The Dangers of Will Worship - Brandon Scalf

Heritage Church Tulsa

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I believe it was two years ago when we first started talking about planting

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Heritage Church and began meeting for the first time that I was asked to comment on Carl Lentz becoming a pastor over at Transformation Church.

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He was a pastor who had been thrown out of his church, a famous church, a church by the

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Hillsong, and quite honestly I didn't know much about the guy and I didn't have a lot to say but they asked also what

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I thought about Transformation Church and Mike Todd and I also didn't know much about that either but what

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I did know is that on Easter Sunday of that year the pastor of that church decided to substitute the preaching of God's Word for a two -hour play that featured dozens of provocative dances, flashing lights, pyrotechnics, demonic characters, dry ice, and renditions that they labeled as Christian of songs written by Kesha, Justin Timberlake, and Beyonce to name a few.

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And not to mention those songs were not edited enough to remove the sexually suggestive language that existed in them.

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And in an attempt to justify why in the world this pastor decided to do such a thing, he said in an interview,

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I told my team, and I quote, we're going to the edge on this.

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And they said, Pastor, how far on the edge are we going to go? And I said, we're going to do everything short of sin.

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In other words, he wanted to create something for the people who, according to his own words in the same article, don't know

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God and are far from him. The question that I want to pose to you this evening in an attempt to understand how we are to approach

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God in worship is this. Is he right? Are we, as Christian people, given the license to worship

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God according to our own desires, ideas, or a proclivity toward artistic and, everybody's favorite word nowadays, authentic expressions of worship?

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And are we to design our worship services or gatherings according to those who are far from God or for the people of God?

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In short, we could ask the question, should our worship please God or please man?

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When we gather as God's people for worship, are we seeking to do what God wants us to do, or are we worship having devised and prescribed our own methods?

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Well, many churches, many ministries, many authors who would call themselves church plant and church leading experts agree that we should do anything short of sin to win people who are not yet Christian.

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But Christians, particularly of the past, would argue that that is not what the

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Bible teaches. That is what is called will worship.

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That is that we are worshiping not God when we come to the worship service, but that we are worshiping ourselves, what we desire, what we want, or what we will.

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Not God's will, but our will be done. Jeremiah Burroughs, keeping this in mind, tells us in one of his old tracts, we must be willing worshipers.

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That is, we must be ready to come to worship, but we will not, if we love

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God, be will worshipers. We will not be will worshipers.

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And so as we look at Leviticus chapter 10, specifically verse 3, I want you to take this doctrine down.

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I don't usually do this, but I think in this moment it's important to understand what

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I'm getting at more plainly than maybe before. The doctrine that this passage teaches is true worshipers willfully worship

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God according to his word, character, and nature, and they reject all forms of profane will worship so that God may be treated as holy and be glorified before all people.

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And if you're taking notes, I'll go ahead and repeat that one more time. True worshipers willfully worship

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God according to his word, character, and nature, and they reject all forms of profane will worship so that God may be treated as holy and be glorified before all people.

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And so if you would, please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible, and all -sufficient word. We will begin in verse 1, and we will continue reading.

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This is the word of God. Then Nadab and Bihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans and put fire in them.

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Then they placed incense on it and offered strange fire before Yahweh, which she had not commanded them.

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And fire came out from the presence of Yahweh and consumed them, and they died before Yahweh.

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Then Moses said to Aaron, It is what Yahweh spoke, saying, By those who come near me

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I will be treated as holy, and before all the people I will be glorified. So Aaron kept silent.

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Then Moses called to Mishael, and Elzaphan, and the sons of Aaron's uncle

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Uziel, and said to them, Come near, carry your relatives away from the front of the sanctuary to the outside of the camp.

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So they came near and carried them still in their tunics to the outside of the camp. And Moses had said, as Moses had said.

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Then Moses said to Aaron and to his sons Eleazar and Ithamar, Do not uncover your heads, nor tear your clothes, so that you will not die, and that he will not become wrathful against all the congregation.

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For your relatives, the whole house of Israel, shall weep over the burning which Yahweh has brought about. You should not even go out from the doorway of the tent of meeting, lest you die, for the anointing oil of Yahweh is upon you.

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So they did according to the word of Moses. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our

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God endures forever. Amen. Amen. Go ahead and have a seat. Have a seat.

