Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. What principles undergird the worship experience in your church? The book of Hebrews gives us a basis for how we should conduct corporate worship. And today we'll hear teaching that can set all of our churches on solid ground.
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, your focus today will be on what pleases God, especially in our services of worship. Do we need guidance on this, or do we have it all figured out?
Well, Dave, of course we need guidance on this. As a matter of fact, the scripture mentions worship, corporate worship, many times. And we have to keep going back to the scriptures to remind ourselves what worship is all about.
I find it very interesting that in the Old Testament, worship always involved bringing an offering to the Lord. And that brings me, of course, to the fact that today is the last day of the year. What a wonderful opportunity for you to contribute to this ministry.
Now I need to emphasize that because of people just like you, Running to Win is in 50 different countries in seven different languages. And we have an exciting year ahead. Would you consider helping us? You have simply a few hours left to do it within this calendar year. Here's what you can do. You can give online.
You can give us a call, and I'll give you that info in a moment, or you can send a check. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.
That's rtwoffer.com, or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Thank you in advance. And let us remember that as we are generous, we do indeed please the Lord. And now let me talk about the worship service. One last passage to turn to, and that is Hebrews chapter 13.
Now we finally get to the worship service. Hebrews chapter 13. And the writer of Hebrews says in verses 13 and 14, he's talking about the reproach of Christ and how we should be willing to follow him and go outside the camp and bear his reproach and be identified with him even at great personal cost. And then he says in verse 15, through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God that is the fruit of our lips and give thanks to his name and do not neglect doing good and sharing for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. You'll notice now he begins to talk about praising.
That's the seventh verb. It's to praise God. And of course we can praise God individually, but one of the reasons, one of the reasons that we come together collectively as members of the body of Christ is so that we can praise him together. What does this text teach us about worship, and what should it mean in terms of our worship service?
Let me give you some ideas. First of all, notice that the writer is saying that worship should be intentional. We come, the text says, to offer up a sacrifice through Christ. Through Christ we come. Later on, I hope to preach a series of messages on God, and we'll clarify this point many times, but can you think of the irreverence that there is today in the world for God?
Everybody thinking that they can barge into God's presence on their own, that they can just come to God and find him in their souls or find him in whatever way they possibly can. That's not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible must always be approached properly, and you must come through Christ.
Apart from that, you will be turned away, because that's the only offering that he ultimately accepts. So we come. We don't just come barging into the throne room of God without first of all going to the altar. We come to confess. We come to humble ourselves. We come to say with Isaiah, woe is me, for I am undone. We come in that spirit of repentance and humility, and we come through Christ, and then we're invited to come into the throne room and to get into the very citadel and the very presence of Almighty God.
That's how we come. You see, my friend, the altar comes before the adoration. The confession comes before the adoration of God. Now, when we gather together today here in this worship service, you'll notice that I began the service. I quoted a passage of Scripture. I reminded you that we should be quiet, that we should be in God's presence, and we invited the presence of Jesus to be here, and we prayed in the name of Jesus. Now I want to ask you a question. Did I do that because that's always the way in which it's been done since as far back as you can remember?
I hope that's not the reason. We did it because we're serious about this. We're not just coming to God willy-nilly on our own. We're coming with that sense of humility, that sense of cleansing, and we come in the name of Jesus. Through him we offer up sacrifices continually, and if Jesus did not make our own sacrifices acceptable to the Father, they would be rejected by him. You don't just come to God as you are without the proper way. So we come the means of blood, you see. We come intentionally. We come with the idea that we are here to worship God. Secondly, notice it is continual.
It is intentional. It is also continual. Through him then let us continually offer up sacrifices to God. How do we do that? Well, we do that in the worship service all the way through, both in the singing and in the understanding of Scripture. We come, you know, and we are of a mind set to worship the Lord our God, and then when we leave here, we continue the worship.
And how do we continue it? How do we do it day after day after day after day if we're not in a worship service? Let me tell you, there are two ways to do it. One is through the meditation of Scripture, which we read and we meditate, and we read a text in the morning and we say, Lord, what is there in here for today that I can chew on for the rest of the day?
That's part of it. The second is we memorize the songs, and we sing them to ourselves. Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The choir has such a great advantage because they memorize words. They know these songs, and throughout the whole day and throughout the whole week, the songs that they are singing of adoration and praise to God keep being replayed in their minds. That's why, my friend, it is necessary not just to have a Bible in your hands, but to also have a hymnal in your hands. The great hymns of adoration that we just sang this morning, the hymn with which we shall close, O come, let us adore him. These are songs that have to be in our minds so that long after the music has died down and we've met our friends and we've gone home, the effects of our worship continue so to tomorrow and Tuesday and Wednesday, we continue the worship. Continually, this text of Scripture says, we offer up the worship and the praise that is due him. So it is intentional. It is continual.
