I preached this sermon during the sunrise service at Hoosier Prairie Baptist Church on April 4, 2010. The sermon text is Matthew 27:62-28:15.
Image made by http://www.wordle.net
Tag Archives: Worship
Worship Wars
Those Horrible Saturdays
For some reason I hate Saturdays. It was not always so. Saturday was the great free day; you could do whatever you wanted on that day. It was a day to hang out with friends, explore a new mall, go see a movie, pretty much anything your heart desired. Then I became a pastor, and while Saturday didn’t stop being a day to try to do the things listed above, there is now one huge difference: I have to preach the next morning.
What this means for our family is that all the fun stuff has to come to a crashing halt at about 8:00 PM so that my wife can plan her Sunday School lesson (she teaches the young children) and iron the family’s clothes and so that I can attempt to get “re-attuned” to God after a day of pursuing other things and then go over my sermon for the next morning.
When I say that I have to “re-attune” myself to God, what I mean is spending a significant amount of time in prayer seeking God’s face, reading a good portion of His Word in order to hear His voice, and then trying to relive all that I have studied throughout the week so that I can get to where I need to be spiritually in order to proclaim His Word the following morning. In biblical terminology it would be called “consecrating yourself for worship” (Exodus 19:10, Joshua 3:5). In the Old Testament, this action of consecration was seen as a necessary condition in order to see and experience the wonders of God’s presence.
Now if that is the case, I want you to think for a second about what the Enemy has done in America by working it so that there are two days off on the weekends for most people. Those who hate God use Sunday as their day to play the hardest, tempting those who would otherwise like to be a part of worship in a church somewhere to join them. But even apart from this temptation, and much more sinisterly subtle, by having another day off right before the day of worship, Christians are encouraged to do everything but consecrate themselves for worship the following day. In fact, we usually desecrate ourselves with an overabundance of worldliness on Saturday that it is impossible for us to indulge in on any other day because of our work schedules.
Now, as I said earlier, I never had the opportunity to even notice this before I became the pastor of a church. I always played right up until I went to bed on Saturday night, not really ever thinking about the need to consecrate myself for worship. And I know that I am not alone.
How much more of God might we experience in our worship services on Sunday mornings if the majority of our people actually made their hearts ready for worship on the day before? How much more of God’s glory might be evident in my sermons if I spent the entire day on Saturday consecrating myself for worship rather than just the last three hours of the evening? What we all seem to be doing is wrapping the weeds of the world (Matthew 13:22) tightly about us on the very day that we ought to be digging them up. And then we wonder why the church in America is so fruitless these days.
Beware the One-Handed Woman!
The miscellaneous laws of the Old Testament are just awesome. If you’ve never taken the time to read through a book like Deuteronomy, then you need to. It’s a real treat. Not only is this where Jesus got all of the ammunition that He used against the Devil during His temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11), but there are also some rare gems among the various laws.
Now, I don’t mean in any way to make fun of the law that I’m about to discuss, but it’s one of those rules that makes me chuckle when I read it. It makes me think of playground hi-jinks and people making funny faces. I’m talking about Deuteronomy 25:11-12.
When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.
I suppose you could say that I have an “immature” sense of humor for laughing when I read a law that mentions seizing someone by the “private parts”, but so be it. This is a funny picture in my mind.
The Law makes it clear, however, that this is in no way a minor offense. Other cultures and religions have various situations in which a person’s hand is to be cut off as punishment for an offense, but this is the only case in the Bible’s Law that calls for this particular penalty. But what makes it such a serious crime? Why take such drastic measures against an action that seems rude but not overly injurious (other than that sickening pain)?
Well, I suppose you could say that since the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” law can’t possibly apply here, something else had to be done, but I don’t think that’s it. The true answer probably lies a couple of chapters back in Deuteronomy 23:1, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD.” In other words, the woman who reaches out to grab hold of her husband’s enemy’s “private parts” may end up permanently disqualifying him from participating in the worship assembly.
Sadly, there are a lot of men sitting through worship services in our churches today that probably wish that there was something to disqualify them from having to be there. Men have become so effeminate in our culture that they abandon the spiritual headship of the home to their wives while they go out and do supposedly “manly” things. In the Bible, however, faith and worship are extremely masculine pursuits. One could make a joke concerning these laws that I’ve mentioned about what you have to have to be able to worship.