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As we look at verse 3 in particular, we become quite aware that we are in the middle of a story.

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And that story is one that is honestly quite ghastly.

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It is one that if we are paying attention should shock us to our very core.

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Namely, that two of God's priests are struck dead on their first day of a ministry.

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And the reason for that, of course, is if we look at our text here, is that they offered up what this translation is calling strange fire.

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And strange fire, as we will get into, is more than just a simple thing.

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It is more than just a type of fire. It is symbolic of a whole thing altogether.

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Not that it's not a specific thing. But the problem here is that they decided that they could improve upon God's way of doing worship.

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You see in chapter 8 of Leviticus, they are ordained to ministry in the temple.

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This system and structure was set up to show forth God's glory, his holiness, and his beauty to the watching world.

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And it is also, of course, the system that points to as a type and shadow of Jesus Christ to come.

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And as a matter of fact, they, just before this, in chapter 9, are giving a similar sacrifice.

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In verse 24, it says, Then fire came out from before Yahweh and consumed the burnt offering and the portions of fat on the altar.

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And all the people saw it and shouted and fell on their faces. That is, that they fell in worship.

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What's ironic about this text is the God who just consumed the sacrifices and pleasure is now going to cause these people who offered the sacrifice to be the sacrifice on his very altar.

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These men, Nadab and Abihu, Aaron's sons and Moses's nephews, were struck dead because they believed they could use their own ideas, their own ingenuity, and their own gifting and lay it before the

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Lord. Now some people, scholars who have too much time on their hands, believe that they quite possibly could have been drunk because of the prohibition of drinking wine before the ceremony and so on and so forth.

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I think that was just a prohibition. I think it was a law being laid out. I don't think it was suggesting that they went up there drunk, especially not on day one.

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Why? Because day one matters. Day one matters. And so we see this reality.

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We see this throughout the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, there are many men who rise to power and they take matters into their own hands.

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They do things that they should not do. You've got stories of kings stepping in the way of priests.

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Uzzah, for example, in 2 Samuel 6 and 7, you've got countless other stories that show forth this very reality.

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It is not foreign to the people of God. So the question becomes, what is strange fire?

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I think it's important to address that before we move forward. The word strange fire in the Hebrew is actually unauthorized fire or fire that was not authorized.

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And so you could translate this, not as strange fire, but unauthorized fire. So they offered fire that God did not sanction.

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What does that mean? Well, depending on which scholars you read, they will throw up many different ideas.

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Well, there was fire that had a certain type of dye in it, or it was a fire that that they used different sorts of salts that caused it to smell differently or or smoke differently or whatever the case may be.

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The reality is we do not know. There's nothing else in the Bible that tells us what strange fire is.

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So what is this teaching us? Is it teaching us that we, when we come to church as it were, are not to offer up strange fire?

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Well, no, it's not teaching us that, because we don't know what the strange fire is. But there is something important here to note that I think is going to govern the rest of our time together as we study this passage.

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Namely, that there is no prohibition to offering strange fire elsewhere in the Bible. Nothing saying what it is, how it can be offered, nor are there any parameters set on how to use it.

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You know, in other words, it could be this tall or it can be this wide or so on and so forth. What this teaches us is not, it's not just enough to worship or offer worship to God that isn't forbidden in His Word, but that we aren't to offer

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Him anything that is not prescribed in His Word. Which is why the first thing that I want you to see as we look at this text is true worship must be regulated by God's Word.

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True worship must be regulated by God's Word. Look with me here at verse 3. It says, Then Moses said to Aaron, it is what

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Yahweh spoke, saying. Now, I want to pause here, and I want us to kind of inject ourselves into the story.

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And I don't mean I want us to read ourselves into the story. I want us to think about what's happening here. Because if we don't think about what's happening here, we actually don't understand this response that Moses is giving to Aaron.

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Just a few chapters earlier, Aaron is proud of his boys.

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He's raised his boys to be God -fearing and holy, and they have been ordained to ministry.

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And they're going to function as priests over the nation of Israel. They're going to offer sacrifices not only for themselves, but for God's people.

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This is a huge deal. This is maybe the biggest deal. And so they are ordained, and he would have been super excited.

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He would have been elated. He would have been so proud of his boys who are now giving themselves to the work of God.