Notice it is directional. To him, to him, we offer praise to God. I have to ask you this, when you come to a worship service, what are you thinking? What are you expecting? Are you saying to yourself, well, you know, I sure hope I get something out of this. Vance Habner said that he never heard a sermon yet where he didn't get something out of it, but he said he's had some mighty close calls. We've all had our mighty close calls.
Some of us have created those mighty close calls. So are you saying to yourself, I wonder if the sermon is going to be good and speak to me. I wonder if I'm going to meet the people that I want to meet. I wonder, is this what it is? Well, all those things may be part of the mix, but they're not the bottom line.
They're not the priority. When we come to a worship service, our first thought should be, what is God going to get out of this? Is God going to be pleased?
Is he going to be honored? Because finally my life and my lips have come together so that I can legitimately sing. Oh, come let us adore him because my whole life has been one of adoration to God. I know these verbs that I have worshiped and served and I've given and I've yielded and now Lord, this is just the culmination of who I am. Oh, what a difference that makes in our worship service. And that's why you see we do not speak when we enter into the auditorium for our worship service.
We can speak out in the hallways, but we don't speak here because this is the time. What if God were to really show up? We're going to bring an audience and offering to the King. We're coming into the presence of the King of Kings together and we'd better be prepared and we'd better have our hands washed and our hearts made clean because this is important stuff. God is among his people.
It's directional. And that's why if we have children, if we have babies, we sit near a door so that if the child cries, we can exit so that we don't disturb people because we want people to focus on God. We want people to think that this is an offering to the Almighty.
With this microphone, I can't turn around and talk to the choir, but there is a rumor they hear me back there anyway. Choir, I exhort you that when you sing those lovely anthems that bless us, I exhort you to use them as an offering to God and to simply say, this is for God. We want people to be blessed. We want to do well and you always do so well, but at the end of the day, everything has to be God directed and the real question is, is he pleased?
Is he pleased? So that when we sing solos or sing in the choir, the question is, are we directing people to God? Because our own hearts are clean. It is directional. It is purposeful.
Notice what the text says. And I love this here to give praise to God. That is the fruit of our lips. What imagery, what he's saying is, is that when you come to give praise to God, it's because it's a whole life that backs you up.
This is just the fruit of your whole lifestyle. Giving praise and thanks to his name in everything give thanks. You say, well, Pastor Lutzer, why is this a sacrifice? Why is giving praise to God a sacrifice? It's easy. All that we do is we say a Psalm or sing a hymn that is very worshipful, that gives God praise.
There's no cost involved. You know, you read the Psalms and you discover something. Many of those Psalms were born out of incredible circumstances of grief, of pain, of disappointment, of loneliness and anguish. And that's why praise can be costly. Because we're offering this praise to God in the midst of our trials, in the midst of unanswered prayer, in the midst of all of our questions, because we don't have answers, but still we praise God. And that costs something and therefore it's the sacrifice of praise to God intentionally and purposefully given to him. Now, if I need to emphasize again the connection that the Bible writers always make between the praise that comes out of our mouth and the life that we live, notice the very next verse, and do not neglect doing good and sharing for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. He said, by the way, the sacrifice of praise in verse 15 is acceptable, but the sacrifice of sharing, that is to say giving, is also acceptable. And don't you dare think that you can do one without the other.
Let me give you some bottom lines. I hope I've already made the point that worship is always costly. If it's acceptable to God, it's costly. One day God said, Abraham, take your son. Abraham said, all right, Lord, I've got two sons. But God said, your only son, Isaac. And he said, take him on Mount Moriah and offer him there for a sacrifice. I don't think Abraham told Sarah where he was going, but it was a three day journey. And he got to the bottom of the hill and he said to the young man who was with him, he said, look, you stay here with the donkey and so forth.
And I'm going to take some wood and my son and I are going to go to the top of the mountain. And then Abraham said this. He said, we will worship and come again to you. I say, Abraham, you're going to kill your boy and you're saying it's worship. Now, apart from the ethical issue because God did not allow him to kill, the simple fact is this. God was saying to Abraham, I want to find out whether or not I mean more to you than your son.
That's really the whole thing that's going on there. But Abraham says this excruciating act of sacrifice of finally giving my boy to God, which is tearing out my insides. This is worship. What made us think that we could worship just because we know how to sing or read the right scripture. One day, David was going to buy a threshing floor from a run of the Jebusite and Arona said, hey, look, you're the king.
You know, being king does have some perks. He said, I'm going to give it to you. David said, no way, Jose. That's a Hebrew translation, translation of the Hebrew. He said, I will not offer to God something that costs me nothing.
