A Worship Guide

This section of Deuteronomy is sort of a conclusion to the sermon that Moses has been preaching. It starts then after this chapter with more specific instructions about what they are supposed to do. You'll find in the first two verses of this, verse 12 and 13, is sort of a summary of what he's going to say in the rest of this chapter. Then there's kind of an interesting way that he has what are called couplets. Like verse 14 sort of matches with verse 17, there's sort of a continuation of it. And verse 15 with 18 and verse 16 with 19. So that one of them sort of introduces the idea, and this was obviously poetic, like a song, and so you have a little bit of a phrase that begins and then later on it picks up the same idea and expands it somewhat. So there's an idea that he's talking about something that he builds on. But the beginning, or the first two verses of this, summarize everything that he's going to talk about in the rest of this chapter. So it's a very packed chapter. Chapter 10, beginning with verse 12. And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord's commandments and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? In this series of short, simple, declarative sentences, phrases, he describes the nature of all the things that he's going to talk about after this and summarizes the things he's been talking about before this. And whenever you read in the passage in the Bible, especially the book of Deuteronomy, this phrase, and now, O Israel, it's sort of like in the New Testament, you oftentimes see the word, therefore. It usually means this is a conclusion. And that's the same thing here. This is a conclusion to what he's been saying so that he finishes up the other part of what he's just been talking about and introduces then the specifics or the details about what does it mean to fear God. That's the first one of these. And each one of these statements he talks about, and now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God, and whenever you see this word LORD in caps, it's about the name of God, calling Him by His name. And now, O Israel, what does Yahweh your God ask of you but to fear Yahweh your God, to walk in all of His ways, love, to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, observe Yahweh's commandments and decrees. So each of these specific things he's going to detail throughout this long list of how he wants us to be able to live. But in this summary is a critical understanding of the nature of God and what life with God is really like. When I was talking to you about understanding God and seeing from the things that He does what He's like, you'll see in this simple series of one statement something about the nature of God that defines His character. Now what does Yahweh ask of you? And the first is that we're to fear Yahweh our God. Now a lot of people are disturbed about this idea of fearing God. They think that we should see God as a God of love, and we should see Him always as a kind person who's going to do good things for us. And it certainly is true that God is a God of love. But love and fear are not opposites. Sometimes they can seem that way, and sometimes they can be. But love and fear are oftentimes compatible with each other. For the idea of fear means that you look at someone and you see in that person a person of authority and respect. Now the relationship that God has with His children is just like that. We are His children. So the model for how you deal with God is the model between parent and child. Now if you grew up in a home where your parents were trying to help you learn and grow up, you learned to fear your parents. You were afraid to disappoint them. Now see fear comes in a lot of different ways. We think of the word fear like I'm trembling in fear because someone is out of control and it's going to hurt me. But a parent doesn't have to be out of control for a child to be afraid to disappoint their parents. Why do you be afraid of disappointing your parents? Because you care about them. Because you want them to see you in a way that would cause them to respect you and value you. And every parent is happy with their children when their children are doing the things that they're supposed to do. So whenever the Bible talks about fear, a part of what it's talking about is having a reverence and respect for who God is. When a parent has respect for their, when a child has respect for their parents and their parent says, here's what I want you to do, the child takes the instruction from the parent and it becomes a guiding principle for their behavior. I do not want you to put your foot, your feet on the dining room table. So you've let them know exactly what you want for them to do. They know what would please you and what would disappoint you. And so they think about that and they decide they're not going to do it because they don't want to disappoint you. Now there are times of course whenever a child doesn't pay attention to that and they have to be concerned that the discipline of the parent will bring pain and suffering to them. So in that way, whenever they continue in their rebellion, their parent who loves them will make sure that they are corrected in a way that will be beneficial for their lives. So if you press this issue far enough, the parent that you respect because they demand your respect, which includes obedience, will make sure that obedience follows. So the parenting that is normal for us in this world is the parenting that we get patterned after God's