The Discipline Of Worship Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. The winning athlete is invariably the one who understands discipline, and you can be sure that it also takes discipline to win in the race of life. Today, Pastor Erwin Lutzer begins the series exploring five disciplines that grow godliness. Are you ready to get into the real game?

If so, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, looking at our culture, disciplines of any kind seem to be low priority for many people. What led you to tackle this topic?

Dave, I'll tell you exactly why I tackled this topic. We're living in a day and age when people think that they can become spiritual by osmosis, so to speak. And what we need to do is to balance discipline along with trust in the Holy Spirit to grow godliness. You know, for years as a Bible college student, I noticed that there were people who would come to chapel and to tell us, be disciplined. And then someone else would tell us, I just learned to rest in the Lord. And I didn't know how to put those two together until I realized that the book of Hebrews says that we should strive to enter into rest. Discipline is part of growing in godliness.

And that's why I think that this series of messages is so critical in today's lackadaisical world. I would like to tell the story of a woman I've told you about before who one time was reared in a very ancient part of the world and in a small village. Like most women who get married, she thought for sure that marriage might bring happiness. But like many women and men have discovered, marriage sometimes does not do that. And even with the best of intentions, though she was married and had high hopes, those hopes were totally dashed to the ground. And eventually, as the strains of the relationship began to be made very clear, she and her husband divorced.

Those of you who have been through a divorce, you will know, I'm sure, that divorce always indicates a time of failure, of distress, of emotional turmoil. And undoubtedly she experienced that. But as time went on, she married another man and she thought for sure that this second man would bring her the happiness that the first man did not. As time went on, it became very clear that once again her hopes would be dashed to the ground and she would not be able to experience the kind of joy that she hoped this relationship would bring. And eventually they were divorced again. When she was married a third time, by then she was angry with God and angry with men. Was there anything that life could possibly bring her?

Was there any happiness that could be left in this world with all of its broken relationships, broken promises, and brutality? She did not know, but she gave it a try. By the time she was married the fourth time and the fifth time, and then she met another man and decided that now marriage was a mockery.

So they simply decided to live together without the benefit of even going through a ceremony. And this woman, who in many respects was a failure, who was looked down upon in her small village, and I'm sure that if you had interviewed her she'd have said she has no hope, no meaning, not much left after all that mess, she was radically transformed by an encounter with Jesus Christ. And as you may have guessed, her story is found for us in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. John chapter 4, the amazing story of Jesus Christ who is sitting on a well as he goes between Jerusalem and Judea, or I should say Upper Galilee and Jerusalem, and he sits on a well and he meets what is known to us as the woman of Samaria. We pick up the text in chapter 4, verse 8, his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. Verse 9, the Samaritan woman therefore said to him, how is it that you being a Jew ask me drink for I am a Samaritan woman, parens, for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.

I hope you love the Lord Jesus Christ for many reasons, but one of the reasons we should love him is because of his humility and his willingness to talk to anyone. There was no dealings between the Jews and the Samaritans because the Samaritans were of mixed blood. They were part Assyrian and they were part Jewish, and in the Jewish mind of those days they were totally unworthy.

They were referred to as dogs. And the very fact that Jesus Christ asked this woman for a drink, putting himself, so to speak, under her authority and asking a favor of her was a mighty great honor. And she was so shocked she couldn't help but blurt out how is it that you being a Jew ask of me a drink because I am a Samaritan. And then Jesus says in verse 10, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that was saying to you, give me to drink, you would have asked of him and he would have given you living water.

This woman, bless her heart, misunderstands and she begins to think, you know, that's a great idea. If I had living water, if I had running water, I wouldn't have to come to this well. She said, sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. From whence do you get to this living water? You are not greater than our father, Jacob, are you? Who gave us the well and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle. Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.

But the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. The woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw. And he said, go call your husband and come here. The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said, well, you know, you are telling me the truth.

You don't have a husband because you've had five husbands and the one whom you now have is not your husband. This you have said truly. The woman said to him, sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus said to her, woman, believe me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall you worship the father. You worship that which you do not know. We worship that which we know for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming and now is when the true worshiper shall worship the father in spirit and in truth for such people. The father seeks to be his worshippers just that far in the text. I want you to notice in passing that to a woman who had blown it in a series of horrendous marital relationships, Jesus was saying that if you believe in me, you will find within you the resources to go on living.

There will be a well of water springing up into you that will eventually lead to eternal life and you will have the privilege of recognizing that down deep inside that well, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit, will enable you to cope despite your background and despite the messes and the bad choices that you have made. And then in the middle of this dialogue, Jesus Christ begins to talk to this woman about worship. The subject of worship comes up and we have one of the most illuminating sections in all the Bible as to what it is to worship God. And what I'd like you to do today is to notice that in verse 23, we actually have three characteristics of genuine worship and this woman, despite her past, is invited to participate, to be a worshiper of Almighty God. So all that by way of introduction and now let us look at what those characteristics of true worship are. First of all, he says, the true worshipers worship in spirit. Worship is a matter of the heart.

