SERMON: The End Of Worship

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.

Now over the last seven sermons, we've been constructing a theology of worship together week by week in the book of Proverbs. We've been trying to grapple with and understand what is a picture of true worship.

A picture that's so much larger and much more demanding and also much more beautiful than most of us may be imagined. And we began with that foundation by seeing that God is the all-seeing God. Nothing is hidden from him.

All of our life has lived quorum Deo, which is Latin for before the face of God. And worship is not just what you do on Sunday morning. It is the total orientation of the creature to the Creator. It's whatever you and I have placed upon the throne of our heart is what we inevitably will worship.

And we saw in the second week how the fear of God is not a kind of terror that we're supposed to flee from it. It's a treasure that we run towards because if all of life is lived before the presence of God and if we see God for who he truly is, we will fear him and we will run to him and our souls will be at rest in him.

And he will open up to us a fountain of life that will never fail and always quench our soul. We saw that not all worship is acceptable to God in week three. That wicked men still worship. There is no such thing by nature as an atheist.

Everyone worships something and not all worship is pleasing or acceptable to God. The wicked bring their sacrifices and it's an abomination to God. The righteous bring their sacrifices to God and he accepts them on the basis of Jesus Christ.

Not on the basis of our merit because what we saw in that week was that if we brought our worship to God with our polluted hearts and hands, it too would be an abomination to him. The only reason he accepts our worship is because of Christ's faithful service on our behalf.

Then we saw that worship affects every sphere of life. Our politics, our economics, our justice, the use of our tongue. All of it either bows down to a sovereign God or it quietly crowns us as.

A.

Deific rival. And then last week we saw the most common rival to worship of them all is not the idols of gold or stone, but it's men and women, made in flesh and bone, who we've elevated their opinion, their approval over that of God, and we have bowed to the fear of man, which is one of the most ancient and most devastating substitutes that will kill worship in the heart of God.

It is a cruel task master dressed up in a costume of wisdom. We saw that only the only cure for the fear of man is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the only verdict that matters about you, and what I mean by that is the only opinion of you that matters,.

The only.

Approval that you could ever have, the only reason you could ever have confidence is not because of what a corresponding person tells you, says to you, or promises you. The only reason you can have those things is because of Christ and Christ.

Alone.

So before we read a single verse this morning, this series has been kind of relentlessly demanding, and intentionally so, that true worship is going to cost us something. It requires the death of self-sovereignty.

Worship, by its very nature, requires the death of we are in control. We know what is best. We understand. No, we don't. We must die and then live in order to really worship this God who for us and on our behalf died so that we may live.

So if we ended this series there, we would have a good theology of what worship is and what worship demands. But today I want to bring a final message, and I wanted to answer the question that's kind of been lurking underneath the surface.

What does worship actually lead us to? If I fear God instead of man, if I surrender my plans, if I bring my whole life into alignment with this great God instead of just religious performance or secular hedonism, if I confess to Him instead of seceding to my control, if I do everything right towards this God, where does it lead?

What does it cause? What happens? What is the telos of worship? And the book of Proverbs is going to tell us that worship ultimately leads to life, it leads to freedom, it leads to praise, it leads to flourishing, and it leads to a kind of death that death cannot undo.

So with that, I.

Want us to look at a few passages today. Proverbs 22 4, Proverbs 29 18, Proverbs 29 6, Proverbs 38 through 9, Proverbs 31 30, those aren't right.

At least not all of them.

I'm gonna read them, we're gonna look at them, and then we're gonna end today worshiping this God, understanding what worship is and what it's done. Proverbs 22 4, the reward of humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, honor, and life.

Proverbs 29 18, where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law. Proverbs 29 6, in the transgression of an evil man, there is a snare, but the righteous sings and rejoices.

Proverbs 30 8 through 9, give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with the food that is my portion, that I not be full and deny you and say who is the Lord, or that I not be and want and steal and profane the name of my God.

And then Proverbs 31 30, charm is deceitful and beauty is vanity, but a woman who fears the Lord shall be praised. Husbands, you're allowed to look at your wife and smile. So let's pray. Lord, we thank you.