He said, I'm going to pay you this. So we come and we say, I worship you, Lord, and I adore you, Lord, and aren't you wonderful, Lord? And we think that's the end of the deal. We worshiped and it cost us nothing. We didn't give. We didn't pray. We didn't yield. We didn't try to lead anybody to Christ.
We didn't do all those things. But here we were, we worshiped. David said, look, I'm not going to offer to God something.
It costs me nothing. One day, there was a man in the Old Testament by the name of Job. He had 10 sons. God sent through Satan a windstorm, which blew all the boys away, 10 fresh graves in that hillside. Job bows down in the dust and worships and said, the Lord gave and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. And you and I think that we can worship and it costs us nothing. Worship is costly. Secondly, worship is transforming.
It's transforming. It's the thing that will change your life radically. You give God glory. You become a worshiper of God. And as we pointed out last time, you can do that even no matter what your life has been like.
An immoral woman sitting at the well of Jesus was inviting to be a worshiper. But here's the thing. It is really radically transforming. I like the words of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury back in the 40s. He said, both for perplexity and for dulled conscience, the remedy is the same sincerity and spiritual worship. Wow.
Are you going to be ready for this? For worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of our conscience by his holiness, the nourishment of the mind with his truth, the purifying of the imagination by his beauty, the opening of the heart to his love, the surrender of the will to his purpose and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness, which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin. Yes, worship in spirit and truth is the way to the solution of our problem with perplexity and our liberation from sin.
Finally, we have found the answer. We worship. The temptations rage in our body, but we have a plan. We worship. We know what it's like to sing hymns. We know what it's like to quote scripture. We know what it's like to adore God. And pretty soon the desires of the flesh and of the mind to begin to subside, because now we have focused on the only one who can help us. We've decided that God is going to be the focal point of our life and all of our life is going to be God directed.
We are going to be God intoxicated, filled to the fullness of God. I like to tell that story about Nathaniel Hawthorne, the one that he wrote about little Ernest. Did you remember it? It's entitled The Great Stone Face and it goes this way. There was a village set on a hill and on the other side of a long valley there were some stones thrown together in a mountain in such a way that it really looked like the face of a man. As people looked at that man, that stone face, it looked so kind and so gentle. So there was a rumor in the village that someday a man would show up in the village who looked like the great stone face.
Little Ernest heard the rumor from his mother and was absolutely enamored by that great stone face and would actually sit on a rock and look across the valley hour after hour staring at the great stone face. Many people came through the village and every time someone came of significance people said, ha ha, he's the one who resembles the great stone face. A poet came and they all said he must be the one. A philosopher came and they said he must be the one. Ernest was so excited to try to find the person who looked like the great stone face but no one qualified. One day as an old man Ernest was standing along a hill speaking to the townspeople and as they saw him silhouetted against the mountain they saw the resemblance. Indeed he was the one who looked like the great stone face. But we all with open face beholding us in a mirror the glory of the Lord are transformed from one degree of glory to another degree of glory even by the Lord the Spirit.
Why? Because our focus is on him and we absorb all that God is. But here's the secret friend. Some of you have got a long valley to look beyond to see God, don't you? As long as we're looking at that valley, as long as we're thinking of all the fights that take place, as long as we think of the enemies that are crouched around us, as long as we're preoccupied by this business that we call earning a living and this becomes all-consuming, we have no time for God. I ask you today in weakness, I ask today those of you whose faith seems to be so small, don't stare at the valley because we become whatever we stare at.
You look at God, you look at God and you'll discover that Archbishop Temple was right. Yes, worship in spirit and truth is the way of the solution for our perplexities and from our liberation of sin. Through him then let us continually, not just on Sunday, but let us do it well on Sunday, but continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God that is the fruit of the lips and give thanks to his name and let us do good and let us share for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. If you and I ever learn how to worship, it'll take all that we are and all that we have. But God, God, needless to say is worth it. Well, this is Pastor Lutzer. I have to say this, the older I get, the more important worship is to me. Every morning I wake up, I give thanks to God, I praise his name, I bless him as the scripture says and it is so fulfilling for me and I believe it brings him honor. Well, when you look at the calendar, you realize that today is the last day you have an opportunity to make a tax deductible gift to the ministry of running to win.
Would you prayerfully seek the Lord as to whether or not he would have you join us, join our hands in ministry around the world? Here's what you can do. I'm going to be giving you some contact info. You can give online, you can call us or you can send a check.
Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com. RTWOffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. If you've been blessed by this ministry, it's because other people just like you have invested. Once again, that contact info, go to RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.
You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. If you believe the media, what matters most is who got elected. In a hundred years, this won't matter. Next time, we'll cut through the clutter, fly above today's clouds of gloom and find out what really is most important. The answer lies in the words of the Apostle Paul, words that will transform your life. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
