How to worship

Bibles to Deuteronomy, chapter 12. Chapter 12, verse 1. I'm going to go back a little bit to 11 to set the context for this. Stories are always written, I mean the story is written in a, they have a connection. So to pick one piece out and start with it always sort of leaves you uncertain about what's taking place. And what I want to focus on is the idea that here he is beginning to tell them sort of the result of all the things he's been talking about with regard to obedience to God. And I went back the last couple of chapters, beginning with chapter 10, verse 13, he started out saying, and observed the Lord's commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good. And he hasn't given them yet, but he's telling them that he's going to. Chapter 11, verse 1. Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and commands always. And in verse, chapter 11, verse 8, observed therefore all the commands I'm giving you today so that you may have strength to go and take over the land you're coming to cross the Jordan to possess. And then verse 13 in the same chapter, he says, so if you faithfully obey the commands I'm giving you today to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul. And then he tells them the end result that's going to come from that. And then verses 18 through 20, sort of an extended discussion of the same thing, fix these words of mine in your heart and minds and tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them to your foreheads. If you remember Sunday, I was talking about this is where they get this passage to use the phylacteries on their hands and on their heads. This is where they get that. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you get up, write them on your doorpost of your house so your days and the days of your children may be many. And then on verse 27, the same chapter, he says again, blessings if you obey the commands of the Lord, your God, I'm giving you today. Verse 28, he says, curses if you disobey the commands of the Lord, your God, I'm giving you in the way I command you today to follow and follow other gods. Verse 32, the same chapter, the end of it, the very end of that chapter, he says, and when you take it over, you're there, be sure you obey all the decrees and laws I'm setting before you today. See how repetitious the idea of complete obedience to God was. It was saturated with all this, but he hadn't told them yet the things they were supposed to obey or do. Chapter 12 begins the long discussion about what they are to do. These obedience to the commands open up blessings for God and they open up the responsibility of the opportunity for curses that come from God. So that obedience to the things he's going to say now are critical. So he starts before he even gets to this by repeatedly saying over and over again, you must obey these things that I'm going to tell you. These are critical issues for you to obey. So over and over he's laid the groundwork for what's going to take place. Now chapter 12, verse 1, he starts. These are the decrees and laws you must carefully follow in the land of the Lord. The God of your fathers has given you to possess as long as you live in the land. Now, the Old Testament uses the word law and when we think of a law, we think of something like the speed limit or we think of something that's on the law books that would require you to do with a penalty that came as a result of disobedience to it. But in the Old Testament and the New Testament, the concept of the law was a little bit different. It's more like we would say the law of gravity. It's not something you can repeal. It's a principle set forth by God in nature. And he set forth for us as the way we ought to operate. The gravity operates in this world as God set it up to do. These principles of operation, the principle of gravity, as you throw something up, it's pulled back down to the earth. These principles are given to people to live by. They're not automatic like the law of gravity because nature just obeys what God tells it to do. But human beings have a choice about what they do. But the principle is really the same. If you will operate this way, then your lives will have an order or structure to them that will bring positive results. If we didn't have the law of gravity, think what a terrible mess we'd be in. You couldn't get on the ground. You couldn't turn loose of anything. Everything would be so different than it is now. And the chaos that comes to human lives who refuse to live by these principles are what Moses was trying to guard against. These are the basic principles that I made you to live by. But unlike the natural order, you have a choice about this. You can defy this if you want to. If you choose to do so, you can defy them. But I've told you over and over again how important it is for you to listen to these and live by them. If you do not do that, you will not find life as it ought to be. So the term law is really a word to describe a lifestyle. If you could say, this is the lifestyle that people were made to live by. This is the lifestyle that God intended human beings to live according to. And a violation of this lifestyle, that is to live different than the lifestyle, brings disaster to you. If you live according to this lifestyle, you will find the blessings of God in your life. And a lot of people who have terrible lives and a lot of difficulties and a lot of trials don't get this. They don't understand why this is happening to them. They think they should be able to live exactly as they want to and have life as they know it could be. But it doesn't work that way. That's why Moses was so careful to keep repeating to them, you've got to obey these things before you even told them. Now, these are the decrees that he's going to give to them. And the first one starts in verse 2. When you get into this land, destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their Asherah poles in the fire, and cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places. Now, he's describing, yes. It's a long pole that just sticks up in the sky. It's really a phallic symbol of the fertility cults, usually of a female goddess. So they were a symbol of where sex could be found, sort of an advertisement, maybe you might say. And the phallic symbols or the Asherah poles were a sign of divinity worship for a female goddess. Now, the hills were all, and thank you for asking that, I'm sure, nobody, it's good to know. The mountains and hills were a constant place of worship. The people in the ancient world believed that the high places or the mountains were the location where you would be close to God. And so all of the, sometimes the altars were said to be on high places or they were called high places. And a hill or a mountain were seen as sacred places. So all the gods that the Canaanites worshiped were on mountains. In fact, Jerusalem is sort of a mountain, a hill too. And they had on Mount Sinai worshiped there as this place where God spoke to them. So all through the Old Testament, mountains are seen as places where God communicates with people. So the people in the land where Moses was entering, they had their worship places to their gods on these mountains. And their symbols were the phallic symbol or the Asherah pole was a symbol of all these places. Now, he says, when you come into this land, you're to go to every hill where you find one of these altars and you're to tear it down, burn it up, destroy it completely. Every Asherah pole, you're to cut it down and burn it up and destroy it completely. So that not one evidence of any of these gods still exists in the land in which you're going to live. You must completely destroy every one of these worship places. Now, this sounds like it's talking about a fight between the people and God, but that's not really what this is about. What he's going to talk about in just a moment is, you are to worship God only in one place and worship Him exactly as I tell you to worship Him. What he's saying to his people is, you're going to enter this land and you have not been following me very long. They've been following Him through the wilderness and they haven't developed a way to worship God yet as people in a resident place, stable place where they live. And you're going to go in a community where everyone around you worships these different gods. Now, a god is a symbol of what controls your lifestyle. That's why he says you're to have no other gods before me. There's nothing to control your lifestyle more than me. And all these ancient gods told them something they had to do to be able to have success. If you wanted your crops to grow, you went to the place where the Asherah poles were. If you wanted comfort of some kind, there were other idols that were set up for all these different things that they were depending on their gods to provide for them. So the people of Israel now were coming into this land and they were surrounded now by people who thought a different kind of lifestyle would be successful for them. They were saying, this is the way we've always lived. This is the way our God has taken care of us here. And they had one idea that's so foreign to us we can't even think of it. The ancient world believed that all of these gods were location gods. That is, that the god that you serve could only be served within the territory of your nation or your tribe or your city. So now they're coming into this foreign land and all these gods have been there and they're the gods who rule that land. They're coming into this and all of their neighbors and the people around them are saying, these are our gods that have given us prosperity, given us good families, have given us success. These are the gods that have ruled this land for generations. Now the temptation would be when you move there to sort of join in with them since these are the gods that have made all the people here successful and prosperous. And he knows, God knows, he's not going to be able to get them to live the way he wants them to with all this temptation around them. So you must get rid of all the temptation to let some other god control your life except me. I'm going to tell you all the things I want you to do. They're going to be harder for you than taking the easy way. They're going to be difficult for you because you've never done it before. But this is the only way you can succeed. So you must remove every temptation from your life to do anything other than what I'm telling you. You can't begin to do what I'm telling you unless you can erase these temptations to do something else to be able to live a different way than I'm telling you. So you must begin by destroying everything that would be a temptation for you to turn away and do something other than what I'm going to tell you to do. God hasn't told them the commands he wants them to live by yet. You have to begin that way. If you'll think about this, it's the same thing with us. If you grow up and you come to know Christ as an adult, say 20 years old or 30 years old, you've already developed a lifestyle of your own. You've learned how to make choices. You've learned how to choose to do the things you want to do. You've learned how to say, how am I going to decide what I do? It's whether or not I like it or don't like it, whether or not it's fun for me, whether or not I think it's going to be beneficial to me. You're already making decisions in your life up to that point without God's direction, without His control of your life. And it's a deep ingrained pattern in you. And the older you are when you come to Christ, the more deeply ingrained these patterns are. If you know someone has come to Christ later in life, you know how hard it is for them to change what they've always