Genuine worship involves more than simply the Bible. Today on Truth for Life, we'll explore what's needed for us to worship God biblically. Alistair Begg is teaching from 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. We're studying verses 16 through 18. Nobody can worship God properly unless they're theological. And to be theological means just to have a knowledge of God as it is revealed to us in the Bible.
In other words, it's what we know from the Bible that gives us the lips to praise. Not what I know of myself, because what I know of myself gets me down. At no point in pumping myself up. Even when I pump myself up, I'm not worth pumping up. And at my most pumped up, there's still a lot to discourage. So if I'm looking to that, to energize me in worship, no, I'll never really worship.
It is what I know of thee, my Lord and God, that fills my heart with praise, my lips with song. You come out of a situation in the middle of the week where things have gone poorly for you, whatever it might be. You finished a paper, and it was rotten, and you know that you got a lousy grade before it even comes back. You made a sales call, and you could tell from the way the guy said, I'll be getting back in touch with you, that you'd never hear from him again in your life.
That you were gonna have to continue to go and knock on more doors because you still had not made your quota. You perhaps were concerned because the circumstances you'd left at home or the preoccupations with just the daily grind and maternal considerations are just absolutely crushing you and weighing you down. Perhaps you've had dreadful news of the loss of a loved one, or perhaps your marriage has begun to disintegrate. Your spouse has walked away. Now, where is there gonna be praise in all of this? Unless you're able to retreat to the Bible and say, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Oh, you say to yourself, things are not the way I would like them to be. I am not all that I ought to be. My circumstances are not all that they should be.
But it's what I know of thee, my Lord and God, that fills my heart with praise, my lips with song. Some of your friends have beat you up. You had an elbow on the ribs from the most unlikely of sources. You took a spike in the shins that you were never expecting.
And as you drove in your car, you said to yourself, I don't know how to get out of this one. And we heard the words coming back from our Sunday school, Do thy friends despise, forsake thee? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged.
Take it to the Lord in prayer. What a friend we have in Jesus! All our sins and griefs to bear! Oh, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! I am so glad that my Father in heaven tells of his love in the book. He has given wonderful things in the Bible, I see, and this is the dearest, that Jesus loves me. She may not love me, he may not like me, and they may say this about me, but I am so glad that Jesus loves me. Jesus loves even me. And suddenly there is equilibrium.
The circumstances haven't changed. There's no one at the end of the telephone line. There is no mail as expected in the mailbox.
There is no money for the payment of the check. But it is what I know of thee, my Lord and God, that fills my lips with praise and my heart with song. When you come to worship, when I come to worship out of that spirit, boy, will you hear singing. Boy, will you experience praise. But when we come to worship expecting that something is going to, quotes, trigger it for me, nobody's gonna big enough or diverse enough trigger to trigger it for everyone.
You'd better be pulling your own trigger before you leave the house, so you don't arrive to sit and fire a bunch of blanks. It is biblical—biblical, theological. That's why we're not singing silly songs like Kumbaya.
Does anyone know what Kumbaya was about? That's why, by and large, we're not singing, If I were a butterfly, I'd thank you, Lord, for giving me wings. That's why we are singing, A mighty fortress is our God. That's why we are singing meekness and majesty. That's why we are singing, At your feet we fall, mighty risen Lord.
That's why we are singing, Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise, separated by miles and by years. The hymn writers give fuel to our praise, because their words are biblical. And to worship in spirit and in truth is biblical worship. It is grounded in the Word of God, if said enough. Secondly, it is also rational insofar as it engages the mind. Genuine worship engages our minds.
The idea of some kind of Hindu mantra singing is absolutely unbiblical. The idea that what you do is you get together, and you sing yourself into a kind of frenzy. You disengage your brain, and you just let it move you.
You just go with it. There is no basis in Scripture for that. It is through the mind to the heart. True worship engages our minds.
