A Wrong Way to Worship

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Well, in a lot of circumstances, it’s just as important to know what not to do as it is to know what we’re supposed to do. You’ve probably experienced some of this as well. I know this week, Charla and I went to install at the house a semi-permanent baby gate.

Because, you know, we’ve got these that you pull up on the lever every time you have to move the whole gate. That’s a lot of work. And sometimes we just have to keep Charlie corralled so he won’t get into stuff he’s not supposed to.

And so we ordered one of these really expensive ones on Amazon that was on sale right after Thanksgiving. We ordered one of these that I don’t even know how it works because it’s not solid at the top. I have no idea how it works.

But somehow or another, it anchors to the sides of the door frame, and then it’s got a little gate in the middle that you can just open, It’s so much more convenient. So we were going to install this, and the instructions, as they were telling you what to do, every page said, do not snip this cord that’s on the site. It said that on every stinking page from the beginning to the end.

Do not snip this cord until you’ve got it exactly where you want it. And, you know, I’m thankful that it had that instruction that said, do not snip the cord, because I would have probably snipped the cord first thing. Well, that zip tie doesn’t belong there.

And if you didn’t have that cord there, that zip tie, it wouldn’t have, one of the sides would have flopped or something. It wouldn’t have set up right. So next time we have to move it somewhere else, I’m not sure how we’re going to do it unless maybe we zip tie it again.

But I’m not sure how that works. But I’m thankful for the instruction that said, whatever you do, don’t do this. Okay, I wish more things came with those instructions that say, don’t do this.

And I mean practical instructions, not, you know, don’t drink scalding hot coffee through your nose kind of thing. Some of the instructions you look at and you think, what happened that they had to put this in the warning label? But, you know, there are some things that are really helpful, even for those of us with a little bit of common sense, that you think, I wish they would put that in the instructions.

You know, back right before deer season, I bought a shotgun. and I bought a 12-gauge, and I spent some money on it, and I read the book, I read the manual. I will read the instructions, unlike a lot of men. I will read the instructions before I do anything.

Nowhere in this instruction book, nowhere in the instruction book, the owner’s manual, anything, for this 12-gauge shotgun, does it say that you cannot shoot slugs through it because it’s got some kind of choke barrel. Some of you already know where I’m going with this. Because if you shoot slugs through this barrel, this tapered barrel, best case scenario, it gets stuck.

Worst case scenario, the thing explodes. There’s nothing in the book that says do not shoot slugs. No, I didn’t shoot slugs.

Thankfully, I’m so leery that I did even more research than the book. I’m fairly new to guns. I want to make sure I understand everything about it before I do anything.

So I did research on the internet. looked at YouTube videos about people using this gun and then came and asked Phil, should I shoot slugs in this? And well, here’s how you tell, here’s how you don’t tell.

I ended up taking it down to BDC and they said, no, don’t do that. Thank you for asking us before you. It would have been helpful if somewhere in the book they’d said, don’t put slugs in this because somebody somewhere I’m sure has made their gun explode by not being told.

You know, it helps to be told what not to do. And I hate those recipes. There’s a recipe for cupcakes I made a couple years ago where you go through the whole recipe and at the bottom, at the bottom of the page, there’s a little box that says, helpful tip, don’t overbeat the flour.

I’m a cook, I’m not a baker. Those are two different things. My wife will tell you, she’s a baker and not a cook.

Okay, there’s a difference. I didn’t know not to overbeat flour. That’s something you want to tell people at the beginning before they beat the flour.

You know, these little instructions that tell you what not to do are helpful to know in the beginning before you overbeat the flower. And, you know, it’s like eating a shoe leather. Thank you.

I was trying to think of something. Yes, shoe leather. Okay.

Sometimes the instructions on what not to do are just as important as the instructions on what to do. And the same is true of this series that we’re going through on worship. You know, the Bible doesn’t just tell us about worship and how to worship.

