Who is the object of worship? God, but not some vague spirit, some floating God undefined or called by any name you want to call Him, but the God who is the Father, the Father of whom? The Father of all mankind?
No, no. The Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, one in essence with Him. Why get up early Sunday morning and pile your family into the car and go to church? What would you say if someone, maybe an unbelieving neighbor or a co-worker, asked you that question? You might say church is where you worship God with fellow believers, and that's a good reply, but it raises a fundamental question that I think many people might struggle to answer. The question, what is true worship? What does it look like?
What does it sound like? Where should it take place and how often should it happen? And which is more important, worshiping the exact right way or just being sincere? Get to the heart of those questions now on Grace to You with John MacArthur. Here he is with a study he calls, True Worship. In Ephesians 1 you have one of the great peons of praise ever given in the Bible, one of the great benedictions, one of the great statements of glory offered to God. In fact, from verse 3 to 14 is one sentence without a period.
It's just a long list of praise phrases. But it begins this way in verse 3. Ephesians 1, 3, Blessed be the God. What God? What God? The God and Father, the Father of whom? Of our Lord Jesus Christ, you see.
That is how God is known and is not known apart from that. In verse 17 of the same chapter, in Paul's great prayer, he prays that the God...what God? The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory. And again, God is qualified as the God who is identified with the Lord Jesus Christ.
In 2 Corinthians, another illustration, chapter 1 verse 3, Blessed be God. What God? What God are you worshiping? Even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And again, you see, God is known as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Philippians chapter 2, that great passage, verse 9, God has highly exalted Christ, given Him a name above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and so forth.
And then in verse 11, And every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God. What God? The Father.
The Father of whom? Of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the only way God can be known. In Romans 15, next to the last chapter, the sixth verse, the apostle Paul says that ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God. Not God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. You see, beloved, you cannot worship God apart from a recognition that Jesus Christ His Son is equal to God. That's His deity. You say, well, that's all Paul. Did everybody agree with that?
Well, I'll just give you a sample. Peter sure did. 1 Peter 1, 3, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. How about the apostle John?
He did too. 2 John, verse 3, listen to this, Grace be with you, mercy and peace from God. What God? The Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father.
Isn't that great? You see, God is not just some floating Spirit going through space and anybody can sort of plug in anywhere they want with any particular form they want. God is eternal. God is vast, filling all of eternity, ever present, everywhere to be worshiped at all times by all people, but the only way you ever come to God is as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now you know why he had to say, no man comes unto the Father but by me. So I just tell you that because you can't worship God apart from Jesus Christ. Now look at John chapter 5, verse 23, and I want to give you one other verse. And this is so important.
This is the logical conclusion to what I've just said. John 5, 23 says, That all men should honor the Son, it's another word for worship, even as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father who hath sent Him.
Did you get that? We're not only to worship the Father then, we're to worship whom? The Son. And that is bound up in John 4 in the fact that God is the Father of the Son. So who's the object of our worship? God the Father and God the Son. God the Father, God the Son. Somebody came to me and said, I've been taught that it's blasphemous to pray to anyone except the Father.
Is that true? I said, no, that's not true. I said, it sounds like somebody's just gotten a little bit of knowledge and twisted a few Scriptures and trying to pass themselves off as a Bible teacher. You can't even worship God the Father unless you worship the Son. You can't even come before God the Father unless you come in the name of the Son. If you're going to honor the Father, you're going to honor the Son. If you're going to ask of the Father, you're asking of the Son. If you're going to praise the Father, you're praising the Son. They come together.
There's no way to isolate the two. Therefore, without Jesus Christ, no one worships God at all. And if we do worship God, we worship God as Father and as Son. And you have every right to go to the Son, to praise the Son, to petition the Son as you would the Father. We are called upon to worship the Son.
Nothing wrong with that. And I think that's bound up in John 4. And Jesus says it in a way that so fits His humiliation. He doesn't say, hey, worship Me. He just affirms worship God as Spirit who is My Father of whom I am of the same essence.
Therefore, you must be worshiping Me. But He doesn't say it. It is that He is true to His humiliation.
And yet the conclusion is the same. And the church knew it. From the earliest years of the church, He was worshiped as Lord. He was confessed as Lord in baptism. He is invoked as Lord in the Christian assembly. He is worshiped as Lord when knees bow before Him.
He is petitioned as Lord when we need help and strength. Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the bottom line in all worship.
That is the fundamental doctrine. We come to God through Christ and we come to Christ in coming to God. You see, when Thomas fell on his knees after the resurrection looking at Jesus and said, My Lord and My what?
God. He knew exactly that He was fulfilling the proper perspective of worship. God is to be worshiped but only can be as He is perceived to be one and the same with His Son who is also to receive the same honor the Father receives. So who do we worship when we gather?