Worship of the Almighty Creator and King of the cosmos is at once our highest privilege and the most natural expression of our faith. Worship is not our right. God makes that clear by denying many people access to the assembly (Deuteronomy 23:1-8). It is a gracious blessing to be able to draw near to God, even just to be able to sing with others about His greatness. But this is exactly what the man who loves God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength greatly desires to do. When something or someone is truly praiseworthy, we long to give the deserved praise.
Men who show little or no desire to be in worship ought not to kid themselves that they are genuine believers. Disobeying the Word of God when it commands attendance at worship (Hebrews 10:25) is not a “cool” and “manly” thing to do. It is a faithless and cowardly thing. Real men worship God with all their hearts. The rest may as well just go ahead and emasculate themselves (Galatians 5:12).
Heavenly Worship
The following quote is from the book, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, by Alexander Schmemann, cited in the book, Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation, by David Chilton:
The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended. They realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world. For there – in heaven – they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension,’ they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses. They brought not programs and no theories; but wherever they went, the seeds of the Kingdom sprouted, faith was kindled, life was transfigured, things impossible were made possible. They were witnesses, and when they were asked, ‘Whence shines this light, where is the source of its power?’ they knew what to answer and where to lead men. In church today, we so often find we meet only the same old world, not Christ and His Kingdom. We do not realize that we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind us.
Unburnable Bush
The bush that burns without being consumed (Exodus 3) is a puzzle. It’s just as puzzling to readers today as it was to Moses thousands of years ago. We want to stop and examine this phenomenon just as much as he did.
Why is the bush not burned?
Clearly this meeting is full of revelation from God. This is where He revealed His eternal Name to His servant Moses. The signs of the staff-tuned-snake-turned-staff and the hand-made-leprous-made-clean also revealed something about God’s power and character. The instruction for Moses to remove His sandals because the ground was holy further revealed God’s character. But what was the fire in the bush saying?
Moses gives us an indication that the significance of this theophany (a display of God’s presence) is radically different than we might at first think in Deuteronomy 4:24: “For Yahweh your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.” How does the man who first meets God in the symbol of a bush not being consumed with fire end up declaring that this same God is a consuming fire?
What we find here at the bush is nothing less than the wonder and mystery of the gospel. The fire of God speaks everywhere of His judgment. It was fire from God that consumed Nadab and Abihu for not worshiping in the commanded way (Leviticus 10:1-2). He is the jealous God that consumes all who will not worship Him in eternal flames (Deuteronomy 4:24, Revelation 14:11). This fire is holy fire from a God that is “of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong” (Habakkuk 1:13). And yet here, in this dry bush in the desert – a plant that should be consumed almost instantly – the fire dwells but does not consume. And standing before the bush is a murderer (Exodus 2:12).
From the expulsion from Eden to this point in God’s revelation of Himself to man there has only been one sin enumerated that carries with it the death penalty, and that’s murder (Genesis 9:6). So now here, standing before the presence of the Judge of the universe is one who has no right to appeal the sentence he deserves, and yet God appears as a flame that does not consume. Herein is the essence of the gospel: the God who made us is a holy and just God who must punish sin, and yet He is also merciful and gracious, giving life where death is due.
How can He do this? This is the wonder of Christ and His substitutionary atonement. Sin must be consumed by God’s holy wrath, it cannot simply be forgotten. To simply forget sin would mean that God has no concern for justice. But in Christ, God is shown to be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:26). This is because Jesus stood in Moses’ place and took the wrath of God that Moses deserved onto Himself. He became a curse for him so that he would not be cursed (Galatians 3:13). The fire did not consume the dry kindling because the heat of its flame had been redirected to a Substitute.
We will all meet this flame at one point, if we haven’t already. He is always a consuming fire, but for those whose faith is firmly in Christ, the fire is a beauty and a wonder, for the heat of the blaze has been spent on another. Many, however, will meet this fire on different circumstances and it will be torment, for it will consume them in their sin, and they will wish more than anything that those that they love who are still alive could know the Savior (Luke 16:19-31).
Don’t wait until it gets to that point. This fire now burns all through the highly flammable pages of a book we call the Bible, and yet it is not consumed. It reveals all we need to know of this great and awesome God. It speaks of His Law, His justice, and His grace through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. You can meet God on the same terms that Moses did, and find the same Savior that he did (Hebrews 11:23-26). Don’t miss the wonder.
