Imitation Worship

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Do any of the rest of you have little gremlins that live in your phone and listen to you? Or is it just me? Especially with the ads?

Back in October, I was telling Charla that I’d like to take some wood and cut out some nativity silhouettes to paint and put in our yard. And the next thing I know, I start getting ads for things like that on Facebook. And some of the ads I was looking at, I clicked on, and if you click on them, you only get more ads.

But I was looking at one, and I thought, this is a really good deal. I mean, given the price of lumber and the amount of time I would have to put into this, why not? So I spent some money on this nativity scene. And let me tell you, everything about the store, I’m very suspicious by nature, but everything about the store looked legitimate.

I feel like I’m pretty good at spotting a fake. Well, evidently not. But everything about this looked legitimate.

The storefront, the emails they were sending, the transaction, everything looked like it was on the up and up. Everything looked like it was the real deal. So I ordered back in October and I got emails updating me on shipping. And, you know, it still hadn’t come by mid-November.

And I’m starting to think, well, this is odd, although it’s telling me it’s coming from overseas. Of course, it’s going to take a little bit of time. They’re sending me emails about it clearing customs and this and that.

Finally, after a while, I thought it’s, they said it went through customs and it arrived at U. S. Customs and went through Nashua, New Hampshire.

And I thought, that’s not a major port. That’s just weird. So I took the tracking number and I ran it through U.

S. Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, DHL, everybody I could think of, and they’re all coming back, we don’t recognize this tracking number. So at that point, I knew what was going on.

I contacted the seller. I didn’t immediately want to use the word scam. I wanted to see, I was gathering more proof.

And so I said, I’m running into a problem with the tracking number you’ve given me. Which company is handling here in the U. S.

? Oh, well, we just contacted the shipping company and they’re updating their delivery system. We’ll get you a new tracking number as soon as possible.

I thought, yeah, okay. These major shipping companies are going to update their delivery system in the middle of the holiday season. That makes a lot of sense.

I think they’re a little smarter than that. So I’ve been battling with the seller and with PayPal. I was telling Bob and Stella in the office about it the other day, and Bob said most of us would just let that money go and say it was a lesson learned. I said, well, I guess I’m enough like my dad that no, they’re not going to win.

Even if I have to go get a lawyer and pay several hundred dollars in legal fees, they’re not keeping the money. I’m going to, I don’t know, I might fly to China. I’m going to track these people down.

I’m going to get my nativity scene money. But my point in telling you all of this, so if I end up on the news that I got arrested in China, you’ll know why. It’s either this or criticizing the Communist Party.

We’ll see. My point in telling you all of this is that everything about it from the outside looked legit until you dug a little closer into the innards of what’s going on and you see that it’s a fake storefront. Their website isn’t even there anymore.

You start to see everything was just an imitation. It was just a facade. It’s easy to be fooled by imitations sometimes until we see them for what they really are.

And Jesus encountered some people who looked like they were legitimate worshipers of God to everybody around them. They looked like they were the real deal. They looked like people who were deeply concerned with what God wanted and with what glorified God. But when you begin to dig deeper, as Jesus did, into what was going on, you realize they were just imitation worshipers.

And they were just imitating worship. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning in Matthew 15 as we continue this series on worship and what it means to worship and how we should worship and how we should not worship, we’re going to look at this in Matthew chapter 15. Now it’ll be on the screen if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find it, but if you have your Bible, I encourage you to turn there with me to Matthew chapter 15, and once you find it, if you’re able to stand without too much difficulty, stand with me as we read together from God’s Word.

We’re going to look at the first 11 verses of this chapter, at what Jesus says about these people and the way they interacted with God and their worship here. So 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.

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. 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. 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.

And you may be seated. So we’ve talked about for the last several weeks how the biblical idea of worship is more than just songs that we sing. It’s more than just coming together to sing those songs.

It’s more than just those songs on our own. That’s part of it. But biblical worship is this posture we assume toward God, where we are in reverence toward God and we seek to honor Him, we seek to glorify Him with the way that we live our lives.

That is worship. And so yes, we do that when we come together and sing and study and pray and fellowship on Sunday mornings. We also do that when we are chasing our children around.

We also do that in the way we treat our co-workers, especially when they drive us up the wall. We do that in the attitude we have and the job we do when we’re pushing a mop around. We do that in how we treat others.