We thank you that you are good, that you are kind, and that you have invited in us into worship. And Lord, you've not invited us into worship because you have need, or because you have in some insecurity that must be met by millions of people praising you.

You've invited us into worship because you alone are worthy of it. And also, it does something. It leads us somewhere. It establishes us. It remakes us. It reintegrates us. It orients us. By your sheer love, based on nothing we could do for you, you have given us this gift that is at the center of everything.

This is the center of the way we work, the way that we live, the way that we speak, the way that we walk, the way that we talk, the way that we sleep, the way that we do everything. At the heart of everything is worship.

And you've given us this gift to orient it rightly towards you, because in you only life can be found. So Lord, we thank you. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. The first thing I want us to see as we close out this section on true worship is that fear produces flourishing.

Proverbs 22, 4 tells us that there's a humility that comes first, and fear comes second, and then blessings come third. Notice what comes before the reward, what comes before the riches and the honor and the life.

It's not achievement. It's not religious performance. It's not even sacrifice. It's humility. And then it's fear. Which means that Proverbs is not describing a vending machine kind of God where you enter in your good works, and you enter in your coins of prayer, and you receive your little blessing.

It's not like you fear God and then you get to collect the prize. The passage is describing a posture of worship, an orientation of worship. A whole life lived beneath the lordship of this sovereign God.

It's a kind of settled and a kind of clear-eyed understanding of exactly who you are and exactly who He is. Worship cannot happen without the knowledge of who God is and the knowledge of who you are.

And if you really know who you are, then you really know how much you need who He is. Humility, as C .S. Lewis once said, is not thinking less of yourself. Humility is thinking about yourself less. That's why you can be morbidly depressed and be the most arrogant person in the room.

Why? That doesn't seem right. Well, because I've thought about how bad I am all day, I'm still thinking about me instead of thinking about Him. Humility is not thinking less of you, it's about thinking of you less.

It's knowing that you are the creature. It's knowing that you are entirely dependent, sustained by mercy, incapable of a moment or even a nanosecond of self-sovereignty. If every cell in your body died instantly, you would have no say in whether or not you survived.

All of us are a dollar and fifty bullet away from death. And we can't change the root of it, no matter what those movies say. Have you ever seen that movie where they bend the bullets? We have no capability of even sustaining ourselves.

We have no ability of controlling our beginning. We have no ability of controlling our present. We have no ability of controlling our future. We have no ability of controlling any external stimuli that happens around us.

You can't control which word I say next. You have no idea what word I'm going to say next. Orange, you didn't know. And in that way, us not knowing anything, us being able to do nothing, and us being able to control nothing, really ought to point us to the fact that we must be in relationship with the only one who can.

This is the kind of involuntary trembling of reverence and awe that seizes the finite soul. When you see this God for who He is, and you say,.

I trust you.

I don't trust me anymore. And in that way, our faith is a kind of self-abasement, is it not? Because when we were born, we were taught to think about ourselves constantly. If you've never had an infant, then just wait.

All they do is think about them every second of every day, and that's how we're born. Our natural posture is to think about ourself in the gospel, and the Bible says, no, you die so that you may live.

He must become greater, and you must become less. What Christianity and what God, through Christ, is offering you is a path to the murder and the death of you so that you may live through Him. That is all that it is.

You have been invited to your own funeral so that you can let go of the reins of your own life and now be led by Him. And if you do that, that leads to true worship. If you stay in the white knuckling, your control, then who are you worshiping?

You're not worshiping the God who controls all things. You're worshiping you and your ability and your performance to control all things. That leads us to what are blessings. What are the blessings that actually come from actually surrendering in this way, being vulnerable in this way, and putting ourself in such a way that the only way that we could actually be saved or be helped or be aided or be blessed is through giving up control.

What does that lead us to? Well, in the passage, it says riches, honor, and life. And now before we reduce this to a kind of name it and claim it gospel prosperity or prosperity gospel sort of message, because that's not what Proverbs is doing, and before we reduce it to numbers in our bank account, we have to understand what this is saying.