That's why Paul says to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 14, he says, In your thinking be mature. Worship is a conscious activity. It's not an unconscious activity. Worship is not a glandular condition. It doesn't happen on its own. You don't just sit there and it goes, Oh, goodness, did you see that? I just started to worship. Isn't that amazing? I wasn't planning on it or nothing, and it just… I'm doing it.
No, you're not. You might be doing something else, but you're not worshiping, because worship is a conscious activity. That's why it demands preparation. It demands preparation. You think of the preparation… When I spoke at Cedarville a few weeks ago, I was sitting eating breakfast in my hotel in Springfield, Ohio, and I was sitting next to three guys, two of whom were attorneys, and one was their client. And our tables were so close to one another that I couldn't help but hear what was going on. Fortunately, I was not the opposing attorney. I don't know how they knew I wasn't. Presumably, they checked it out.
But if I had been, it would have been a great insight for me, because they were preparing meticulously their client for testimony. And they were going back and forth, Well, what if they say that? What if they say this? Now, if he says that, you say this. Now, say that to me. And the guy would say, he'd say, No, don't say that. If you say that, we're in deep trouble.
Say it just the way I'm telling you. And they were meticulous in their preparation, so that when the guy goes, Order? They weren't leaving a thing up to chance.
They were prepared. That's how it's supposed to be in worship, in corporate worship. It ought not to be that Pastor Owen comes and leads us from the front here, and when he calls us, as it were, to order, who knows what's about to happen because of the manifold lack of preparation in each of our hearts? Because we've been listening to the same radio programs we always listen to Monday through Saturday. We've been engaged in the same kind of news broadcasts that we always listen to Monday through Saturday. We've been engaged in the same old junk, and we just decided that somehow or another we'd be able to press button A and become worshipers. I'm gonna tell you, you won't, you can't.
It doesn't happen that way. It demands preparation. And as strange as it may sound, I still remember my father saying as we would be driving along in the car—and I used to think it was banal, I used to resent it sometimes, and, you know, I'm being honest—but my dad would say, Okay, it's time to prepare ourselves for worship. And although he couldn't hold a note—with that, I can identify—he would lead us off in some songs or some choruses as we drove in the car, so that when we came into the experience of corporate worship, we'd have already warmed up the pipes, tuned in our thoughts, established our parameters, and made preparation for what was about to take place. Can I ask you this morning, how did you prepare for this worship event? In terms of what you listened to in the car? In terms of the time that you got up?
In terms of the time you went to bed last night? Is it really good enough to say that I will attend upon Almighty God and listen to him speak through his Word, and that I will offer to him praise and worship on the fragments of my poor sleep patterns, because I was too selfishly oriented to go to bed in time to get up in the morning? Every pilot takes his proper rest. He's gonna fly. Every surgeon takes his proper rest.
He's gonna carve. Every worshiper takes our proper rest. We're going to praise. You see, it demands preparation.
And it demands exposition. What you worship, says Paul to the Athenians, is something unknown I'm going to proclaim to you. And the proclamation of the Word of God, declaring the truth of God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, is directly interwoven in our praise. The Book of Common Prayer, given to us from the Anglican Communion, declares that we assemble in God's presence both to hear his most holy Word and to set forth his most worthy praise. Indeed, genuine preaching in and of itself is worship, because it is a sacrifice of praise.
It is the fruit of lips of those who acknowledge his name. It's not a performance. It's not a speech. It's not a talk. It's worship. Stephen Charnock, in an earlier generation, says, When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves, as if somehow he'd been made for us rather than we for him.
And yet if you do exit interviews with people in relationship to their experience of worship, by and large, people answer always in terms of their personal expectations. Well, it was a little longer than I expected. Well, it was a little livelier than I expected. It was a little duller than I thought. There was a little too much preaching. There wasn't enough singing. There wasn't enough kind of singing. There wasn't this, there wasn't that, there wasn't the next thing.
