True Worship, Part 5 B

In 2 Timothy 2.22, he says, Flee youthful lusts, and follow righteousness, faith, love, peace, and then this statement, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. There's a marvelous insight into true worship. It is calling upon the Lord out of a pure heart. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Thanks for tuning in today as John MacArthur continues an important study he calls true worship. Today he's looking at God's holiness and why you need to focus on it and how it should affect your worship.

It's a practical lesson that shows you the attitudes and actions that characterize someone who's really come to grips with who God is. We'll be in the Old Testament for much of today. If you have your Bible, turn to the book of Isaiah and here's the lesson. But I cannot teach this series and leave this out, so look at Isaiah chapter 6. The concept of worshiping God with holiness and fear is what we're after. It's not just Old Testament. Hebrews 12, 28 says, Worship God acceptably with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire.

So it's New Testament as well. But in Isaiah 6, Isaiah goes to worship the Lord. And he goes into the temple. King Isaiah has died after 52 years on the throne.

It's about 740 B.C., just a few years before the northern kingdom's going into captivity as a judgment for their sin. He sees the demise of his people. He senses the problem in his nation and he rushes into the presence of God to worship. And he has a vision of God in verse 1 in which God is majestically lifted up, surrounded by seraphim who are the guardians of the holiness of God.

Two of their wings are used for service and four of them are used for worship, giving us an insight into the priority of worship. Even they worship God. They cry back and forth and this is what they say, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And there we find again that most magnificent definition of God's otherness, God's uniqueness. He is holy. He is holy. And as Isaiah is worshiping God, he perceives holiness and that is the right perspective.

That God has a holiness that causes him to react against sin. And what is Isaiah's response? Verse 5, Then said I, woe is me. I am disintegrating. I am falling apart.

I am going to pieces. And the word woe means curse, curse me. He is overwhelmed with his sinfulness. He says, I'm a man with a dirty mouth and I dwell in the midst of a people with dirty mouths. All he can see is his sin and he has the best mouth of all of them, but he cannot see any goodness in himself in comparison with God. And the reason it's so stark is the end of verse 5, because he has seen the king, the Lord of hosts. Now you may not have a vision like this, nor may I, but nonetheless the lesson is true that when we enter into the presence of God, if we truly see God, we see him as holy, holy, holy. And so we are then faced with a sense of our utter unholiness.

If you have never worshiped God with a broken and a contrite spirit, then you've really never worshiped God, because that is the right response to entering the presence of holy God. Holiness inspires fear. He was afraid.

Why was he afraid? Because he knew that a holy God had every right to react against an unholy sinner. He knew that God had every right to judge him.

God had every right to take his life on the spot. And I guess my heart is concerned that there's a lot of flippancy in entering into the presence of God in our society today, that God has become so casual in our thinking, God has become so human, so buddy-buddy, that we don't understand the whole perspective of God's utter holiness, that he is a consuming fire, that he has a holy indignance against sin, and if we flippantly rush into his presence with lives unattended to by repentance and confession and cleansing by the Spirit, then we are vulnerable to that holy reaction. It is only by his grace that we breathe another breath, is it not?

For he has every reason to take our life, for the wages of sin is death. And so Isaiah has the only reaction that a true worshiper could ever have in true worship, and that is humble, broken contrition. He sees himself as a sinner, and in the midst of his repentance, in the midst of his confession, the angel comes with a coal, purges him, and God says, you're the one I'll send in my place. And there is a marvelous communion, there's a marvelous camaraderie, there's a marvelous union between God and the true worshiper through the confession of sin and the purging of his lips. And so that's really the spirit of true worship.

You see, the holiness of God are overwhelmed with your own unholiness. Now look with me for a moment at one passage that I think has been sort of lost in the shuffle, 2 Timothy 2.22. Paul is writing to Timothy, and of course he's instructing him about being a godly man, a faithful servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he tells him all the things that are necessary to guard his life for usefulness and talks to him about being a vessel unto honor, sanctified, fit for the master's use, prepared unto every good work in verse 21, 2 Timothy 2.21. And then in 2 Timothy 2.22, he says, flee youthful lusts and follow righteousness, faith, love, peace, and then this statement, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. There's a marvelous insight into true worship. It is calling upon the Lord out of a pure heart. And it is not that our heart is pure by our own design or by our own device, it is that our heart is pure in the confession and the repentance that Isaiah experienced in facing a holy God. So a true worshiper is primarily aware of his unholiness.

And if you go through the Old Testament, I'll just jog your memory. Whenever the people of God encountered God, there was a terrifying reaction. They felt afraid.

They felt intimidated. They felt their life was in danger because they knew they were sinners in the presence of a holy God. And Job, who thought he knew God, who probably thought he worshipped God the way God wanted to be worshipped, when he'd gone through that amazing pilgrimage and came to the end of it and really saw God as the sovereign, holy Lord of the universe, he said, now I see thee with mine eye and I repent in dust and ashes.

