Message Info:
- Text: Deuteronomy 6:1-9, NKJV
- Series: Come and Worship (2018), No. 1
- Date: Sunday morning, November 11, 2018
- Venue: Trinity Baptist Church — Seminole, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ But it’s easy at times to get to where we’re going through the motions of doing church, of doing religious things, and we forget about the singular importance of worshiping God. And really, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? It’s to worship God.
I mean, there are other important things that happen here. It’s important that we’re learning God’s Word. It’s important that we fellowship together.
It’s important that we’re here because we’re being obedient to what God has told us about assembling ourselves together. But ultimately, the reason why we’re here, the reason why we should be here, is to worship God. You see, that raises another issue in my mind, because when we look at what the Bible teaches about worship, I don’t know where we came up with the idea that worship is something we do on Sundays.
Worship is something we’re supposed to do every day. Some of you already may be thinking, I don’t have time to come here every day. Worship is not.
Folks, worship is not. It’s not about music. You know, when people fight over traditional versus contemporary songs, they call it the worship wars.
The only reason it should be called the worship wars is if we’re worshiping our preferences more than we’re worshiping God when we come together. It’s a conflict over styles of music. It’s not a war about worship.
Worship is not about music. It’s not about, it’s more than the songs we sing. Now, don’t get me wrong.
Music is a part of worship. What we come together and do on Sunday mornings when we sing together, that’s a part of worshiping God. But we get off course when we think it’s the sum total of what it means to worship God.
Worship is about more than music. It’s about more than songs we sing. Worship is far more than what we do together on Sunday mornings between the hours of 10.
30 and 11. 30. If that’s all we’re doing for worship, we’re missing the boat as far as worship is concerned.
There’s a song that was written, I want to say years ago, that makes it sound really old. I remember it from when I was a teenager. I think it was fairly new at the time.
Yeah, that’s antique. It’s not as many years as it was for some of you, but it’s more years than those years have snuck up on me. But the song starts out, it says, when the music fades and all is stripped away and I simply come longing just to bring something that’s of worth that will bless your heart.
I bring you more than a song, for a song in itself is not what you’ve required. I search much deeper within, I’m sorry, you look much deeper within, through the way things appear, you’re looking into my heart. And the chorus says, I’m coming back to the heart of worship, where it’s all about you.
And if I remember the story correctly, that song was written by a music minister, a worship pastor, at a church who got frustrated with what worship was turning into, and it was turning into just the songs and just this and that. And at some point, they did away with the music. How would you like that if we just did away with the music?
That’s heresy, isn’t it? Brother Kim might not be too thrilled about that. But they did away with the singing for a time until they figured out what worship really was.
And then when they came back to actually worship, and when they came back and began again to worship in song, I believe the man wrote that song. But that song always reminded me as a teenager, I still think about it today. I’ve thought about it constantly as I’ve been working on this series.
It’s reminded me that worship is not about our music. It’s not about what we come together and do necessarily. It’s about Jesus.
It’s about worshiping the one who is worthy. And yes, singing together is part of that. I believe we can worship together and sing.
I believe we worship together when we study God’s word together. You know what? I also believe we’re worshiping God together when we get out and serve and minister in the community in his name together.
But anything we’re doing to bring God glory, I believe, is worship. And this morning, we’re going to see this, I think, in Deuteronomy chapter 6, that our worship, again, it’s not about music, it’s not about songs, it’s not just about what we do on Sunday mornings. Our worship is about the orientation of our hearts, where our hearts are pointed.
And our worship is reflected in the way we live our lives. See, again, I want to be very clear on this. getting together on Sunday mornings is part of our worship singing songs together is part of our worship folks there’s so much more to worshiping God than just what we do in this one hour a week it’s about the orientation of our hearts and it’s reflected in the way that we live our lives something we need to understand is that because of the way we’re created we will worship something we will worship something everybody is worshiping something I said, well, what about my neighbor who doesn’t even believe in God?
Oh, he’s worshiping something. Some people worship money. That’s why we have the phrase, they bow down before the almighty dollar.
Some people worship money. Some people worship stuff. Some people worship food.
Some people, for some reason, worship celebrities. I don’t understand that one. I don’t understand any of it, but I definitely don’t understand worshiping celebrities.
Some people worship, I forgot what all I’ve listed. Some people worship nature. Some people worship their jobs.
