Gateway Church's Podcast
The Way of Worship
I want to go directly to the Word of God and ask you to go there in the 25th chapter of Exodus with me this morning. As you turn there, I want to bring greetings from Anna who will be with me next week, and that will be the third and concluding week of this series that I'm having with you. And we're dealing with a theme you see on the overhead screen, Watershed Worship. And if you were not here last week, I'll give some interpretation of that and we continue. And the term is one I've never used before, this series, while obviously dealt with a subject of worship many times. And as we come to this passage of Scripture and turning there, I'm very, very moved because of happening in our family this last week. And I'm going to get to that momentarily, but I not only want to read this, I will add an addendum passage from the New Testament, and I'm not going to ask you to turn there so we're not flipping pages, but if you're making notes, you can quickly jot down first Peter chapter 2, first Peter chapter 2, and I will read a few verses from that chapter as companion to the text we're looking at together in Exodus chapter 25. I'm going to read three pairs of two verses, the first and second and then eight and nine and then we'll go down deeper in the text. Then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, "Speak to the children of Israel that they bring me an offering. From everyone who gives it willingly with his heart, you shall take my offering." And let me say that this offering was actually materials by and large that contained precious stones and contained gold and silver. It was the building pieces for the tabernacle, and the list of things that were prescribed there are what ensues to verse 8. Going back to the universe to those who give willingly that verse 8, "Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them." Would you read those words with me together? Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. According to all that I show you, that is the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its furnishings, just so you shall make it. No elaboration of that right now, but I'll pick up on that and remind you of it next week, though we'll take a different text than this. Verse 21, "In between the ark of the covenant," or the ark of the testimony, as it's sometimes called, "is described in detail how to build it," verse 10 through 20. And then in concluding of verse 21, "You shall put the mercy seat on top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the testimony," that is the tablets of the Ten Commandments, that I will give you, "and there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat from between the two cherubim." It goes on in the ensuing chapters to describe the establishment of the Old Testament priesthood that would provide leadership in the worship in the tabernacle as they minister to the Lord. And in that regard, I want now to read the assignment that transitions to us under the New Covenant, chapter 2 of 1 Peter. Coming to him, that is to the Lord Jesus, as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious. You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house. Let them make me a sanctuary. You are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, verse 9 and 10. You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Judah arrived on Thursday morning. I had just flown back from Orlando where I had been the day before. And Judah, whose name means praise, was born Thursday morning. A week ago, I announced the preceding week we had a great grandchild added to our family. This week it was Judah. I don't know of any next week, but at the rate we're going, who knows, but may be. We do have another one coming in July. And it was such a delight when I was going to my time of prayer yesterday before catching the plane here. I picked up off of the counter in the kitchen a copy that had been sent to us email a picture of Judah only minutes after he was born. Incidentally, you know what the pictures of babies right after they were born look like. It takes the gifted discernment to find out really what it is. You know, as this animal, mineral or vegetable because of the distortion of features oftentimes and things normalized shortly reminds me of a routine that Bill Cosby did years ago where he's talking about the birth of their first child. And he tells the description of that child and he says he went in and saw his wife and he says, "I hope you're proud of yourself, delivery in the way that only Cosby can do it. You're proud of yourself. You have given birth to a lizard." Well, Judah looks a little bit better than that, but I took his picture to prayer with me yesterday morning, very early. I had a fairly early flight, but there's a pattern of things in a special way that on Saturdays that I pursue in prayer. And I wanted to have that baby's picture with me. It was a very, very moving experience as I prayed for family members and now added him to the list. I'm so pleased his family, his mom and dad know why they chose his name because Judah means praise and they want this boy to worship God. And I can tell you he will be trained that way and it will not be coercion, it will be by understanding because it is people who understand the heart of God and why he calls us to worship. And that begins to possess our hearts. It transforms everything about the approach to worship, which in turn transforms us. And as we deal with this subject, we have picked up the theme Watershed Worship, which I explained last week as a theme that I used because of that invisible line up in the Rocky Mountains that defines ecologically and geologically the place of the great divide where water that flows throughout the United States from those mountains goes from the great divide either east or west, the division takes place. The drama of the picture that you have in that is that as you look