Proverbs is not primarily talking about financial blessings. It's talking about the fullness of covenant riches. It's talking about covenant fullness, covenant abundance. It's talking about a filled life full of the treasures of God, of a man whose soul is no longer at war with God or even at war with himself.

The life of a man who's no longer scrambling to try to figure out how he's going to continue to build his own little empire because he knows the one who holds everything together. And in that way, honor, worship, reverence in Proverbs is not done transactionally for what we get.

Honor is the weight of a life. Surrender to him that outlives us. A name that echoes past your grave, a legacy that plants seeds your grandchildren will harvest. It's not about I'm going to obey God in order to get my Mercedes or my whatever you want to put in that blank.

It's about being so focused on the fact that God himself is the treasure and that you yourself are the one that needs to put down your will so that you could rightly say he is your greatest treasure. That's the richness.

That's the blessing that comes from knowing God is that you realize that the Maserati will rust in a few good New England winters and yet what you have in him will never fade. That's the riches of knowing God.

That's the riches of putting you and putting materialism and putting hedonism and putting humanism and putting every other ism down in favor of knowing him because the fruit that comes from knowing him will never fade and he will produce it a hundredfold, a thousandfold, not just through you but through your generations.

I came to faith because of the Spirit of God saving me. Amen. But I also came to faith born in a family of people I will never know and never met who were faithful before me, who could have never imagined that they would have a crazy Mocksvillian leave to move to Massachusetts to be here with you today and you all have that same story.

You're in a lineage of people who have professed faith in Christ before you and if not, you're the beginning of a legacy. That's the blessings, not bank accounts, not yachts, not finances, none of that.

Next I want to say, what does it mean to actually live this way? True worship is alignment with reality. God built a world where reverence leads to flourishing, not like magic, not as an arbitrary reward, but as a natural consequence of living in accordance with the nature of the way things are.

If God made this world according to his nature, then aligning yourself with his nature would actually make you live more fully in the world. It would actually unify you more with the world because now you're in unity with the designer.

A tree planted by a river bears much fruit. It produces fruit because it's where it was designed to be. It's rooted in its right place. It's obeying the rules of what trees do because it's in an environment and in a soil where trees flourish.

You plant a tree in the middle of the Sahara Desert, it doesn't tend to do well. You plant even tropical fruit here in New England, it doesn't do well. It's not the right soil. So when we are rooted in and connected to what God has told us about ourselves, if we're planted in the right soil, we actually end up flourishing more in the world that God has made.

And in that way, all of this that we're talking about, worship, submitting ourselves to the holiness of God, surrendering our will, being rooted where we're supposed to be rooted, all of this will end up actually transforming the society in which we live.

Worship does lead to a society that's flourishing. Because why? It's bottom-up. It's not revival-based, where we have a million-man revival and then we think we're going to somehow change the country.

It's not electing the right president, and then we're going to change the country. Well, we've seen how that worked. And I'm not just talking about the current president, I'm talking about every single election.

There's this hopium that happens, that change you can believe in, build back better, and whatever the other slogans are, that never end up materializing. What we need is a few people who will surrender their life to the lordship of Almighty God and who will train their children how to live up under the lordship of Almighty God and who will be fruitful in multiplying the things that God has given them, and that would change churches.

And those churches then would infect neighborhoods, and then those neighborhoods would then start taking over counties, and then counties would take over commonwealths, and then commonwealths would take over countries, and then countries would spread to the ends of the earth.

We need a bottom-up revolution, not a top-down devolution like we've seen. Worship is the very bridle of civilization. You see what Proverbs has been saying, the blessing of true worship of people who fear God and keep His word extends far beyond just a single soul.

It stabilizes society. If you have a society filled with Christians, you're going to have a Christian nation. You're going to have a nation that's preserved for generations. You're going to have something that you can build upon.

That will outlast you.

That will outlast the opinion cycles of the news chyrons. When you fear God and you keep His law and you order your family around His word, you are doing something that is so consequential to the health of a nation that it will extend beyond your own life to your neighborhood, to your culture, to everything.

It will flourish. We've got to get back, brothers and sisters, to that. We've got to get back to stop swinging for the fences through national elections, and we've got to get to the place to where we say, I'm going to do the faithful work today in my home.