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Not only that, but Moses, his brother, would see his nephews doing the same, and they would have been ecstatic.

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Can you believe this? They're probably sitting around. These, you know, our boys are going to be priests. This is great.

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They're going to love the Lord, going to serve the Lord, they're going to die serving the

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Lord. Little did they know that he would literally die serving the Lord the first time they went to ministry.

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So now, put yourself in that position. Aaron is looking at them, and he's like, this is day one for my boys.

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And the next thing you know, God strikes them dead and consumes them with fire.

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And what would you expect Moses to say? You would expect Moses, maybe as his brother, to pull him aside and say,

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I am so sorry, brother. I cannot believe this has happened to you. Is there anything

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I can do for you? I love you. This shouldn't have happened.

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We'll set up a meal tray. Like, you know what I mean? Like, he's trying to wrap his arms around his brother, but he doesn't do that.

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He looks at Aaron, and he says, in the first words out of his mouth, after these men have hit the ground dead, it is what

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Yahweh spoke, saying. Now, if you're paying attention, this is going to bump up against our cultural sensibilities and our desire to be and act as God.

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Because we, if we were in his position, would want a lot of consolation. We would want to be told, this shouldn't have happened.

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I mean, we would think, how dare God kill two men who are seemingly seeker to honor him, who have seemingly sought to build their lives around ministering to God's people.

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But essentially, the message that Aaron receives is, God is holy, and he requires his people to be holy.

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And he requires his people to tread boldly, but very carefully. As Moses knew well, because he knew, when he first talked to God in the burning bush in Exodus, that he was to remove his sandals from the very place where God was burning that bush.

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Why? Because it was holy ground. It's a devastating, devastating time for Aaron.

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It's a devastating time for Moses. But it was also a devastating time for Israel. God had removed, as it were, their very priests.

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And so Moses speaks to a distressed Aaron, and he says, it is what

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Yahweh spoke, saying. You see, in times of stress or distress, in times of severe pain, we could even say, especially in this case, in the death of a loved one, the only thing that matters is what

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God has said. And what God has said in his word. And that ought to govern our affections, govern our will, and govern our hands and our feet.

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And it ought to navigate us, as it were, the North Star. He answered by saying, this is what

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God has already said would happen. That's essentially what he's saying. Why? Because God's word is

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God's promise. You cannot separate God's word from God's promise. What God says he will do, he will bring to pass, no matter what.

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And so he says. And we know that because he goes on and said, by those who come near me,

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I will treat them as holy, and before all people I will be glorified. This seems to be some sort of mantra.

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As a matter of fact, in most Bibles, they put quotations around it saying, hey, God said this at some point.

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The problem with that is when you look throughout your Old Testament, or even in the New Testament, God says this how many times?

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Zero. It's not written down anywhere, but here. Now, there are some scholars who try to link this vaguely to different types of verses that seemingly say different things.

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But quite honestly, I feel like it's a stretch. But here is what's true. He must have said it at some point to Moses while he was on the mountain communing with him.

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You see, Moses had access to God that others didn't. And he must have made known this mantra to the rest of Israel, especially to the priests,

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Aaron specifically. Aaron must have known it. Because he says, it is what

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Yahweh spoke saying. Like, you already knew this. By those who come near me, I will be treated as holy, and before all people

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I will be glorified. God's Word is paramount. Deuteronomy 4 .2 says, you shall not add to the word which

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I am commanding you, nor take away from it that you may keep the commandments of Yahweh your God which I am commanding you.

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God's Word is not to be added to. It is not to be taken away from.

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It is what it is, and it is true. What's interesting is in Matthew 15, 8 and 9,

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Jesus says of the Pharisees, the people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

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But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. And so in the

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Bible we have this kind of dichotomy, if you will. The teachings of God which are, that's

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Psalm 19 says, pure, trustworthy. And the doctrines of men which are they.

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In other words, it's important to know that we must trust in God's Word because men want to stand contrary to God's Word and do what they want to do regardless of what it says, but we must obey it.

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Now there are certainly some vulgar expressions of this. People stand and spit in the face of God and do whatever they want to do.

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But some of us, as innocent as it may seem, good Calvinistic folk, believe we can conduct the worship gathering however we want so long as we have correct doctrine and a pure heart.