It's a matter of the heart. It's not a matter of geography. You see, the dialogue that was going on dates back historically to the fact that after the time of Solomon, you have the kingdom which was divided. You have the northern kingdom, which was Israel. You have the southern kingdom, which was Judah. And there was a king by the name of Jeroboam who ruled in the north, who said, I don't like my people going all the way to Jerusalem to worship because if they do that, I might lose them. What I want to do is to have them worship here. And so there was an altar built on Mount Gerizim years ago long before you had a lot of the conflicts in the Middle East that you have now. In 1968, immediately after the 67 War, I happened to have the privilege of studying in Israel. And in those days, you could actually go to Jacob's Well.

Today you can't because it is such a highly volatile area. But when we were sitting there at Jacob's Well, we could see Mount Gerizim, which in the Old Testament is the Mount of Blessing. And there were trees and there were bushes on it. And then there was another mountain called the Mountain of Cursing, Mount Ebal, which is close to the village where the woman came from.

And it was totally barren. And in between, you have this amphitheater because that's where Israel would sing the blessings and the curses. And those who were singing the blessings were on Mount Gerizim. Those who were singing the curses were on Mount Ebal.

And they sang it antiphonally. This is mentioned in the Old Testament. And almost right in between those two mountains, there is Jacob's Well where Jesus sat. And so I can imagine the woman who is there at the well saying, now our fathers worshiped in this mountain. And you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

And Jesus says to her, woman, I want you to understand something. It is not in this mountain nor in Jerusalem that people worship. But the hour is coming when the true worshipers will worship in spirit and in truth. And they will be able to worship all over the world because God is not limited to Mount Gerizim. God is not limited to Mount Ebal. He is not limited to Jerusalem. God exists everywhere.

And he has always wanted people's hearts. And that's what worship really is. It is God capturing our hearts. It is an awareness of God.

It is a dependency upon God. It is adoring wonder for Almighty God. And we can have that no matter where we are. We can worship God while riding on the CTA, though we should be praying at the same time. We can worship God while going down the Kennedy Expressway. We can worship God in a hospital. You can worship God wherever you may be.

You can worship God at your job. As long as your heart is filled with adoring wonder, it is that heart that God desperately desires. And the scripture says, as we'll notice in a moment, that he is seeking worshipers because he desires those whose hearts are completely his. And so God wants our hearts.

In fact, God has always wanted people's hearts. You read the Old Testament and you find that David had worshiped God. And it wasn't simply true that he worshiped God when he was in the sanctuary in Jerusalem. He was worshiping God while he was taking care of sheep. He was worshiping God when he was running from Saul. He was worshiping God in all the experiences of life because God has always wanted people's hearts.

Isn't it interesting how we bypass that? And even the worship at Jerusalem, with all of its rituals, oftentimes was a substitute for the heart. And that's the thing that bothered Christ so deeply about the religious leaders of his time. And so he said to them, Well, hath Isaiah prophesied of you hypocrites. This people, they honor me with their lips. They sing the right songs. They come to the right sanctuary. They say the right words. They recite the right scripture.

But their heart is far from me. And isn't that true also when we come to church, that our hearts can be far from God? We come to God and what we were thinking about is the difficulty that we may have had parking, the argument that we may have had in the car on the way to church, the anxiety because we were late, the circumstances of life that we faced yesterday, the circumstances of life that we face tomorrow. And all of these things are vying for our attention and they are distracting us from the songs that we are singing, from the scripture that is being read, from the word that is being preached. And God does not have our hearts.

And yet that's exactly what he wants. Worship, Jesus said, is not a matter of geography. It is a matter of heart. It is a matter of spirit. And worship can take place in a church, obviously, but sometimes it doesn't because we are distracted and not focused on God. There's a second characteristic of worship. Worship is a matter certainly of sincerity and a matter of heart in spirit. But notice also, Jesus says, it is a matter of truth.

It is a matter of honesty. It's a matter of being transparent and honest with God. You know, the scripture says in 1 John, if we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus Christ, God's son, cleanses us from all sin.

What does it mean to walk in the light? It means that we are exposed to God, that we are open and that we are honest before him. And that's the one thing we do not want to be. It is difficult to be honest with God. And when we are dishonest with God, we are dishonest with ourselves. We are dishonest with our mates. We are dishonest with our families. We are dishonest with our friends.

All because you and I are basically fundamentally dishonest. We are always desiring to hide who we really are and the struggles of the soul. And sometimes we even hide those struggles from God and they become the seat of all of our problems. It is what we hide from the Almighty that causes us the distress.