relationship with us. He tells us in the contract that He made with the people of Israel, here are the things I want you to do. And when you look at those things, He says, I don't want you to steal, honor your parents. I don't want you to try to get other people's things, to covet them. I don't want you to lie. Every time we see those things and we do one of them that's wrong, we know we disappoint our God in heaven. Now does that matter to you? See that's the important issue. If you love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, it would matter that He would look at you and be disappointed in your behavior. Why? Because you do not want to disappoint Him if you love Him with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. One time when our kids were growing up, we had our second child. You know, the first one comes along, you control the environment. When the second one comes along, you don't have any control over the environment like you did before. So we didn't encourage our kids to throw their food on the floor. We discouraged that. And if they did something, if our one son did something that was outrageous, we didn't laugh. We tried to ignore it. And we tried to make sure that we limited so they couldn't do it again. Well our second came along. So our son, the first one, was sitting in the chair, high chair, and his brother was sitting there. And he took some food and he threw it on the floor. And his brother just laughed hysterically. That was not the reaction we wanted. We wanted to scold him and we wanted him to know that we disapproved. And so we told him not to throw any more food on the floor. And he knew that there would be some consequence from us. And so he took his food and he held it up and he looked at us. You could see he's thinking, what's going to happen there? He looked at his brother, saying, boy, he's going to laugh like crazy when I do this. And he looked back at us and he looked back at his brother. You could tell he was deciding, which one do I want? Do I want the laughter from my brother to be a hero and a leader for him? Or do I want my parents to be mad at me? He threw it on the floor. He threw it on the floor. But you see, whenever you obey someone, whether it's your brother, who you're trying to get to approve of you by laughter, or your parents that you're trying to get to approve of you by good behavior, you are looking at them and you're wanting to please them. You do not want to disappoint them. You actually have fear of disappointing them. Do I want my little brother to really think I'm great? Or do I want my parents to really be proud of me? That's a choice you have to make in your life. And so he starts this in the very beginning by saying the same things in the first commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. You're to have no other gods before you. He means by that that you're to look at God with such respect that everything He tells you to do in these commandments, you're going to do because you do not want Him to disappoint you. You do not want to disappoint Him. So the foundation of everything that Moses talks about, and the foundation of everything you find in the law, and even in the New Testament, is based on this one simple ingredient. You place God in the position of ultimate authority. You love Him because of His creation and His power. You respect Him because of who He is. And it is out of that that you're going to do what you ought to do, what He tells you. And if you don't have respect for God, you'll do whatever you want to do. Well God says you shouldn't do this. You say, well, I don't care. I'm going to do it anyway. Why? Because I want to please myself. Or I want to please someone else who I value. So if you run around with other people who look at you and are trying to get you to do things that fit in with them, whether it's a husband or wife or friends or neighbors or whoever it is, you have to make a choice as to who you want to disappoint and who you're afraid to disappoint. Now not fear in the sense they're going to beat you up, but you don't want your friends to look at you and say, you're not cool. You don't have the courage to do this. You don't want them to be disapproving of you. It makes life very complicated if you don't get this issue settled straight up front. Who am I going to listen to when the issues are facing me? Is it my own human nature, what everyone else around me is doing, what other people tell me to do, or am I going to listen to God? This is how you enter the kingdom of heaven. You can't get in unless you do this. Jesus said, I am the way, and the way is narrow. And what you have to do is exactly what I tell you to get in. Respect for God is almost the same thing as saying having fear of God. Fear of His disapproval and fear of His reaction to what you're going to do is a critical ingredient in our faith. If you do not have it, all of the commandments that Moses is going to give will be of no value to you because you don't respect the mind who gives it to you, and you don't respect the fact that if you disobey God and refuse to take His and follow His instructions that any consequence will come. We fear consequences. And the more severe the consequence is, the more our fear comes to the front and guides our behavior. So if you believe that God has consequences for violating His instructions, you will be very careful to make sure that you keep them. So that's why He starts by saying to Israel, what does your God ask of you but to fear Yahweh, your God? You