True Worship, Part 2

God will not accept people into His kingdom, into His eternity, into His presence, who worship other deities. Anyone who worships false gods is excluded from entering into God's presence because that is unacceptable worship.

He will not accept that. It's safe to say that every Bible teaching lesson here on Grace To You accomplishes one of three things. John MacArthur either covers biblical truths that are brand new to you, or he refreshes your thinking on a familiar passage, or he helps clear up misunderstandings you may have on a particular passage or topic. Well, the study John continues today probably falls into that third category for many people, the subject as well as the title, true worship. It answers a simple yet profound question, what does it really mean to worship God? And with that, let's get to today's lesson.

Here's John. Destiny is determined by worship. Who you worship and what you worship and how you worship is determinative and reflective of your destiny. And we suggested to you that there are only two ways to worship really that will reflect your destiny.

One is unacceptable and the other is acceptable. If your worship is unacceptable to God, then you will be excluded from His eternal kingdom. If your worship is acceptable to God, you will be included. There are four kinds of unacceptable worship.

The first one is the worship of false gods. The Bible is very clear that God does not accept the worship of false gods. God will not accept people into His kingdom, into His eternity, into His presence who worship other deities, whether they are deities of a religious nature or whether they are gold and silver and power and prestige and self. Anyone who worships false gods is excluded from entering into God's presence because that is unacceptable worship.

He will not accept that and thus will not accept the one who offers it. Now the second kind of unacceptable worship is this. Worship is unacceptable when it is the worship of the true God in the wrong way. God will not accept the worship of the false god and He will not accept the worship of the true God if offered in the wrong way. Worship of the true God is very specifically established in Scripture and its mode and manner is equally specifically established.

I very often hear people say, well, God as I perceive Him to be is such and such and such and such. And if your definition of God does not square with the Word of God, then your worship is unacceptable even though you may identify it with the true God. Now that leads me to a third kind of unacceptable worship. The first one is worshiping a false god. The second one is worshiping the true God in an unacceptable manner. And the third one is worship of the true God in a self-styled manner.

Now what do I mean by that? Look back with me in your Bible at Leviticus chapter 10. Now this records for us a great event. Aaron was the high priest and Aaron had two sons and they of course would be entering into the priesthood. It was a great and wonderful day because this was their ordination day.

They had been allowed to accompany Moses to the holy mountain. They had been prepared to be ordained to function as those who represented God. They had been part of that ordination of the priesthood. This was their first day really to be considered as those who would lead in the worship of God. And it says in verse 1, Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and the censer was that which was filled with incense which was emblematic and symbolic of worship as it rose in its fragrance as it were to the nostrils of God. It was like their worship pleasing to him. They took their censers and put fire therein and put incense thereon and offered strange fire before the Lord which He commanded them not.

Strange fire. Believe it or not, it may well be true that they were drunk. If you look down at verse 9, there is a warning immediately following that the Lord gives to Aaron which suggests this possibility because he says, Don't drink wine or strong drink, thou nor thy sons with thee when you go into the tabernacle of the congregation lest ye die. Now it may well have been that they got a little bit inebriated and when they went in they began to fool around in there and do things that were not according to God's law for the priesthood. And it says in verse 2, there went out fire from the Lord and devoured them and they died. Kind of a sad way to start your ministry.

No start at all. God will not accept self-styled, self-invented modes of worship. We do not worship God on our terms but according to the terms of Scripture. Now this is a little different than the New Testament and if you will look with me at Matthew for a moment, I'll show you chapter 15. This is exactly what the Pharisees did. They tried to worship the true God with their own self-styled system, not according to His commandments, not according to His standards, but according to their own inventions. And of course the Pharisees had developed this very sophisticated system of worship which was totally man-made. And in the first nine verses of Matthew 15 you have a very interesting situation. The Pharisees say to Jesus, verse 2, why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?

Why are you breaking our rules, our standards? Because they're not washing their hands when they eat bread. It doesn't mean that they weren't washing them for the sake of cleanliness but that they were not ceremonially washing. They were not going through some ritual. And He answered, why do you transgress the commandment of God by your traditions?

That's the issue. They said, you don't worship by our traditions. And Jesus said, you don't worship by God's commands.

