SERMON: Worship That God Hates

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, if you'll remember, we're in a mini -series on worship. And after preaching expositionally through Proverbs chapters 1 through 9, which is quite easy to preach through expositionally.

Not easy, but I mean it's easier than the rest of Proverbs. After doing that, we've been tackling some of the major themes of the book, and we've decided in Proverbs 10 through 31, which is a collection of wisdom statements, to now do smaller mini -series, somewhat six to eight weeks, on various topics that the book of theology speaks about.

And the book of Proverbs speaks about a lot of topics. So the way that we're going to do that is we're going to look at the topic of worship as our first one.

We're going to be looking at about eight sermons in this series. This is sermon number three, so that we can have a full theology of what worship is, and what

God expects from us when it comes to worship, because worship is the most crucial and critical part of our faith.

Why do we exist? We exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which is worship.

Paul says in 1st Corinthians 10 and 31, whether you eat or whether you drink, do all to the glory of God, which means that everything that we do is worship.

It means worship is central to our identity and our being, and we could not talk about what worship is without giving into what worship isn't.

Man was created to love God and enjoy him forever, and Proverbs presses us to understand what worship rightly is, because worship is what

God cares about. Worship is how sinful people engage with a holy God, and in this way, this series is meant to strip away our assumptions about worship, our false confidences in what we think worship is, and to think biblically about the topic of worship.

Worship is not a performance that we give. It is not a Sunday behavior that we offer.

It is a God -defined response to who he is. So if you wanted to look at a definition for worship, it is a

God -defined response for who he is. Now, two weeks ago, we looked at how worship begins with the fear of the

Lord. It's the foundation of all biblical worship. Last week, we looked at how the fear of the Lord is the only pathway to delight and joy, or not last week, two weeks ago, excuse me, but we looked at how true worship is downstream of the fear of the

Lord, and the fear of the Lord is the only way to joy, which is so antithetical to the way we think, is it not?

So that if you want to worship God correctly, worship him with adoration, affection, joy, with great delight.

If you want worship to be thrilling, whether it be here, whether it be Monday morning, then you have to have an understanding of and an application of the fear of God.

Now this week, Proverbs is going to confront us with the sobering reality that not all worship is pleasing to God, not all worship is accepted by God, and God is the one who decides the difference.

And in that truth alone, much of what we would call modern -day worship is in the crosshairs of God's truth.

We live in a moment where it is assumed that worship is valid simply because it's offered.

If people gather and sing loudly enough and sway their hips in a religious motion, raise our hands and feel the liver shivers and the spirit fingers, well then some kind of worshipful activity has happened.

And just because we've deemed it to be Godward in its orientation does not mean that God is pleased.

Worship is treated like a gift that God is obligated to accept simply because we gave it.

And even more than that, He must be pleased by it because we did our best. Men and women showed up, crawled out of the bed, came to the rock and light concert, and listened to a guy in skinny jeans talk about life hacks and geeks as jukes, and all of a sudden we've worshipped.

Whether that worship band has played ACDC's Highway to Hell as a way to motivate people to come to the kingdom of God, we've worshipped.

See, the underlying assumption in all of this, and there's much more we could talk about, is that God is pleased with whatever we give, the scraps, whatever,

He must be. Simply because we got together and we did something that we thought was cool and epic,

God must accept it. And I'm so glad that we're in the book of Proverbs because it actually addresses this topic directly and it tells us, with sobering clarity, the kind of worship that God loves and the kind of worship that He hates.

You see, in the book of Proverbs, worship is not treated as a day of the week or a creative space or an experience where man gets to express himself to God.

However, he psychologically feels fit. Worship is not defined by man.

Worship is prescribed by a holy God. Worship is not what we think is best, it's what

God has told us is best in His Word. And worship is God defining how we approach

Him. Worship is a covenant act governed by God's Word and His law and His rules, not human ingenuity.

Which means that worship is one of the most glorious and dangerous activities that we could ever endeavor upon.