Why? Because all the expectations begin horizontally. But when I understand that God is supposed to be glorified, and I'm not supposed to be satisfied—that's a byproduct—then God stays where he should be, and I stay where I should be. But when it begins with my satisfaction rather than God's glory, then God is down here, and I'm up here, as if somehow he existed to serve us. Finally, to worship in spirit and truth is not only biblical, grounded in the truth of Scripture, rational, engaging our minds, but it is spiritual. It is spiritual. And this, you see, is why some of us can't get it.
Because we are unspiritual. You say, Well, I'm a spiritual being. You just said at the beginning that everyone is a spiritual being.
Now, let me share with you what I mean by this. In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul describes the circumstances of the Ephesian Christians—indeed, of all believers—before they came to Jesus Christ. And he says to them, As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins. And the reason that some of us don't worship is because we're dead. Now, that may seem very unpalatable to us.
Indeed, it may seem phenomenally offensive to us, and I understand that. But I've got to tell you, dead people can't sing. And as long as you and I remain dead and in our trespasses and in our sins, as long as you and I remain separated from God in our rebellion or in our indifference, removed from the wonder of who Jesus is and what he has done upon the cross, then all of this talk about worship and all of the experience of worship will just leave us absolutely cold. Indeed, you're saying to yourself, if you're in that condition this morning, Frankly, I don't know what all this fuss is about.
Check it out. Maybe you're dead. Indeed, you are dead unless Christ has made you alive. Jesus said, I am come that you might have life and that you might have it in all of its fullness. Why would he say to living, breathing people that he had come to give them life? They had life.
They didn't have spiritual life. Oh, but people say, I'm a spiritual person, you know, I am very interested in spiritual things. I go to Borders Bookshop every so often, I get myself a coffee mocha, and I read all those things about angels. I'm a very spiritual person. I understand you have a spiritual interest. And the reason that you feel the way you feel is because the Spirit of God is at work within your mind, forcing you to consider the fact that there is something beyond yourself. But I want to tell you, you'll only find the answer in Jesus. And when you meet Jesus, then he'll make you alive.
And when he makes you alive, he'll make you sing. Let me give you a paltry illustration of it. Twelve years ago, I didn't know which end of a baseball to hold. Twelve years ago, I couldn't have cared less about baseball. I didn't know first base from who knows where.
As far as I was concerned, the Indians and their stadium and everything else was geography totally unfamiliar to me. But not today. Not today. I've been made alive! I am alive to it!
Now, I have a family here from Scotland. They haven't got a clue what's going on. They're looking at me. They're saying, How in the world could anybody be so excited about this?
Is it not, said one of them, a little bit boring to keep playing day after day after day, the same team? Oh, I said, You see, you're dead! But if you, like me, would come alive, then you'll sing!
You'll care! I make the point purposefully. We need to be spiritually alive. Secondly, we need to be spiritually assisted.
Once alive, we need to be assisted. That's why Ephesians 5 18 says, Don't get drunk with wine and get boozed up in excess, but be filled with the Spirit of God and sing and speak to one another. The reason some of us have got a problem with worship is because we are not living Spirit-filled lives.
We are grieving the Spirit of God by our rebellion, by our selfishness, by our disinterest, by our preoccupations. And because it is different from how I may expect it to be, I don't enter into worship as I might, and the reason is that I am not being spiritually assisted. Well, you say, What do you do? You get flat on your face before God and say, Assist me. Assist me. Cleanse me from my sin, Lord. Put thy power within, Lord. Take me as I am, Lord, and make me all your own. Keep me day by day, Lord, underneath your sway, Lord, and make my heart your palace and your royal throne.
Assist me. My gracious Master and my God, assist me to proclaim, to spread through all the earth abroad, the glories of thy name. The only way you will have a worshiping congregation is when they are spiritually alive, spiritually assisted, and finally, spiritually active. Spiritually active. Doing it, in other words. Ephesians 5.16, making the most of every opportunity, saying, I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord. I'm glad to be in the house of the Lord. It may be different from what I normally engage in.