Everything we do can be worship if it’s done with the intention of glorifying God. Now that is an incredibly high hurdle. I submit to you that with all their rules and everything the Pharisees had that sound really hard, the biblical idea of worship is even harder.

And you and I are inevitably going to fall short of it. I fall short of it every day. But the idea is to recognize where we fall short, repent, seek to get right with God again, and move on continuing to try to hit that target of glorifying God in all that we do.

That is worship. And it has a lot in common with obedience. obedience toward God, done in the right frame of mind, done with the right heart, that obedience looks a lot like worship.

They have a lot in common. And so the scribes and Pharisees believed that they were doing what God required. They believed that they were worshiping God with all of their rules and all their rituals.

And by the way, we have a misunderstanding in our culture about what the Pharisees were about and what makes somebody a Pharisee. And we can be really firm on standing on the truth of God’s word, and people can say, oh, you’re just like the Pharisees. Wrong.

That’s not what the Pharisees were doing. The Pharisees, I think, started out hundreds of years before this with maybe some good intentions. They wanted to make sure that they were following God’s law, and so they built hedges around it.

They built their own rules around it to make sure they couldn’t even get close to breaking God’s law. Well, by the time we get to the time of Jesus, and I’m not saying that was right, but I think maybe their hearts were in the right place at first, they were just wrong in how they went about it. By the time we get to Jesus they are not standing firm on God’s law they are not emphasizing the law of God they are emphasizing their rules and their traditions.

It is not legalistic to say we’re going to obey God it is legalistic to say we’re going to obey our own human rules that we’ve made up and we have to know where the line is between God’s law and ours. The way we know that is by being familiar with what God says in his word. And so they had all these rules and all these rituals, and they believed that they were obeying God by doing these things.

As a matter of fact, they believed that they were probably the people who were most right with God on the whole planet. But Jesus pointed out that they had everything so twisted that they were merely pretending to obey God while walking in disobedience. Have you ever worked with somebody that was really good at looking busy while doing nothing?

This is sort of the spiritual equivalent of that. They were looking really obedient while being very disobedient. They had that mastered.

They had that down to a science. And so Jesus quotes Isaiah 29, 13. What we read in verses 8 and 9 here is a quote from Isaiah 29, 13.

And it’s a passage that predicted the judgment of God on Jerusalem 700 years earlier. And it describes their worship as worthless. 700 years earlier, one of the reasons why God was going to judge the people of Jerusalem was because of the way they worshipped him in vain, the empty way, the imitation way that they worshipped him.

And he said it was worthless. Now why does Jesus quote this? Why does he bring up worship?

Because everything that they did was oriented around following God’s law, keeping God’s law, at least in their minds. It was really about their traditions. In their minds, they were worshipping God through everything they did, and yet Jesus said the way they went about it undermined what they said they were trying to do.

They tried to look like they were worshiping and serving God, when inwardly they were being as disobedient as they could be. And so we need to look at this this morning to make sure that we are careful not to follow in their footsteps, careful not to repeat their mistakes. And so he says in the early part of this chapter, in verse 1, the scribes and Pharisees came from Jerusalem.

He’s still up in Galilee. They don’t just see this. Jesus has so confounded the Pharisees up to this point, the ones in Galilee, he has been able to answer every charge and every accusation they’ve made, so they call him the big guns, they call him reinforcements from Jerusalem, the big time Pharisees, to come up here and scope him out and find something that they can trip him up on.

These guys have come from Jerusalem, and they say, why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread. All right, washing your hands is a good idea, right?

If we’ve learned nothing from the last two years, nothing else from the last two years, just wash your hands, right? Anytime we go on a road trip, we’ll be in a men’s room somewhere, and some man inevitably will walk out without washing his hands, and Benjamin and Charlie start going, Daddy, stop. We’re not his mama, but I’m glad you noticed that this is not a good thing.

Wash your hands. Wash your hands, you know, when you’re supposed to, especially wash your hands before you eat. What did you learn in church today?

We learned we’re supposed to wash our hands. Yeah, we know this. That’s not what they’re talking about.

They’re not talking about washing your hands for cleanliness. They’re talking about going through a ritual washing that is going to make you ceremonially clean. And it’s not even one that’s specified in the Old Testament law, at least not the way they did it.

