offer him.

And we come together and we praise God and the Bible says that the praise of his people is a pleasant thing to him. And to hear when you’re one of the leaders of Israel who are supposed to be God’s chosen people, leave me alone, get those praises out of my ear, those are offensive to me. I would think for me that would cause me to seriously step back and take stock of the way I’m living my life.

So he says, take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy vials. He says, but let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. And folks, what he’s saying here, God basically has rejected every kind of religious activity that they were involved in.

Now, what could possibly make God respond to his people this way in the Old Testament? What could possibly make God respond to the nation of Israel in this way when they were doing the things he commanded them to do? It wasn’t, folks, it was because they had sin in their lives, but it wasn’t just sin.

It was the way their hearts were divided in their loyalty toward God. They were wholly given to idolatry. W-H-O-L-L-Y, not H-O-L-Y.

They were entirely given up to idolatry. They had this idea that we can worship God. We can worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and we can worship these others also.

There was a divided loyalty. Let me make this as perfectly clear as I know how to make it. In the service of the one true God, there is no room for divided loyalty.

There is no room. There is no room for two gods where one of them is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when one of them is the father of the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s no room. See, the Romans, they didn’t care how many gods you worship.

You could worship Jupiter. You could worship Saturn, as we’ll see in just a minute. You could worship Mars.

The Greeks were the same way. They had a lot of the same gods just under different names. You could worship Zeus and Apollos and Athena.

They didn’t care. Worship three of them. Worship 80 of them.

Worship all of them. In Hinduism, they’ve got a whole pantheon of gods, too. And you can worship all of them.

As a matter of fact, the Romans worshipped their Caesar as a god. And to them, we don’t care if you pray to Jesus also, as long as you bow down to Caesar, too. What’s one more God, they thought?

The God of the Bible is exclusive. He says, you shall have no other gods. He says it in the Ten Commandments.

He says it all throughout the Old Testament. He says it in the New Testament. He says, there is no one else.

The God of the Bible expects to be the Lord and master of our lives. And as Jesus says, a man cannot serve two masters. We cannot worship something else and still worship God.

because to worship God the way he expects to be worshipped means to give him all of our worship. And so their problem wasn’t just sin, it was the fact that they had abandoned the worship of the one true God because they thought we can worship him, and we can worship these others as well. And he’ll be fine.

He’ll be fine with whatever we bring him, however we worship him. As long as we’re worshiping him, he won’t care. No, God says, I want all of your attention, all of your focus.

He says, have you offered unto me sacrifices and offerings wilderness 40 years, O house of Israel. And they had offered him. They had offered him sacrifices.

He points them back again to their divided loyalty during the 40 years. Seems to me they had problems even during the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness after they came out of Egypt, because they were no sooner out of Egypt than they built the golden calf. They were no sooner out of Egypt than some of them began appealing to the gods of Egypt.

Well, we should just go back to them and their gods rather than live out here and die. And they grumbled and they complained against God the whole time. And as soon as they were into the promised land, you read the book of Judges and you probably think, do these people never learn?

Because they would continuously go back to the worship of these other gods and countries around them and do, as the book of Judges said, every man what was right in his own eyes. They had offered him sacrifices all this time, but they had a divided loyalty. Their hearts were not right before God.

And here’s where it gets scary in verse 26. But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Kion, your images, the star of your God, which ye made to yourselves. Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts.

And so he tells them because of their divided loyalty, because their hearts were not right before God, not only was he rejecting their worship, not only was he rejecting the show that they were putting on and saying, yeah, we serve God, we’re religious, we’re good Jews. He was rejecting their show, but he was going to send them into captivity in Assyria, as he says so many times through here, and eventually he does. But he points out to them, lest they say, well, we’re not doing anything wrong.

He says, exactly what you’re doing wrong here is you worship Molech, you worship Chayon, and you carry their idols around with you. You carry things around with you to help you to worship them. They were putting on a show of worshiping the one true God, and that’s all it was, was a show.

Maybe very convincing outwardly, but man looks on the outward appearance and God looks on the heart, as David said. All the while they were carrying around in their hearts an affection for Molech and Cyan, which was also, this god Cyan was also known as Rimfan, who is the, I guess, the Canaanite equivalent of the Roman god Saturn. So they were worshiping these two gods, both of whom were fertility gods dealing with agriculture and things like that.

Kyan, as I said, was sort of the equivalent of Saturn, and they would perform rituals so that he would cause things to grow, so that he would help with their livestock and all that sort of thing. And folks, they had the God of Israel who, they didn’t need a God of this, a God of that, a God of agriculture, a God of wisdom. Folks, they had all of that in the God of the Bible.

And they would carry around their amulets and their idols and their things close to their hearts for cayenne or rim fan or saturn however you want to call it but this worship of molek is even scarier is even worse molek was another canaanite fertility god that looked like a bull and I’ve looked at some pictures of some of the idols last night on the internet and it was frightening it look folks the cows I’m used to seeing other than driving to and from here I’m used to the Chick-fil-A cows. Looks nothing like that. It looks nothing like the happy cows that you see in the California cheese commercials.