Worship either aligns a man or a woman with the fear of the Lord or it places him in opposition to Him, which is a dangerous place to be.

And as we understand this, it leads us to the very deeply and unsettling conclusion, if not all worship is pleasing to God, then some worship is not.

And where do I stand? Worship that God has not prescribed doesn't merely miss the mark, it offends

His holiness and His wrath breaks out against it. If you don't believe me, look at the examples of Cain, Nadab, Abihu, Uzzah, Ananias, and Sapphira, who were either severely cursed or terminated for worship violations.

Every one of these are permanent reminders that God does not just respond to false worship with a dissatisfied glum expression, but He breaks out against it with holy fury.

The most destructive worship, in fact, is not the open hostility of the atheists nor the idolatry of the pagans.

The worship that is most dangerous, most offensive to God, is that kind of worship that feels sincere, looks religious, follows the right cultural norms, and yet is morally repugnant to God.

And this morning, Proverbs forces us to confront the reality head -on and to ask ourselves the most fundamental question that we cannot avoid.

How can a sinful man, a sinful woman, ever worship God in a way that He actually accepts?

Because if God is holy and we are not, how can we worship this God in a way that He loves our worship, accepts our worship, is thankful and grateful for our worship, and how much fear and trembling should there be in the midst of that question?

So today, that question is going to govern everything. How can a sinful man or woman worship this holy

God? How is it possible? And how is it possible that God would accept our worship this morning? Why is it that God does not let a loose meteorite on us as we gather, or have the earth open up and swallow us whole like Korah in their rebellion?

How is it that us as sinful creatures can gather in the name of God and do so in a way that pleases

Him? That is what we are going to discuss today. And we're going to be looking at four different passages in the book.

Proverbs 15 .8, Proverbs 21 .3, Proverbs 21 .27, sorry 5,

Proverbs 16 .2 -6, and Proverbs 15 .29. I'm going to read those passages to you so that we can have a theology of worship that God hates.

And the goal is if we know what God hates, hopefully we can run towards Him and worship that He loves.

So let us read. Proverbs 15 .8, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the

Lord, but the prayer of the upright is His delight. Proverbs 21 .3, to do righteousness and justice is desired by the

Lord more than sacrifice. Proverbs 21 .27, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination.

How much more when He brings it with an evil intent? Proverbs 16 .2 -6, all the ways of man are clean in his own sight, but the

Lord weighs the motives. Commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be established. The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil.

Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord. Assuredly, He will not be unpunished.

And by loving kindness and truth, iniquity is atoned for, and by the fear of the Lord one keeps away from evil.

And then finally Proverbs 15 .29, the Lord is far from the wicked, but He hears the prayers of the righteous.

Let us pray. Lord, today we come to you knowing that you are not a

God who is impressed by our noise, by our effort, or by our supposed sincerity alone.

You see past what we offer with our lips, you see past the glimmer and the glitz and the glam, and you hear what is down in the depths of our soul.

You see it as it truly is. And Lord, how unsettling is that for us? Lord, we confess that we are often far more confident in our worship than we should be, and that we assume that you are pleased simply because we showed up, that we brought the picture, you put it on the refrigerator, and you smiled at it.

That's the way we treat worship, Lord. Would you expose our false confidence this morning? And would you pull down all of the different idols and refuges that we have built in order to hide in?

And Lord, would you cause us to see worship as you intended it? A worship that is holy, glorifying, pleasing, and delightful in your sight.

And Lord, would you let us offer you that? And it's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen. The first thing I want to talk about this morning is that false worship follows fear, just like true worship follows fear.

But the question is, what are you fearing in? Before Proverbs tells us what God rejects, it also tells us what

God requires. By the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil, Proverbs 16, 6.

And again, the Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous, Proverbs 15, 29. These two verses establish a fixed order that cannot be reversed.

Worship does not produce the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord produces worship. I'm going to say that again.