We worship the Father and we worship the Son. You say, What about the Holy Spirit? Well, there's nothing in Scripture that directly tells us to worship the Holy Spirit. But all worship is energized in the power of the Spirit, isn't it? It is the Spirit that allows us to come into God's presence.
Galatians 4 and Romans 8 says, The Spirit allows us to come into God's presence and cry, Abba, Father. It is in the Spirit's power and presence that we have access to worship God. And so the Spirit is a part of worship. The Spirit is the driving energy and power in all of true worship.
And we would not set that aside. We would not deny that reality that the Spirit is the energy of worship. And we would also as a corollary have to say that if the Spirit is equal to the Son and equal to the Father, He's worthy to be worshiped also, right?
Although the Scripture does not point that out to us as such, it's a necessary observation. The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of God in many passages. In Romans 8, He is called the Spirit of Christ.
He is simply the radiation of God the Father, the radiation of God the Son, and is worthy of worship as such. So don't hesitate to worship the Spirit as well as the Son and the Father. But in the uniqueness of the Spirit's ministry as we see it defined in the church age, the Holy Spirit calls us to the Son. The Son calls us to the Father. And so there's a sense in which the Spirit wants us to worship the Son and the Son wants us to worship the Father, and yet all are worthy to be worshiped. And so what is it saying in John 4? Who is the object of worship? God.
But not some vague spirit, some floating God undefined or called by any name you want to call Him. But the God who is the Father, the Father of whom? The Father of all mankind?
No, no. The Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, one in essence with Him. And as we worship Him, we worship the Son as well.
It is fitting, beloved, that our hearts go out and worship the Jesus Christ as well as the Father. In the 14th chapter of Revelation, I want to show you a great scene. Revelation 14, verse 1, and I looked and lo, a lamb stood on Mount Zion, and of course Mount Zion for the Jews is most likely a symbol of heaven. And so this is kind of a vision of heaven that John has, and he sees the Lamb, and the Lamb is Christ, the Lamb that was slain from before the foundation of the world, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world. He sees the Lamb, and the Lamb is Christ, and with Him 144,000 having His Father's name written in their foreheads, and a voice from heaven like the voice of many waters and like the voice of a great thunder, and the voice of harpers harping with their harps, and they sang, as it were, a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures who are angels and the elders who I believe represent the church, and no man could learn that song but the 144,000 who were redeemed from the earth. Now here you have a picture of worship.
You have these redeemed special emissaries of God used for the proclamation of the gospel during the time of the Tribulation, and they're pouring out praise to the Lamb, to the Lamb, and that is none other than Christ. Worshiping Jesus Christ is fitting. It is right. It is proper. And even though in His humiliation in John 4 He doesn't come right out and say, Worship Me, it's bound up in the concept that He is one with the Father, and no man comes to the Father but through Him, but through Him.
And so we have every reason and every right and fact. We have every command to come to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. True Trinitarian worship. And I don't know about you, but when I think of what the Spirit of God does in my life in bringing me to God, in empowering me for service, in energizing me for worship, I cannot help but respond to give glory and adoration and praise to the Spirit as well as the Son as well as the Father. That's the focus of worship. That's why I'm concerned about people who just vaguely worship God. And I'm also concerned about the kind of people whose worship seems to terminate at the Son. It just goes to Christ. It's sort of the Jesus approach.
It never gets beyond that. And I also worry about that which inordinately and incessantly focuses only on the Holy Spirit. We are to worship God, but God as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ in the energy and the power of the blessed Holy Spirit. Now, we've talked about the importance of worship. We've talked about the source of worship, our redemption. We've talked about the object of worship, the Trinity. And now I want to talk about the sphere of worship, the sphere of worship.
We could call it the place. Where do we worship? Where do we worship? Clearly, in the Old Testament, they worshiped in temples, tabernacles, very specified geographical locations.
But notice verse 21. The woman has said, We Samaritans worship in Mount Gerizim, which is up in the north. You Jews worship in Jerusalem, Mount Moriah. And she's sort of saying, Which is the right place? And Jesus says, Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh when you shall neither in this mountain, that is Mount Gerizim, or at Jerusalem worship the Father. Neither one. In other words, He says, Very soon neither one will be the place.
They're both going to be eliminated. Now, that is not to deny the place of the Old Testament temple and tabernacle. That is not to deny the reality of the ceremonial system or the sacrificial system. That is not to deny all of the emblems and pictures and so forth that God gave them.
But what it's saying is this, there's coming a time when those symbols will pass away. There won't need to be a physical tabernacle or a physical temple anymore. There won't need to be any more sacrifices, any more priests.
