Bible Lesson 40

On Worship
#6 in a series

Isn’t it sad that, as we have begun our study of proper worship of God that we have, of necessity, had to undertake to understand what the Bible says about the life of those who are true Christians. When we come to really think about how we worship and who we worship, we realize that our churches have accommodated themselves to our secularist culture. The result has been that the church is now in many cases, first of all comfortable and shallow and worse yet, illiterate in the Word and Will of God. We have become a cheerleading team, rather than a force that should be changing the world with its message of power and love and God?s Mercy.

I know that most of the people who go to church at all, will when they read this want to argue at least about their particular church; but if we stop and examine ourselves and look at what our church is doing for the Kingdom, we have to admit that we are a mile wide, but only skin deep. Think about this; if your church were to have a “white-glove inspection”, and the truth of all of the congregation was to be revealed, what kind of rating would you get?

That is not a judgment, because I am not the judge; but we all know we can hide sin from each other and from the pastor and the community we live in, but we cannot hide sin from God. Our problem is that we have been lured to sleep by half-truths, and weak preaching.

We have been wrong for so long, that if we ever get right before God we will think that we are wrong. We have made the main thing, individuals when the main thing must be God. We have begun to have a talking Christianity, and that at best is only mumbling. We know all the answers but we don’t yet know the questions. We can sound like real Christians, but we do not demonstrate Christ in the way that we live.

We are told by Christ in Matthew 5:13-16 that we are to live like salt and light to the lost world, and Christ says that our Christian lives would cause others who see our good works, to glorify God. That brings to mind an incident where a policeman witnessed a woman tailgating the car ahead of her and when the car had to stop in traffic, she immediately began to rant and use foul language and make gestures to the person ahead of her.

The policeman arrested her and took her to jail in handcuffs, and told her he was arresting her for auto theft; because the car she was driving had a “what would Jesus do” tag holder and a bumper sticker that read “follow me to church Sunday”, so he figured that the car must be stolen. How many people today stand to be arrested because their bumper sticker says one thing and their acts say another?

Before we leave bumper stickers, I saw one several years ago that I think encapsulates most church-members level of dedication and it read, ” How much can I sin, and still go to heaven?” What can we expect when we began decades ago to preach with our Bibles open, but our message upside down?

If you are a student of the Bible, you have to know that there is bad news and there is good news, and before we are ready to hear the good news, we must come to terms with the bad news. One of our great old Theologians said this many years ago, “no man will ever know the love of God until he has dealt with the wrath of God against his sin.”

Churches for some reason have chosen to forget the bad news, and they preach only the good news. They choose to preach that God loves everybody and Jesus died for everybody and we cannot live the life that God portrays in the Bible. They seem to close with a plea for everybody in this congregation to seek to appear that they are in unity and everybody will just float into heaven. I tell you on the authority of the Word of God, the Bible, that is a lie off the mud-sills of hell. Yes, the Bible tells us in John 3:16, that God loved the world; but notice that love is in the past tense. Before the foundation of the world, before Adam fell, God loved the world; however, since the fall, God has seen mankind under His wrath and the only remedy for man is to come to Jesus Christ for Salvation. Now since most knowledgeable preachers know that the vast majority of church members are lost folks where do we get off telling everybody that God loves them?

Jesus Christ puts love to the test in John chapter 14, verses 21-24; and Jesus Christ, the only Savior of mankind, says there, that it is those who love Him enough to obey Him, that the Father loves and that He will love them also. Now, if that be true and we know it is true, don’t we have some work to do, before we can draw large crowds and say that we are gathered to worship God? Have you ever thought that you can throw a drowning man a lifejacket and if he doesn’t think he is drowning, he will not put it on? People must come to the knowledge of their lost conditions before they are ready for the good news of the gospel. You may ask, what has that to do with worship? And I reply that it has everything to do with worship. There can be the only One who is ever worshiped and that is Jehovah God, and the only people who can ever get a hearing from God, the only ones who are welcomed into the throne room of God, are those who not just say that they are saved; but those who prove that they are saved by being salt and light.

Jesus Christ preached in His Sermon on the mount, that we can know people by the fruit that they produce. Fruit, in Matthew 7:16-20, speaks of the good works that God says that He planned from the foundation of the world, that men would walk in them (See Ephesians 2:10). The first Bible that most people ever read is the Bible that they see in the lives of those who know the Lord. So we can understand that the purest form of Worship would be the Christ-like life of those who belong to Him. Then why aren’t we seeing many of those kinds of lives today?

The answer is simple, we have become people who want to have their ears tickled by hucksters in our pulpits who preach what people want to hear, rather than preaching what people need to hear.
God did not give us the Written Word, the Bible, and the Living Word, His Son Jesus Christ so that people could adjust or change them to suit the tastes of sinners who would hear nothing else. God gave us the Word of God to challenge, to warn, to shock those who heard, and to show them their need to live a different life.

The problem is that we have begun to adjust to and tolerate the world rather than to challenge it. C.S. Lewis noted that Christians all too often accommodate themselves to the world: at least when they are not hiding from it. We take a religion whose teachings violate directly the teachings of the Bible and we try every way that we know how to make that religion align with Christianity. Let me assure you it was not Buddha, or Allah, or any other god, that came to earth to die on a cross. It was the Son of God, Jesus Christ who came and bore our sins on Calvary; and our God says that He will not share His glory with anyone else (See Isaiah 42:8; 48:11).

