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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon and we pray that as we declare the
Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who
Christ is and may you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you.
Before we sang a single note this morning, before I had ever strummed a chord,
God had already heard worship emanating from this place and also from you.
But before your drive here, it was true. Before you tied your tie, before your morning cup of joe, before you fixed your hair, the words were already ascending to God and they were saying something about the state of your and my worship, about the state of our soul.
And this is because in the Bible our words not only matter, but our words are a barometer for our worship.
What we say and what we mutter and the vocal folds that tongues shape into words that escape across our lips say more about the state of worship than what radio station or what
Spotify channel we listen to or what psalms and hymns and songs that we prefer to sing on Sunday.
And that's because God doesn't wait for the music to start before he determines that we are worshiping.
He's been listening to you since you woke up this morning. Indeed, in fact, he's been listening to you since that first cry in the hospital when you cried out in fear or joy or whatever it was that you cried out for.
Your words have been telling a story about who you worship and how you worship.
And because of that phenomenon, I want us to examine what Proverbs has to say about the relationship between our words and our worship so that we can continue as we've been doing over the last several weeks defining what true worship is.
And if we're going to define what true worship is, we need to understand the relationship between what words say and communicate and what worship is because all worship is done before the face of God.
So this is part four in our exploration of what the book of Proverbs has to say about worship, and it's what does worship have to do with our words.
So if you will, I'm going to read a few passages. We're going to pray. We're going to examine this together.
And I'll begin with Proverbs 1529. I don't think that the slide is right,
Calvin, so it's okay. You can write these down. Proverbs 1529.
The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous. Proverbs 28 9.
He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, even his prayer is an abomination.
Proverbs 20 verse 25. It is a snare for a man to say rashly, it is holy, and after the vow to make an inquiry.
Proverbs 28 4 through 5. Those who forsake the law praise the wicked, and those who keep the law strive with them.
And then Proverbs 28 13. He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion.
Let us pray. Lord, we thank you that you have created this phenomenon of language and words and voices, and Lord, you have created it so that we could orient it towards you, so that we could speak in manners that are truthful and righteous and God -glorifying and joyful and praiseworthy.
As Paul says, whatever is praiseworthy or good or excellent or beautiful, think on these things, speak on these things. And yet,
Lord, we use our words and our voices in such sinful ways.
Lord, help us today to see the relationship between words and worship, and Lord, help us to feel the beautiful and glorious and necessary conviction of the
Spirit that we would even be a people who grow in the usage of our words and the tightening of our phrases and the looseness of our lips.
And Lord, may it all be for your glory and for the good of your church. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. I want to begin by just pointing out the fact that words are worship, and I'm going to look at the two passages that we read first.
Proverbs 15, 29, The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous. In Proverbs 28, 9,
He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, even his prayer is an abomination. Proverbs introduces worship not through the ten -stringed lyre or the harp or the loud crashing cymbals as we see in Psalm 150, but it introduces worship as speech, and it puts prayer front and center of that speech because prayer is probably the most worshipful form of human language, because it is the clearest test case for how
God evaluates every word that is spoken to Him. And if prayer can be rejected, and if prayer can be called an abomination, then there's no speech offered to God that is not subject to his scrutiny.
There's no speech that is neutral. Words function as worship because they expose our allegiances, our fears, our obediences, and even our rebellions.
Every sentence we utter places us, the speaker, before the face of God, not as a mere conversationalist, but as a worshiper under evaluation.
What I'm saying is that God does not merely hear our words, He weighs them, and the evaluation of our words will determine how we worship, and our worship will determine the nearness that we experience to Almighty God.
And by that, I don't mean the arrangement of alphabetic letters and multi -syllabic patterns with unique sounds and accents that evoke images, memories, and meaning through our spoken voices.
I'm not saying that words in that sense in and of themselves will dictate your nearness to God. What I am saying is that our words will demonstrate who we are and what we love, and that will dictate your nearness to God.
I want you to think about it this way. God is omnipresent, which means
God is everywhere, which means God is in all places at all time perfectly, and there is no place where God is not.
And yet, even though God is omnipresent, that doesn't guarantee that you will always be close to God.
What do I mean? Well, if the Lord's everywhere perfectly and fully, how is
He not perfectly and fully close to the wicked? Well, it's a difference between proximity and relationship.
There is a way that God is with the wicked, perfectly with the wicked, and yet far from them.