Why? Because the time is coming when every individual will be a living temple. Every individual will be a living priest and the sacrifice that Christ offers will be the one full, final, permanent sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, right? Now, there was nothing wrong with those symbols, but they were only symbols. God never did just confine Himself to the temple or the tabernacle.
God was never limited to that. They were just praters of the mind. They were just symbols. They weren't the reality. They were just the symbols. But Christ says, in the New Covenant, even the symbols are going to go inside, as it were.
Even the things that you focus on will be internal rather than external. And so, they will come to an end, these things that have identified themselves as the places of worship. And you know, when Jesus died, the temple was rent from the top to the bottom, split open.
Everybody could walk right into the Holy of Holies. And in 70 A.D., the whole temple was destroyed and wiped out. The Samaritan Temple was destroyed before Christ. That system ended. You say, well, then, if it isn't in a temple and it isn't in a special physical building and all of that, where do we worship God?
Where is the sphere? All right, let's establish this to begin with. You're a temple yourself. First Corinthians 6, what know you not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, right? You're the living temple of the Holy Spirit. You say, you mean I can worship Him right here?
That's right. Everywhere you go, God goes in a very living residential presence. You mean I can worship Him anywhere?
That's right. You can worship Him at the beach. You can worship Him in the mountains. You can worship Him driving down the road. You can sit under a tree. You can take a walk in the woods.
You can go in the country. You can worship God in your living room. You can worship the Lord sitting on your porch looking at the stars or smelling the fresh flowers in the morning. You can worship God anywhere you are under any kind of circumstance or condition because you are a living, breathing temple in which God dwells.
The sphere is unlimited. You say now, does that mean that I don't need to come to church? Yes, in one sense it means that you don't need to come to church to worship God. But let me see if I can't give you another dimension. There is a place today. There is a building today.
Maybe you don't know about this building. But there is a building today where God does uniquely meet with His people, apart from the individuals. There is a very special building where He meets with His people.
I'd like you to see what building it is, so turn to Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 19. Now here Paul describes the Christian in some very graphic terms. He describes them.
Now watch this word, collectively. He sees the Christians not as individual temples sort of running around disconnected, but he sees them collectively. And first of all, he says in verse 19, you are no more strangers and sojourners but fellow citizens with the saints. He sees them all linked together as fellow citizens in the kingdom of light. We're all fellow citizens.
We have that in common. We have common citizenship. Then he says, we also belong to the household of God.
Now it's getting more intimate. We're family. We're family. So there is something to be said for our coming together, isn't there? We are linked by common citizenship.
We are linked by common blood as family. But then look at verse 20. And we are built and now all of a sudden we're a building. And we're built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Jesus Christ the chief cornerstone. And we are the building fitly framed together that grows up to be a holy temple in the Lord in whom we collectively are built together for a house of God through the Spirit. God has a building.
You know what that building is? It is the visible living assembly of the redeemed saints. We constitute the temple of God in a unique way. We are not only individual temples but collectively we are one great temple in which God dwells. In 1 Peter 2 verse 5 it says, Ye are living stones built up a spiritual house.
Living stones. And when we come together like this, we constitute a place of worship where God manifests Himself in ways unique to our assembly that He cannot manifest Himself when we are alone. For He moves to us through others.
In 2 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 16, Paul says, Ye are collectively again the temple of the living God. As God hath said, I will dwell in them and walk in them. God moves in our midst, beloved, when we come together.
God moves with His wonderful presence. In 1 Corinthians chapter 3 and verse 9 it says, Ye are God's building. Ye are God's building. In verse 16, Ye are the temple of God. And in Hebrews chapter 10 it says that since a new and living way has been made and since we are to draw near and worship, let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves. What's the next word? Together.
Why? Because when we come together in a marvelous, unique way, we become the living temple of God. We are not a building made with stone.
We are a building made with living flesh. Yes, you can worship God anyplace. You can worship God out in the isolation of privacy all alone. But you must also worship God in the assembly of His redeemed people so that you can, as it says in 1024 of Hebrews, stimulate one another to love and good works.
You won't survive out there by yourself. We need the collective assembly. We need the living stones piled one upon the other which constitute the habitation of the living God. So worshiping God is not really a geographical issue, but that doesn't mean there's no congregation. That doesn't mean there's no special building. That doesn't mean there's no special place. You must come together with God's redeemed people. We don't need special priests and we don't need sacrifices.
The sacrifice has once for all been offered. We have immediate access to God on our own. We are His living temple. That's why it says, Peter says, that the church is the house of God. And He doesn't mean the building.
He means the living stones, the people. And so I say this to you. When God instituted His worship to take place on the first day of the week, He did it so that we'd be faithful to it. If there's anything in your life that you need to be faithful to, it's this. You'll not survive out there alone. Besides, you're flying in the face of the demand of God to forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.