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But the reality is, it is the sole prerogative of God to determine the terms and conditions upon which ill -deserving sinners may approach him in corporate worship.

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We stand at a chasm. Not only that, but God is God. We are sinners.

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And we are made to worship. And if we are made to worship and there's a great chasm, then it is

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God's choice to decide how he is worshipped.

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The reality is, injecting extra biblical practices into corporate worship unavoidably nullifies and undermines

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God's right to self -appointed worship. When you come in and think, and when I think, well it should be done this way because this is my preference.

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Who are you, old man? Paul says in Romans 8. The question is, what does

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God's Word say? And true worshipers worship in light of God's Word and they are regulated by God's Word.

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You know that we love the Puritans around here. They're very helpful in thinking about this.

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Did you know the reason that we have a pulpit right here, the reason that many other pulpits exist, is because the

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Puritans believed this with their life. And what I mean by that is the

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Roman Catholic Church, if you want to call it that, had tons of things you might call will worship.

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They still do. They have tons of icons, tons of Second Commandment violations, if you will.

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They put in the center of the sanctuary a table for the

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Eucharist and they put the pulpit off to the side and they give pre -packaged homilies that take little in the way of 15 to 20 minutes, if that.

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Now, of course, you can find churches that are still of that persuasion to do things a little bit differently, but their theology remains similar, if not the same.

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And what the Puritans did, well the Reformers first and then followed by the Puritans, is they said this is not how we are going to do things.

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We are going to do things according to the Word of God. Now, of course, you know, the big thing that everybody remembers is

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Martin Luther nailing his, you know, 95 theses and challenging the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

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But actually the Reformation was far broader than that and really what it was trying to do is reform everything to Scripture.

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And so what they did is that they took over these churches. They defaced all of these icons. They moved everything around and they took the

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Eucharist and they didn't say it was unimportant, but they put a pulpit in the middle. They took it from over there and they put it in the middle.

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And they put it in the middle because what they wanted to do is say this, if we're going to worship God, we're going to worship God according to God's Word because God's Word is all that matters.

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And if God's Word doesn't tell us to do it, we're not going to do it. Back to our text. It's not so much that these men did something extra or it's not so much that they did something, actually that is the problem, they did something extra and that is the problem.

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And so what I am arguing for, if it's if it's unclear, is something called the regulative principle of worship.

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And maybe an easy way to define that would be God's house,

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God's Word, God's rules. Your God's body, worship like it.

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Now, of course, when I say regulative principle of worship, I'm borrowing theological language that has been employed for a very long time.

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The regulative principle of worship, very simply, without getting to turn a phrase here, simply means that we only worship

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God in light of what has been commanded in Scripture. This is contrasted, of course, to what theologians have called the normative principle of worship, which essentially means you're allowed to do anything that you want in the worship service so long as it is not forbidden.

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But this shows us that that's not how God does things, right?

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Because these two men, Nadab and Abihu, are struck dead because they have chosen to do something that God did not prescribe.

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Now, chapter 22, in the first paragraph, the

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Second London Baptist Confession essentially sums up this entire first point in totality.

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It says this, the light of nature shows that there is a God who has lordship and sovereignty over all, is just, good, and does good to all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might.

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But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself.

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Is anyone offended by that? That there is an acceptable way to worship, which by logical deduction means that there is an unacceptable way to worship

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God, but it gets spicier. And so limited by his own revealed will that he may not be worshiped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation or any other way not prescribed in the

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Holy Scriptures. In other words, our Confession states, if you're doing worship any other way, but the way that God prescribes in his

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Word, doing only that which God commands, you are either doing one of three things.

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You are worshiping either according to the imagination or the devices of men, or you are entertaining the suggestions of Satan.

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And of course, that is provable throughout all of Scripture, but somehow

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I'm not even out of point one. So point two, true worship must treat God as holy.

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He goes on speaking to Aaron. It is what Yahweh spoke, that is his word, saying, by those who come near me

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I will be treated as holy. Now it should be no surprise to you, I think we talk about it quite often here at Heritage, but for the sake of repetition, because you can never hear it enough,

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God is holy. He is innately and perfectly good. He is completely and gloriously holy and righteous.

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He is the only source of good, and he is the only one who does good. He is transcendent. He is set apart from his creation, that is, you and me and everything else, both in his powerful might and his moral excellence.