And we know this is true in human relationships. We know that there's times where we've been mere inches away from a person, and yet felt worlds away.
What we're seeing here is that while God is fully present in one sense,
He can be relationally distant in another, like two people in deep conflict, except this
God, when He is in conflict with you, has the power not only to throw you into hell, but to destroy your soul.
Because Solomon says prayer proves this principle, and that God hates the speech of the wicked, but He hears the prayer of the righteous, then we can understand that our words actually matter.
And our words say something about the proximity of which we will experience the intimacy of God.
That's clearly demonstrated here in prayer, but it also says something about every word that comes out of our mouth.
Our prayer is weighed. Our speech is weighed. If prayer can be rejected, then every other word we have can be rejected.
If prayer exposes your heart, then so does every sentence. That is why the same mouth that prays also complains.
The same lips that ask God for mercy also withhold it from others. The same tongue that praises our
Lord and God, the Father's James says, uses it to curse men, and mutter, and flatter, and slander, and resist correction.
Edit the truth, and stay silent when righteousness is needed. This is our worship revealed through the words that we choose.
And what does that say about our worship when our words are tired, defensive, insecure, afraid?
They're not less spiritual than the ones you say in private, in prayer, or in your car listening to Caleb if you do such a thing.
Our words tell the truth about what we fear, about what we trust, about who we are actually living for.
Our words are not outside of our worship. Our words are some of its truest expression.
Again, words themselves do not bring us near to God, but they reveal to us where God already is in proximity to us.
Now, it's also true that Proverbs applies the language of abomination to prayers that are prayed inappropriately.
That to me is astounding. The same word that is used about the wickedness of homosexuality, the destructive nature of ripping a child out of its mother's womb and murdering a child is the same word that is applied here to a prayer that is prayed in an inappropriate way.
The same word used for bowing down to demonic gods is used to describe a prayer that is prayed to God inappropriately.
Solomon says, he who turns away his ear from listening to the law, even his prayer is an abomination.
This means that external prayers and appearances of sincerity don't protect us. Our passion is not a shield for us.
Our repetition, as Jesus said, our vain repetition is not some kind of leverage against God.
God is not impressed by the volume of our words, nor moved by the up and down of our tone, nor obligated by our religious language.
God is not impressed if you pray in King James English. I remember
I was praying with someone. We were evaluating a denomination. It was a Dutch reformed denomination before we knew like what that meant.
But when they started praying in King James English, I was like, this is pretty, it's pretty spiritual.
God evaluates our words in proportion to the righteousness that is coming from our own hearts.
He determines the quality of our speech based on the loyalty we have to his covenant. And in this way, prayer functions as the quintessential example of what the highest and most holy form of speech ought to be.
And because prayer is rejected because we are lawbreakers, then none of our words are safe.
Which is what we see in Proverbs 20, 25, where Solomon now talks about rash words.
He's going to move from prayer to rash words, words spoken without a lot of thought, words spoken hastily and quickly and impetuously.
Because we're talking about words from the holiest of words down to the most thoughtless of words.
And they say something about the way that we worship and who we actually worship. Proverbs 20, 25 says, it is a snare for a man to say rashly, it is holy and after the vow to make an inquiry.
If words are worship and our words are going to be morally weighed, then Proverbs now names a particular sin that almost every single
Christian commits without even thinking. Because it's rash. Now, I want to be clear here.
Solomon is not talking about crude speech. He's not talking about a joke that should not have been told.
He's not talking about curse words in this. It's actually worse. It's actually more dangerous than that.
He's talking about religious words that are spoken too quickly. Words that sound faithful, but they're issued forth without any fear and trembling, without any thought, without any promise to devotion to God.
They're spoken in some flippant manner without counting the cost of what those words will actually entail.
And Solomon calls this a snare, a trap that is set that you will fall into.
The man in Proverbs 20, 25 is the kind of man who speaks first and thinks later.
It's convicting. I know I've done that time after time after time.
A man who thinks to himself, I want to do something great for God and then begins babbling his plans with no follow -through.
With no plan on how to do it, when to do it, where to do it, why to do it, or I said how maybe, how to do it.
Labeling something as holy before asking whether God feels the same way. Announcing his devotion without even examining his own heart.
Declaring some kind of commitment without counting the cost. Sure, it's a religious statement, but it is not holy.
It's hasty and rash with a zeal that outpaces us if we don't follow through with it.