The Bible also has several places where it talks about how not to worship. It talks about the wrong kind of worship. And I could do a whole series on some of these things that the Bible says on what not to do in worship, but I didn’t want to stop mid-series and do a whole other series in the middle of it.

So this morning I’m going to take you through one of the important things that the Bible says not to do in worship. God’s Word has some instructions for us on what not to do. And so we’re going to look at one of the passages, again, one of many passages that talk about things we should avoid in worship, but we’re going to look at one of these passages this morning, which is in Matthew chapter 15.

This is probably a familiar passage to you if you’ve been here for any length of time. I feel like I preached on this passage for another application a couple of months ago, but we’re going to look at it this morning and see specifically what it says about about worship. So Matthew chapter 15, if you haven’t already turned there, and we’re going to look at the first 11 verses of the chapter.

Starting in verse 1, it says, Then the scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread. So what has happened already at this point, just to catch you up with the story, is Jesus is out there with his disciples.

They’re walking around doing, he’s doing ministry, he’s teaching them. The Pharisees are constantly looking for some reason to accuse Jesus or to attack Jesus, and they think they finally found something, but it’s one of these situations where they’re really grasping at straws. They don’t have a whole lot of ammunition.

The best that they can get Jesus, they can’t find where he’s sinned, they can’t find where he’s broken God’s law, so the best they can come up with is that his disciples don’t follow the traditions of the elders. They admit themselves that these are man-made rules. This was not, the Pharisees came and said, your disciples, shame on them.

Why don’t they wash their hands before they eat? Now, we would look at that and say, well, of course, why wouldn’t they wash their hands before they eat? That’s it.

But, you know, we know about the germ theory of disease. There are good reasons to wash your hands. This wasn’t about, you know, cleanliness, though.

This one of the washings that’s required by God’s law. There were certain ritual washings in the Old Testament law that they were supposed to go through at certain times. This was not one of those things.

Verse 2 says that the disciples broke the tradition of the elders. What we’re talking about is a totally man-made rule. They were taking something that was not commanded in God’s Word, and they were treating it like it was something that was commanded in God’s Word.

Now, if you’ve ever had small children, you know, sometimes you have to be right on them about things like washing and cleanliness, okay? Sometimes until they’re teenagers. I’m hoping they’ll get it.

I’m hoping the six and seven-year-old will get it, but odds are, you know, just having been around teenagers, I’m probably going to have to be on them for a few more years. But I, you know, we try to teach them, wash your did you wash your hands? Did you use soap?

And they go back again. Did you use hot water? And they go back again.

Did you dry them? Madeline won’t dry her hands and she ends up with rashes all over her hands. And so we try to drill it into the kids.

Wash your hands correctly before you eat. Wash your hands after you go to the restroom. And then I’ll be with Benjamin.

We’ll be at a gas station. We’ll be at a restaurant and we’ll be washing our hands in the restroom after having gone. And some man will walk from one of the stalls and just walk out the door and I’ll stand there just horrified because I know he’s touching the door handles and he’s touching the gas pumps and he’s touching everything.

I’m a little bit of a germaphobe if y’all didn’t know this. I’ve had to get over some of it since I had kids otherwise I’d die but I still have that tendency and I’ll just stand there and I’ll catch myself sometimes. I’ll come out into the gas station.

They’re still there. They’re doors, cold case. What are those things called?

Nobody knows what the door where you open and it’s cold and there’s sodas in there, whatever that thing is. They’ll be standing there and I’ll just catch myself giving not the nicest looks because I’m kind of grossed out by this. And I have to remember because I feel like I could be one of the Pharisees.

Okay, that’s just gross. It doesn’t mean they’re going to hell because of it. They were taking it.