to the east, there are those fertile and fruited plains that we sing about in the magnificent song America the Beautiful, which was written from up there near that great divide. The lyrics were written from a person visiting that site. And you look to the massive harvest fields that spread to the east where the water flows and disperses itself throughout that region. The other way, the water that flows to the west, by and large, goes through the Colorado River, which does not disperse broadly, in fact, has carved a gorge over the centuries, the geologic ages, and carved a gorge that basically leaves everything else around it, a desert. And without elaboration, because it's not really the point, but it is a very dramatic picture in terms of nature around us, of that which makes a decision of what will flow of the bounty of what is given to us from heaven. And as we worship, watershed worship is intended that through our lives, they're not only proportional refreshing, but a flow that becomes a bountiful flow to those around us and extends and disperses, whereas the other way, as you have the Colorado River going deeper and deeper, which just carries a channel of water with very little dispersion, is the ease with which irrespective of whether it's a goal of our life or not, we can be so caught up in ourselves that all we do is get deeper and deeper in our own focus and lose a sense of what God wants to flow of his life upon us and through us. Watershed Worship is our thing. Today I want you to look with me, if you will, at the heart of God in worship. The title of message is The Way of Worship, and the way we worship will very much be determined by what we understand to be the invitation, the call. And the call really is from God's heart, and nothing could be more tender than the way it's cast in this text. The Lord has brought his people out of bondage. He has brought them to himself, and through the stages of first the Passover, which came about by reason of his visitation to Moses first, at the burning bush, Moses responds to the call reluctantly, but he goes because of the constraint of God upon his life and his desire. For the well-being of his people, the promise they would be delivered, and then faces the entire struggle that has to do with the constant rejection of Pharaoh to hear the summons. Let my people go. The plagues that come, finally, the surrender after a fashion of Pharaoh, the escape of the people, their release, and then Pharaoh's changed his mind. Coming to the Red Sea, the massive and marvelous and miraculous deliverance that takes place at the Red Sea, their passage through their adversaries, cut off behind them and the triumph of a new life, and they're trucking through a desert situation that is not the target of their destiny, but it is there that shortly they come to a place where two things happen, and it's Mount Sinai. If you ask people what happened to Mount Sinai, most everyone will say that's where the ten commandments were given, but there was something else that was given there. Not only the ten commandments, the word, but the tabernacle, how to worship God. The word and worship, say it with me, will you, the word and worship. The living, the incarnational flow of the life of God in us to make the word come alive really comes out of the natural overflow, or the spiritual overflow of our commitment to worship God, because simply the accumulation of the word in our head is not what transforms us. The enlightened mind calls us then to specific choices, decisions along the way, and those decisions begin with saying, Lord, I'm going to move with you in a partnership, a friendship, a fellowship of worship, and as I move in that relationship, I will be drawn ever deeper the more that I remember the heart that is seen in this text. And that heart speaks so beautifully, so when God says, have the people bring an offering, he is not looking for anything for himself, he needs nothing. He's wanting a people to do when we assess it an almost unimaginable thing when you think for what reason. God says, I want them to build me a house. God who created all things, God who is dwells in the heavens of the heavens, is basically saying in this text, he says, I'd like for them to build a tent, a movable tent, kind of a campsite, but he said it's because I want to dwell among them. I want you to hear the heart of God. I want you to hear the God who made all things, who made you and me, who made little baby Judah that arrived in his arms of his mother, Lindsey, who occasioned the call of his daddy, who when James called the house, Anna told me, he says, grandma, he says, the babies arrived, his name is Judah, and he is just over 20 inches long, and he weighs 7 pounds and 13 ounces, and he is awesome. And that didn't surprise me given the genetics of his great grandparents. And it's just the heart of God, as I feel for that little child, as his mother and father do, the heart of God like is like that for us. I want the richest and most wonderful things, not in the sense of the temporal wealth of this world, but the richness of a life that flows, that flows with the bounty from heaven, and that learns that the secret of that flows, the transmission of it beyond yourself, and it begins with worship, opening to him, and God says, I want to dwell among them. I want to be with them. God could simply from heaven at a distance just command a song, a well-known song of a couple of decades ago of that medler's issue. She's saying from a distance, God is watching us. And so many people think of him somewhere out there and he says, I want to come and be where you are. I want to build a house, and it's not build a house for something of his own need, but build a house by a conscious decision on our part. I want to talk about the word "house" for just a minute. The word "house" in the New Testament scriptures, the word "oikos," is a word that describes basically four things. The