I'm going to lead my family in worship today. I'm going to pray with my wife. I'm going to read Scripture over my children. I'm going to do the small, seemingly insignificant things that no one will ever see en route to world dominion because that's how the world is won.

That's how the world will be stabilized under the lordship of Christ is by small, insignificant, unseen acts of faithfulness in every single one of our homes until it spreads to more, until it spreads to more, until it spreads to more.

It says happier are those who keep the law. So how much happier would we be if we kept the law? How much happier would our nation be? How much happier would the world be? I don't understand a theology that continues to expect the world to get worse and worse and worse and worse.

I don't understand it. Because what does that say about the king that we serve? What does it say about Christ? Adam lost the world. Now we have a true and better Christ. Oh, don't worry, he won't lose the world too.

That doesn't make any sense. But the way that Jesus wins the world is not like the Muslims through jihad. It's not like the Mongols. It's not like the Vikings. It's through daddies praying with their children.

It's through saying grace at the table. It's through going to work, praying before you walk into your work and saying, Lord, let Christ be seen in me today. Give me an opportunity to share the gospel.

Lord, let me get a flat tire on the way home so that I can share the gospel with someone. It's all of Christ permeating all of life until that affects all the world. The next thing that we're going to talk about is how worship liberates us.

Proverbs 29 .6 tells us that there's something unusual that happens. Instead of outcomes that are being compared, it compares the kind of sounds. One side is a snare. It's silent.

It's hidden.

It's baiting. It's tightened. And on the other side is a song. Did you see that in Proverbs 29 .6 when we read it before? There's a snare for the wicked, but there's a song for the righteous. When the mousetrap snaps on the wicked, that's a sound.

But when the righteous are saved, there's a song on their lips. There's a freedom. There's a beauty. There's a sweetness. It's overflowing. The man ruled by sin is not primarily a rebel. He is fundamentally a prisoner.

He's trapped in the things that he thinks are going to give him freedom, and he is chained by the things that he thinks he loves. Sin causes us not to be free. Sin causes us to be chained. So to the degree that we give in to sin is to the degree that we will be chained.

And slowly and surely and inexorably, the snare closes. The noose tightens. The breath gets more shallow. The pressure gets heavier, and you are further from God than you ever wanted to be. And the capacity for real intimacy diminishes as we throw water on the fire of the Spirit.

And that's even true for Christians. The more you quench the Spirit of God, the more you are choked out from intimacy with Him. If you don't feel close to God, it is not because you're going through bad times.

We've seen that. The men and women in the Bible praised God for their hardships. They sang in prison. They sang as they beat them. Paul, I love the story, they drag him by his ankles outside of the city with his head bombing along the concrete.

They stone him to death. He gets up, and the first thing that he does is he walks back into the city and starts preaching again because he understood that his joy was not in his probably concussion, probably broken bones, absolutely bruises from rocks hurled at him at 50, 60 miles an hour.

You got some good strong Israelite men who throw some good fastballs with a stone. His hope wasn't in his health. His hope was in his Christ. And that led him to joyfully declare the Word even though they beat him, even though they tried to kill him, even though they eventually succeeded in beheading him.

All of this is leading us to the fact that when we rightly see who God is and we rightly understand who we are, it will lead us to joy in every area of our life. Somebody rams your car, and now you have to deal with the inconvenience of it.

What's your first default emotion? Anger? Justice? How dare they? What would it look like if the default emotion that you feel when something like that happens to you is, well, God's in control, and praise God, he's given me this so that I can now talk to the person who hit me and share with them the gospel.

What happens if somebody cuts you in line? That's so silly. But my justice bone inside of me flares up so intensely. I'm at California Burrito. This guy clearly saw me. Stands right in front of me, nudges his way past me, and I say to myself, what is wrong with this man?

And I'm six foot three, and I have the ability to end this situation in a second. And I'm reminded, be patient, be kind. I tap the man on the shoulder and I say, I hope you're having a good day. And that was my way of mortifying that desire within me to strangle that man for cutting in front of me.