thought and the way they've always acted. Because this pagan lifestyle has been controlling their mind and their will and their emotions. And now all of a sudden they're put out in a place where they're trying to live differently and it seems like every decision is so hard to make. You've seen people who've had patterns of anger, for example, or they've had patterns of immorality, or patterns of lying, or patterns in their life of different kind of addictions. You know how hard it is for them. And someone called me this week talking about themselves and they said they did something they told their God they weren't going to do as their old lifestyle and said, I'm just beating myself up every minute because of this. I just can't believe that I did this again. I knew I wasn't going to do it and I said I wasn't going to do it, but there I was and I did it. And maybe you've experienced that as an adult for yourself, knowing how difficult it is to break those patterns. What he's telling them is, you can't come into this place starting out living for me with all the temptation around you and all the pressure around you to do something different than what I'm telling you. So you have to obliterate that. So when you come into your Christian faith and you say you stand before God and say I've lived my life up to this point doing what I thought was the right thing to do. And now I say to you I'm going to live in obedience to you the rest of my life. You find it's very, very hard. The older you are, the more difficult it seems to get to break those patterns in your life. And you have to destroy them. You have to start by changing the things that you do. You have to change your life. I don't know anyone, there may be people like this, but I don't know anyone that says, you know, yesterday I had three hours that I just didn't know what I was going to do. I thought, well, I wish I had something to do. Everybody fills their time with something. Now maybe just television, but they fill their life with something. Now when you come to Christ and He says to you, I want you to start reading the Bible. You've got to take some time in your life and move it out of the way to put Bible reading in there. If He says to you, I want you to follow me and I want you to be joined with other people who are doing this so you become part of a church, then you have to make time on Sunday morning to get up to go to church and Sunday school and Sunday night and Wednesday night. And you have to move things out of your life to be able to give that time to God because it's not automatically there. And some people can never break those habits and patterns. Their lives are so entrenched that these seem difficult, if not impossible to do. So you then start hearing God say, now I'd like you to do, teach a Sunday school class. Well, I've never taught anything before. I don't know if I can do that. Well, here's some training you need to go to. Well, I've never done that. It's just so foreign to me. And step by step you find that each step of that way, God is asking you to give up something, to change something and become different. And it's those old patterns that hold on to you that keep you from doing it. That's what He was saying to the people of Israel. You're not going to be able to go into this land of promise and watch the people around you who are living an entirely different way and live by the instructions I give you. Because the fact is that the instructions God gives us require sacrifice, self-denial and struggle. That's what Jesus said, to follow me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. And it is very difficult for a person to do, to choose to put themselves in a position where they're doing something that they don't really want to do. It's hard for a person to put themselves in a position where they're suffering. Our human nature wants to avoid that. So the very nature of following God requires that. So what Moses was saying to the people of Israel is the same that God says to all of us in any age, if you're going to start living for me, you've got to begin by ridding your life of the powerful forces that have controlled you up to this point. And sometimes they're the most powerful forces in human nature. And we have to say no to those forces, no to those powers, and let God alone control and rule our lives. That's what he was talking about all the way in chapter 10 and 11. You must do everything that I tell you. You must allow me to control your behavior. You must learn to live the way I am telling you you should live. You're not going to succeed at this unless you do. And that's the same picture Jesus gave to people. You remember people came to him and said, one man came and said, I'd like to really follow you. He said, OK, what do I need to do? Well, keep the law. He said, I've done all that. He said, well, one thing you missed, I want you to sell everything you have and give it away and come and follow me. The man was sad and went home sad because he wasn't prepared to pay that price. Every person that came to Jesus, he asked them to pay a price to follow him, to give up their families, to give up their lifestyle, to give up their home, and even some to give up their lives. God always asks us in obedience to him is to do what he did, and that was to be obedient to the Father regardless of how difficult, painful, or costly it might be. That's what God was asking of the people of Israel. So to begin this, the best thing for you to do is to clear this land of any temptation to live a different lifestyle that is comfortable, that is enjoyable, that is fun, that is satisfactory, which is what a lot of these religions were that populated that land. Now, get rid of all of those. Break down their idols, break down their altars, everything that they do. In verse 4, you must not worship the Lord your God in their way. Now he says, you