Some people worship themselves. We are creatures that are designed to worship. And so we’re going to worship something.
Mark my words. You’re going to worship something. It may be yourself, but you’re going to worship something.
It’s either going to be the one true God or it’s going to be an idol. We will worship something because worship is second nature to us. And what we worship matters.
What we worship matters. So we were designed to worship. We were created to worship.
And so we will, but we were designed to worship our creator alone. He’s the one we’re supposed to worship. And when mankind decided we didn’t want to worship our creator, there was a vacuum left there and we were incomplete.
And so mankind’s been trying to fill that vacuum and been looking for other things to worship ever since the days of the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve decided that they could worship themselves and their desires instead of worshiping God. And so over the next few weeks, especially this morning, We’re going to look at what does it mean to worship God. So if you haven’t already, turn with me to Deuteronomy chapter 6.
Deuteronomy chapter 6. If you’re new to church, if you’re new to God’s word, don’t fret about it. It’s the fifth book of your Bible.
If you’ve got one with the Old Testament in it, it’s the fifth book of the Bible. It goes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and then Deuteronomy. If you get to Joshua, you’ve gone too far and turned back.
Deuteronomy, and we’re going to be in chapter 6. We’re going to look at the first nine verses of the chapter this morning. It says, Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged.
Therefore, and this verse may sound familiar to you because we talked about it in the last few weeks when I was looking at some of the questions Jesus was asked, and somebody said, what’s the most important commandment? And he took them back to this verse in Deuteronomy. Therefore, verse 3, hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it.
I’m sorry, it’s verse 4 that he pointed them to, but this is setting the stage for it. Therefore, hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey. Here we go, verse 4.
Verse 6 says, And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
You shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates. Now he goes on to talk more about their relationship with God, but we’re going to stop right there for this morning. This passage, to my recollection, we don’t see the word worship in this passage, but this passage is about teaching Israel how to worship God.
This was written down by, God is the author of the entire scriptures, but it was written down by the hand of Moses as the people of Israel were preparing to leave their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. They’re preparing to go in after Moses dies and Joshua takes the helm of the nation. They’re preparing to go in and possess the land that God has been promising to them since the days of Abraham.
They’re preparing to go into this land. And as they prepare to set up this new nation, this new society, God wants them to understand how he is to be worshipped. And we can learn, We can learn, too, from how they were taught to worship.
Now, you and I do not worship the same way under God’s new covenant that they worshiped under the old covenant. We are no longer bound to offer sacrifices. We’re no longer bound to go through all these rituals.
All of those things were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. But there are still principles that are taught in the Old Testament about the holiness of God, about who He is, about what He deserves, and who we are in comparison to Him, that I think teach us a lot more than we realize about how to worship Him. This was about worshiping him, teaching Israel how they were to respond to him. And you’ll find throughout the Old Testament that it does prescribe some pretty strict rules and rituals about how they were to worship when they came into the tabernacle, when they came into the temple for their corporate worship.
There were some pretty strict rules. I mean, you had to do certain things in certain orders, and only certain people could do certain things, and people got punished for breaking that law. So there were some strict rules about how God was to be worshipped in the rituals.
But this chapter here, the reason I think it applies so well for us today, or it’s so instructive for us today, is because it’s not talking about when you go to worship him in the tabernacle. It’s not talking about when you go to offer sacrifices in the temple. It’s talking about how you worship God as part of your everyday life.
And that’s what God wanted them to understand in chapter 6. And I think it is important for us as well. As this chapter talks about the importance of worship as a lifestyle, as a way of living, we need to recognize that it’s not this chapter, this passage we’ve just read, unlike some of the others, is not focused on particular rules.
Just like the New Testament, it’s focused on the condition of the heart, the orientation of the heart, because that’s what God cared about all along. The rules and the rituals were there to point to other things. They were there to point to Jesus.
They were there to point to how our hearts were not oriented correctly. What God really cares about is the condition of the heart. And we’re going to see, first of all, in this passage this morning, that real worship includes a pattern of submission toward God.
Now, submission is not a word that’s fun to talk about in our society. People don’t like the idea of submitting, but we’re taught to submit to God. Some of you are like me, and you don’t like being told what to do.
Tough. I’m just going to be blunt with it. I’ve had to learn that too.
I don’t like being told what to do, but God’s in charge, not me. And so we learn to get with the program. As I tell my children, you better skip to my loo because this is the way it’s going to be.