Again overwhelmed with sinfulness. Manoah, the father of Samson in the 13th chapter of Judges in the 22nd verse, cries out, we shall surely die because he had seen the holiness of God. There was Habakkuk who when really discerning God's presence began to shake so that his legs smashed against each other. And there was the restored remnant who when they heard the holy word of God spoken by Haggai came to terror in their hearts.

Look with me for just another illustration at the 9th chapter of Ezra. And Ezra comes before the Lord and you see the spirit of a broken contrite heart, which is the spirit of a true worshiper. Verse 5, and at the evening sacrifice. So it's time for worship.

It's the official time for worship. It's time to come before God in the evening sacrifice. And he rose up, he says, from his heaviness and tore his garment and tore his cloak and fell on his knees and spread out his hands to the Lord. Now here is a man of God in an act of worship, prostrate, tearing his garments, burdened, and here is the attitude of his worship. I said, Oh my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee my God.

That's reminiscent, isn't it, of the publican who beat on his breast and would not lift up his eyes so much as to heaven? For our iniquities are increased over our head and our trespasses grown up unto the heavens. We know that it reaches you. We know that you know we are sinful. And then he goes on to describe the sin and then he talks about God's grace.

Verse 8, he says, For a little moment grace has been shown from the Lord our God. And you've given us a tent peg. You've given us life.

You've given us a place to put up a tent. You've let us survive in spite of what we've done. In the end, in verse 15, O Lord God of Israel, thou art righteous, for we remain yet escaped as it is this day. Behold, we are before thee in our trespasses, for we cannot stand before thee because of this. He just is broken over sin. And he prays in verse 1 of 10, And confess, and wept, and cast himself down before the house of God. And the people came around him, and they poured out their tears of penitence.

Now that is the heart of a true worshiper. Coming in the presence of God afraid, coming in the presence of God knowing that God has a right to take your life, even if you have been his child, even if you have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, there's a sense in which God still has the right to punish for sin. And he says in the New Testament to those who are his own, every son he chastens and scourges. When our Lord walked on the earth, people were afraid of him. I always think of the disciples who were terrified when they knew he was God in their boat. You know, he calmed the storm in Mark 4, and it says they were exceedingly terrified. It's far worse to have God in your boat than to have a storm outside your boat, because you have to face the holiness of God displayed in the power that had been displayed.

And they said, What kind of man is this, that the wind and the waves obey his voice? And when Jesus sent the demons into the herd of pigs, and they went into the lake and drowned, the people ran out and pleaded with him to leave their country. He terrified them. He panicked them. They were afraid. And Peter, when in Luke 5, was fishing and couldn't catch anything, and the Lord said, Now let your nets down.

They'll be there. And he did, and they were all there. And Peter looked at the Lord and said, Go away, leave, for I am a sinful man. All he could see was his own sinfulness when confronted with the reality of a holy God. Jesus had that effect on people. He traumatized people. He scared people. I believe the Pharisees were so afraid of him, that's really why they killed him. They were astonished, the Bible says, at what he taught. They were astonished at what he did. They panicked when they saw his power, and they heard his wisdom. Jesus traumatized people.

He let them know that God was in their midst, and they immediately were confronted with the evil of their hearts. Now the true worshiper, then, is going to come in that vein, is going to come in that spirit. He is going to be broken over his sinfulness.

And that's the attitude that you use when you come to God, who is the eternal spirit, who is the omnipresent spirit. If I'm going to have a true worshipping life, then it is a life of brokenness. It is a life of contrition. It is a life which sees sin and confesses continually. That's a worshipping life.

You can't just sin and sin and sin, and then enter into the church on Sunday and think you're going to worship the Lord. I talked to a man on this trip. He came to see me, and he said, you know, I listen to your tapes.

I get them all. I study with you, and I really love it, and you're my teacher, and I love to have you as my friend, and so forth. And we got into talking and spent a couple of hours with him. Patricia and I did, and he said, you know, I have a situation in my life which is very sinful. And he went on to describe a horrifying thing. And he said, I just stay in this sin all the time. And I said, well, doesn't it bother you? And he said, yeah, it bothers me, but not enough to quit.

And then you study the Word of God all along with it at the same time, and you probably think you're worshipping God. Well, you're not. And I said, I can't fellowship with you. I can't be your friend.

I have to separate myself. And he said, well, I would die if I couldn't think you were my friend. Well, I said, I can't be because that life doesn't honor God.

You can't do that. If God is a spirit and is everywhere at all times, he is to be worshipped that way. And if he is holy as spirit, then he is to be worshipped in the beauty of holiness. And that means you live your life with a sense of fear because you know that God has every right to chasten your unholiness.