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He loves and executes justice perfectly and justly. He is supremely beautiful and garbed in purity.

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There is no God besides him, and he cannot dwell with, approve of, or ultimately allow sin.

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There's a reason why Psalm 5 says God hates all who do iniquity. It's because he cannot approve of, or dwell with, or allow people who sin to worship him, though we worship him, and we'll get to that momentarily.

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But this is a fact, this is reality, regardless of whether or not we agree with it, recognize it, but it is true, biblical, and it is what ought to govern our worship, and we are demanded to recognize it.

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You see, too many people come to the gathering, as it were, first and foremost thinking of God's love or all of these other things, which

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I am not saying that you are not to think about God's love. God is love. But there is only one time in the

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Bible when an attribute is used three times, and that time is

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Isaiah 6. And in Isaiah 6, Isaiah is caught up into a vision, and he is seeing,

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I believe, Christ on his throne. And seraphim are flying around him, and they're crying out,

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Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. Now, I am a good

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Orthodox, as you could say, classical theist, and so I believe God is simple. That is, he is not made up of parts.

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So I do believe that God is God all the time. That is, that he is always holy and always loving and always lovingly holy.

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That there's never a time that his attributes are separated. He's never loving one moment and angry the next, or whatever the case may be.

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Although, I'll leave that alone. However, I think

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Thomas Watson is right when he says, he's also Orthodox, classical theist, that what?

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Holiness is the crown jewel of God's crown. It gives everything, he says, its glitter.

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It's what? All of these other attributes, it's this quintessential aspect of it that we must recognize, and it's what drives our worship.

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And so it says here that he will be treated as holy, or some translations say, he will be sanctified.

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And he will be sanctified. It's not saying that he should be or that he could be, or if we try really hard, he will be.

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It says, he will be sovereign. And he will be in two ways, by the holiness of his people and their conduct toward him, or in correct worship, or in this case, which we are looking at with Nadab and Abihu in his judgment on those who do not treat him as holy.

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Now, let me take this in steps really quickly, as fast as I can. It says here, by those who come near me.

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Who's he speaking about? Well, of course, when we're sitting down reading the Bible, we might come to the conclusion he's speaking about Christians, because Christians are near to God by virtue of the blood of the cross, and amen and amen.

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But that's not specifically what he's talking about, though I think that you could make some, you know, far -reaching application to say such a thing.

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But in context, it's specifically talking about priests. He's talking to those who are leading the congregation in worship.

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And specifically, just so you understand my flow of thought here, is they were the ones who came and did the sacrificing.

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Later on in Israel's histories, they were the ones that would come to the Holy of Holies in the temple.

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And so he's saying, I will be treated as holy by my, if you want to use the

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New Testament expression, pastors. This is why in Titus 1a,

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God says, God's shepherds are to be hospitable. And by God, I mean Paul through the

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Holy Spirit. Loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, and self -controlled.

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And so when a minister of God, when a priest of God, or when a pastor of God who's leading the worship of the people is holy, and he's promoting holiness in his church, that God would see holiness, that God is treated as holy, is set apart as holy, as righteous, as good.

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Or pastors are hypocrites. And hypocrites, above all men, may expect the most severe judgment of God upon them because they come so near to God, especially in worship.

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What this teaches us, among many other things, is what happens in God's house is of first importance. The world is crazy, friends.

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There's no doubt about that. When we look outside our front door and we see the rampant rise of the

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LGBT community, when we look outside our front doors and we see all of the murders that are happening around the world.

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I mean, just yesterday, right, there was an assassination attempt on one of our ex -presidents.

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Although I think he gets to keep the name even after he's not a president anymore. Sad, horrific, disease is everywhere.

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Poverty is everywhere. And God does care about those things, but what God cares about the most is what happens inside these walls.

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It's true. We should be involved as we are in abolition ministry. We should be involved as Christians in politics.

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But friends, if we do not get the church right, we have nothing to offer the world. Nothing. This is why

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Paul says in the New Testament that judgment begins where? In the household of God, which is why

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God showed his judgment on Nadab and Abihu.

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So, holiness of God's people inside his church, primarily of his priests and pastors.

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Pastors because priests are no longer in effect. When they are holy, it shows

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God to be holy, and when they aren't, God is still shown to be holy because of his judgment on those who are hypocrites, on those who do not treat him as holy.