I don’t know that that’s how that song is supposed to be used, but that’s what it means in our house. God’s in charge, and part of worshiping him is submitting to him. We’re going to see this in verses 1 and 2.
It says, Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over. He’s not listing the rules, but he’s saying when you cross into the other country, there are going to be commandments and teachings that you’re going to need to listen to, you’re going to need to follow and observe, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and all his commandments. Again, obey him, submit to him, follow the things he tells you to do.
His statutes and commandments, which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged. So what he’s telling us there, first of all, I want to go back and talk about this as it applies to worship. In the Bible, when I’ve looked up all the places where the word worship is used, over 160 of those instances, over 160 of those instances, the word describes something that involves bowing.
It involves something, it involves bowing. And the majority of those paint a picture of lying prostrate, you know, on your face before God. So when we see the word worship, we’ve got to understand, it’s not talking about just coming together and singing some songs.
It’s talking about a life that we are on our face before God. And when we worship God, we begin by humbling ourselves before Him. That’s really what submission means.
Just the recognition that God is up here and calls the shots, and I listen to Him. He’s in charge. That submission starts with the humility of understanding, I am not in control of my life.
And again, that’s not something I always like. because the flesh in me wants to control everything, wants to be king of my life, and I have to remind myself all the time, there is a God and I am not him. Some of you may have that conversation with yourselves at times.
Some of you may need to have that conversation with yourselves at times. I have to remind myself, God is in charge of this. I work for him.
I have to submit to him. And this way of interacting with God is necessary because we cannot worship him without submitting to him. We can’t.
that’s like saying that at your job your subordinates, you work for them I’m above you, but I claim I work for you some of you some of you when I said that gave flashes of looks like it doesn’t make sense, does it? and that’s what it’s like when we try to come to God and say I worship God, but I’m not humbling myself before you we’re never going to be able to worship Him like that Okay, we submit to God and this shows up. This heart of submission, this heart of humility toward God shows up in the way that we interact with Him, in the way that we follow Him.
Because if we are submitting to Him, one of the natural results of that is that we are going to obey Him. We teach our children to be submissive to our authority. When they disobey us, are they being submissive to our authority?
It’s not a trick question, I promise. No, they’re not. Some of you have children in their 40s who don’t listen to you at all.
I’ll ask my kids from time to time mine are still little I’ll ask them do you care especially when they’re getting in trouble it’s it’s like you don’t care at all about what daddy says no I do they always say no I do yeah I don’t believe that I don’t buy that not even on double coupon day I see you not doing the things I told you to do and that proves everything to me that you don’t care about what I’m telling you to do. I think they’re getting better. Now, as soon as I say that, it’s going to be a rough week.
But trying to say we submit to God without showing it in obedience is like the child saying, no, absolutely, Dad, I respect you, but I’m not doing anything you say. It doesn’t work that way. When we are in submission to God, it’s going to show up by us trying to be obedient.
Can you or I ever be fully 100% obedient to God? No. That’s not a trick question either.
We have a sin nature, and we’re going to sin. But as God’s children, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we should have the desire to be obedient. And if you’re like me, not that I hold myself up as the perfect example, I mess up a lot.
And you know what? As a child of God, I feel bad about it. I don’t say, I messed up, big whoop.
God, I’m sorry. I messed up, I feel terrible one of the worst feelings in the world is knowing I’ve disappointed my father so what you and I should there should be a longing, a desire in our hearts to obey God now you can also obey without truly worshipping we need to understand here the relationship between submission and obedience we can obey without really worshipping because we can obey without being in submission to God, did your parents ever tell you to do something and you did it even though you really didn’t want to and you grumbled the whole time. If I grumbled the whole time, I would have gotten smacked.
So I grumbled in my mind the whole time. Charla, are there ever times that you ask me to do something and you know I don’t want to, but I do it anyway? I’ve told you all before, there’s a difference between asking, will you change the baby and do you want to change the baby?
Many times she’s asked me, do you want to change the baby for me? No. She’s learned, will you change the baby?
Yes, that’s a different question. I’ll change the baby even though I’m gagging and grumbling the whole time. But we can obey God even though our hearts aren’t really in it, right?
Submission is obeying God and our hearts are in it. Now, we should obey him whether we feel like it or not. But submission says, I’m choosing to obey you because I love you.