At the same time, to keep the balance, you live a life of thanksgiving, don't you? Because he doesn't give you what you deserve. He has not rendered unto us according to our sins. But what happens is we get so used to sinning and getting away with it, sinning and being forgiven, that we just keep sinning. You see, this guy was so used to doing the sin and God hadn't done anything yet that he just kept doing it.

And we're all like that. You know, we are so used to mercy. We are so used to grace. We are so used to God forgiving us that we just trade on that.

We abuse it. And God is gracious. You know, a holy God, if he really wanted to enforce his holiness, said in the Bible the wages of sin is death, said to Adam, the day you sin, you die. Anytime we sin, we'd be dead.

And that would be true to his holy character. But God is so merciful. Every sin was a capital offense in the beginning. The day you sin, you die. Didn't say what sin. You just, you know, really you can... I've only given you one deal.

You do it and you die. And then as time went on, God, of course, didn't even take Adam and Eve's life. He spared them by grace. And then as you come down to the Mosaic Covenant, there are about 35 sins that have a capital punishment assigned to them. But even that God acted graciously toward.

And there were many times, for example, just take David. He committed the sins that had been given the death penalty over and over and over and over. And God was gracious and merciful and forgave him.

There were consequences, but not death. God was gracious. And so God has shown himself gracious. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't care about your sin. That doesn't mean you can run into God's presence with sin in your life. It doesn't mean you can abuse that mercy because the day may come when he acts in righteous indignation against you. And he has every right to do that.

And me as well. See, we get so used to mercy that when God does what is just, we think he's unjust. Somebody dies. Well, how could God let that happen? Well, how can the Lord allow all these problems? Listen, how can he not allow those to come when we're sinful?

See, we look at it backwards. People look at the Old Testament and say, what kind of a God is it that lets 40 little boys yell baldy baldy at the prophet and a bear comes out and rips them into shreds? What kind of God lets that happen? What kind of God slays two young men, Nadab and Abihu, on the day of their ordination just because they got a little drunk and fooled around with the incense in the temple and God slew them? What kind of God slays a man that touches the ark to try to keep it from falling off a cart? What kind of God gives a man leprosy and makes him a victim of leprosy when he's been a faithful king for 52 years just because he got a little proud? Why does God do it? And why this guy and not that guy? And why so much mercy and then wham?

And why did Amnestiaphira die? After all, they gave a gift to the Lord. It just wasn't what they said they'd give. I mean, why did they have to die for that? That's not the question. The question is why when you did that and promised the Lord something and didn't do it, why did you live? That's the question.

See? The question isn't why did God take the life of an adulterer over there? The question is when you committed adultery, why didn't God take your life? It is never a question of God being unjust. It's only an issue of God being merciful. And sometimes when he does do what is just, he does it as an illustration.

You see, you've got to have a signpost somewhere along the line. And that's what 1 Corinthians 10 says. These things have happened as examples to us. And as you look through Scripture and you see the times when God acted in a holy way against unholiness, that's to show you that God will do that. And the question is not how can God be unjust? The question is how can God be merciful when His holiness is violated? That's the issue.

People say, well, isn't it awful and current? Some people actually died because they were coming to the Lord's table sinful. That isn't the issue. The issue is how come we're alive and we've come that way so many times? It's just God's grace. It's His grace. People say, how could He turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt? That isn't the question. The question is why didn't He turn us into pillars of salt? When we acted in a worldly fashion as she did, and lusted after the things of the flesh. How could He swallow up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in the ground for being disobedient?

No, that isn't the question. How could He not swallow us up when we were disobedient? You see, you have to see things from the side of God's holiness.

That's so important. God is gracious, but He's holy. And don't let His grace sell short His holiness. You see, what I'm trying to say is we must worship God acceptably with reverence and godly fear for our God is a consuming fire. And you must worship God in the beauty of holiness.

You must understand that He is a Spirit. He is everywhere at all times to be worshipped everywhere at all times and in the beauty of holiness. And what this says, beloved, is so important. This says that when I live my life, I am to live a holy life before God.

I am to live a life where I confess, repent, turn from my sin so that my worship to God is that which pleases God. And I do not want to go rushing into His presence in an act of worship with unholiness, lest I receive my just desserts at His hand. And so while we are thankful for His grace and we understand His love, we have somehow in our Christianity missed His holiness. And that's the heart of our worship.

God is a living, eternal, glorious, holy, merciful Spirit, the object of our worship. And we must come in the contrition and the humility and the brokenness of sinners who see ourselves against the backdrop of His utter holiness. F. W. Faber, who has written so many very, very beautiful words, wrote this.

Listen carefully. It is a hymn of praise. My God, how wonderful Thou art! Thy majesty, how bright! How beautiful Thy mercy seed in depths of burning light! How dread are Thine eternal years, O everlasting Lord, by prostrate spirits day and night incessantly adored! How wonderful, how beautiful the sight of Thee must be, Thine endless wisdom, boundless power, and awful purity!