fear Him because He has the right answers, and if you don't listen to them, you'll be in trouble. Not only because you'll do things that will bring terrible consequences, but also you become His enemy. And you fear making Him disappointed in you. So this motivation for Israel is key for everything else that they're doing. So when you get that one settled, then all these other things begin to fall in place. So you're to love, to fear Yahweh, your God, and second, to walk in all His ways. See that's the motivation. So God says, here's the way you should live, okay? Well listen to what you have to say. This is the way I want you to live your life, and the word walk in the Bible is synonymous with living because everybody walked everywhere, not like us driving cars. So a walk, a person's walk, we still say that, a person's walk is their life. You're to live your life exactly as God wants you to live, and that's what Moses is going to tell them, all the details about how they're supposed to live. In the New Testament, Jesus describes this as following His example, knowing what He's like and how He lived and how He reacted to people and circumstances and events is the guide for us. When Jesus was calling His disciples, He said it very simply, you must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me. The self-denial is to say, I'm not going to listen to myself or do what I want, instead I'll do what God tells me. Second thing is, I'm willing to do that no matter how difficult or hard it is, and what is it I'm going to do? I'm going to live exactly the way Jesus Himself lived. He is my guide for life. So when people say, I'm ready to become a follower of Christ, I always tell them, take the Bible, begin at the book of Matthew, read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. When you finish with that, go back and read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. By the time you're through with that, you've read the life story of Jesus four times twice or eight different times. And by the process of this, you go through once and you pick up some things, you go through again and you pick up more things, you begin to now get a grasp of what Jesus was like and how He wants us to live, because you see that, and the respect you have for Him causes you to be able to make right choices in your life. Choices that are the right ones, consistent with the nature and character of God. So the Old Testament and the New Testament tell the same things. Here He says, you're to have respect for God, and you're to make sure that you fear Him, and then you're to walk in all of His ways. Now Moses is going to explain those. He doesn't have a person's life to hold up like we do for Christ, but all he has are a list of instructions about what you're supposed to do, and that's what the rest of the book of Deuteronomy is really mostly about. So after this respect, you're then to begin to get these instructions I'm going to give you and follow them. That's why Bible study is such a critical step in your spiritual life. If you don't know what pleases God, you can't do the things that please Him. If you don't know the things that disappoint Him, you don't know how to live a life without that disappointment. You cannot do what you don't know. And so the key ingredient is making this commitment to Him, and then finding out what He wants us to do, and begin to live that way. To walk in all of His ways, to love Him. Now the Bible talks about now the motivation we have for this. What is the motivation that drives us to want to say, I want to put God in a position of greatest authority? Well again, the model we have in our own lives, our parents and family around us, if you have a child who idolizes their parents, we use that language, idolize their parents, who think their parents can do no wrong, and hold them in great respect and reverence, that love motivates them to be obedient. If you find a parent, a child, who has no respect for their parents, who think their parents are bad people, who are not interested in being around their parents because they don't care about them, then you find that child will not care or respond to the discipline that the parent gives them. So there's two sides to this whole thing. We see God and His love and respect we have for Him, and on the other side of it, it is our motivation to please Him that causes us to be able to hold His instructions to the highest level of responsibility. Because I love God, I will do more for Him than anything else in the world. I think sometimes we look at fear and we think that it's a powerful motivator, and it is, it's a powerful motivator, but fear has no comparison to what love will do. If you saw a building burning and a man ran out of the building, and you were to say to the man, I want you to go back in that burning building and see if you can find anybody in there, he might look at you like you were crazy, and you say, you have to go in there and find someone that's in that building. If you pull a gun out of your pocket and you said, if you don't go back in there, I'm going to shoot you, the guy might run up to the building, but all the way there, he's looking for some way to avoid going in without you knowing it, because his motivation is to save his own life. Now, if a man runs out of a building and you say to that man, we're glad that you're safe, but I hate to tell you your five-year-old child is still in the building, it might take two or three people to hold that man to keep him from going back in. What we will not do for the fear of ourselves or protection or safety of ourselves, we will do because of our passionate love for others. That's why the Bible focuses on us being able to see God as someone that we have not only respect and reverence for his authority and power, but a love for him. That's why John 3.16 is such a powerful verse for so many people. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. This is not talking about Jesus, it's talking about God. Because a lot of people think about Jesus as he loves us, but the verse of John 3.16 is about how much God loves us. What God's motivation for us is, is to give everything for us, and to hold nothing at all back. It is this love of God that is to possess our lives and cause us to give ourselves to him, and to give ourselves in self-denying, sacrificial service to the people who are around us. It's why people have been willing to go and live in countries where their lives were in danger. It's why you see all the time that there are people around the world who live in countries where it's illegal to be a follower of Jesus, who are willing to give their lives for Christ. I remember reading a story about one of the early martyrs, and they came and got him as a man in his eighties at the time, and when the Roman soldiers came to get him, they begged him to renounce Christ, and he said, no, I can't do that. They started to roam with him, and all the way to Rome, they kept begging him to renounce Christ because they didn't want to kill him, he was a nice and kind man, and when they pressed him even further, he said, how can I ever betray one who has loved me so? And they took him to Rome, and fed him to the lions. The love that God has for us causes us to return to him. This self-denying sacrificial service, that's why it's so easy to give up things that we really want and desire, if we just know it would please our Father in heaven. That's why people are willing to give themselves and their lives and whatever else God asks of them to say, yes, because you have loved me so much, I want to love you in return. The word for love in the Bible and the New Testament is a word that means self-denying sacrificial service to others. If you will put that word in the place of love, you'll see exactly what it means. A lot of people think love is an emotion or a feeling, and in some ways romance is, and in some way brotherly love is, but whenever you take the passage, it's where it describes how we're supposed to treat each other in the community of faith. Treat your brother or sister in self-denying sacrificial service. Treat your husband or your wife in self-denying sacrificial service. It is this kind of quality that marks the relationship that God has with his people, because that's what he's done for us, and that's what we do back for him. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, for it is exactly the way God has loved us. The Bible holds God up as the model for how we are to live our lives. He's completely committed to us and to our welfare and benefit. He wants us to respect him in such a way so that when he tells us something is wrong, that we would want to get away from it. I don't know what there is about our human nature. You tell somebody, a small child, don't touch that. The first thing they want to do is touch it. And when you tell a grown person don't do that, the first thing they want to do is do it. I was going to a seminar one time after I graduated from seminary. We had a break one day in the night, and a couple of the guys said, well, I tell you, we're in Fort Worth, and we're way away from our churches, nobody's going to find out. We'd like to go out to some of these places that we hear about and just see what life is like out there, so we'll have experience, so we'll know what to preach against and what to avoid in the future. Well, you see, the love of God causes us, in spite of our human nature, wanting to find its own satisfaction to say, if the Father tells me that's not a good thing to do, I believe him. He would only ask the very best of me. You notice what happens in the Garden of Eden whenever Adam and Eve did not believe that the commandment of God was in their best interest. They didn't believe that God loved them. Satan said, well, the only reason God's telling you not to eat that is because he wants to keep all the good stuff for himself. He doesn't want you to be as good as he is. Once you lose your respect for God, then your actions also will follow in disobedience. And once you have the kind of respect for God, you wouldn't do anything contrary to what he wants. This is the foundation stone of what it means to be a follower of God and a follower of Christ. Would you bow your heads for a moment? If you were to look God in the face, could you say to him, I have such respect for you, I would never do anything in disobedience to you on purpose. Sometimes in our immaturity we do. Sometimes in our weakness we do. But not just say, okay, I don't care what you say, I'm going to do it. When you see the great love God has for you, does it motivate you to want to be pure, holy, and obedient? If you want to strengthen that, you just read the crucifixion story and see how much God loves you and how much he wants you to be holy. It'll give you new motivation. Father, help us to learn to love you as you've loved us. Help us to learn to live our lives exactly as you want us to, that there might be nothing that would distract us from faithfulness. In the name of Christ we ask it, amen.