If we’re obeying outwardly out of a begrudging sense of obligation toward God rather than a loving, willful submission, we’re not really worshiping him. Because you’ll notice verse 2 encourages us to fear the Lord. Now, yes, there’s an element in there of trembling.
I’ve heard it said so long that fearing the Lord just means respect. No, I think we should be a little bit afraid. I knew my parents loved me.
I feared my parents, and part of that was I was a little bit afraid of my parents. Still might be. But that’s all rolled up into one package.
And that’s a condition of the heart, a fear of the Lord. Not I’m going to obey you because I’m solely scared to death of you, but I’m going to obey you because I have this reverence for you, because I recognize who you are. And that leads us into the second part of this.
We’re going to skip ahead to verse 5. We’ve gone from talking about the commandments and the statutes and this obedience that is the result, the symptom of submission. And we go on to talking about, really, the condition of the heart more so and how we’re supposed to lift God up.
Because real worship doesn’t, it’s not just a pattern of submission toward God, it’s a pattern of reverence toward God as well. So we look at verses 5 through 9 here and we see this again. He says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength.
I’m sorry. I gave you the New Testament version of that. With all your heart, your soul, and your strength.
Verse 6, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. So it’s not just that I’ve given the commandments, obey. He says you’re going to take these commands into your heart.
Why would we take them into our heart? Because they’re God’s word and we love him. You shall teach them diligently to your children.
These are important to pass along. These are important to tell your children about. Raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
And we’re trying to do that with our kids, not in the sense of forcing our beliefs on them. I recognize that at some point they’re going to be fully responsible for their own choices before God. But I want to give them every opportunity that I can to know God’s truth and put it in there so that one day hopefully they have the best chance they can get of making the right choices and of loving Him and serving Him.
And that’s sort of where it was with Israel. Teach these to your children. Show your children what’s important.
Yeah, the children of Israel were going to make their own decisions. But show them what’s important. Teach them diligently to your children and talk of them when you sit in your house.
He’s wanting us to sit and talk about God’s Word as part of our everyday lives. Talk about the things of God. Don’t let that just be a Sunday thing.
Talk about God. Discuss Him. make him a part of your everyday life.
Treat this as something that’s important. You know what we do with the things we care about? We talk about them, right?
I was with a group of people the other day that we sat down to lunch and they said, ah, I’m so glad the election’s over. And I thought, me too. And then they sat there and they talked about the election for 20 minutes and I thought, bang my head on this table.
You know what? I care very deeply about our politics and our elections, but at that point I just had burnout. And you know what?
I didn’t care about it anymore, so I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I wanted to talk about other things. The things that I come home and I’m just bursting to tell Charla about something that happened, it’s because I care about it.
The things that we care about, we talk about. The things that we care about become part of our everyday lives. And so I said, talk about these things.
When you sit at your house, when you walk by the way, when you’re going about your everyday life, your regular business. Irritate the people at work. No, don’t irritate them on purpose.
But make the things of God part of your everyday life, part of your everyday conversation. When you walk by the way, when you lie down, have God on the brain, last thing when you go to sleep. When you rise up, have God on the brain, first thing when you wake up in the morning.
He said, verse 8, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand. Now they were taught to tie the scriptures on these little things on their hands, and he says, let them be frontlets before your eyes. They would carry them sometimes in little boxes on their foreheads.
And now we’re not commanded to do that necessarily, but the purpose here is let God’s word be in your, let God and the things of God and his will and his word, let those things claim your attention all the time. Be careful about how you do it. You don’t want to be obnoxious about it.
There’s a line. I’m not always sure I know where that line is, but there’s a line. We want to lead people to the cross, not drive them away.
But let God’s word have your attention. I remember when I was in high school, I kind of took this verse a little bit literally, but I would sit there during the morning announcements that are so boring, and I would sit there, and I’d come up with a verse of the day, and I’d sit there. I had a notebook and I’d write it a few times in my notebook, whatever that verse was, to help me remember it.
I’d try to memorize a verse a day. And I still have that notebook somewhere. Then I’d take my left hand because I’m right-handed.
I think it says do it on your right hand, but I’m left-handed. So I’d write the verse reference on my left hand, on the back of my hand. My first job in high school was as a cashier at Homeland.
And I remember one day I had written a verse on my hand, at least the reference, and this very, very old lady came through my line and started harassing me about these godless teenagers and our tattoos and how the scripture commands us not to have tattoos and all this. I said, are you aware that the book of Deuteronomy says to bind God’s word on your hand? I said, because that’s all this is.
