Welcome to Delight in Grace. The Teaching Ministry of Rich Powell. pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. Mankind, made in the image of God. cannot help but worship.
It's built into us. The question for each of us is, who or what will we worship? Deuteronomy 12 gives a portrait of what it looks like to worship the Lord God of the Bible. In this message titled A People Who Worship You Shall Rejoice in the Lord, Pastor Rich lays out seven principles for worshiping our Lord God. Let's listen in.
I'll be reading from uh Deuteronomy chapter 12. Verses 1 through 14 from the ESV version of God's Word. These are the statutes and rules that you shall be careful to do in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess. all the days that you live on the earth. You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods.
on the high mountains, and on the hills, and under every green tree. You shall tear down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and burn their asherim with fire. You shall chop down the carved images of their gods, and destroy their name out of that place. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way. But you shall seek the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name and make his habitation there.
There you shall go, and there you shall bring your burnt offerings and your sacrifices. your tithes and the contribution that you present. your vow offerings, your free will offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock. And there you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice. You and your households in all that you undertake.
in which the Lord your God has blessed you. You shall not do according to all that That we are doing here today, everyone doing whatever is right in his own eyes. For you have not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance that the Lord your God is giving you. But when you go over the Jordan and live in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to inherit. And when he gives you rest from all your enemies around, so that you live in safety.
Then to the place that the Lord your God will choose, to make his name dwell there. There you shall bring all that I command you. Your burnt offerings and your sacrifices. your tithes, and the contribution that you present, and all your finest vow offerings that you vow to the Lord. And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your sons and your daughters, your male servants and your female servants.
and the Levite that is within your towns. since he has no poss portion or inheritance with you. Take care that you do not offer your burnt offerings at any place that you see. but at the place that the Lord will choose in one of your tribes. There you shall offer your burnt offerings, and there you shall do all that I am commanding you.
Let's pray. Lordly, thank you for this passage from Deuteronomy. You spoke so many. Uh years ago. We know there's a truth for us today.
We ask that you help Rich as he unpacks this for us to be true. Uh to the to the to the word. Thank you for his work. his effort in in bringing it to us. Give him Um strength uh to bring it to us.
It's in Christ's name I pray. Amen. Good morning, church. Deuteronomy chapter 12. We have finished two sections of the book of Deuteronomy, the first three chapters.
Were Moses informing this new generation of Israelites? How did we get here? And then chapters 4 through 11. was a call to faithfulness. Your fathers had been unfaithful.
You are called to faithful. God has promised, He's called you out as His people. He has taken you into the land that He promised your forefathers. And this is a call to faithfulness, chapters 4 through 11. And now we come to the third section of Deuteronomy, beginning in chapter 12.
And it is a people who worship. This gets into now specifically the laws, the commandments that God lays out. For the people of Israel. He's already gone over the Ten Commandments again, but now he's getting into the specific. Multiple, many laws that he has for the people of Israel.
And he begins here for these next several chapters on. The topic of worship. This is how you worship.
So let's glean from this, of course, this is under the Mosaic, this is part of the Mosaic law, which was a law for a specific people for a specific time. time. And yet, We glean so much from it. We learn from it. We see God's heart.
We see the demands of His righteousness. We see him as the holy God, the holacent, benevolent sovereign that he is. And he is worthy to be worshipped, but we must make sure that we're worshiping him. accurately We must know him in the way that he has made himself known. In light of that, We're going to go through chapter 12 here, and we're going to learn about what God expects from our work.
worship Our worship of God is to be, number one, a contrast. to paganism. Let me begin just by saying this. Everyone worships. There are no exceptions.
Everyone worships. Every human being is created in the image of God, and we were created to worship. And if we are ignoring God, If we have abandoned him, If we do not know him, we will worship the God of our imagination. But everyone worships. Today, the chief object of worship.
is the self. And our worship of God is to be a contrast, indeed, a repudiation. to paganism. In the natural reason that God gives us, the capacity to reason, we are rational, emotive, volitional beings created by God. And with our reason, we can look and see and determine that indeed there is a God.
To affirm otherwise, you have to suppress a huge amount of information. There is a God. But just what you can see does not tell you who God is. That requires special revelation.
Now apart from that, human imagination, in our human worship, Because we all worship our Our human imagination will be due to imagination and sensation And that kind of worship will lead us to worship material things. In these nations that Israel was going in to dispossess, they would worship trees and they would worship the sun. We don't worship material things, do we?
So this doesn't apply to us. I hope you know that sarcasm. Not only did they worship material things, but their gods were imaginary. They know there is a God, but the God that they worship is an imaginary God. And what God is telling the people of Israel here is that they need to root them out.
You need to root these false gods out of your space. They don't belong in the worship of Jehovah. We see that very strongly in verses 1 to 3. And the book ends of the chapter. Look way back at verses 29 to 31.
When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them, and dwell in their land, take care that you do not. You are not ensnared to follow them, for they have been destroyed before you, that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? that I also may do the same. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing. That the Lord hates, they have done.
for their gods, for they even burned their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods. They would worship in the high mountains and the hills. Here's their imagination. Here's how it works: the high mountains and the hills, right? They look up there.
Not a lot of people live up there, so they look up in the high mountains and the hills.
Well, way up there, you're closer to God. That's the human imagination, right? We could talk about Ratio there. Truly, if the earth were the size of a billiard ball, The earth would be smoother than the billiard ball.
Okay, so to think that you can go up on a mountain and be closer to God. is nonsense. All right. Amy. But that's what they would think.
And so they would build worship places in the hills. They would go under every green tree, it says in verse 2. And in verse 31, as we just read, they did every abominable thing that the Lord hates. Here's the point we glean from this. When your worship And everyone does.
when your worship is left up to your imagination and sensations. You will use it to indulge your passions. And that is a truth. We see that throughout world history.
So our worship of God is to be a contrast to paganism.
So then what is it? Number two, our worship of God is to be anchored in divine revelation. Our worship of God is to be anchored in divine revelation. The Creator, Designer, by whom and for whom are all things. has spoken.
He has spoken. And we see numerous times in this chapter, verse 11, verse 14, verse 21, verse 28, verse 32, all that I command you. God has spoken. Our worship is the appropriate response to God's self-disclosure. Our worship is the appropriate response to God's self-disclosure.
Worship is to be anchored in objective truth, not personal sensation. That doesn't mean that sensation is not a part of worship. but our worship is to be anchored in objective truth, God's self-disclosure. And the worship. That we exercise is not a human construction, it is a divine ordination.
Thanks for joining us here at Delight in Grace. You've been listening to Rich Powell, the lead pastor at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. The Delight in Grace Mission. To help you know that God designed you to realize your highest good. and your deepest satisfaction in him.
the one who is infinitely good. We hope you'll join us again on weekdays at 10 a.m.