Our attitude changes when we understand who God is and who we are. I deserve nothing. You deserve nothing. What we deserve is an eternity in the flames of hell for our behavior that has baselessly degraded Christ every day of our life.

What we deserve is eternal conscious torment. What we have gotten is eternal pleasures forever. And because He's been that gracious to us, can we not be gracious to others? And can we not use our situations as moments for worship, as moments for praise?

I'm preaching to myself here. Today there's going to be a moment that I face that I'm going to look at it and I'm going to look at it and say, oh! Instead, I'm praying for myself and I'm praying for us that we would look instead at that and say, my God is good.

My God knows what's good. My God has given me what's good. And therefore I can celebrate whatever that thing is because it's from Him for me for His glory and my good. And when we get that, when we truly get that, that's where worship lives.

And we can get that, brothers and sisters. Not through legalism, not through moralism, not through hedonism, not through Shirley Temple do-goody-ism, not by Pollyanna optimism. We get that because by our very nature, the only way that this changes in us is if something external to us comes in to us and changes us from within.

And that is what happened when Jesus went to the cross. Of anybody on earth who had a right to be angry over an injustice, it was Jesus. Think of anything anybody could do to you and you could say, that's not just, that's not right.

Oh, really? Really?

How many times have we done the exact same thing that we get mad about when someone else does it to us? When they do it, it's grievous sin. When we do it, there's a really good reason. There's nothing wrong that happens to me or you that is undeserved.

In fact, everything bad that's ever happened in my life was probably less than I deserve. In fact, it absolutely was less than I deserve. I have no standing to complain. But the one who never sinned, the one who never erred, the one who never offended the holiness of God for a nanosecond, the one who always obeyed the commandments, the one who always honored God, the one who never sinned, when they blindfolded him and punched him in the face, when they spit in his face, when they pressed a crown of thorns down into his skull, causing blood to flow from his perfect brow, when they stripped him naked and they beat him and beat him and beat him.

Innocent. The only one. He's the only one who ever had cause to say this is not fair. And he's the only one who in that moment said nothing. Before his captors and before his shearers, he was silent. And what was Jesus doing?

Jesus was honoring God the Father on our behalf. He was honoring God the Father on behalf of grumblers, complainers, whiners. He was honoring God the Father on behalf of men and women like you and I, who for all of our lives have said, I don't deserve this.

He did not deserve this. And he died what we deserve to give us what we could never earn. And when he did that, and when he rose from the grave, and when he ascended to the right hand of the Father, and when he sat down on his throne to reign, then he sent forth the spirit of the living God, the same spirit that rose Christ from the dead to come into you, make his home in you, to produce himself in you.

He did it. And now he's given you his spirit so that you and I can learn and grow to do it as well. So as we end this series on true worship, my admonition to you is know who you are. And I will tell you this, your opinion is not low enough of yourself, not yet.

Know who you are. Know who he is. And I will tell you this, your opinion of him is not yet high enough of who he is. Press yourself to understand those two things. Press yourself to understand the depravity of yourself, but don't stop there, because if you stop there, you'll end in despair.

Thomas Chalmers was a great post-Puritan preacher. And he said that the heart that has nothing to hope in will die. And that's what suicide happens. That's when suicide happens, when the heart has nothing left to hope in, it dies.

So what I'm trying to tell you to do is I'm trying to tell you to kill your love of you because you're not worth it. But don't leave it there. Make sure you remember to replace it with the love of Christ and press your mind and press your heart and wear out your knees until you understand how good and how high and how glorious and how mighty and how wonderful this God is until it blows your mind.

Until it makes you cry out, dear God. And then live there. All of Christ for all of life.

That's true worship.

Let's pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this series where we've been able to look at what worship is. Where we've been able to see what the point of it is and where it's leading us. And Lord, we thank you for today being able to see that it's supposed to permeate every area of our life.

Lord, give us wisdom to see who we really are. And give us wisdom to see who you truly are. And Lord, in the mix of those two moments of understanding our inability and your infinite ability, let our hearts be enthralled with pleasure.

And let it affect our work. And let it affect our parenting. And let it affect our marriages. Let it affect our driving, our drinking, our eating, or whatever we do. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.