They had added things, and you’re supposed to go through this ritual, and otherwise you can’t eat, or you’re considered unclean under the law. Keep away from me because you’re unclean, that sort of thing. they said, he’s transgressing the tradition of the elders.

They don’t say, your disciples are breaking the law. They say, they’re going against our traditions. And Jesus’ response is basically, hang your traditions.

Because Jesus comes back at them and points out that it is possible to imitate worship, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. They say, why do your disciples, why do your disciples transgress our traditions? And Jesus, instead of answering why it’s okay, it’s this and that Jesus, you know, I told you last Sunday night, I think it was, Jesus was very good at pointing out where the premise of their question was wrong and going to what the premise ought to be.

He’s not going to debate with them that tradition. He wants to debate with them or wants to educate them, maybe better said, on what the role of their traditions ought to be. So when they say, why do your disciples violate our traditions?

Jesus says, why do your traditions violate God’s word. You want to talk tradition? Let’s talk about that.

We have this image of a laid back Jesus all the time that just let everybody get by with stuff. I would not want to be on the opposite side of Jesus in a debate. They come in with their accusations.

Why do your disciples violate our traditions? Jesus just claps right back at them. Why do your traditions violate God’s word?

Verse three, why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? He said their traditions, these things that they so carefully and meticulously kept, they looked to the people like these were things that honored God, but they were actually causing the Pharisees to disobey Him. And before they get a chance to say, we don’t do that, before they get a chance to protest innocence, Jesus gives them an example.

In verse 4, He says, for God commanded, honor your father and your mother, and he who curses father and mother, let him be put to death. He says this in verse 4. God has given a couple of commandments here.

Let’s go for an example. God’s given a couple of commandments that deal with how we’re to treat our parents. You’re supposed to honor them.

You’re not supposed to curse them. In other words, the law is teaching that you are supposed to do right by the people who birthed you and nurtured you. You’re supposed to honor that.

God said to honor your parents. In the context of what Jesus is talking about, He’s saying you honor them by taking care of them. So that’s what God’s law is teaching.

But he goes on in verse 5, verses 5 and 6, to say what they were doing and what their tradition was doing instead. He said, 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. Now I could spend a lot more time explaining this.

I don’t have a lot of time though. This was called the Corbin vow. And just to give you a brief overview of what’s going on here.

They were supposed to take care of their parents, but they also had this system in place where they could dedicate their wealth to the Lord. They could dedicate it to the temple. They could dedicate it to the service of God.

Over the years, though, the Pharisees had worked out a system where they could dedicate or earmark these things for God and yet keep them and enjoy them themselves. And so it looks to mom and dad like you’ve got all this money, you should be able to take care of us, but you’re able to say, oh, no, no, I’m sorry, that’s really for God. Wait, but you just went out and bought a brand new speedboat.

Yeah, that’s God’s boat. But you’re going and taking all these fancy trips. Yeah, but we’re doing it for the Lord.

And we’re here starving? Yeah, I’m sorry, man, geez, if I just had some money of my own. But it’s for the Lord.

It’s kind of a corrupt system when you think about it, right? You can understand why Jesus was so mad about this. Their traditions allowed them to earmark their wealth for God, to keep it and enjoy it and tell their parents, sorry, we’d love to help you, but we don’t actually have anything that we can give you.

And they were able to do this and get all the applause and all the credit because they had dedicated their wealth to God. And everybody says, oh, how spiritual, oh, how godly they are. And yet they were getting all of that applause and all that credit while doing precisely the opposite of what God told them to do.

You see why Jesus was upset about, and you come at me with some nonsense about washing hands, some made up human rule about washing hands. Let’s talk about the real problem. So he says in verse 6, thus you’ve made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition.

He says you’re not worshiping God, you’re serving your own desires, you’re doing exactly what you want to do, and you’re treating God’s word like it’s meaningless. And if I sound a little fired up, I’m not mad at you. I just, I get a little wrapped up sometimes in what’s going on in the text.

So they had set up this system where it was possible to look godly on the outside while inwardly they could not care any less. If they tried, they couldn’t care less about what God told them to do, about what God wanted. And I submit to you, it’s still possible to do this today.