must get rid of all these things, but don't think you can compromise. How would he mean to worship God in their way? Well, the temptation of all these different religious places and religious styles offered them self-indulgence, sex, drinking, a lot of the indulgences of a human fleshly nature. And so it was easy for the people of Israel, which they did over and over again, was to say we're still going to worship Yahweh, God, but what's wrong with worshiping Baal here? We'll have both gods, we'll have both sides of this deal. You're not to say you're worshiping me if you're worshiping and letting something else control your lifestyle but me. I've told you what morality is. You can't live this immoral life and still say you're following me. Impossible. I've told you what I want, so you must make sure that you never compromise. Israel never did say we're not going to worship Yahweh, God. That was never their problem. What they always said when they fell in trouble, if you read through the Old Testament, you see over and over again this happened to them. Every generation almost it happened. The people would start falling away from God and what they called that was they would start worshiping the local gods along with worshiping Yahweh. Here's the key thing that God's trying to say to us and them. You will have no other gods except me. He demanded unilateral control of their life. That's what makes it so hard. If you talk to people out on the street like you're talking about and say, are you a Christian? And they say yes. And you say, well, do you read your Bible? They might say no. Most of them might say no. Do you go to church every Sunday? No. Are you teaching in Sunday school? No. Are you giving a tithe? No. They would say no to so many of the commands but claim a submission to God. What God did not want them to do was get in this situation where they could say, I'm serving God but I'm going to live the way I want to. I'm going to do the things I want to do. You can't do that, he said. You must have ultimate loyalty to me. That you are to seek the place, you're not to worship the Lord your God in their way, but you're to seek the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his name there for his dwelling. To that place you must go. There bring your burnt offerings, sacrifices, your tithes, your special gifts, whatever you vowed to give, and your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks. There in the presence of the Lord, Yahweh your God, you and your family shall eat and shall rejoice in everything you put your hand to because the Lord, Yahweh your God, has blessed you. So he focuses on a key ingredient. You are to do the things I'm going to tell you to do in here, but when you come to worship God you're to come to only one place and it's the place I tell you. Now he doesn't tell them where it is yet. He doesn't say this is where you're supposed to go. But he tells them there is one place and he will choose it. What God begins with is to say, your focus on me is under my control. I have the authority to tell you where to worship and how to worship. And no one can change that because I am an ultimate authority over your worship. What God was focusing on here was when you enter the land the most important thing you must do is to place me in the situation where I have ultimate authority over your life. Now he's going to talk about a lot of other things he has authority over, but even your church life I must have authority over it. You're not to build your temples anywhere. You're not to set your sacrifices or your altars anywhere. You must all come to the one location where I want you to go. This would have been a big burden for them. They had to walk, had to lead their animals they were going to sacrifice and come to this one special place where God would set for them. But I am in control and you must do it my way. Don't you hear a lot of people complain because worship is not like they want it? That's never been an issue the Bible makes important. What should happen is I should say God what do you want me to preach? Denise should say God what music do you want us to sing? And whenever God gives it to us we must say if that's what you ask God that's what we do. It doesn't matter how hard it is, it doesn't matter if I don't like it, it doesn't matter if I know what it is. For you have told us what you want to do. Now of course it could be that I didn't have God's ear that week. Could be Denise just was doing what she wanted. Could be. But if it's done right whatever comes on that time we gather together is from God and you do it His way. Because this is the way I want you to tell me of your love for me. You do it some other way I still pay attention to that. It's like buying a gift for someone that you like. It doesn't mean you care for them, it means you care for yourself. God says in the very beginning worship and lifestyle belongs to me if you're my people and nothing should ever interrupt it. Let's bow for a prayer please. I hope when you sit down in church to worship you'll think about this command that God gave. I have set the place, the time, and the way in which you worship me. Submit yourself to me. I am the Lord. Don't pay any attention to what other people do, pay attention to what I tell you to do. This act of submission is the greatest act of worship that we have. You alone God are in charge. So Father we live in a land surrounded by people who do things their own way. And our temptation is to appeal to them because that makes them want to come, it makes them want to be a part, but we must never compromise what you ask us to do. So make sure Father that we do the things you want us to do. So my own life and mine with your direction, Denise too, and all of us who work at this, that we might do what you've commanded. Worship you as you tell us. In the name of Christ we ask it, amen.