If you start thinking that that sort of thing, please, by the way, please wash your hands, but if you’re thinking that sort of thing has a bearing on someone’s spiritual life that they’re going to hell because they didn’t wash their hands, congratulations, you’re joining me on the verge of Pharisee territory. That’s what they were doing. They were taking something that was a good idea, let’s wash up before we eat, and they were turning it into something that was a spiritual matter.

They were treating their laws like they were God’s laws. And what has happened here, the Pharisees’ religious sensibilities were offended because Jesus’ disciples didn’t follow their tradition, the tradition of their elders. They didn’t wash their hands before they ate bread.

I don’t know if this was a habit, but it was something at least once that they saw them do. Washing before a meal, again, something that was a good idea, is something that they had turned into a religious requirement. And they turned it into a religious requirement to show how pure and how holy they were.

That because we’re cleaner, we’re automatically better people, right? That’s where they were headed with this. Because we’re cleaner, because we wash our hands, we’re better people.

And again, they were always looking for a reason to attack Jesus, and this is all they could find. At this point, this is all they could find. And so while they were offended that the disciples didn’t follow their traditions, Jesus pointed out that God was offended, that they used their traditions as an excuse not to obey God.

So if you’ll look with me at the next few verses, we’ll look at verses 3 through 6 here. It says, He answered and said to them, Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honor your father and your mother, and he who curses father or mother, let him be put to death.

But you say, whoever says to his father or mother, whatever profit you might have received from me is a gift to God, then he need not honor his father or mother. Thus, you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. He points out that they have used their tradition as an excuse not to obey God, and that’s a bigger deal. Jesus turned the question about transgressions around on the Pharisees.

And he said that their traditions had caused the Pharisees to transgress, to violate, to break the commandment of God. God had commanded them to obey their parents. The two things that Jesus mentions here in verse 4 come from the book of Exodus, where God said, Honor your father and your mother.

And the remainder of that verse in Exodus 20, 12, is honor your father and your mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. So it was a commandment and a promise to Israel. And it was also said in Exodus 21, 17, which is the second part of the verse that he quotes, that if they curse their father and mother, that they’re to be put to death.

So there was this command of God to do right by your parents. And yet the Pharisees had taken their traditions and they’d use them as excuses. I won’t go into the whole Corbin vow and all that.

I’ve told you about that before. If you don’t remember it, that’s all right. Let’s just say that they had taken their traditions and used them as excuses to hoard money, to hoard their resources and their riches, to keep them back from their parents.

They didn’t have to give to support their parents. They could hoard this money and say it was for God, and so what they’re doing is they’re really being greedy and holding on to stuff for themselves, telling their parents to go fend for themselves and getting to look super religious while they’re doing it. Now this was not a good system.

So there were actual divine laws, actual divine commandments that God had given them that they were deciding not to follow, they were refusing to follow God’s laws because they were more concerned with what they wanted than with what God wanted, these Pharisees. more concerned with what they wanted than with what God wanted. And they were only too happy to cover it up with this sort of man-made religiosity so that they could look good the whole time they were disobeying God and being selfish.

As long as they look good on the outside, as long as they look religious, as long as they look like they were serving God on the outside, who cares if they actually serve God or not, was the way their thought process went to its logical conclusion. So Jesus here is comparing the disciples and the Pharisees. He’s comparing the disciples and the Pharisees.

The disciples, the Pharisees wanted to come make the comparison. Oh, we’re so good because we wash up and your disciples are not. They wanted to make the comparison.

Jesus says, all right, let’s make the comparison. One group was breaking some man-made rules, some made-up rules, while the other was violating the actual word of God because of their man-made rules. I’d ask you which one’s more important.

You don’t have to answer out loud, but deep down you know which one is more important. The made-up rules are the actual word of God. We know which one is more important.

But the Pharisees’ behavior made it clear what they thought was more important. See, despite their outward appearance, the Pharisees were totally unconcerned with actually worshiping God. They wanted to look like they were worshiping God.

They wanted to look godly. but when it came to actually doing what God said. Remember what I told you at the beginning of this series, that worship is not just the songs we sing.

It’s not just what we come together to do. It’s not just an experience. Worship is about humbling ourselves before God and reverencing God.

We acknowledge that we’re down here and He’s up here and we serve Him. It’s the pattern of our lives and whether or not our hearts are oriented toward doing what God says. And yes, that’ll show up in times of song and praise, and that’ll show up in corporate times together, but worship has a whole lot more to do with the way we live our lives 168 hours a week than it does with the songs that we sing one hour a week.

So when it came to actually worshiping God, the Pharisees weren’t all that concerned with actually doing it. They were much more concerned with looking like they were doing it. So we look at verses 7, 8, and 9 here.

Verse 7, this is still Jesus speaking to the Pharisees, and he says, Hypocrites, hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying these people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, and in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Now this is going to be, especially verse 9 here, this is going to be central to our understanding of everything this morning. But he starts out by calling them hypocrites, And he’s quoting here Isaiah 29, 13, where God specifically was in that moment talking about the Israelites before the captivity, before they were overrun by Babylon and taken into captivity.

If you’re not familiar with the Babylonian captivity, that’s the period of time where we got stories like Daniel and the lion’s den. Nehemiah rebuilding the wall was when they came back from captivity. At a point toward the end of the Old Testament, the Israelites were overrun.

God got so frustrated with their idolatry. God got so frustrated with their unfaithfulness that God sent the Babylonians in and allowed them to overrun Israel, take it over, and take many of the Israelites back to Babylon as captives. And Isaiah in chapter 29 is talking to a group of people before this captivity.

God is speaking through Isaiah to a group of people before this captivity. about their idolatry, about how their hearts were distant toward God. He says, these people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

And Jesus quotes Isaiah 29, 13, and says it’s also a prophecy about the Pharisees, because what he’s doing here is he’s comparing the Pharisees to those idolaters in Israel before the captivity to say that the Pharisees are no better. See, the Pharisees would have wanted to think that they were so much better because they would look back on idol worshipers, anything that looked like they were worshiping false gods, and the Pharisees would have been horrified by that. You see, in Isaiah’s day, Israel was professing its love for God outwardly, maybe going through some of the motions of worship, both in life and at the temple.

They were going through some of the motions. They were professing their love for God outwardly, But inwardly, deep down, they were worshiping false gods and idols. And in some pretty horrifying ways.

I mean, they were sacrificing animals to these idols. Sometimes they were sacrificing their own children to these false gods. In things that just made God sick to look at.

Some vile and violent things Israel was doing to worship these false gods. And in Jesus’ day, the Pharisees were professing love for God outwardly. They wanted to look like they were worshiping, but deep down they were worshiping idols.

Now they weren’t bowing down to Baal and Asherah and Molech, some of these false gods, but they were worshiping an idol nonetheless. They were worshiping the idol of self. See, the Pharisees had made themselves and what they wanted and what their rules were.

The Pharisees had made these things their gods. I read something last night. I can’t even remember who wrote it now.

So memory’s starting to go. But it said it’s not so much that we’re in a society that says there is no God. You know, we look around at how vile our society can be sometimes, and we think it’s because society as a whole, that many of the people in our society have decided there’s no God, and so they can do whatever they want.

The problem is not that we are in a society that has decided there’s no God, as much as the problem is that we’re in a society that has decided I am God. Not me, not Jared, but the self. and whenever we worship self and the most important thing is what the self wants all other restraints are cast off.

And our society is not that much different from the Pharisees. Sometimes we’re not that much different from the Pharisees. And the Pharisees weren’t that much different from their ancestors before the captivity.

And these Pharisees were concerned with glorifying themselves. They were concerned with glorifying themselves by showing how pure they were, how holy they were, how religious they were. They wanted to show how much more holy and religious and pure they were than anybody else, as a matter of fact.