The worship does not produce the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord produces worship. How many times have we said

I need to worship, or we've treated worship like that if I could just worship better, worship harder, worship more ardently, worship more pure, then

I would fear the Lord more, then it would be this exchange that happens. But no, it's the fear of the Lord that produces right worship, not right worship producing the fear of the

Lord. That means that the worship that God accepts does not begin with music, emotions, environment, or intensity of affections.

It begins with the fear of God, and not with terror as we said last week, but with reverence for God, awe and wonder, adoration that produces a kind of overwhelming gratitude that bends our will and breaks our self -rule and turns us away from sin that we nurse unto the

God that we want to praise. Where the fear of God is absent is where devotion is missing.

It's where worship shrivels. It's where it bounces off of the ceiling and intersects with your forehead.

It's where worship rots on the altar. It becomes the primary evidence against you in your condemnation.

It becomes Exhibit A in the case against you. And Proverbs is clear here.

God does not hear our prayer simply because we pray them. It says he hears the prayer of the righteous.

Proverbs 15 29. He does not simply draw near because we mumble some heartfelt words like you would read on a

Hallmark card. He draws near unto the righteous. And you cannot be righteous without the fear of God, and your prayers will not be heard apart from righteous fear.

In this way, fear ought to produce repentance, and repentance produces obedience, and obedience produces righteousness, and righteousness is the reward to the man with God's presence.

It is nearness. If you remove repentance, you remove righteousness. And if you remove righteousness, then worship is just a theater for the sacred play act.

If you remove righteous obedience, prayer becomes a noisy gong, an acclaiming symbol.

And this is why worship is never primarily about what we bring to God.

It is about who we are before the face of God. And in that way, you cannot sing your way to righteousness.

You cannot pray your way past obedience. You cannot drown your life in disobedience and then think that with a few psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that you're going to impress this thrice holy

God. It would be like spraying two -dollar perfume on a three -day -old corpse.

It doesn't work. Fearless worship is always dishonest worship.

And it's what happens when men and women offer God attendance instead of repentance.

Vocal folds instead of submission. Religious language instead of a surrendered will. It is the worship of people who sing on Sunday and who visit the same sinful sewage tank again on Monday.

People who lift their hands in holy prayer and yet refuse to reconcile with the man or woman that they've wronged.

People who say, Lord, I surrender all, while negotiating with themselves the sins that they still find off -limits to God.

It's the worship of husbands who will not lead, and wives who will not submit, and parents who will not discipline, and Christians who will not forgive, and yet expect

God to be pleased with the refuse that we offer Him. It's worship that asks

God for peace, peace, peace, while coddling sin. Worship that wants the

Lord's blessings without repentance. Nearness to God without righteousness. Assurance in our salvation without the assurance of a changed life.

Worship that wants God close enough to help us, but distant enough not to interfere with us.

It's the kind of worship that functions like spiritual anesthesia. It dulls the conscience while you're being cut open by your sin.

The conclusion that Proverbs has given us is both devastating and unavoidable. Style and frequency of worship does not shape the worshiper.

It's the fear of God that shapes us. So that when you worship, it will be pleasing to God.

And because of this, we know that worship, not all worship is pleasing to Him.

Because not everybody who calls on the name of the Lord is actually of Him. Because there will be many on that day who say,

Lord, Lord, didn't we do many miracles in Your name? Didn't we do this and this and that? And He would say, depart from Me.

I never knew you. That's the first thing, is that fear is the predecessor to worship.

The second thing I want to talk about is not all worship is true worship. There is worship that God rejects.

There is worship that drops from our lips like a guillotine on our head.

Proverbs 15, 8 says, The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord. Did you see that? The same thing that God says about homosexuality and murdering children is true of the one who worships falsely.

The kind of person who comes to God, who brings sacrifices, who participates in the worship, who goes through all of the motions, who eats at the

Lord's table. And because God knows the secret recesses of our heart and knows who are wicked and who are not,

He detests their worship. He calls it an abomination, not a misunderstanding, not an error in the form or process.

Oh, you used an acoustic guitar instead of a piano. Zap. God looks at the heart when it comes to worship, and God sees something inside of the wicked that is morally repulsive to Him.

And here's the question, because it seems very easy to think that Christians offer worship to God and the rest of people are in rebellion to God, but the way that Proverbs describes this is that everybody offers worship to God.

There's not a single person on earth that's offering something other than worship to God. The question is, will it be accepted or will it not?

Because worship is inherently something that we do. Worship is an esteem and an adoration for the things that we love, so we will either be loving rightly the

Lord God, fearing Him correctly, or be bowing down to everything else. There's no such thing, actually, as an atheist.

The question is, what God do they serve? Proverbs 15 .8

does not just say that the wicked fail to worship. It says that they do indeed worship, and God despises it.

They bring sacrifices, and He hates it. They pray, and He abhors it.

They perform religious acts in service of their God, and He detests it.

God recoils from it, and because God is not ultimately interested in people checking off their to -do list,

He is clear that it's an abomination, and God Himself is the one who judges the legitimacy of the worship, not the behaviors that we do.

That's why you can have folks who sing the same psalms and hymns and spiritual songs sitting side by side, and yet they will have an entirely different destination, eternally speaking.

That's why John could say that they went out from us because they were not of us. They worshiped, they praised, they sang the

Christ hymn, they listened to the words, they heard the sermons, and yet they were not of faith.

Now, I will say this, because in our circles, we can become kind of hoity -toity, if you know that word, a little on the pretentious side about our liturgy.

We do covenant renewal worship, which I think is amazing. I think it's a right way of worshiping our

Father. But God is also not up in heaven saying that, well, you've passed the bar because you have a good liturgy.

You've passed the bar because you did a law homily, and the other church didn't. You say the

Lord's Prayer every week, I told you to do that, good job, you're approved. Now, obviously those things are amazing, we think those things are good, we think those things are right, we think those things should do that, but the behaviors and the forms don't dictate your posture to God.

The posture towards God, the fear of the Lord, should dictate how we worship Him. God wants our minds and our hearts before He wants our sacrifices and our efforts.

And in this way, righteousness matters more than ritual. That's why Proverbs 21 .3 says, to do righteousness and justice is desired by the

Lord far more than sacrifice. This was written by the man who brought like 20 ,000 bowls and sacrificed them all on the same day when the

Lord God rained down fire from heaven. This is the man who was used by God to build the temple that had daily sacrifices every day of the week, and he says through the

Spirit of God that God desires righteousness and justice more than sacrifice.

And in the Old Covenant, sacrifice was necessary. You couldn't even be near the presence of God without it.

So clearly God is not dismissing the form of worship, but what

He is saying is that you can slaughter 10 ,000 calves and pour out 1 ,000 gallons of their blood, and if you do not love me with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, your worship is disgusting to me.

That is why the old -timey pastor, Leonard Ravenhill, who's not a

Calvinist, by the way, in case you were wondering. In case you weren't, there you go. But he has a great quote.

He said, I would rather have 10 men that love God than 10 ,000 men who play church. I'd rather have 10 men who love

God than 10 ,000 men who want to play church. In all of this, we see a great lie that often is rarely named in the modern evangelical church, but it plagues so many, and that's religious ritual can compensate for rebellion.

We instinctively believe, all of us do, if we do enough, if we sing enough, if we read enough, if we pray enough, if we fast enough, if we confess enough, then the

Lord will be pleased with us, and we know that we believe that because when bad things happen to us, we say, I don't deserve this.

My prayer earned me something. My faithfulness at 5 o 'clock in the morning reading the

Bible, that should get me more than my pagan neighbor. Sure, we think that way because we think that our religious forms justify our rebellion, and we don't see the fact that God is entirely and utterly and overwhelmingly gracious that he would save anyone and that our actions don't earn us anything.

Without a heart that loves and adores God, worship is meaningless, and more than meaningless, it's an abomination.

And it says that evil intent makes worship worse so that if there are gradations of abominations, an evil intent makes it worse.

Look at what it says in Proverbs 21, 27. The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination. How much more when he brings it with an evil intent?

It's an abomination to offer God worship when you are evil, and how much more so that when your heart is corrupt.

So Solomon's telling us if our heart's not in our worship, then our worship is displeasing to him.

And my goodness, how that word falls short. This means, and I want us to look at this very carefully here, this means when we wake up and begrudgingly study our

Bible so that we don't fall behind in our reading plan and we do not read our word with adoration and affection for God, we are coming to the

Lord with a wicked intent. This means that when we fight with our spouse on the way to church and put on a everything's okay face, that we are coming with an evil intent.

That means when we harbor bitterness against that person who said that thing and we dare come to the

Lord's table with polluted hands, we offer worship with a wicked intent.

It even means, this hits everyone, it even means when we daydream while we worship, when we get distracted in our worship, when we lose focus in our worship, when we play with our phone in worship, that we are sinning against God because we are saying to him, you are not beautiful enough to captivate my attention.

How wicked is that to say that to the face of Almighty God? Worshiping God without all of your heart, without all of your soul, without all of your mind, without all of your strength, is the kind of worship that will get you vomited out of the mouth of Christ, as he said to the

Laodiceans in Revelation 3 .16. It's the other 3 .16. For God so loved the world, but he'll vomit you out of his mouth.

What we're saying is that you can pray and God be far from you. You can sing and God be disgusted with you.

You can worship and God reject you because religious activities do not sugarcoat a rotten heart and it does not soften

God towards you and God does not operate under the millennial assumption that just because you showed up you get a participation trophy.

And that's the scariest truth of all, that all of us do this. None of us have worshipped

God with pure motives in this room. And if you think you have, then pray that the Lord does not strike you down for such an arrogant thought like Herod Agrippa.

None of us love him with all of our heart. No one can say that. None of us are righteous, we read earlier.

Not even one! Which means none of us obey him. None of us deserve to be near him.

Which means all of our worship offered in its own merits is nothing other than vomitous, odious, noxious fumes in the nostrils of God Almighty.

That's the third thing

I want to talk about. None of us can produce true worship. Our worship is corrupt and yet we still believe ourselves clean.

We stand before God convinced that our scales are accurate when

Jeremiah says that our heart is a sick organ, so sick in fact that who could even know it or trust it.

So we weigh ourselves and we say, I'm pretty good. And you have no idea even what the concept of good means.

And yet while a man weighs himself and a woman weighs herself, God Almighty is measuring him or her with the most accurate scales that have ever been.

And this is because God knows what's inside man. Past our pretensions and our self -justifications and our subtle narcissisms and our self -denigration that we talked about earlier, our delusions of grandeur and our false humility,

He knows who we are because He does not just inspect the veneer of the surface.

He sees past the one millimeter covering of mahogany over a rotten heart.

He doesn't look on the part that we present to people. He doesn't watch for us to check the right boxes.

He lowers the plumb line into the very depths of our soul and measures what no man can see.

And when He does, He finds what we call worship, a steaming pile of maggot -infested dung, and He is offended by it and despises it.

And the reason that we're offended by this is because the very faculty that we use to worship

God, our hearts, are themselves entirely corrupt. That's why

Jeremiah said, again, it's more deceitful than all else. It's desperately sick. Who can understand it? Or, as Samuel says, man looks at outward appearance, but the

Lord God looks upon the heart. That's why Solomon says at the end of his life in Ecclesiastes 9 .3,

the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts.

Our hearts in our very nature have insanity coursing through them. So how can we even make rational decisions about such things so high and holy as worship?

The heart that offers worship is the same heart that evaluates it, and if the evaluation is morally crooked, entirely twisted, then how can we know the truth about how our worship actually is?

Like a warped scale that always reads incorrectly, we declare ourselves clean while standing guilty before a

God whose scales never need balanced. Remember, the real problem in our worship is not the quality of our devotion, but the condition of the one who is offering it.

Sin is not just a stain on the practice of our worship, it is in the bloodstream of our hearts that poisons everything we touch.

And this is the unavoidable conclusion that Proverbs has been driving us forward, that sinful men cannot produce true worship of God.

Sinful men cannot because they're infected at their very core so that no one on their own can offer anything but refuse to God.

And because of this, God has promised to utterly destroy that worship.

Look at what it says in Proverbs 16, 14. This is a scary passage. And this is the fourth thing that I want to talk about.

Now that we've seen that no one offers right worship to God, I want us to see how God will destroy false worship.

Proverbs 16, 4, The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil or for the day of judgment.

God is saying that He made the wicked, He constructed the wicked, and His good plan for their life was to destroy them for the sake of His righteousness, for the sake of His holiness, for the sake of His justice.

God is glorified in the destruction of the wicked. It's saying that the downfall of the wicked is not a warning, it's a scheduled, calendared event that is surely coming.

God has made everything for its purpose, and if all of us have fallen short of the righteousness of God, then we are wicked, so He's made everyone for a purpose, even false worshipers, even worship that looks sincere.

It was made for His judgment to magnify His holiness and glory. We know that God sees everything.

He's omniscient. He's omnipresent. He's seen the state of our hearts and He has set a date that is fixed in order to deal with it.

And in that sense, the eternal gas chamber is waiting. On that day, every act of worship that refused the righteousness of God, ignored the fear of God, did not produce obedience to God will be the noose that will slip over the soul of the one who lifted their hands in praise on Sunday and yet whose hearts were still frozen cold on Monday.

For that man or for that woman, the trap has been set and the door will soon open and the body will lurch downward into hell, swinging by a rope that will not burn, exposed, hollow, and a public warning that God Himself will not be mocked.

Like a firing squad, many will stand bound before the judge of all and God's fury will take aim at them on the day of judgment and the first shot will shatter all heartless theology and the second will empty all of their religious performances and the third, the heart that they never gave

Him. And there's so many different images that we could cover. For brevity and for grace,

I've shortened it. God promises to thrust every false worshiper in the forge of His fury until every motive, every intention, every performance is exposed and when

He is finished, there will be no music left. There will be no pretending left. There will be no religious,

Christian -easy language left. Church attendance will liquefy like wax.

Baptism will drown you. Communion will choke you. Your theology will be the thing that strangles you and your

Christian resume will be a witness against you. And the scariest part is that the trap has already been sprung and like a mouse, we are soon to walk into it in our flesh, in our nature, which is where the true horror lies because false worship is not just casual worship.

It's an abomination to God that marches us straight into the gallows of His fury. False worship, while it may not be a dramatic insurrection, it is thoughtless, mindless rebellion.

It is approaching the Holy One of Israel thinking that He were predictable, safe, and easily satisfied by whatever we give

Him. And Proverbs 16, 4 tells us that God's justice is just and that He's already decided their ends and that the justice that God is bringing is the inevitable conclusion of every act of worship offered without care or heart or thought.

And this is not just a kind of macabre cruelty. God has made everything for its purpose, even the false worshiper.

You have a purpose to magnify the holiness of God in your downfall. Apart from Jesus Christ, you exist to be publicly dismantled.

Every creature in heaven and earth, apart from Christ, will see the terrifying holiness of the

God that they dared to mock and they will learn to fear Him so that if you are a false worshiper, if you are apart from Christ, you are kindling for the fire of God's eternal glory.

You are an exhibit in the museum of His justice. As Jonathan Edwards once said, you are 10 ,000 times more abominable in the eyes of God than the most hateful, venomous serpent is in yours.

Which brings us back to the question, How can a sinful people ever worship a holy

God in a way that He accepts? How can we avoid the trap that has been sprung, the day of evil that has been set for all who are wicked?

And that means us. Because the gallows have been built like they were for Haman.

The furnace has been heated. The sentence has been written. And we have no defense.