first thing is the place where you live, your home, the dwelling, whether it's a mobile home or whether it's a palace somewhere, that the place where you live. It's the scope of influence that you've been given, and usually we have no sense of the measurement of that. It is always greater than we think. People that are touched by our life, perhaps only once or twice over an extended period of time or day by day where we work, but it's the scope of our influence. It is our family, the circle of those with whom we're acquainted, and that's more than those immediate in our bloodline, but more distant. It's that influence, and then it's the matter of your business. Where you carry on your business. I was thinking, for example, we often think of the person that operates a business, but the place of your vocation, and the picture came to my mind, for example, of someone who is a checker in a supermarket line. People just are moving on by with the groceries, and they're sailing things over that computer that is picking up the image and totaling a price, and as they then prepare things, sack them and pass them on. Somebody who knows the Lord and the capability of being the kind of person that, in fact, because I've seen in a store near our house, a person who does that in such a way you like to get in their line, that it's even worth waiting an extra thing, because of the whole demeanor with which they reflect, whatever it is that's in their life. I have a little doubt in that person's case that it's the life of Jesus in them, because I know something about them, but it comes through where they are, and you know as well as I do that people that live in the flow of the life of the Lord are not people with some polyanny smile on their face or who concocting some superficial look of spirituality, but they're just genuine people because they are being made increasingly into what God invented them to be in the first place, and that's unique, and it's truly natural by reason of the great goodness of God who has created the possibilities of a healthy and whole kind of person within us and how many things sour and oppress and squeeze out the life God has, and the Lord comes to flow it in. In watershed worship, people that walk with Him fills up the flow and it overflows. I can imagine that a person like that would have somebody that goes through the line so many times that they sometimes say, "You know, you just, you always seem so just warm and cheery, you know, and I just, why are you like that?" And just while a person's checking things through, say, "Well, thank you very much." I guess it's just that I know the Lord and Jesus is good and they go ahead and sack things up and don't push a thing, and to that, it's very likely they may get the response, "Well, that's just great. Where do you go to church?" And doors open that way, and it could be on any terms. Somebody is selling insurance, someone that's operating just the simplest business or the most elaborate oversight role that you have from a very significant managerial or ownership role. The Lord wants the place of our house, and all of these things are not calling for a worship of God that creates the Old King James called where it says in 2nd and 1 Peter 2, "A special people the Old King James used the word peculiar." And peculiar, as that was translated in the early 1900s, meant very, very special. We would call it precious because that's how the Lord views us. Not in the sense of some effeminate description, but in the sense of a tender value that He puts on us, His own special people, treasured people. And yet I've seen people who, on the grounds of that verse some years ago, they thought peculiar meant something else that today it means, and they fulfilled the concept, by the way, that worship became sort of a, just a wonderful life. And don't you love Jesus, and something that you just, it's kind of like a flying saucer. They just kind of float off into the ether. There is something, something of the genuineness of life. The Lord wants to show. He said, "I want to dwell with you," and He said, "and I want to meet you." You say, "Well, dwell, meet, and I've lived together, dwelled together, for 56 years." But there are times in just the duties of life, this last week I had a very unusual schedule, and I was in four cities in four days, this being the first. And in that travel, when I got home, I really, we'd just come back not long before that, for 23 days on a trip together, and had a marvelous time in the ministry and three nations on that trip, by the way. One of those nations was in Australia, and my job there was, of course, to fulfill the John the Baptist role, to prepare the people for Roberts coming. And as we returned from that trip, this rather short trip of four days, though there was a weak hiatus between the return from the other trip, I came home, very, very lonesome to be with her. And it was a happy feeling of lonesomeness, when we got home, when I got home from the airport, I said, "Honey, I'm going to unpack these things," and she was busy doing something when I arrived from the airport that day, last Thursday morning. And she, I told her, in about 45 minutes, let's just get a cup of tea and go sit in the front room and talk, which we did for probably all 45 minutes or so, just being with her. The Lord says, "I want to meet you. I don't just want to live in the same place with you, I want to meet you," to open up, to be with Him. And then He says, "I want to meet you and speak with you." The Word of God comes alive so dramatically in an atmosphere of worship. We can accumulate information, or we can experience transformation in the Word. And I'm not suggesting that every time we sit down and read the Bible that everything will burst out with fresh revelation and joy, but I'm saying the frequency of that increases when we live in the simplicity and integrity, in the simplicity, recognizing it's not complex and