You've invented your own system. And then He gives them an illustration of it and then down in verse 7 He says, you hypocrites. You hypocrites. Well did Isaiah prophesy of you saying, this people draweth near unto Me with their mouth and on earth Me with their lips but their heart is far from Me, for in vain do they worship Me. It is useless, fruitless, pointless worship because they have substituted the commandments of men for the truth of God. And every time I see all the holy hocus pocus that goes on in so many, many so-called Christian churches, I see the substitution of the tradition of men for the commandments of God.

God says I will be worshiped in spirit and in truth, not through images or through rituals or through liturgies but in spirit and in truth. In chapter 23 the Lord further indicts the Pharisees in Matthew and it goes all through a whole list of things. But as one classic illustration of the folly of their kind of worship, verse 23 of Matthew chapter 23 says, Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you pay your tithe of mint and anise and cumin. That's herbs and plants and seeds.

If they had ten seeds, they'd count out one, you know, and give it. But you have omitted the weightier issues of the law, justice, mercy and faith. These ought you to have done, not to have left the other undone. And so they had missed the whole point of true worship. They were straining at gnats and swallowing camels and they were hypocrites.

Cleaning the outside, verse 25, while inside they were full of extortion and excess and painted white but inside full of dead men's bones. So what I'm trying to show you is there is a category of unacceptable worship. You cannot worship false gods. You cannot worship the true God by reducing him to imagery, reducing him to an idol, reducing him to an icon in any way. And you cannot worship the true God in a self-styled manner.

It must be according to the prescription of Holy Scripture. And fourthly, and I think this could kind of sum it up, the fourth kind of unacceptable worship is to worship the true God with a wrong attitude. You cannot worship him with a materializing of him into some image. You cannot truly worship him with a self-styled way and you cannot worship him even though you don't have an image and even though you try to follow the Scripture if your attitude isn't right, if your heart isn't right.

So now we've really funneled it right down, haven't we? True worship, we eliminate all the false gods. We eliminate all the images of the true God. We eliminate all the self-styled modes of worship. We come down to the biblically revealed kind of worship of the true God but it must be with a true heart attitude.

And now we really get down to where we live. Now I want to take a minute to develop this so turn in your Bible to the Old Testament, the book of Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament and we'll work our way from there back deeper into the Old Testament to see this truth. And I really believe this provides a death blow to all legalism and all ritualism, all formalism. Malachi the prophet indicting the people of God, indicting them because of their sin and he does so in many ways in this marvelous prophecy. He points up at least seven sins which are monumental sins of which they're guilty. But one that stands out and dominates all is that they were involved in worshiping God with the wrong attitude. They were going through it as a functionary. They were just going through the motions and their hearts weren't in it. They were just like the Pharisees really. His heart was far from God. But just watch.

Begin in verse 6 of chapter 1 and Malachi speaks to Israel. A son honors his father and a servant his master. Now that's a truism, isn't it? That's an established fact. Nobody's going to argue with that. A son normally honors his father, a servant honors his master.

That's the basic principle. If then I be a father, and they couldn't argue with that either. He was their father. Where is my honor? And if I be a master, where is my reverence? Set the Lord of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my name.

Now wait a minute. The priests despised his name? Where is my honor? Where is my worship? And what do the priests say? In what way have we despised thy name?

What are you saying? How did we do that? We've been carrying out our function.

We've been doing it all just the way the prescription says. The prophet takes it a step further in verse 7. Ye offer polluted flesh upon mine altar. And ye say, in what way have we polluted thee? You know how?

Listen to this. In that ye say, the altar of the Lord. That's what it means. The table of the Lord refers to that altar. The altar of the Lord is contemptible. What in the world were they doing? They were treating their worship with contempt. It was strictly a function. It was strictly a routine. It was strictly a ritual.

There was no heart. And they were actually bringing to God that which was the least rather than that which was the best. They had contempt for worship. Before you pounce on them with both feet and before I do, may I remind you that having contempt for worship is coming to worship with any kind of a wrong attitude.

Any kind. And what were they doing? Verse 8. They were offering the blind for sacrifice. Is that not evil?

What does that mean? Well, when they would want to bring an animal to sacrifice to God, they'd bring a blind one. Because a blind one was useless to them. A blind one would probably die anyway because it couldn't find its way to the food. And they would just get rid of the blind animal that way.