I’ve written a verse on my hand. Oh, she couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I don’t think she ever came through my line again.
So you got to be careful about how you do this. I was also a little bit more of a smart mouth in that day. Well, I still am.
I just mask it now. You got to be careful about how you do it, but do what you can to make, I did that not to show off the verse, because clearly she couldn’t see what was written on my hand, but I did it so every time I’d look down at my hand, I’d remember that verse of the day. Find ways to give God your full attention.
You know why? Because he deserves it. He says, write it on your doorposts and on your house and on your gates.
Just bring God’s word out into the open. You know why we’re doing that? Because we’re raising God up.
He’s already king of the universe, whether we acknowledge it or not, but we’re acknowledging it. That’s what reverence is. Worship is not just humbling ourselves, because humbling ourselves means recognizing that we’re below God.
It means recognizing that we’re here. A pattern of reverence means recognizing that God is up here because we can humble ourselves and still worship something else. We can humble ourselves and worship stuff.
We can humble ourselves and worship nature. And we need to have a reverence for God that says it’s God that belongs on the throne. Folks, he is in the throne whether we recognize it or not.
But the pattern of reverence, this worship, is about recognizing that God is and belongs on the throne and keeping Him in our focus and in our attention. It requires reverence for God, this pattern of reverence, not just at a worship service but in our daily lives. We’re told in this passage, love God with your whole heart, not just on Sundays but every day.
We’re told carry His word in your heart, sometimes maybe even carry His word on your hand. Teach your kids to follow Him. Make it an everyday part of your life.
Make it a topic of conversation around your house. Talk about him constantly. Think about him.
Keep his word in front of you at all times. And what this is, is describing a heart that is devoted to God. A heart that looks at God as the most important thing and acknowledges that he’s on the throne.
Not just of the universe, but on the throne in our own hearts. There’s a difference between submission and reverence. And we need both.
We need both to worship God. Now I think this third part may be the most important thing here. As we go back to verses 3 and 4, we need to understand that real worship grows out of a covenant relationship with God.
Real worship grows out of a covenant relationship with God. It says in verse 3 and then verse 4, Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you, a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.
We need to understand that worshiping God does not bring us into a relationship with Him. You can come into church, you can sit here and you can sing songs, you can even go out and you can write scripture on your hand, you can post scripture on the doorpost of your house, you can talk to your children about God’s Word. That does not bring you into a relationship with God.
It’s the relationship with God that brings us the ability to worship. Don’t get those two things backwards. Much of the world today is trying to earn their way to a relationship with God.
But the commands of God’s word, the things that he tells us to do, the things that he expects of us, are not things that we can do. And they only become possible through a relationship with him. In the middle of this discussion, you’ll notice we looked at the beginning part of the passage, and then we looked at the end part of the passage, and we’re coming back now to the middle.
That’s because in the middle of this passage about worshiping God as part of their everyday lives, Moses stops and reminds them of the connection between the covenant and worship. He reminds them of the covenant between God and Israel. See, they had a special relationship with God.
They were part of this covenant. God had made his covenant with them and said, I will be your God and you will be my people. And because of this relationship, because he was their God, And because they were his people, this was a natural reaction.
Worship was a natural response to that relationship. And so because they were in that relationship where he was their God and they were his people, they were able to worship him and they were called to worship him. We don’t see a lot of calls in the Old Testament for the Egyptians to worship God.
There might be calls for the Egyptians to obey God, but I don’t recall, And I’ll check this later and correct myself if I’m wrong. But I don’t remember seeing calls for the Egyptians to worship God. Certainly not as many as we see for the Israelites.
I don’t remember seeing calls for the Babylonians to worship God. Maybe to obey, yes. All these countries around them, and I recall seeing the calls for Israel to worship God.
Because only Israel had the covenant relationship with God that would allow them to really worship. Going back to the thing about music, we conflate the terms praise and worship. They’re similar, but they mean two different things.
Praise is telling how great God is and how good God is. And anybody, I think, can do that. I mean, the Bible says that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
They will say those things that glorify Jesus Christ. They will, in essence, praise Him for who He is. But that’s not worship. It’s a part of worship, but it’s not the whole of worship.
The world outside can praise God, but I fully believe that only his children, only those in a covenant relationship with him can worship God. Now, we don’t have the sa
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