integrity that we give time to it and purely open our heart to Him and say, "Lord, here I am before you," and give ourselves to worship to Him. He says, "I want to meet you there." Now someone may say, "Well, Jack, these verbs are there in the passage we read, but you're here in the Old Testament and the relationship of that, you're making a lot of points, but how does that relate New Testament wise?" Well, to begin with, the reason that I read the New Testament passage is because it focuses on the New Testament called the priesthood, which is a priestly ministry in the Old Testament. It's a continuum under the covenant of God of the idea that there is a tabernacle. In the New Testament, the tabernacle describes the house that I've already defined. It's the details and the places of our life, but in the New Testament it's also the gathering place of a people, and it's not the structure even there. Structures are necessary. Just as a family needs a house, this growing family is building a larger house as we speak, but the issue, really, is the people are being built together a spiritual house. When it says in 1 Peter chapter 2, "You as living stones are being built together." It's not talking about the rocks, mortar, the boards, and so forth of the steel trusses and so forth that are being shaped to make a physical structure. It's talking about people who, by their openness to the presence of God, become a house, a people. Whether it's a congregation of 30 or of 30,000. It's a group of people who understand worship and live in it. It becomes far more than the things that excite and ignite when we come together. As delightful as it is for me, for years of pastoring to have great worship teams who helped us, great choral groups, as happy as it is when I come here and see the dedication and enjoy the quality of worship music here, the bottom line is worship is not about the music. The music assists us in our worship. Will someone say amen? And it is our entry into our drawing near to Him. And as we do so, then the Lord begins to reveal Himself and that revelation takes place at a specific site where He's welcome and then at a place defined and I draw toward the conclusion of this teaching. A place that's defined when the Lord said, "And I will meet you and speak to you from above the mercy seat." The Ark of the Covenant, which I think most of us are very aware, was a box about this long and about that wide square on the end. And in it were the Ten Commandments. In it was a pot of the manna, the miracle that was the day by day of bread and the wilderness. And then if you didn't know this, beside the Ten Commandments in there was a stick. And it's a stick that blossomed and blossomed miraculously. And that branch was, there's a story that goes back, that had to do with a contest for a contesting of Aaron's leadership as a priest. And it's a testimony referred to in the New Testament of how that budding branch verified that Aaron was the one in fact to be the high priest. It's a picture of the resurrection life of Jesus bursting out of the branch that was cut off and dead at the cross and the life burst forth again and verifies his high priesthood. That if the blood of Jesus was powerful enough to take Jesus to the grave as he died for my sin, then my sins were powerful enough to keep him there if the blood didn't atone. But the atoning blood is what that testimony is about of the mercy seat. The mercy seat was where once a year on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, that the blood would be put on the mercy seat and the people would have the reminder of God's covenant to forgive their sins. And that depicts, of course, the it is finished of our Savior. And it is there that we come through the blood. We sang two songs this morning, the last two of which focused on the blood of Jesus and His cross. Thank you for the cross, Lord. Thank you for the nail pierced hands. We sang in the blood of Jesus. Set me free. The blood of Jesus is my victory. Last evening I wept and I teared up this morning again because it is through the power of the blood that we have certain entry into the presence of God. And the center point of our praise forever will be worthy is the Lamb whose blood was shed. And it is because in the pouring out of His life, He is offered to us the opportunity for the flowing out of His life toward us and His life in us and His life through us. And as we worship Him, it is the way of not just honoring what He did, but opening to its intent. Oh, the blood of Jesus, it washes wide as snow. But listen, oh, the blood of Jesus, it releases all life's flow just as well. And as we come together around this theme these days, I want to invite you to continue to let the refreshing of life's central truth, to know the Lord, worship Him, and enjoy Him forever, and in declaring the wonder of what was done in the cross and in singing of the marvels of His person, surrender ourselves to Him. And God keep us from anything that simply becomes the ritual of habit. God keep us from the calluses that can come on the soul because we know so well how to do what we call worship, and the Lord is instead calling us to a fresh surrender and a freshness of flow that there come the abundant fruitfulness that He intends for all of us. Little baby Jude is on His way, and as long as I remember that when I keep my heart child-like with praises and simplicity and openness, the flow will continue on, into, and through my life in years. How many of you say I'm a taker of it? Just lift one hand. Go on, stand up with me, and let's lift the other hand at the same time. And I want you to just sing with me as conclude. And we're going to sing, "Oh, the blood of Jesus releases all life's flow." Sing those words, sing, "Oh, the blood of Jesus, oh, the blood of Jesus releases all life's flow," and just this one line added, "The greatest found I know." Everybody say amen? Amen. God bless you today. [APPLAUSE]