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The Lord's judgment comes swiftly in this text. In the dramatic reversal, the fire that had consumed the offerings now consumes those presenting the offering.

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Those making the sacrifice, namely Nadab and Abihu, become the sacrifice.

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In a single day, this story that is so great, right? These men becoming priests.

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The story moves from triumph to tragedy. And the reason for it, friends, is because though God loves each and every one of us because we are made in the image of God, he loves his name more.

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He loves his name more. Or as Charles Spurgeon has said,

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Christians are dear to God, but his name is dearer yet still. He had a way with words.

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And it's not unloving to say that. And it's not unloving to say that because you are made to worship, you are made to live alongside

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God's people, and when he shows himself to be glorious, that's the best thing for you.

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This is why C .S. Lewis and his conversion story, for example, was converted over this very issue.

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C .S. Lewis famously, if I'm remembering this story right, I'm sure there's details I'm leaving out, bear with me, wouldn't become a

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Christian because he would read the Psalms and he would read other scriptures and he would say God's essentially acting like a needy housewife, always begging for compliments and walking around saying love me, love me, love me, love me, and he essentially was like that's very annoying, that's gross and grotesque, and that's not the way that anyone should be.

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Nobody wants to be around that, nobody appreciates that, and really it's prideful, arrogant, and ridiculous because God would always say love me, worship me, but it wasn't until C .S.

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Lewis began to understand that that's what we were created for and it actually brings us the most joy, that when

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God tells us to worship him, he's not being egotistical because he is the thing that will satiate us the most.

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He is the thing that is the most beautiful, he is the thing that is most helpful, most comforting, and when he realized that, he threw down his self -made crown.

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In Amos 3 .2, God says you only have I known among the families of the earth, therefore

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I will punish you for all of your iniquities. The reason I bring that text up is to show that God is going to get his holiness out of you, out of me, out of this church in some way, whether that's to lift it up as a beacon of holiness for good or to crush us in judgment, and both will show forth his holiness.

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John Calvin says it like this before I get to my next point, if we reflect how holy a thing God's worship is, which we need to do, then when we think about the situation with Nadab and Abihu specifically, the enormity of the punishment will by no means offend us.

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Besides, it was necessary that the religion should be sanctified at its very commencement, for if God had suffered the sons of Aaron to transgress with impunity, they would have afterwards carelessly neglected the whole law.

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This therefore was the reason of such great severity that the priest should anxiously watch against all profaneness.

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In other words, he's saying what I said earlier, day one matters. If we, and here's something interesting to think about, and it's really the thrust of the entire sermon, so I hope you get it, if we think that the punishment of Nadab and Abihu is so horrible, then we don't get it.

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We don't get God, and we don't get worship. Thirdly, I want you to see that true worship must glorify

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God before all people. So not only is God after his glory, not only is he or not not only is

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God after promoting his holiness and being treated as holy, being set apart as holy, he is also a glory hunter.

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And once again, I want you to look at the grammar. He's not saying that he might be glorified or desires to be glorified, but that he will sovereignly see to it that he will assuredly be glorified.

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This is the refrain of all of Scripture. Thus I will harden Pharaoh's heart with strength, and he will pursue them, and I will be glorified through Pharaoh and all of his army, so that the

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Egyptians will know that I am Yahweh, and they did so. Isaiah 49 .3, he said to me, you are my servant

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Israel in whom I will show forth my beautiful glory. God's glory, friends, is more important than men's lives, and Nadab and Abihu died to reveal that truth to us.

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God will fetch his glory, and he will do it, whether we are obedient or disobedient, because our

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God is that good. Now what's interesting is if we read the rest of the

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Scripture that I pointed out here, because at this time you're expecting people to weep, but he actually,

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Moses, tells those who would gather this man and put him outside the camp not to weep, not to look at them, not to make his problem their problem, because if you start to feel pity for God judging the unrighteous, then you have set yourself up as the righteous judge of God himself, and you are not more righteous than God, and so if you start to feel any sort of sympathy, once again, you don't get it.

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So he commands them not to pay attention, to get them out outside the camp where their bodies, their polluted bodies, could be gotten rid of, because they had polluted the very sanctuary.

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They had done what is evil in the sight of God, and that's the short of it.