And it may reflect the fact also that the blindness was due to some disease and so they brought a diseased animal. That was the kind of worship they offered God. Just give God what you can't use anyhow. And if you offer, it says in verse 8, the lame and the sick, is it not evil? Offer it now unto the governor. Try that when you go to pay your taxes. And see if the governor will be pleased with thee and accept that.

You give me what you wouldn't even give the government. And now I pray you, beseech God that he will be gracious unto us. This has been by your means. Will he regard your persons, saith the Lord of Hosts? If this is how you treat God, how do you think God's going to treat you?

You think he's going to regard you any different than you regarded him? He says in verse 10, you kindle fire on my altar for nothing. There's no heart. There's no spirit. And I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord of Hosts. Now watch this. Neither will I, what's the next word?

What is it? Accept an offering at your hand. There's some things God won't accept. He will not accept worship offered in a materialized way. He will not accept worship offered in a self-styled way. And he will not accept worship offered half-heartedly. For from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, my name shall be great among the nations. And in every place incense shall be offered unto my name and a pure offering. I do not want your impure. You know, when God told him to bring a lamb, what kind of lamb were they to bring?

Without spot, without blemish, the best in the flock. They weren't doing it. And verse 12 says, you have profaned it. In other words, you've treated it as an unworthy thing. You've treated it as a useless thing. And you have said, the table of the Lord is polluted.

It's contemptible. They were treating the table of God with contempt. And then verse 13, just a really sad statement. And you have also said, behold what a weariness.

And you sniffed at it. And you brought that which was torn and the lame and the sick. And thus you brought an offering.

Should I accept this of your hand? Cursed be the deceiver who has in his flock a male and vows, makes a big vow to God, plays spiritual, and sacrifices unto the Lord a corrupt thing. For I am a great king, saith the Lord of hosts, and my name is terrible among the nations. So he says, look, and here, by the way, if you go all the way back, see, to verse 6, he's indicting the priests. The priests were the leaders in the sin and filled it all the way down to the people. The whole system was rotten from top to bottom. They had contempt to the table of the Lord.

And verse 13, I think, is the key. It says, behold what a weariness. To them the whole exercise of worship was just a big pain in the neck. What a drag. What a boring deal. What a pain. We have to go down there and do that deal again.

Well, just get rid of that blind lamb or that lame one. And they went through the function, and they went through the form, but their hearts weren't in it. There was no reality there. And in chapter 3, they even went further. Verse 13, they got so sick of doing this that they finally began to just badmouth God. Your words have been stout against me, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, and they always come back with this phony attitude, what have we spoken against thee? What do you mean when we're doing all of the things the Scripture says? But you have said it is vain to serve God. And what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance and walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts?

In other words, you've decided that you don't make enough money doing that. There's no profit in it. Boy, what a terrible, terrible attitude. And there was result for that. Chapter 4 says, the day comes it will burn like an oven, and the proud and all that do wickedly shall be stubble. And the day comes that God shall burn them up, leaving neither root nor branch. He will tread down, verse 3, the wicked. There will be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I do this, says the Lord of hosts. And then verse 5 and 6 talks about the terrible day of the Lord and the smiting of the earth with a curse. You see, the people of God had come to the place where they were worshiping the true God in the true way with the wrong attitude.

Their hearts weren't in it. Just kind of look in your own heart. You say, I don't worship false gods.

That's good. I worship the true God. And I haven't really reduced him to some idol, some image, some statue. And I haven't sort of invented my own way of worship. I'm not sitting on a mountain contemplating my navel.

I'm trying to do it by the book. Do it by the word of God. Then ask yourself if your heart's in it. Ask yourself if when it comes time to give, do you give the best?

The best of all you have? When it comes time to make your vows and your promises to God, do you make him the promise that is the most reflective of magnanimity and generosity? Is your heart filled with awe and reverence?

Because if it isn't, the stuff you're going through is pointless and unacceptable. Look at Amos, the prophet Amos, and you find the same message and the prophecies of God to his people. But listen to what it says in chapter 5, verse 21.

And this is really amazing. Imagine God saying this, I hate, I despise your feast days. I will not take delight in your solemn assemblies. I can't stand your worship, that's what he says. I can't stand your services. I can't stand your worship activities.

Though you offer me burnt offerings, you give me your worship and you bring me your meal offerings, I will not... And what's that word again? Accept them. They're not acceptable. I will not accept them. I will not take the peace offerings of your fat beast. Now, they're even given the good animals here.