These are not happy cows. This is a big angry bull with glowing eyes. And what they would do is they would make a hollow statue.

Sorry, I don’t mean to make light of it. They would make a hollow statue of this bull sitting there with outstretched arms. And they would set a fire inside the statue to where eventually the metal would glow red. And again, there are the arms there, and a big open mouth.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not just my speculation. This is borne up by history, and it’s talked about in the Old Testament as well. To placate the god Molech, they would make sacrifices.

They would put their children, they would put their children in the arms of the statue. And depending on how that particular statue that they had in their particular temple worked, the children would either be cooked alive on the arms of the statue, or the statue’s arms would fold back and throw the child into the mouth and down into the fire. And they would worship around this statue, and they would play flutes, and they would play harps and things.

Folks, maybe even the same harps that they were using in the worship of the one true God. And they would play this music, and they would sing in order to drown out the screams of the children they had just sacrificed. And I read this, and not to get political on you, but I read this, and I read about their civilization, And I think how wicked does a nation have to be to sacrifice its own children?

And in one of those parallels between us and the ancient Israelites, I see we do the exact same thing. Folks, we’ve got not only is there abortion, which is the first thing that comes to mind, but we are in a time when people sacrifice their children to their own desires. They either abuse or neglect their children, or they just let their children run wild because they’re too busy pursuing what they want out of life to take care of their children.

Folks, we as a nation are sacrificing our children. They were doing the same thing. And they were doing it to placate this God and to get what they wanted out of this God, Molech.

And God looked at it. And folks, when we see what they were doing with their children, it becomes a little easier for us to understand why God was so upset. I mean, we would look at this and say, you know, really?

Get your worship out of my ears? That seems kind of harsh. Folks, the same mouths they were praising God with were the same mouths that they were praising these other gods, and they were destroying their children.

They were destroying their nation. How sick and twisted did it have to be that these things were going on. And God says, you cannot worship that.

You cannot worship these filthy, stinking idols and turn around and worship me with the same mouth and the same heart. It doesn’t work that way. And I submit to you today, I know none of us go out and burn our children in statues, but there are real idols in America today.

There’s money. There’s wealth. power, prestige, influence, relationships, folks, you name it, beauty, you name it, there are idols everywhere.

Television, we could go on. A lot of us deal with the idol of self. And folks, these idols, these false gods that are served, that are worshipped, will cause us to sacrifice the things that are truly precious in order to get what we want.

And God says, I believe to us today, you cannot serve those filthy, stinking idols and turn around and praise me with the same mouth and the same heart. It doesn’t work that way. There’s a holy God who demands our entire heart, who demands all the praise and worship that we have.

And demand may not even be the right word because that makes it sound like he’s being unreasonable. Folks, it’s more than reasonable for God to expect everything we have because he deserves it. He deserves it.

And we can make an outward show of religion. It doesn’t impress God and it doesn’t benefit us at all. And just three things real quickly here that I see in this passage that applied to them and applied to us as well.

When our hearts are not right, God is not honored in our gatherings. As it says in verse 21, they would come together in their solemn assemblies. They would keep the feast days.

They would gather together and worship. And God took no pleasure in that because their hearts were not right. Their loyalties were divided.

Ladies and gentlemen, we can come to church. I’m not telling you stop coming to church. We can come to church and we can put on a good show on Sunday, carry our big family Bible under our arm, and put on a good show for the other people in town and say, look how religious he is, and yet have a heart that is not fully given over to God that is instead involved in the worship of idols throughout the week.

And folks, it does not impress God and it does not benefit us because God rejects that kind of worship. God rejects that kind of religion. And I say that realizing that I am guilty at times.

We all have idols. And folks, as long as we are on this side of eternity, It is a daily struggle to sweep those idols out of the temple of our hearts. But folks, when we let those idols grow and we worship them and we give lip service to God, he’s not impressed with it.

And folks, God rejects our worship no matter how much we come together and no matter how good we look outwardly. When our hearts are not right, God is not honored in our gatherings. Is God more honored, ladies and gentlemen, by a group of people who gather together and there’s no pretense, there’s no show?

Folks, maybe a gathering like this, I’ve told some of you, before. One of the things I love about this church, Sandy will come up here or Michaela and say, okay, what are we going to sing this morning? And it’s not planned out.

It’s not, I mean, there may be some preparation involved. I don’t mean it that way, but it’s not scripted. If we need to do something different, there’s room for the Holy Spirit to move.

Nobody is here putting on a show. And I love that. Is God more honored by a group that comes together and there’s no pretense, there’s no show.

We’re here. We realize we’re fallen sinful people and we’re trying to love and serve God, or is God more honored by a s