Listen to this. And how I fear Thee, living God, with deepest, tenderest fears, and worship Thee with trembling heart and penitential tears! Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord, almighty as Thou art, for Thou hast stooped to ask of me the love of my poor heart. No earthly father loves like Thee, no mother ere so mild bears and forebears as Thou hast done with me Thy sinful child.

Let's bow in prayer. Our Lord, we come to worship this morning the God who is Spirit, who is not confined to temples made with hands, who is not bound by the images of men, the God who is infinite, eternal, everywhere, every place, at all times. And we have come to worship the God who is holy, who can only be worshipped in the beauty of holiness, in the reverence and godly fear that a sinner must have who enters into such holy presence. And so, Lord God, may we see as the men of old saw Your holiness, and like Isaiah, may we cry, Woe is me!

I am undone! And in that confession may we be touched with the coal from off the altar, our lips purged, and may we be acceptable. We thank you that Jesus Christ has made the provision for that, that He has made the way possible, that He has opened unto us access whereby we can rush into Your presence, come boldly there, without fear, knowing that we stand in Christ's place, a place of honor and acceptability. But, Lord, may we too be aware that as we come into Your presence in the blood of Christ, as we come, having been washed from head to feet, we do gather the dust of the earth, and we need that daily preparation of heart, that daily confession and cleansing that is so basic to a worshipping life. We thank you that you've given us the positional holiness, you've given us the reality of eternal holiness in Christ. Now help us in our practice, in our daily walk, to walk the walk that fits the calling to which we're called. May we truly worship, Lord, and out of the flow of a worshipping life and a responding God, know the tremendous blessing and usefulness that Isaiah knew, that Your kingdom might be advanced in this day. We will thank You in Christ's name.

Amen. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, with some practical direction for your worship. John's current study here on Grace to You is titled, simply, True Worship. John, you've been talking in this series about worship in spirit and in truth, and it's kind of convicting, really, because I find myself sometimes in church just reading the words of the hymn as I sing, and not really thinking about the meaning, not really worshiping in truth. So what are some of the practical hindrances to our worship, and what are some practical suggestions for worshiping honestly in spirit and in truth? Well, it's a basic question, and obviously the hindrances to our worship would be a lack of the knowledge of God or of God's character.

I like to talk about it as who He is and what He has done and what He commands. So worship is only as effective as the knowledge of divine truth. In other words, if you have a very shallow knowledge of divine truth, you have only a shallow capacity to really worship. You can be artificially stimulated by the emotion of the music and all of that, but real worship comes from the heart, and the more you understand the revelation of God, the richer your grasp of Scripture and sound doctrine, the more your heart is uplifted in the contemplation of those things. And I think worship also in music takes us to a place where we can be disconnected from the normal invasions of our thoughts. Let's say you're sitting in church and the preacher's preaching, and what happens typically is, and I know this as a preacher, people come and go, they think about home, they think about something else, some other place, some other conversation, and you're always trying to get them back to the attention of the sermon.

Music has a wonderful way of blocking all of that out, because it sweeps you up in the words, the lyrics, and the melody, and the beauty of it. And so it may be, for sort of a foundational principle, it may be the point at which you are most focused on divine truth, which is why it should be sound doctrine, because I don't think people are really any more focused in a worship service than when they are actually singing because nothing else is occupying their minds, and they're verbalizing these truths, and that has a way of causing them to be memorized almost involuntarily. So worship is vital in every sense in the life of the church. And I want to remind you of the book, Worship, that's its title. You need to know how to worship because God requires worship. He saved you to be a worshiper, and you're going to spend eternity in heaven doing nothing really but worshiping and serving the Lord. So if you want to know what worship is all about, order a copy of the book, Worship. Take advantage of our reduced prices, 25% off the regular price for a limited time. That's right, and when your day is filled with distractions and unexpected emergencies, and maybe even conflict with others, how do you keep your focus on worship? Get practical answers that you need, and find out how you can lead others to genuine worship in this book simply titled, Worship. It's currently on sale for 25% off the normal price, so order your copy today. Just call 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. Again, to pick up John's book called Worship at 25% off the regular price, or a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible, or almost anything we sell at the same 25% discount, call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org.

And friend, a quick note. Today is the second day of our Truth Matters conference. It's a sold-out event, but you can still enjoy all of the teaching sessions and the Q&As by livestream. For all the details, go to our website, gty.org. We've also been sending out information about the event via our social media, so if you follow us on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, keep checking for our latest posts about the Truth Matters conference, which runs through tomorrow.

Again, for details on live streaming, go to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Invite a friend to tune in tomorrow when John looks at timeless biblical instruction that will help you worship the Lord the right way. Don't miss the next half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.