And this happens constantly in so many ways that feel very normal to us.
We say things like, I'll pray for you. But did you? We called something holy and then didn't think about it later.
I really feel like this is from the Lord. That just means that we want it. Whatever that thing is,
I think that's from the Lord. We say, I'm committing this to God.
When we've not prayed, we've not sought counsel, we've not examined our motives. We say, yeah, I'm really struggling with that.
We haven't shed a single drop of sweat and struggle against that thing.
We say, you know, God just, God tells us to be patient and what we're really doing often when we say that is we're baptizing our cowardice as a way of participating in avoidance.
I've even heard this from pastors who say things like, you just need to forgive when what they're actually doing is enabling sin and using
God's providence as an excuse to do nothing. Our words are not neutral babblings.
Our words carry with them worshipful declarations and when we speak rashly, when we attribute something to God that is not really from God, we are not honoring
God, we are disobeying God. When we sprinkle a little Christian ease on something, we're not performing worship, we are not looking to the great
I am, we are looking to the me, me, me. What Solomon and the
Holy Spirit are telling us is that we should be very careful and we should measure our words with caution.
We should say what we mean and mean what we say and we should know for sure when we say things that are dedicated to God that they actually are and that we actually will follow through with what we said.
Because what does it say about how we view God if we say, yes Lord, I'll do this thing and don't. It'd be better to refuse to say anything at all.
That's not all this passage is getting after, however. Solomon finishes the verse by saying, it's a snare for a man to say rashly it's holy and then after the vow to make an inquiry.
He's saying once you say the words, you can't take them back. You can't unpledge something to God and then later put in the effort that you were supposed to put in on the front end in order to say the thing in the first place.
And that would be like trying to buy a house before you've looked at your finances. Thankfully banks won't let you do that.
We could call that getting the proverbial cart in front of the proverbial horse. And this is because inquiry is meant to happen before we speak.
We're actually supposed to use this organ before we use this one. Before we make a pledge to God, before we evoke the name of God, before we speak religious language, we're supposed to put in thought and say, does this honor the
Lord? Am I committed to doing this for the Lord? Or am I just saying something to make myself feel better, to make myself look better among people who would think that such a thing would gain me some sort of credit.
I mean think about how often this happens in real life. We promised God that we're gonna stop doing a particular sin before we actually know how much killing and mortifying that it's actually gonna require.
Could this be why we say the same prayer a million times and never mortify the sin, never gain the victory, because we never actually thought about what we were saying before we said it.
We never actually weighed the cost. We vow to increase our time in prayer. I don't know how many times
I've read that quote from Martin Luther. I'm too busy not to pray for four hours a day. I'm like, I need to pray four hours a day.
And I don't do it. And neither do you. We commit to read the
Word, right? Every January we're like, we're gonna read the whole Bible. And then Exodus 21 happens and things aren't fun anymore.
We say I'm gonna talk to them and tell them how what they said made me feel. I'm gonna deal with it, or I'm gonna confess, or I'm gonna change.
And weeks go by and it's untouched. And what happens next is quite subtle.
It's not open rebellion. It's just we eventually end up softening the language and reinterpreting what we said.
And we lower the standards so that our conscience can actually deal with our own lack of fortitude in what we said.
We say, well, I had all every good intention. But you know this and this happened and life got in the way and things got busy.
I said that this week about exercising. I was going really strong and then all of a sudden got busy and I said,
I'm not gonna do it. It's because we do this all the time, don't we? We give ourselves excuses when our obedience is higher than our perceived ability.
It's not that we don't have the ability to do what we've said. It's because we don't want we don't want to.
Something else becomes more important in the moment. Proverbs says these kind of hasty and rash words are worship, but they're not the good and the wholesome kind of worship.
They're not the kind that magnify the splendor of God and show that the person saying them understands the weight of his holiness and righteousness.
They are words from a person who is defaming the holiness of God and thinking lightly about God's righteousness and power.
Because we did not think through them clearly and we dared to speak them before a holy God, quorum
Deo, before his face with no plan whatsoever of following through.
And in this way, we should see that words are worshipful and how God cares about the manner in which we speak.
God himself is not flippant. Therefore, God expects that we would not be flippant. God says
I am holy, therefore you be holy. So if God is not flippant, we should not be flippant and we are.
God never uses language in less than holy ways because he's holy and yet we do. There's not a single person in this room who has not violated this particular proverb.