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So what is glory? Well, the Hebrew word literally means to be heavy, be weighty, be grievous, be hard.

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Sometimes it means to be rich or to be honorable or glorious, to be burdensome, to be honored.

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Now, all of these help us to understand what the word glory means. Like, God is a heavy weight pressed down upon us, but when it is applied to God, it really means the things that make

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God, God. This infinite beauty or greatness of his manifold perfections.

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Now, when theologians talk about glory, they generally do so by splitting it into two different categories. Firstly, they will talk about intrinsic glory.

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Intrinsic glory is just this idea that it is who God is in himself. Did you know that we will never exhaust

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God's glory? Did you know that we don't see God's glory as glorious as it is? If you didn't know that, now you do.

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The only glory that we can see or know of God is the glory that he displays to us in creation and in his word and through the person and work of Jesus Christ, the righteous.

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Another type of glory that the Bible speaks about is ascribed glory. Ascribed glory, that is

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John Piper, who

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I don't regularly quote around here for various different reasons, has a very good way of putting this.

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He says, ascribed glory is basically that type of glory that shows us that God will be glorified by making his attributes go public.

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His ascribed glory is showing, as best he has decided to reveal it, his intrinsic worth.

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I think that's good, right? It is God putting his glory on display and us ascribing as we see what we can see, glory to it.

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And one of the ways I love that he talks about this in a way that I love.

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He says, I want to make that make sense to you, but the word glory is like the word beautiful and not like the word basketball.

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And what he means by that is, if I say, hey, do you know what a basketball is?

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No. It's a ball. It's a sphere. It's filled with air.

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It's got rubber on the outside and when you hit it on the ground, it bounces back up to you and you can throw it into a hoop.

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Hoop is a metal ring. It's got a net made of rope, right? That's concrete.

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But now if I said, what's beautiful mean? All of a sudden, it's like you know what it is, but it's something that you have to see in order for you to be able to define it, right?

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Like those flowers are beautiful, or that music is beautiful, or that whatever, right?

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My wife is beautiful. Like you know what that means, but like you don't know what that means exactly, right?

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And so he's saying it's kind of like that. It's our best attempt to ascribe this thing, glory, his intrinsic worth as it is displayed.

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And it's God's glory that is on display in the killing of these two men. And we must see it as such.

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Stephen Charnock says it like this much better than I can, a Puritan of old, when he said, when we believe that we ought to be satisfied rather than God glorified, we set

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God below ourselves. Imagine that he should submit his own honor to our advantage, and we make ourselves more glorious than God, as though we were not made for him, but he made for us.

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And then he says, this is to have a very low esteem of the majesty of the glory of Almighty God.

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So do we want to glorify God? We should. The question becomes, how are we to respond to this sort of thing, right?

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We've seen how Moses responds. He reminds Aaron of God's Word. He tells him that you already know that God will be treated as holy, either in the promotion of holiness, in the minister's work, or in the judgment of the ungodly.

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And then he tells him that he will be glorified before all people. They will see it in his glorious nature in the worship gathering.

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So how does Aaron respond? Hey man, that's really hard -hearted. Can't you see that my son's just died?

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Who do you think you are? He's throwing Bible verses at me. Now look with me what it says here at the end of verse 3.

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It says, so Aaron kept silent. Friends, when you are confronted with God's Word, his holiness, and his glory, there's nothing to debate.

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There's nothing to debate. Aaron kept silent because that's all you can do when you are confronted with truth, and you believe it, especially about God, right?

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When your heart eyeballs, Ephesians, right? The eyes of your heart and your affections see

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God for who he is, then everything out here begins to make sense.

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And you understand that consequences happen. And so here we see him coming to grips with reality that, no, that's right.

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God's Word is equal to his promises. And I should have known.

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Or maybe he's saying, I did know. Thanks for reminding me. But the reality is he just kept his mouth shut.

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What this teaches us, friends, is that worship is more than the songs we sing.

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It's even more than the preaching that we do from this pulpit. Worship is being

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God -enthralled by who God actually is. And so sometimes there's just no application other than behold your

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God in his holiness and his glorious nature. And so we must worship

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God according to his Word to be true worshipers. We must treat

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God as holy to be true worshipers. And we must desire

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God's glory to be put before all people to be true worshipers because those who worship

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God do so in spirit and in truth, John 4 .4. The last thing

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I want you to see before we leave, lest this turn into some moralistic call to do things the way that I think it should be done, although we should all want it to be done according to the

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Word of God, I want to remind you lastly that true worship was purchased for us by Jesus Christ.