Christianity is not a mumbo-jumbo, mystical, hopeful; never sure of our salvation and where it comes from and what it does in and for us; instead it comes to us from The Book that was inspired by God and hence is inerrant, infallible, tried and true. We call that book the Bible, and almost everyone in America has at least one and yet it is the least read and studied book in the world. As a consequence, we have become sloppy, apathetic, and carnal as people.

Notice I did not say that we had become carnal Christians, I said we had become carnal, because we live in the flesh and for the flesh. We can’t serve God with one hand and the devil with the other. We cannot be “fence-sitters”, those who are always above the fray, sitting comfortably on our fence where we are free to decide for the devil or God, depending upon our mood and the situation. We are, as the visible church, neither hot nor cold; and God will not tolerate that kind of worship (See Revelation 3:15-16).

If you think that the visible church exercises any moral authority in it?s community, think about this. It is at the point that a person can stand in the door of one church and spit and hit the door of another, in most places, yet the communities with all these churches are going to hell in a handbasket. God never intended for His church to be a decoration in a sea of crime and immorality. God sent His Son Jesus Christ to die so that men and women, boys and girls could be free to live lives that were acceptable to God. That is a possibility: but only for those who know Jesus Christ in an intimate love affair that brings a person out of the darkness and into the light of Christ. We have stopped short of submitting ourselves to the only Savior, and have begun to operate like we believe that if we join some denominational church we are pleasing to God. God’s children all look like Christ; because they are in Christ and Christ is in them. (See Ephesians 2:10; 2nd Cor. 5:17).

That is a hard and fast rule, God does not have children that do not obey Him and they all obey Him in the same way and the same degree. Why do you suppose that most churches in our day have plateaued in membership and many are even in decline? There are of course some individual groups that are increasing in membership but it is not normally because people are coming to Christ, but rather, because they are leaving one church and coming to another. Our ministers are guilty of preaching confusing sermons, sermons that are normally objective, or preached as mystical maybes that never cause individuals to examine themselves so that they can see their needs. It is no wonder that someone has said, ” Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and not tried.” We cannot fault those who look at what we hold out as the ecclesia (a gathering of the called-out ones), and they see a portrait of the world in which they were born.

Why would anyone want to wake early on Saturday or Sunday, jump up and dress and rush to church, if they hear what they know is not serious Bible preaching. I hope that the previous five bible lessons on worship have not been lost on anyone. We have attempted to point out and warn the visible church and those who do not know the Lord in Spirit and Truth, that there is a problem. If we have not done that, then we must be incapable of doing it; however, I know that we have shown the problem. Now what we want to do is to point to the solution. The solution to the problem of ineffectual worship is given to us by the Lord in many places in His Word the Bible, and it is often quoted as a preamble to our “revivals”.

The verse is found in Second Chronicles 7:14; and God speaks to us there and says, “If My people, who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land”. That verse will if properly understood and applied to the lives of those who are true seekers, energize a morality in this country that will change our families, our communities, and our cities.

Notice, now, the verse says that God’s people must first humble themselves and there is where the problem lies. We do not have many truly humble people among us today, at least not in this nation. We are a people who will help in a pinch, donate money to most causes but we will never be humble; because we see humbleness as a weakness. We deal with others with sharp tongues, and sharp, cutting words. We see ourselves as good as the best and better than the rest. That is not humble! Humble speak of many things like low degree, low estate, courteous, abasement; and we consider all of these terms to point to weakness, which is far from the truth. To be humble is to be able to see ourselves in our true relationship with God.

To see ourselves as mere creatures, and God as the Almighty Creator. Once we see ourselves in that sense, we will of necessity, pray, and we will seek the face of God and turn from our wicked ways, and then and only then will God hear from heaven and heal our land. In revivals that I have been involved in and observed, there are not many who ever prepare themselves for God intervention by turning inward and purposefully humbling ourselves.

We normally don’t mind sending up a short prayer, but forget us giving up much time to stay on our knees before our sovereign God. We have been fooled into thinking that sin is always a part and parcel of our lives (especially if we are saved). That means that we won’t even think about turning from our sin.

Everyone should be able to see by now, that we are not ripe for help from God because we want to manipulate God instead of submitting ourselves wholeheartedly to Him. Jesus Christ spoke to us about that attitude in His Sermon on the Mount, and He said, “Why do you call me “Lord, Lord” and not do the things which I say?” (See Luke 6:46). The Christian life, the life where all things work together for good for them that love the Lord, is a life that is marked by obedience to God.

We can look to Hebrews chapter 5, verses 8-9, and we find there that Jesus Christ died for those who would obey Him. In the gospel of John chapter 14 and verses 21-24, we find Jesus Christ assures us that it is those who know His commandments and keeps them that His Father loves and that He will love.

I find so many church members in our day, who feel they have an obligation to fight or resist the will and the power of God. Many join some church group and then call themselves Christians, but they deny the power of God in their salvation. They want to think that salvation was their idea and their decision and even their work. The God who saves is the God who will not share his power with anyone, especially a nominal church member.

Salvation is of God and Grace and faith are both gifts of God in our salvation (Ephesians 2:8-9). We are born into this world under the wrath of God and we exist as dead in trespass and sin until God intervenes in our lives to quicken us and allow us to exercise his gift of faith. Ephesians 2:1-10. Those who understand God and His miracle of salvation are then able to worship God the way that God must be worshiped, in Spirit and Truth. The solution is evident, and it exists in our being taught by the Holy Spirit of God, the truths of God.

Think on these things and then begin to study your Bible, and ask God to illuminate it so that you will be able to worship Him. 

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob