TLP 380 (COG 4): The Freedom to Celebrate God

But does God demand our worship with rigorous expectation and unattainable standards? Today I share the fourth episode of the Celebration of God to better understand what freedom our homes have in our family worship.

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M. Brewster.

I don't know if you've been able to tell, but I am thoroughly enjoying this unique series we're in. But here's something you probably wouldn't know. My wife and I walk most days, and we've been spending hours talking about the Celebration of God—what it is, what it could become, and how God would have us use it in our own personal home.

In fact, I told her today that I wish I could record our talks because I think I communicate some of the ideas so much better than I do when it actually comes time to record the podcast. All of this to say, when it comes to the Celebration of God, I pray your family can enjoy even a fraction of the excitement we have about this resource.

But before we jump into today's episode, I want to remind you that Truth. Love. Parent. is a listener-supported ministry. We have been able to produce these podcasts, create the Celebration of God, record the James Bible study, develop the Communication House, build the website, and so much more because God has used His people to provide for this ministry.

But I think it's easy to get the wrong impression if we don't have all the details. At the time of this recording, we have 13 individuals who give regularly to this ministry. Though each one of them is a beautiful and a wonderful and adored gift from God, you heard right, there are only 13 of them, and their monthly gifts add up to $665.

Now, we praise God for every cent and do our best to put it to good use, but one of the big steps of faith my family and I made back in January was that I would not work another job in order to support what I do with TLP.

I have dedicated myself full-time to this ministry, and it is our livelihood. Now again, God has provided for my family in miraculous ways through the care and attention of many friends and family, but I would love for Truth Loved Parent to be able to sustain itself and provide the income necessary to care for my family.

And for that, I think we're going to need more than maybe $665 a month. If you have been benefited at all from this ministry and the parenting resources we've created, will you please prayerfully consider how much money you could afford to donate to Truth Loved Parent?

We are well on our way to becoming a 501c3, so all of your gifts would eventually be tax-deductible. But in the meantime, we still need to keep the lights on. If only 300 people gave $10 a month, that would be more than enough to provide for the needs of the ministry and my family and make it possible for Truth Loved Parent to grow into a better tool for Christ.

And many of you can do far more than that. We completely trust God that He will continue to supply all of TLP and my family's needs, and we're excited to see how He does it. Thank you so much for worshiping God by supporting our work.

You can go to truthlovedparent .com and click on the TLP friend links to learn more about how you can give. As before, the transcript and episode notes for today's show will be linked in the description.

The Freedom to Celebrate God and the Limits of Worship

The Celebration of God has its own blog, and we want to direct as much traffic there as possible. All right, let's talk about the glorious freedom we have in our family worship. Religions all over the world have strict requirements for exactly how their rites and sacraments are to be performed.

In some cases, the eternal fate of the one performing the sacrament may be at stake if they do something wrong, but things are different for the Christian. Yes, the Lord has many expectations for our lives and godliness, but there's also a lot of freedom in how we glorify God, both in our feasts as well as in our famines.

God calls us to celebrate Him and cherishes the diversity of His creation, and we get to know God better as we discover how He wants us worshiping Him. Isn't that worth celebrating? The one true God of the universe has existed since eternity past in ultimate perfection.

He spoke the cosmos into existence for His soul, honor, and glory. He moved heaven and earth to redeem mankind, even though we have nothing to offer Him. And He's given us everything we need for life and godliness in His Word.

He deserves our worship. He deserves our adoration. He deserves our praise. I'm your host, A .M. Brewster, and this is The Celebration of God. Today is part four of a 15-part introduction to The Celebration of God.

This introductory material is extremely important because it's setting the biblical foundation as well as unveiling the important facets of this program. The Celebration of God can be seen as a calendar, yes, a simple collection of dates and observances, but it's so much more than that.

The Celebration of God is a philosophy. It's a worldview that acknowledges God for who the Bible reveals Him to be, but it's also a tool to help us know God better and, by necessity, relate to Him differently in every area of our lives.

On June 7, 2020, Paul Tripp reposted a study on this podcast called Resist Spirituality. It dealt with the incorrect idea that we can compartmentalize our faith. Many people talk about how Christians segment their lives into the sacred and the secular, but the biblical reality is that such a thing is impossible.

There is no sacred or secular, in a way, there is no divide between the spiritual and the physical. We are spiritual beings and our faith is being exercised during every moment of every day in our physical lives.

Our quote-unquote secular or quote-unquote physical choices aren't a movement away from the spiritual. They're our personal application of our spiritual choices. For this reason and more, The Celebration of God is a program that helps us to live in the reality of that fact.

It teaches us who God is and what He expects from us, and then it helps us make the spiritual choices that please Him. And that involves celebrating Him in every moment and decision of the day. So, in the same way we can't not be spiritual, there's no way to not celebrate.

The question isn't whether or not to celebrate, the question is whether we're going to celebrate God or celebrate self. Are we going to be disciples of Christ or follow our own path? So, The Celebration of God resource is a very robust and dynamic personal and family discipleship tool.

That's why it's so vital to lay the ground work we're laying, and today's topic is one that has been excessively important for all mankind since the beginning of creation. What kind of freedom do we have when it comes to celebrating God?

Is a church elder or maybe a podcaster supposed to dictate exactly how everyone is to worship God? Or is each individual Christian responsible to create his own methods? Or could it be somewhere in the middle?

This conversation is so important for a podcast like this because this audience has lots of different experiences and beliefs, and everyone's going to want to know how important it is that they participate in everything outlined in the tool.

Some will hate the idea that a faceless podcaster might suggest that a quote-unquote good Christian is going to do certain things in their celebration of God, and others are going to be concerned that if they don't do everything exactly the same way that everyone else does, they're sinning, or even worse, unsaved.

Well, like everything else in life, the Bible has the answers. There's no need to fret or wander around in ignorance. So let's look at the answers together. I think what makes this discussion so difficult for many is that no one person knows everything, and it's easy to find a verse or passage and come to a conclusion about what it means, all the while we're ignorant of another verse or passage that is necessary to inform our response to the first.

This is a powerful reminder of the fact that followers of Christ need to be intimately aware of the entirety of God's revelation. There's no part of scripture we can argue is unimportant to us. As always, my goal is not to cover absolutely every verse that applies to this conversation, but to give examples of the bookends and the practical application in between.

So there are four main considerations for our topic. Number one, God expects that we celebrate Him. Yes, this is review. Two episodes ago we saw that we serve a God of celebrations. He created celebrations and He commanded celebrations.

And last time we were reminded that though Christians may not worship God with all the same actions and traditions, they will all worship God in one way or another. I won't share any more verses to support this point because I covered a number of them before, but I do want to read Galatians 4, 8 through 11 because the flip side of this coin is that God not only expects us to celebrate Him, He expects us not to worship anything else.

Quote, unquote. The days and months and seasons and years did not refer to Christ-honoring observations, but to pagan festivals and godless celebrations. Now, this point is going to be an important one in the future as we consider whether or not Christians should participate in worldly celebrations like the modern commercialized Christmas, Valentine's Day, or the really controversial one, Halloween.

But those are later discussions. For now, we need to remember that God is to be celebrated, and everything else we adore must be celebrated in a way that glorifies Him first and foremost. Of course, we must never worship anything to the degree that we worship God.

Moving on, it's also important to note that, number two, God defines the heart posture in which we are to celebrate Him. This is extremely important, and I'm going to use the Old Testament sacrificial system to illustrate this.

God goes through extreme detail to explain to the nation of Israel exactly how they were supposed to sacrifice. Weights, measures, dates, times, waving, burning—it was all written out in fantastic detail.

But then, in Isaiah 1, 14 through 15, we read, I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you.

Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Jesus gives a similar example in the New Testament when He referred to the Pharisee tithing and praying in a way that everyone could see. Jesus made it clear that the Father was not pleased and that the Pharisee's reward was nothing more than the pitiful adoration of men.

In Luke 16, 15, Jesus said to them, You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts. For that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God. And in Matthew 15, 3, Jesus said to them, Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?

Yes, we can do the right things in the right ways for the wrong reasons, but that's just as much a sin as doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. So what should our heart posture be? Well, it starts with loving God with all of our hearts, souls, mind, and strength, and then we exhibit that love by pouring it onto others.

Those are the two greatest commandments, and they have everything to do with our hearts. We could also say with our minds, the place where we choose to follow God or to go our own way. Augustine basically said to love God and do whatever you want because he knew that any action motivated by biblical love would be pleasing to the Lord.

Now, this is where people get tripped up. Unfortunately, we can't take the time right now to discuss biblical love in its entirety, but fortunately, I did a short series concerning exactly what God means when He talks about love.

I'll include a link to those podcast episodes in the description of this show because we can't really go any further down this road until we truly understand what it is to love God and love others. Otherwise, we could end up just like the Jewish people, dutifully following God's commands on the outside, maybe even believing they were being loving toward God and their fellow man, but all the while God hated their sacrifices and celebrations because they were motivated by selfishness and idolatry.

The short podcast series I just referenced is called The Four Family Loves, and I would strongly encourage you to listen to that series with your whole family so that you can all be on the same page when it comes to God's expectations for love.

Moving on, we've seen that God expects us to celebrate Him and He expects us to do the right things in the right ways for the right reasons. And number three, in some cases, God expects us to do certain things in order to celebrate Him correctly.

I don't have a ton of examples for this because, honestly, God doesn't have the same list of standardized practices for the Church as He did the Jewish people. We don't have time right now to explain why, but for now it's important to at least acknowledge it.

But there are some biblical examples we can cite. For instance, God expects the local body of believers to assemble for the purpose of loving God and loving each other, specifically through the communal practice of the one another's.

Therefore, it would be inappropriate to say that a Christian can glorify God by never assembling with the Church. I have another study I'll link for you called Your Family Needs to Go to Church, and in that series we look at the biblical expectations for our assembling for corporate worship.

Jesus was also very clear that the Lord's Supper should be practiced by all of His followers. He illustrated for us the method, but it's also important to note that He didn't give much more detail. He didn't provide dates or times or frequency.

Of course, in the broader discussions of celebration and worship, we understand that the entire Bible is filled with expectations for our life and godliness. When we're commanded to be honest, being honest is one way that we can worship God.

When the Bible says that we need to admonish and rebuke and come alongside a sinning brother, He's prescribed for us certain steps that absolutely must be taken if we don't want to fail our Lord. But again, there's a bunch of additional information He doesn't prescribe.

In Genesis 4, we see Cain and Abel bringing sacrifices to God. God has obviously commanded the sacrifices, and based off of our Lord's words in verses 6 and 7, God has also made it clear what kind of sacrifice should be brought.

God confronted Cain about his poor choice, but instead of submitting to God's expectations, Cain became angry and murdered his brother. May we not be so foolish when we encounter God's specific commands concerning our worship.

So, God does expect us to celebrate Him, and He expects us to celebrate Him in spirit and in truth. And in many cases, He's extremely clear what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. But what does it mean that Jesus didn't script out for us how to conduct a baptism?

What does it mean that nowhere in the New Testament are we commanded to follow a certain order of service for our church gatherings? In fact, Jesus doesn't even provide a script that people need to repeat in order to be saved.

Can you imagine that? What may be considered the single most important, quote-unquote, religious rite in which anyone could ever participate, a .k .a. calling on God for salvation, is left, in large part, to the whims of the individual doing it for the first time.

What should a person pray in order to be saved? Well, the Bible illustrates, in Romans 10, 9 through 10, that if we confess with our mouths Jesus is Lord and believe in your hearts that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. But no script is provided and no magical words are given. So, based off the fact that God doesn't dictate absolutely everything we should be doing and expect us to do it all the same way, finally, number four, in the vast majority of cases, God gives us liberty to celebrate Him with various words, actions, and traditions as long as they are motivated by the correct heart posture.

I want to make four sub-points in order to illustrate this. A. At times, men of God initiated celebrations that had not been previously initiated by God Himself. This is cool because it gives us the freedom to institute for our families or congregations or just ourselves special opportunities for celebrating God, even if it's not specifically outlined in Scripture.

In Nehemiah 8, 9 through 10, we read,. Then Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites, who taught the people, said to all the people, This day is holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn or weep, for all the peoples were weeping when they heard the words of the law. Then he said to them, Go, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, and send portions to him who has nothing prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord.

Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. Yeah, but Aaron, Ezra, and the Levites were priests. Okay, then consider Esther 9, 20 through 22. Then Mordecai recorded these events, and he sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus, both near and far, obliging them to celebrate the fourteenth day of the month Adar and the fifteenth day of the same month annually, because on those days the Jews rid themselves of their enemies.

And it was a month which was turned for them from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday, that they should make them days of feasting and rejoicing and sending portions of food to one another and gifts to the poor.

Mordecai was not a priest. He was not commanded by God to institute the Feast of Purim, but it was worthy of remembrance as the people of God celebrated how Yahweh had saved them. The celebration of God has certain elements exactly like this.

In fact, the very first festival of the celebratory year is one that was created specifically for the celebration of God, and it's a big one. Letter B. Though we may have the freedom to institute unique forms of worship, nothing we institute is allowed to contradict what God commands.

In Matthew 15 .9, Jesus quotes Isaiah 29 .13 when he proclaims,. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men. We're not allowed to take our selfish desires and our worldly philosophies and baptize them in spiritual language or hang it off in obscure proof text.

This goes back to one of our previous points. Nothing we celebrate should dethrone God from our hearts, in word or in deed. So, if the Bible doesn't address it, how do we know if we should celebrate Christmas or Halloween or any of the other events on the celebration of God calendar?

C. When it comes to things that God didn't specifically command, we have freedom to observe it to God's glory or not observe it to God's glory. At some point, I would really love to unpack Colossians 2 and Romans 14, and I will strongly encourage you to read the whole passage in context in your own personal study of the Bible, but for now, I'm going to read selected verses from each chapter and then comment on them.

Colossians 2, starting in verse 6,. And in him you have been made complete, and he is the head over all rule and authority. Therefore, no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day, things which are a mere shadow of what is to come.

But the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the head from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.

If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees such as do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, which all refer to things destined to perish with use, in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?

These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom and self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.". End quote.

Here, Paul provides a beautiful treatise on the motivation of our worship of God. It needs to be rooted in him, and whether a man is telling us to do something or not to do something, we must stand firm in what we know will glorify God.

And now Romans 14. This is the famous passage about whether or not the first-century believers should eat meat offered to idols. Paul both corrects the thinking of the weaker brother, who had the higher standards in regard to his diet, as well as correcting the unloving hearts of the brothers with the lower standards.

Then, in verse 4, he says,. "...who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls, and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike.

Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day observes it for the Lord, and he who eats does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God, and he who eats not for the Lord, he does not eat and gives thanks to God.

For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself, but if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.". Now let's jump to verse 22.

"...the faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves, but he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith, and whatever is not from faith is sin.".

This episode is called The Freedom to Celebrate God. To be transparent, we must acknowledge that we don't have the freedom to refuse to worship God. Sure, He may allow us to worship ourselves, but there will be consequences.

We also don't have the freedom to neglect the direct commands of God. But where God has not been specific as to how and what should be done, He provides everything we need to decide what is best. And the basic foundation stone of that choice must be that everything has to be done in faith, without regard to what others are doing.

At times, men of God initiated celebrations that had not been previously initiated by God Himself. However, nothing we institute is allowed to contradict what God commands. So when it comes to things that God didn't specifically command, we have freedom to observe it to God's glory or not observe it to God's glory.

Then the obvious question must be, how do we decide whether God would be glorified by my participating in a celebration or not? Finally, letter D. God has given us everything we need in the scriptures to make Christ-honoring decisions of liberty.

I did another study called Decision-Making in the Will of God, which will expand on the next few points I'm about to make. I hate to leave you without enough information to make a biblically informed decision, so I'm happy to share these other resources with you.

But let me sum it up for you. In scripture, we see four principles for decision-making. Number one, the principle of obedience. When God commands, we must obey every time. Two, the principle of freedom.

When God doesn't command, He gives us the freedom to decide. Three, the principle of wisdom. This is the key step. In Truth, Love, Parents, Teach Your Children to Learn series, I unpack the biblical concept of the circle of learning from the book of Proverbs.

Knowledge is possessing a fact, understanding is comprehending the fact along with its implications, and wisdom is the ability to use that fact in practical situations. When God doesn't specifically command us, but He's provided illustrations, examples, principles, and the like, we are to learn as much as we can, understand it to the best of our abilities, and then wisely, by faith, use the information to the honor and glory of God.

Of course, many may say, but Aaron, how do we know we made the best or wisest decisions? And that's where the fourth principle comes in. Number four, the principle of humble trust. Faith is trusting God and His methods.

When we've searched the scripture, gotten as much biblical counsel as we can, counted the cost, and prayed a whole bunch, we can trust that God will do the rest. I wish I had the time to share more verses with you, but we're out of time, and the additional podcast episodes I've provided are filled with even more biblical passages to help you better understand the mind of God on the matter.

My friends, we have a tremendous freedom in Christ, not to sin, but to celebrate Him. I hope that we and our families will thrive in that freedom. I'm honored to be taking this journey with you, your family, your congregation, your spouse, your friends, or whoever else you've brought along for the ride, and I pray the celebration of God will not become another empty ritual void of purpose and Christ-honoring motivation.

I pray that it will provide us even more knowledge and understanding about God that we can wisely use to celebrate Him better. I want you to search the scriptures and pray carefully as to whether or not the Lord would be glorified by you and or your family celebrating God with us in the feasts and days of rest, the sacraments, and the most average moments of the most normal days.

You have freedom to celebrate God, and I hope you'll take full advantage of it. Please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets so others can join in the epic experience of worshiping our great God, and join us next time as we get a better understanding of the command to celebrate God.

If you want to know God better, celebrate Him more, and help the ones you love to do the same, subscribe to this podcast and visit celebrationofgod .com to learn more about this dynamic discipleship resource.

And remember, the celebration of God is a listener-supported.

Ministry. Truth. Love. Parents. is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent. Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.