And because of that our goal ought to be accuracy of speech, soberness of speech, thoughtfulness, truthfulness of speech, mortifying the tendencies that we all have to speak hastily and yet what we do is when we fall we often binge.
For instance, let's say you've committed yourself to a particular diet and you eat one slice of cake and then before you know it you are going full hog on everything around you.
That's what we do spiritually as well. We say we're gonna do something we don't and we fall into rebellion. Our words actually matter.
What we say actually means something. Our words reveal where our true allegiances actually are. They either reveal that we belong to God or they reveal that we are in cahoots with the wicked, but they don't mean nothing and they are not neutral.
Look at what Proverbs 28 4 through 5 says as far as words revealing our allegiance. Those who forsake the law praise the wicked.
Notice what Solomon says. He's telling us that when we forsake the law, which is biblical obedience to the things of God in every manner of our life, then we will end up using our voices to praise the wicked.
He doesn't actually say that when we forsake the law we will become the wicked, although that's certainly downstream of it.
He doesn't say that if we forsake the law one time we're gonna throw a parade for sin and we're gonna have a celebrate your abortion party.
That's not what he's saying, but he is saying that when we don't follow the law of God that something very common to all of us will happen and it is subtle and it is dangerous.
When we forsake the law we begin to drift from obedience to God and we begin the process of praising wickedness with our own words, which is a fascinating and terrifying reality that I think we've all experienced happening.
In other words, when obedience slips our speech will follow. For instance, I went to a
Christian school, which meant I was a holy child. I'm just kidding. I was a very innocent child and I remember
I'd never said a cuss word until I was like 15 years old and like all my friends did, but I didn't.
And I remember I was introduced to a band, a metal band, that was so fascinating to me.
The way that they played music and the time signatures that they played and and the way that their drums coincided with these off beats and it was fascinating to me.
And I remember listening to it in my beat -up Toyota pickup truck on my way home from school. Now I was 16 years old.
In North Carolina, we we didn't drive at 15. And I remember listening and every time certain words would come on I would mute the music so that I could still listen to it.
And then before long I was, this is a lot of trouble, I'm just gonna let it play.
And then before long I was singing along, but I was like changing the word. And then before long
I was singing along and I was saying the words. And then before long I was, my whole speech had been corrupted. The same is true with with many people who fall into adultery.
You don't slip and fall into an affair in a day. It's years of compromise that eventually follow with behavior.
What Solomon is saying is that if you disobey the law of God your speech is going to follow. Your speech is going to be compromised.
Your speech is worship and your worship will be polluted by disobeying his law. And it comes in a lot of different varieties.
We'll say, we'll stop saying things like, you know, that's a sin. And then we'll start saying things like, it's complicated.
We'll stop correcting an injustice and we'll start explaining why they or we were justified.
We'll stop contending for truth and we'll start staying quiet. Solomon says that our silence is not neutral because our silence is a kind of praise to the wrong
God. Praise that doesn't always sound like applause. Sometimes it sounds like jokes and memes that we share that we shouldn't have shared.
I'm guilty of that. Sometimes it sounds like not wanting to rock the boat in order to not offend someone.
They've told you something that you should tell them, look brother, you need to repent of that and you don't because you think it's gonna ruin the relationship.
It sounds like when we say, well, you know, they did their best. No, they didn't. It sounds like when we think about obedience and we in our opinion about obedience now shifts to, well, that would be unloving if I told them to do that.
You don't understand how they feel. You don't understand what they're going through. See how simple and quick and subtle even that shift happens.
And it's not cultural savvy. It's not us learning how to be all things to all men. You know, Paul says it became all things to all men so I might win some.
He's not saying that I have to tell the dirty joke in order to win someone to Christ. That's called syncretism, not evangelism.
He's not telling us that we need to try to fly under the cultural radar and laugh at what other people would think is funny when
God actually calls it sin. I remember listening to a sermon by John Piper, so convicting, where he was talking about the show
Friends, where we would think that Friends is kind of like not that big of a deal compared to what is out now.
And yet he mentioned how these people are sleeping together in such licentious ways and we laugh at what
God calls us to hate. And that's with Friends.
That's not with other shows. I don't know. I don't watch TV, so whatever's new.
Solomon gives us this really powerful contrast. Those who keep the law strive against the wicked and those who don't will end up having their speech being corrupted.