And when you get right down to it, when you’re working that hard to glorify yourself, yourself is what you’re worshiping. When they were focused on showing how good I am and how good I can be, then what they were worshiping was themselves. They praised God with their mouths, but their hearts were far from Him, verse 8 says.

They praised Him with their mouths, but their hearts were far from Him. Outwardly, they looked like they were worshiping God, but inwardly, they were worshiping the self. And so in verse 7, Jesus calls them hypocrites.

Hypocrites. And sometime in the last year, I brought out the paper versions of the Greek comedy and tragedy masks. I don’t know if anybody remembers that.

Because we were talking about the concept of a hypocrite. And I had discovered that the Greek word for hypocrite, Hippocrates, describes the way actors would put on a mask. I can’t believe I didn’t know that before.

That’s such a brilliant description of what a hypocrite is. That we’re trying to look good. We’re wearing the mask of goodness to hide something else that’s going on behind the mask.

They were hypocrites. They were hiding behind the mask of their own goodness. The irony is the more that they tried to show their goodness, the more they showed how distant they were from God and how wicked they really were.

They were hypocrites. Because, verse 8 says, their hearts were far from Him, even though their mouths professed to love Him. And verse 7 says that they were hypocrites.

Verse 9 says that as a result of all this, their worship, their outward service to God was completely worthless. It said, in vain, they worship me. In vain, they worship me.

That word vain means empty, worthless, meaningless. There’s no redeeming quality to it. There’s no merit.

It’s not worth anything. I’d hate to ever be told by God that my worship of Him was vain. That’s exactly what He said to the Pharisees.

All this outward service they were doing. It’s just worthless. So the Pharisees were trying to show their devotion to God through their man-made systems of outward worship.

But what they really showed, what they really unmasked, was an inward distance. from God. So when Jesus made this comparison between them and the disciples and what they were doing versus what the disciples were doing, he pointed out that the inward condition, the inward condition of the heart is far more important to God than the outward appearance.

Not saying that, oh great, we can misbehave because God doesn’t care what we do outwardly. That’s not what that means at all. Because if you’re misbehaving, running loose like that outwardly and rejecting God outwardly, that comes from inside and the heart and a heart that rejects God.

But sometimes we can put the mask on and look good outwardly and the heart is not right and God is more concerned. God is infinitely more concerned with the condition of the heart, the inward condition of the heart, than he is the outward appearance. She says in verse 10, When he had called the multitude to himself, he said to them, Hear and understand, not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth.

This defiles a man. For all of the Pharisees’ concern about holiness and purity, they misunderstood it. They misunderstood it.

They were concerned that the dirt on the disciples’ hands that they ingested when they ate bread with unwashed hands, that that was going to somehow defile them. And Jesus says, oh, no, no, no. It’s what comes out of the heart that defiles the man. Impurity does not come from the outside as a result of eating with unwashed hands.

Impurity doesn’t come from the outside. Our wickedness doesn’t come from outside influences. Impurity comes from within, from a heart that’s distant from God.

Comes from a heart that’s distant from God. And again, the irony here is that the more their religious efforts focused on showing how good they were, how righteous they were, the more the Pharisees actually showed how wicked they were on the inside and how distant they were from God. And there’s so much that this passage could teach us.

That’s why I’ve looked at it a few times lately. There’s so much we could look at in terms of our hearts before God and the idea of purity and defilement. There’s a lot of things that this passage can teach us.

But this morning, I want us to focus primarily on the way this passage applies to our worship. Because Jesus did say that the condition of their hearts affected their worship. Jesus showed how the Pharisees, throughout this passage, he showed how the Pharisees’ hearts were not right with God, and how one of the things that affected was their worship.

If the heart’s not right, the worship is not going to be right. He said in verse 9, in vain they worship me. And because of the condition of their hearts, that vanity means that their worship was meaningless and empty.