It is still possible to imitate worship today. It is possible to set ourselves up in a situation where we look godly on the outside, we look to everybody else like we’re doing the things that honor God, but inwardly we could not care less about what God wants. When we imitate worship is when our hearts are not in it.

And that was really at the root of the problem. See, if their hearts were different, if their hearts were different, they wouldn’t be acting this way. So the problem to fix is not the way they were acting.

The problem was inside the condition of their hearts. Their hearts were not in their worship or their relationship with God. So Jesus says in verse 7, Hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy about you.

And when he says well, he’s not saying, well, Isaiah prophesied about you. He’s saying Isaiah got it right. Isaiah did well when he prophesied about you.

He said that judgment of Jerusalem points to you too. And he uses this word Hippocrates in Greek. We get the word hypocrite from it.

I discovered this a few years ago. That Greek word that we get hypocrite from was originally used to describe an actor on a stage. And actors on a stage in the Greek world, they didn’t come out with, typically I guess they didn’t come out with stage makeup and all these things.

They would wear masks. You’ve probably seen the Greek tragedy and comedy masks. They put on these masks so they could appear on stage to be one thing while being something different behind the mask.

That’s what hypocrisy is. Pretending on the outside to be one thing and being something else behind the mask. And that’s what Jesus said about these Pharisees.

while they were pretending to be godly, while they were pretending to care about God. And inwardly, they didn’t care about God or what He said or what He thought or what He told Him to do with other people. He said, you’re wearing a mask.

You hypocrites. And He explains what that looks like in verses 8 and 9 when He says, these people, He quotes Isaiah here, 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.

He says here that outwardly they were professing to honor God. They looked the part. They acted the part.

They appeared really well. They made it, they kept their appearance up really well of being people who loved and honored God. And as far as anyone else was concerned, they did know and love and honor God.

But God sees what’s in the heart. I saw this, somebody had posted this online sometime over the weekend. I saw that somebody saying, the Lord knows what’s in my heart.

And somebody, you’ve probably heard people saying that, God knows my heart. And the answer somebody gave was, you say that like it’s to your advantage. It is not a comforting thought that God knows my heart.

It’s not comforting all the time. That means God knows everything that’s there. And not all of it’s good.

See, the Lord sees in our hearts. He knew the core of who they were. And He knew deep down at the core of who these Pharisees were, there was no concern for God at all.

And so as a result, their worship, he says in verse 9, was vain. It was empty. It was worthless.

It was meaningless. If we want our worship toward God to be meaningful, our heart has to be in it. And if we come and we try to worship God, and again, whether it’s coming to church or we try to worship God in our lives, but our hearts are not in it, it’s meaningless.

Now, let me caution you about something here real quick. We all have times that we think, I’m just not feeling it today. Have you ever felt that way Sunday morning?

I’m just not feeling it. I’ve been there. I’ve told you recently about being at the point where the seven of us were trying to all get ready and get out the door to church.

And I said, if one more person says something, I’m not going. Right? You remember that story?

Benjamin says, you have to. No, I don’t have to. Now there’ll be consequences if I don’t, but I don’t have to.

I wasn’t feeling it. Now the answer is not to stay there and wallow and not feeling it. The answer is get our hearts right with God and then go worship him with a genuine heart.

And let me tell you, that can be something as simple as saying, Lord, I’m not there today, but I need you to help me. He has a great way of turning that around. And I’m not just talking about Sunday.

God, I really don’t have it in me to deal with people today, and yet I’ve got to go to work, and everybody there knows I’m a Christian, and I’ve got to represent you. I can’t do this. you know what?

He can do it. You go to him for help, he’ll do it through you. He’ll get your heart right.

So the answer is not to say, well, if it’s meaningless to do it when my heart is not in it, I just won’t do it. No, the answer is get your heart right. And I tell you that because I know from experience, right?

He said their worship was empty and vain. It was worthless because their heart was not in it. And they were teaching as doctrines, the commandments of men.

They were teaching others how to disobey God and worship in the same fake way that they did. And what we understand today is the point of this passage. It applies to worship.

It applies to our whole relationship with God. Outward religion will never make us right with God. It just won’t.

And I know a lot of people in the world would think, well, that’s a funny thing to hear from a pastor. Don’t be religious. Religion will do you no good when it comes to your relationship with God.