That's why at the end of this message, I'm going to give you a little program by which you can ask God to search your heart. Because all of us live to some extent in denial. We really don't want to see who we are. I remember a story of a woman living in a primitive culture who would take her wash to the local river where everybody was washing their clothes. They would stand in the river and they would open their clothes, the bundle that they had brought and then cloth by cloth and dress by dress. They would wash them.

But this woman was so embarrassed because her clothes were so smelly and they were so dirty that she just took the whole bundle and dipped it into the river and pulled it out again without opening it. And isn't that the way we sometimes are with God? We say, oh God, I know that I have sinned. Forgive my sins. And what we are unwilling to do is to face each of those sins that the Holy Spirit of God brings to our attention, to face those sins individually and say, sin by sin, I want to be cleansed so that I have a pure conscience so that I can stand before you and finally be honest.

I feel sorry for all of you marriage partners who live with somebody who fundamentally is unwilling to face himself or herself. The person who is always right, the person who never asks for forgiveness because he is never wrong, the person who needs to prove a point, the person who is super critical because he does not want to see himself, he therefore finds faults in other people, living in a sense of denial, living with dishonesty simply because he cannot face himself in the presence of God and others. Now I want you to notice that Jesus Christ is saying that true worship always is a matter of truth, transparency, honesty, being who we are in the presence of Almighty God, knowing who we are and therefore also knowing who God is.

One of the characteristics of openness and honesty is what we call brokenness. Openness before God is a sense of submission. It is a sense of resignation to the will of God. It is the person who in the right sense of the word has given up all fight.

He has laid down the weapons of a rebel. He says, God, I will not take you on anymore. I submit to everything that you bring to my attention and I accept the circumstances of life as coming from your loving hand and therefore I will not fight you anymore. Interestingly, I was praying with someone recently and this person said, I cannot give myself to God wholly.

And I said, why? And this individual said, because I want to retain the power of choice. I want to be able to choose and to make my own decisions even though my decisions are destroying me, I prefer my own decisions. Isn't that the way in which all of us are? Aren't we as human beings strange? Even when we know we are doing wrong, we may continue to do that wrong. We oftentimes turn against any discipline in the Christian life. That's why I've written a book entitled Holy Living in an Unholy World. The intention of the book is to help us to see that rules are necessary in the Christian life. Discipline is necessary. But at the same time, we have to interpret that correctly so that we don't become legalistic in our obedience. How do we do that?

Well, those are the kinds of issues that I discuss. Now for a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com, or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for the book Holy Living in an Unholy World. You and I know that the world is increasingly unholy. Temptations are more excruciating and more difficult than they have ever been, and so many people are submitting to the world. I believe that this book will help us think through what holiness means in a world that undoubtedly has lost its way. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

As you might know, rtwoffer is all one word, rtwoffer.com, or call us at any time at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for the book Holy Living in an Unholy World, a world in which the word holy is often misinterpreted, more often simply neglected. Holy Living in an Unholy World. It's time once again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. A lot of Running to Win listeners have questions about what to do at the time of death. Lori listens in Bloomington, Illinois.

She has this question. Does the Bible support cremation? If God created Adam from dust, why couldn't He create a new body for us from the ashes? Of course, Lori, I agree with you.

I'll answer your second question first. Yes, of course, God can create a body out of ashes. So from that standpoint, cremation is not a problem. It does not give God some kind of difficulty.

We don't know exactly how God is able to take all the particles and put them together, but after all, He is God. And so since nothing is impossible with Him, from that standpoint, cremation does not create any kind of a difficulty, if I can put it that way, as far as God's sovereignty is concerned. However, I do think that if you as a Christian have an option, that you really ought to be buried rather than cremated. Now in certain cultures, cremation is popular because there's a lack of space. Sometimes people are cremated because they have no choice at all during a plague or we think of what happened at 9-11.

But if you have a choice, be buried. First of all, in the New Testament, in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, the Apostle Paul says that to put the body in the ground is like putting a seed in the ground. It is sown in corruption. It is raised in incorruption.

It is sown in weakness. It's going to be raised in glory. And that imagery to the early Christians meant a great deal. Resurrection means that the body is going to be raised, so the body was treated with a great deal of respect. Furthermore, when you stop to think of it, Jesus was buried. That's why so many of the early Christians said that they wanted to be buried as opposed to cremation, which of course was already practiced in those days. And so as Jesus was raised from the dead and He comes forth with the very same body, though its molecular structure clearly is radically changed, still there's continuity, in light of that, the Christians said, we also want to be buried and raised again. That's always been the Christian position.

So while I would say that cremation is not a sin, I always tell Christians, if you have an option, be buried. Thank you, Laurie, for the question. Thank you, Dr. Lutzer, for your answer. If you'd like to hear one of your questions answered, you can. Just go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer, or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. A woman sat near an ancient well, face to face with Jesus. And her journey in the race of life was changed forever as she learned the meaning of true worship, next time the amazing interaction of a woman with the Son of God. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.