And folks, as long as we stay focused, as long as we stay focused on our goodness instead of God’s, our worship is going to be similarly meaningless. If you came to church this morning to show how good you are, your worship is meaningless before God. I know that sounds harsh, but that’s something I have to remind myself of sometimes.

That if the things we do are to show how good we are, then it does nothing. It’s meaningless to God. And all this brings me around to the main point of the message this morning.

The singular main point of the message this morning is that self-focused worship does not impress God. If we want to look at how not to worship, the Pharisees and the way they worshipped in a self-focused way provides us a perfect example of what not to do. Now there are other things that the Bible tells us to avoid in worship, but I think this is such a big one.

This is such an important one. Self-focused worship does not impress God. We can easily look righteous on the outside while our hearts are distant toward God on the inside.

We can look like we’re serving God on the outside when what we’re really doing is serving ourselves and our self-image on the inside. If we’re focused on our rituals, if we cut. .

. In the way we live our lives, 168 hours a week, In the way we come together an hour or two or three a week for corporate worship, if we’re focused on our rituals, our desires, our goodness, showing something about ourselves, then we’re not focused on God. And if we’re not focused on God, we’re not worshiping Him.

There’s a few more examples of this throughout Scripture. You look at Cain in Genesis chapter 4. Cain was focused on what he thought should have been a good offering instead of what God required.

and so instead of bringing a lamb a blood sacrifice like Abel did, Cain brought vegetables. He brought God an offering of vegetables like anybody wants that. But on top of it, you know, God says without the shedding of blood there’s no remission of sins.

An offering of vegetables was not going to do anything. And God rejected his offering. And Cain was mad because Cain’s, this is what I brought.

God should have been okay with it. Those weren’t his exact words. That was his attitude.

God should be okay with whatever I deign to offer. and God rejected the offering because Cain was focused on what he wanted instead of doing what God required. Saul disobeyed God’s instructions in a passage that we talked about, I want to say, back in the summer.

King Saul came and offered a sacrifice to God even though he wasn’t supposed to be making the offering. He was supposed to wait for Samuel. Saul violated all the rules and said, well, I can make the offering because I’m the king and he rejected God’s instructions and so God rejected him as king in 1 Samuel chapter 13.

And then here the Pharisees were so focused on keeping their own rules and their own standards that could be used as a loophole to avoid having to obey God. And so Jesus rejected them as hypocrites. Folks, God is never satisfied.

God is never satisfied to receive empty, meaningless worship from people who deep down are more interested in serving themselves serving Him. God’s never going to be satisfied with that. God’s never going to be satisfied with me coming in and saying, I’m here, look how good I am.

Let’s show how much I praise God. Let’s show how much I serve Him and worship Him when all I’m doing is trying to glorify myself. God’s never going to be satisfied with that.

That’s never going to be what God wants, and that’s never going be what God accepts. Self-focused worship does not impress God. If we want to look at what I think is the biggest thing for us to remember about how not to worship, it’s that self-focused worship does not impress God.

And so in talking to them about how the Pharisees worshipped God in vain, Jesus told the crowd, here’s the command from Jesus on this, he says, hear and understand. Hear and understand, he says this in verse 10. And I think on this subject, that’s good advice to us as well.

Hear and understand. Pay attention to what Jesus is teaching about the Pharisees and about their hearts and about their worship. Hear this and understand this.

And folks, for us to understand this means that we’re going to recognize that we bear this tendency as well as human beings. We bear this tendency as well to fall back into the, as Christians, we can sometimes fall into the tendency, going back to the old way, of worshiping self. Because that human nature is still there.

When he says, hear and understand, folks, we need to check our own motivations. I need to check my own motivation on a regular basis about the things that I’m doing to serve God. Am I worshiping, am I serving because I want to serve Him and point to His goodness and His greatness, or am I worshiping and serving because I want to point to mine?

We need to check our motivations in worship. God isn’t impressed with phony worshipers. God’s not impressed with phony worshipers boasting on the outside how