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The reason that we worship God is because, well, there's so many reasons, but the reason that we are gathered here today is because Christ was slain for our profane and idolatrous worship of self.

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When we first planted our first church plant many years ago, we met at a

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Lutheran church in Indiana. These were the dark days before Oklahoma. And this

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Lutheran church had red doors on the wall. And I hadn't got into the minutia of certain types of theology that would tell me why certain doors were certain colors.

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But it seemed somewhat obvious to me that it probably had something to do with Jesus' blood. But it was so interesting to me that I felt like asking, plus I needed to find a way to make conversation with the guy that we were trying to rent the building from.

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And I said, hey man, why is the door red? And I've never forgot this because there's so much theology in just like a painted door.

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And I said, what's up? He said, well, the reason that Lutherans paint their doors, or at least historically have painted their doors red, is because it reminds every person who walks into this building that they can only do so.

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They can only come to worship God with clean hands and a pure heart because of the blood of Jesus Christ spilt for them.

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What am I getting at? In short, what I'm getting at is what the author of Hebrews says in 1312, which has,

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I believe, direct connection to this text. Hebrews, if you didn't know, is a book all about how

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Jesus is better than all of the Old Testament prophets, priests, and kings. And how he has fulfilled the sacrificial system perfectly and once and for all.

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And the author of Hebrews, whoever you think that might be, it's a sermon preached by Paul, recorded by Luke, if you're taking the heritage quiz.

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But of course, this has been argued about for centuries, but that's not the point and I probably shouldn't even brought it up. It says this, therefore, in 1312,

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Jesus also, that he might sanctify or make holy the people through his own blood, suffered outside of the camp.

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So how does this connect? Well, one of the things it means, among many other things, is that Jesus and his person and work was treated so that we might come to him in real worship, in amazing worship, in God -honoring worship, who's treated as Nadab in a bayou, who was put outside the camp.

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Of course, the parallel begins to break down because Jesus had no sin. He was simply treated as having sin.

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He was struck down in God's wrath for our iniquity, for our profane worship of self.

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So, friends, you see, not only does Jesus make it possible for us to come to God in worship, he also frees us to actually.

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Were we once enslaved to sin, dead in our transgressions, Ephesians 2 says, enslaved, as the book of Romans says, he died that we might be given a new heart that bleeds red with blood for him, the desires to worship him as he ought to be worshipped, right?

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Because the logical progression of thought here might lead you to believe, as I say this sort of thing, well, if Jesus paid for our ability to worship, shows us the path of worship because it is him who is the truth, the way, and the life, he is the one whom we worship.

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And not only that, but he gives us the ability to worship where we once could not worship him as we ought, then why do we care to reform our lives to the scriptures and why do we care about the regulative principle?

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Why do we want to govern our worship gatherings according to the word of God if Jesus has already paid for it?

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It's a good theological question. But the answer to that question is found in Romans 6, verse 2.

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When Paul said, May it never be, how shall we who died to sin still live in it?

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We want to obey God's command, to do church God's way because Christ has died to make that a reality for us.

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And what are we to do, friends, spit in his face? What are we to do?

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Say no thank you? We'll worship how we want? No, we give him our lives.

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Romans 12, right? What does it say? That our spiritual service of worship is to live as a living sacrifice on the altar, as it were.

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Living, dying people who worship with their lives Jesus Christ the Risen. Because we see what amazing grace has been extended to us.

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So why is will worship so dangerous? Because it misses the point of the gospel.

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Pray with me. Father, we thank you. We thank you that you have given us your word and we thank you that you have caused us to love your statutes.

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And we ask that you would empower us not only as individuals but as a church to obey your word all the more, understanding that what happens in these walls is way more important to you than what happens outside these walls.

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And of course, remind us that that doesn't mean that we don't labor outside these walls, but you have a bride that you are sanctifying, that you are saving, that you are purifying, and that you are inviting and commanding to worship you.

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So help us. Help us to worship you, help us to love you, and help us to do it in a way that is honoring to you according to the methods you have prescribed, because we're thankful.