They're given the fat animals here. And they're doing it in the right way externally, but he will not take it. And he says in verse 23, take away from me the noise of your songs. I do not like your singing. I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

Why? Let justice run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Your hearts aren't right, you see?

There's no justice and equity. There's no righteousness. While you're making all of these offerings to me, verse 26, you have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chion. Your image is the star of your God, which you made to yourselves. Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts. God says, I'm through with you. Because while on the one hand you come and you offer to me and you go through all of this performance of worship, you turn right around and worship false gods.

You're so ingrained and engulfed and involved in the system of the world that this is hypocrisy and unacceptable. Backing up even further, look at Hosea chapter 6, verse 4. Ephraim is synonymous with Israel, and Judah is mentioned here as well. O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? It's almost melancholy in the part of God.

What am I going to do with you two? Your goodness is like a morning cloud, and like the early dew, it goes away. Your goodness doesn't stay. Therefore, I have hewed them or cut them down, slain them by the word of my mouth. The judgments are as the light that goeth forth. Why?

Listen, here it is. I desired mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than what? Burnt offerings. There we are back to burnt offerings again, the act of worship. I want more than just a burnt offering.

I want you to know me, and I want you to reflect my heart and my attitude of mercy. But they, like men, have transgressed the covenant. There have they dealt treacherously against me.

It goes on to talk about their iniquity and their pollution. Now, just one Scripture in this regard in the New Testament, the seventh chapter of Mark, and I'm going to wrap this point up. Mark 7, verse 6. And this is similar to what I saw earlier in Matthew 15, but I just want to point it out to you, because I think it sums it up. He answered and said to them, Well, hath Isaiah prophesied of you hypocrites? As it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

Their heart is far from me. That is unacceptable. And may I tell you this, people? Listen, if you worship false gods, if you worship the true God reduced to some kind of image, if you worship the true God in a self-styled, self-defined way, or if you worship the true God in the right way with the wrong attitude, it's unacceptable.

Unacceptable. And it will affect your destiny. It will affect your soul, because God cannot accept one who is unacceptable. You've just heard from John MacArthur here on Grace to You, the title of his current study, True Worship. John, I'd like to go back to the beginning of the message where you mentioned four kinds of unacceptable worship. You said there was worshiping false gods, worshiping the true God in the wrong way, worshiping in a self-styled way, and worshiping with the wrong attitude. Now, I think I know how you're going to answer this question, but out of those four, which one do you think is the most prevalent? What kind of false worship are Christians in 2022 most in danger of committing?

So I have to pick one. I don't know that I could isolate one, but I would probably land on worshiping the true God in the wrong way. And I think while they worship the true God, in the sense that they identify him as the God of the Bible, they don't really give him praise for who he is and what he's done because they don't have the rich understanding of his nature and his work that comes with a deep understanding of Scripture and doctrine. So yes, I think they worship the right God in the sense that he's the God of Scripture, the God who is Creator, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But they are incapable of giving him the worship he is due because of the superficiality of their thoughts.

I think there is so much preaching and teaching directed at people and their wants and their needs and how they operate and how they can be successful and how they can be happy that much of even evangelical Christianity is man-centered rather than God-centered. And people who are focused on themselves don't know how to worship. You have to induce some kind of artificial worship. True worship comes when you understand God. In a God-centered environment, a Christ-centered environment, there is going to be pure worship.

Thank you, John. And, friend, to make sure your thoughts about worshiping God align with Scripture, I recommend John's book, None Other, Discovering the God of the Bible. It's a biblical look at the amazing attributes of God which will bring focus and fresh energy to your worship.

Purchase your copy today. To place your order, go to our website, gty.org, or call our toll-free customer service line, 855-GRACE, the title of the book again, None Other, Discovering the God of the Bible. To get a copy for yourself or a few to give away, visit our website, gty.org, or call us at 855-GRACE.

Also, when you get in touch, I would encourage you to write a quick note and tell us what grace to you means to you. Your letters let us know that we are an important part of your day, and they're a great way to let us know that you're praying for us. Our email address is letters at gty.org. Once more, that's letters at gty.org. Or you can reach us by regular mail, and our address here is Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember, Grace To You television airs this Sunday. You can watch it with your family on DIRECTV Channel 378, or check our website to see if it airs on a station near you. And then join us tomorrow when John continues his study, True Worship, with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.