That stimulation is critical in your life. That affirmation that comes when you're in the presence of God's redeemed people, that unique and wondrous ministry that the Spirit of God accomplishes which He cannot accomplish in your isolation is something that you must respond to. Each Lord's Day, each first day of the week should find you in the place of worshiping God with His redeemed people.
To forsake that is to put yourself outside. Always remember the man who didn't attend church very faithfully and the pastor went to see him and he was sitting before a fire that was being warmed by the coals. The coals were red-hot and the fire was warm and it was a cold winter day. And he said to him, My friend, I don't see you at the church on the Lord's Day. You come only when it's convenient for you, only when you feel like you need to and you miss so very often.
I just wish you'd come all the time. And the man didn't seem to be getting the message, so he said, Let me show you something. He took the tongs beside the fireplace, pulled open the screen and reached in and began to separate all the coals, separated them so that none was touching the others and in a matter of moments they were all died out.
He said, My friend, that's what's happening in your life. As soon as you isolate yourself from the rest, the fire goes out. It's really important not only that we worship God everywhere at all times, but that we come together in the assembly of His redeemed people to stimulate one another to love and good works and to honor and worship God. I don't like to allow a week to go by in my life when I haven't set aside a special time to worship God with His people.
Neither should you. Be faithful. Let's bow in prayer. Father, minister to all of our hearts as we meditate on the fact that You call us to worship, to true worship. May we renew our covenant to worship You at everywhere and all times and as well to be faithful to the assembly of that living temple where You meet us in such a special way. We thank You that You've opened Your Word and helped us to understand how better to worship You. And so accept our worship, Lord, and may it leave its mark on all that we say and do and think, that Jesus may be glorified. We pray in His blessed name. Amen. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.
Thanks for being with us. Along with teaching each day on radio stations around the world, John serves as chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study is a look at what the Bible says about true worship. Now, John, today you made the point that each person of the Trinity is worthy of our worship.
But practically speaking, what does that look like? Do we worship each person of the Trinity at different times and maybe for different reasons? When you worship God, you're worshiping the Trinity to start with. Whether you say God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit, any worship of God is worshiping the Trinity. And honestly, if you worship the Lord Jesus Christ, you're worshiping the one who is one with the Father and one with the Spirit. I think people rather easily worship the Father. That's a pretty basic approach to worship, and I think they pretty easily worship Christ. I think people have a little more difficulty thinking of worshiping the Holy Spirit when we shouldn't, because he is equally God. So I think when we worship God, we worship him as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But there is nothing, nothing to prevent us from worshiping each member of the Trinity directly. If you don't understand the doctrine of the Trinity, you're not alone. It's a divine mystery that the foundation of all mystery is about deity, the nature of God.
I want to recommend a book for you. It's a systematic theology book called Biblical Doctrine, because in this book, there is the best treatment of the Trinity that you will find anywhere. And a knowledge of the Trinity is essential to worship, because God is a Trinity.
And to truly worship him, you have to worship him as such. And I think there's no better way to dig into this amazing truth of the Trinity than to get into the sections in the book on Biblical doctrine that unpack Trinitarian theology. And oh, by the way, there's a whole lot of other things in this book about theology, because it's a thousand pages long. What is a systematic theology? A detailed, orderly study of God and all Biblical doctrine.
And it's designed for everyone who loves Christ and his Word, everyone who is a true worshiper, not just pastors. It's readable, accessible, devotional, and powerful. The title of the book, again, Biblical Doctrine, a systematic summary of Bible doctrine.
One thousand pages currently on sale for 25 percent off the regular price. Yes, friend, the sections on the Trinity and the Holy Spirit, those alone would be a valuable addition to your library, but this book covers so much more, and it's currently on sale. So to order your copy of Biblical Doctrine, contact us today. Call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. Again, to order John's book, Biblical Doctrine, at 25 percent off the regular price, call 800-55-GRACE or order online at gty.org. And keep in mind that through this Friday, May 27th, most of our items are available at 25 percent off the regular price. And that includes our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible. If you haven't seen the Study Bible, its most important feature, the 25,000 footnotes that give you historical and cultural background helping you understand the precise meaning of each verse.
The MacArthur Study Bible makes a great gift for a student heading off to college in the fall or for anyone who wants to know God's word clearly. So take advantage of our reduced prices. Place your order by calling 800-55-GRACE or at gty.org. And to stay current on free offers and upcoming series and much more, follow us on social media.
We are on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for being here today and tune in tomorrow when John shows you how to cultivate a greater love for worship. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Tuesday's Grace To You.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-04-15 14:05:35 / 2023-04-15 14:16:18 / 11