And the righteous don't strive with the wicked because they love conflict. There are people, there are
Christians, who maybe they call themselves discernment ministry folks, who love conflict.
That's what they live for. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who view their words as a point of accuracy between them and God, that their words actually are used to worship their
God. And I'm talking about the cowardice that exists in most of us when words become uncomfortable, our allegiances show up.
When we get squeezed by situations, we find out what's actually inside of us. And we find that out by how we talk about sin, how we talk about authority, how we talk about marriage, how we talk about sexuality, how we talk about money, how we talk about repentance, how we talk about obedience.
It shows up in what you defend and what you excuse, what you joke about and what you refuse to name. Now, by now, with just a few verses in Proverbs, I think the noose is sufficiently around all of our necks.
That we have seen that our words are worship, that our words are weighed by God and that our words have been found wanting.
For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In our words, we are condemned.
Our words, our pledges, our vows, our rash and hasty things that we have stated are like drops of hemlock in a cup of wine.
They poisoned us and they are the very reason we deserve to die. And just to press it home, who in this room has never prayed while knowing that you're ignoring something that God has revealed to you and told you not to do?
Who has never asked God to bless a decision that you had no intention of giving to Him or submitting to Him?
Who has never asked for peace in a situation while refusing your own repentance? Who has never sung words about surrender and holiness and obedience and the beauty of God and then walked out of the room and used those same hands that you raised in worship to perform sin?
Who among us has never said amen with their mouth and then used that same mouth in treachery later?
Who among us has never promised to God that you're going to change when you're caught and yet cool off when the urgency dies down?
Who among us has never explained away their sin instead of confessing it or stayed quiet when we should have said something?
All of us have laughed at things that make God angry. All of us have said things with our words that we can't take back.
And all of us are under the guillotine of God's wrath if it were not for the glory and the love and the kindness of God that He gave to us in Jesus Christ.
And I want to share something with you. We do this every week. We spend 75 % of the sermon showing how we don't do it and then we point to Christ.
And there's a very important reason for that because you should never become confident in your own ability and I shouldn't either.
Our words are polluted but praise God that He gave us the Word. The Word made flesh.
The Word who came and dwelt among us. For all of us whose words have failed us,
He gave us the Word that cannot be ever broken. For all of us whose words have spoken treachery,
He gave us the pure Word of God, the living Word, the Logos of God who is Jesus, the
Word made flesh. And what that means, dear one, is that even though you are broken and even though you're in this situation like Paul was in Romans chapter 7 where he says,
I do the things I don't want to do, I don't do the things I want to do, I say the things I shouldn't say,
I laugh at the things I shouldn't laugh at because even the fact that all of us are there, I want you to remember that who is the one holding you and it is the very
Word of God. So that even though our words are corrupt sometimes, the
Word Himself holds us and it's His words by which we are judged, not ours.
Which means that we don't forsake sanctification because this great
Word has saved us and purified our speech before God. Now we grow. We grow into taking our words more seriously, don't we?
We grow into saying what we mean and meaning what we say. We grow into not making rash pledges.
We grow in using our language in ways that honors God because God has given us the
Word to save us. So we don't walk away from here indifferent, oh
I can say whatever I want. We walk away from here saying the One who spoke the final Word has called me
His. And now my words must match this great Friend who saved me.
And I don't want to do anything that offends Him because He's done everything for me. If Jesus has done everything for us, there's nothing
He can't ask for us to give to Him. He wants your words. So let us repent together and let us grow in faithfulness.
Let us do it in the name of the Lord. Amen. Lord, we thank You that our words are often corrupt.
We don't mean what we say. We make pledges and vows and we say all kinds of things and ask
You to bless it. We don't mean it. We are flippant creatures an inch deep.
And yet, Lord, You've given us Jesus Christ the true Word to sanctify our words, to purify our words, to not count our words against us, but to have
His words count for us. And in that, You've given us Your Spirit to grow us into the image of Christ so that our words and our language, the things that we say, the words that we use, the jokes that we tell, every bit of it would come under the sanctification of Christ so that we would no longer speak rashly but truthfully, that we would no longer speak flippantly but with depth, that we would no longer speak without thinking but we would think before speaking, and that,
Lord, this vision that Proverbs has given us about a man whose tongue is bridled, being a man who worships rightly,
Lord, that that would increasingly become our story by the power of Jesus' Spirit at work in us.