I may have traveled from out of town. I may like it with the temperature up a little more. I may like it a little cooler. I may like it a little more liturgical. I may like it a little freer. I may frankly like they had chandeliers that I could swing from.
I may like that they had kneelers that I could kneel upon. But you know what? I recognize that the Spirit of the Lord is in this place, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And so let me then be spiritually active. I will sing. I will praise.
I will honor. I make a commitment to spiritual activity. And then, saying with the psalmist, What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me? I will make a renewed commitment in the awareness of the fact that God is not indifferent as to whether I worship. God is not indifferent as to the object of my worship. God is not indifferent as to the manner of my worship. The manner of my worship is to be in spirit and in truth.
It is to be biblical, grounded in the Bible. It is to be rational, engaging my mind, and it is to be spiritual. So I need to be alive. So I need to be assisted. So I need to be active. Some of you need that God would make you alive today.
You've been wondering why it is, that there's no engagement. You turn that computer screen on, and you press the buttons, and nothing comes up. Why doesn't the mouse move?
I said to myself, What kind of dumb mechanism is this? I can't even get it to appear on the screen. Someone says, You know, maybe this little plug in the back might make a difference.
Well, I said, You got a good point there. I got the mouse. I got the desire. I got the cord. I got the screen. I got the plug. I ain't got it plugged in.
Some of you are coming Sunday by Sunday. You got the place. You got the songs. You've got the group.
You've got the interest. But you're not plugged in. And today in our prayer room, there'll be people be able to introduce you to what it means to be plugged in to the life source of Jesus Christ. Let's bow together in a moment of prayer. Just where you're seated, respond to God's Word as he's spoken into your life.
I know he has to mine. I know my preparation is often poor. I know my expectations are often selfish.
I know how easy it is to grieve the Spirit, to put out his fire. So we pray, O God, that you will come to our waiting hearts in the conclusion of this morning hour, where we live in disobedience, grant that we might repent and follow after you, where we have no knowledge of your life, grant that we may cry out to you and find you to be everything that we need, and where, frankly, we've been sitting on the sidelines and letting other people do the hard work. We've been in the dugout but not on the field. We pray that you will enable us to be active and to make the most of every opportunity. We thank you for one another. We thank you for the great group and congregation you've given to us.
We thank you for the diversity of spiritual gifts, not least of all in the realm of music. And we pray in these days that you will show us what it means to worship you in spirit and in truth. And now, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you his peace, today and forevermore.
Amen. You're listening to Truth for Life. That is Alistair Begg helping us understand why we need to be filled with the Spirit in order to worship biblically, rationally, and spiritually. If you just prayed with Alistair to be made alive in Jesus, we'd love to hear from you.
You can speak to someone at Truth for Life by calling 888-588-7884, or you can email us letters at truthforlife.org. And if you'd like to hear or read more about the Gospel and what it means to be a Christian, visit our website truthforlife.org slash learn more. Now, when you go to our website, be sure to check out the book we are recommending currently. The book is titled Gather, Loving Your Church As You Celebrate Christ Together. Whether you're a regular church attender or find yourself substituting in-person worship for watching online, this book will lead you to prioritize the privilege of corporate worship. You'll consider how no other gathering is like the one that happens when God's people come together in the local church. And the reason is because this gathering is designed by God to nurture and uphold all who come to know Jesus. In fact, this is what Alistair had to say about this book. He said, it doesn't just tell me why I need to gather with my church.
It makes me want to do it. Ask for your copy of the book Gather today when you donate to support the ministry of Truth for Life. Go to truthforlife.org slash donate, or if you'd prefer you can call us at 888-588-7884. Thanks for studying God's Word with us today. Tomorrow we'll examine an inspiring illustration of faith in action. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