The only thing we can offer to God at best is our polluted worship. We are wicked. We are spoiled.

We are tainted. How can we worship God in the state of our sin?

How is it that this holy God could judge the actions of our life and the quality of our worship and the weightiness of our prayers or the lack thereof and somehow be pleased with us and not fling us into the gallows of hell?

And it is exactly right here that the gospel explodes into view.

And this is where the sunrise always explodes against the darkest night.

The gospel is not that God lowered His standards for you, dear one. The gospel is that God lowered

His Son and raised Him up on a cross to meet the standard that you spit in the face of.

Jesus did not come merely to show us how to worship. He came to be our worship.

He came to offer to God the pure and untainted worship that you and I could never offer.

Where we feared God with a divided heart, Jesus feared Him perfectly. Where we obeyed partially, occasionally, reluctantly at best,

Jesus obeyed completely, saying, I always do the things that are pleasing to God, John 8 and 29.

Where we prayed with wandering minds and competing affections and yawns and distractions,

Jesus prayed without distractions, often all night long, spending entire nights in perfect communion with God.

Where we worship with hypocrisy all day long, Jesus worshiped without a single false note ever exiting

His lips. Every breath of His life was a perfect symphony of devotion to God. Every morning

He woke up in the fear of God and went to sleep on the pillow of God's glory and righteousness.

Every word He spoke honored the Father. Every action He took was righteous. Every prayer He prayed was heard.

Every sacrifice He offered was accepted with a delight. For 33 glorious years, I think, if it was 34 or 35, forgive me,

He lived a life of perfect worship that we were created to live but catastrophically failed to give.

He was the righteous one, the obedient one, and the beloved one who worshiped for us.

And then on the cross, the one who worshiped perfectly was treated as you and I deserve.

When you look at the cross, you have to first look at the fact that it was there as a symbol of what your worship deserves, of what your mindless prayers, your distracted praise, and your hate -filled affections for everything that God earned.

The cross was what we deserved. The name above it, Jesus Christ, that should have been you, and that should have been me.

Worship is such a big deal that if you only ever sinned in the category of worship, you should be damned eternally.

And even more than that, to suffer eternal conscious torment. But here is the good news.

Out of God's sheer grace, out of nothing that you deserved, but a life of plagued worship that you offered to him, out of kindness and love, he did to his son what was deserved to be done to you, and he credited to you what was deserved to be credited to his son, so that on the cross, you were treated like...

Yeah, apart from the cross, you were treated like Jesus should have been treated. You stand before God the

Father like Jesus should stand before him. You come to this table, and you eat with lips that have been purified by the lips that cried out,

I thirst. You drink the cup from the one whose side was pierced and blood and water overflowed.

You get what he deserved, and he got what you deserved. So the question, how do we as sinful people worship this

God? It is only because Christ worshiped for us, and we trust in his worship and not our own.

And by people who've now been filled with the Spirit of God, the same Spirit that raised Christ Jesus from the dead, we can in safety grow in our worship.

But apart from Christ, everything I said to you, you being more abominable 10 ,000 times so than a venomous snake in our eyes, that would be yours.

The only way to be pleasing to God is to hide in Christ, which should produce nothing but gratitude.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, nothing to your cross

I bring except my own sin and depravity, and it's true for all of us.

Again, as Edward said, we bring nothing to our salvation but the sin that made it necessary. We bring a million, billion, trillion acts of polluted worship, from worshiping false gods to even daydreaming about what sporting event we're going to go to after church.

Instead of standing in awe of your beauty, every one of us deserves to be in the crosshairs of your fury.

And yet, Jesus, you took the knife, you took the arrow, you took the wrath that was ours to take.

And Lord, as we celebrate and as we sing and as we praise you, Lord, let us always remember whose shadow that we hide in.

And Holy Spirit, now because the penalty has been paid and you are not a

God of double jeopardy, may we grow, may we become ardent, passionate worshipers, knowing that our penalty has already been paid, but out of love and affection for the one who paid it to grow.