Now, I don’t mean that we shouldn’t believe in Him, that we shouldn’t follow His Word. But he explains to them in verses 10 and 11. He called the multitude who’d been standing around.

He called the crowds together. And he said to them, hear and understand, not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth defiles a man. The Pharisees were so upset because this idea of not washing the hands, not going through this ritual. They were worried about being ceremonially unclean.

They were worried about suddenly not being right with God because they hadn’t washed their hands in just the right way. And Jesus tells them, Jesus tells the crowds, it is not that ritual that makes the difference. It is not your failure to perform that outward ritual. It is not the unwashed hands.

It is not the things you do out here that make you unclean. It’s not the things you do out here that are separating you from God. It’s what comes from out here, from in here.

It starts in the heart. The defilement starts in the heart. It’s like all those horror movies, which I don’t have experience watching horror movies, but I know about them.

And it seems like in a lot of them there’s that phone call and then they realize it’s coming from inside the house. I don’t know what movie that is, but well, if you’re looking for the killer, if you’re looking for the source of the defilement, if you’re looking for the problem, the call is coming from inside the house. What defiles us is our heart, our sin nature that dwells in here and drives what we do outwardly.

And it defiles us to the point that even if we do things that look right on the outside, they are still tainted by what’s inside of us. Here they were concerned about the rituals, and we can do all the right, quote-unquote, right religious things and still be wrong with God inside. We can go through all the steps, we can go through all the motions, and our hearts can be just as wicked and just as far from God as anybody else’s because it’s a change of heart that’s needed.

This is why outward worship, outward obedience, as important as they are, why outward religion that is not connected with a change of heart will never, ever be enough. Because what defiles us, what separates us from God is the sin that’s inside of us, the sin that’s in our nature. We all know what it means to do right things outwardly, but be wrong on the inside.

Have you ever obeyed when you didn’t want to? Just me? All right.

You don’t have to show hands and just kind of know from looking at you what you’re saying. We’ve probably all done that. You ever said yes, sir, yes, ma’am to a boss when you wanted to tell them off?

I’ll get right on that. And you go do the right thing. But inside is not right.

I remember very vividly being made to clean my room as a child and I did not like it. And yet I would go do it, but I was not happy about it. We know that there can be a disconnect between what goes on on the outside and what’s going on on the inside.

We’re all familiar with this idea of doing the right things outwardly and the heart not being right. So you can change what you do out here and not affect what’s wrong in here. But if this gets cleaned up, what’s inside of us, then what goes on outside follows.

Just imitating worship. Just saying, well, I’m going to try to glorify God in doing this. It’s never going to be enough.

Because a relationship with God, including genuine worship, including this life of obedience that glorifies Him, all of it begins with a heart change. It has to begin with a heart change because the outward is never enough. Jesus said the defilement comes from the heart.

Where this cleansing starts, where this change happens, is not outwardly, but it’s in the heart when we recognize that we have sinned. When we recognize that we have disobeyed God. When we recognize not only that we have committed sins, but that sin is a part of who we are.

And we realize that we are separated from a holy God. And when we realize that we can’t do anything to change that. Even if from now on we just do all the good outward things, it doesn’t change the condition of the heart.

We don’t get extra credit for doing right things from now on. It has to be paid for. That sin has to be paid for.

Because it’s an obstacle that keeps us separated from God. And our heart has to be changed. And the only way that happens is when we recognize that sin.

And we come to God seeking the forgiveness that he offers in Jesus Christ. When we recognize that Jesus Christ went to the cross. He was nailed to that cross. He shed his blood and he died to pay for our sins in full.

Because it was the only way those sins could be paid for. And he paid for those sins. And he rose again to prove it.

And now he offers forgiveness and he offers eternal life if we’ll simply trust him for it. And then the beauty of that is that not only are we forgiven, but in the condition of our hearts, he begins to do in us what we could not do for ourselves. And he begins to cleanse us and change us.

How does he do that? He promised to send his Holy Spirit to live inside of us. And when you trust Christ as your Savior, not only are you forgiven, but the Holy Spirit comes to take up residence inside you and begins to change that heart and transform you.

And he starts that transformation from the moment you trust Christ as your Savior. But the change has to come from the inside, and it’s not something we can do ourselves. We have to trust the one who died for us and rose again to prove it.