Revelation 5:1-14
Worship
looks different in heaven than it does in the New Testament which itself looks
different that it does in the Old Testament. But one thing remains essential to
them all: the Lamb who was slain is the object of all heaven and earth’s
worship.
The
way of Old Testament worship was never in doubt. There was a single designated
place: only in the temple in
For
the OT believer, worship was a transitive verb meaning what they did was not
worship “in general” but “worship of the true God.” The Lord revealed how
crucial a matter this was. On
I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the
No
mixture was allowed. God was not to be thought of in any other way than as he
revealed himself. You will remember that when the Israelites mixed the Egyptian
bull-god with the true God who revealed himself in their deliverance judgment
was immediate: three thousand men were put to death.[2]
Not
only was there to be no mixture of false gods with God, but there was to be no
mixture even in the smallest details used to worship the true God.[3]
You may remember the story of the two priestly sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu
whose mixture of incense included different ingredients thus offering God a
“strange fire.”[4]
The punishment for their disobedience was immediate: God put them to death.
Why
was it this way? God’s glory was linked to all these prescriptions.[5]
In them God revealed his name and his presence with his people. The temple was
God’s earthly dwelling place so it was holy and sacred.[6]
The temple was the place where heaven and earth met. It was the place of God’s
self-revelation and the people’s purification, so the temple was how God
mediated his presence with his people.
With that as
background, imagine how you might hear Jesus’ teaching
about New Testament worship when he said to the woman at the well:
Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this
mountain nor in
In
this statement, Jesus shifted the location and manner of worship from the
temple to himself. Jesus is now the true temple according to the gospel of
John.[8]
Jesus is the place where God is revealed, met, and purifies the sinner. Jesus
initiated a new way of relating to God and it was operating in advance in his
person and ministry.[9]
The worship of the true God only takes place through Jesus the ultimate temple.[10]
So,
what does this mean for worship in the church today? If Jesus has radically
transformed the focus and manner of worship from formally structured observances
to “in spirit and in truth,” how does his statement inform what we do together
on Sunday mornings? Does it give us license to say what I’m sure you have often
heard or even said yourself, “I don’t need to go to church to worship God, I
can worship him on my own, in the mountains reflecting on the glory of his
nature as I experience his creation”? Or other arguments: “I can worship God in
my own home” or “I worship God on the golf course.”
A
much used argument, but we have to ask, “Is it true?” Is it biblically accurate
to say these things? After all, we don’t see people falling over dead on Sunday
mornings going out in their bathrobes to get the Sunday paper.
Let’s
recognize some true things about NT worship. First, it is true that Christians
are to treat every part of our lives as an act of worship to God. Paul says: “I appeal to you
therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which
is your spiritual worship.”[11]
We do this by actively seeking to conform every part of our lives to his Word
and use it to resist conforming to the world’s standards.
A second true thing is that
while we need not offer animal sacrifices or go to a sacred place, we are still
to offer the sacrifices of praise to God through Christ.[12]
Faith in Christ’s sacrificial life and substitutionary atoning death is the
only means of acceptable worship to God.
So, this leaves us asking, what
are we supposed to do when we come together on Sunday mornings? Peter helps us
here because what we do is shaped by who we are: (1 Pet 2:4-5)
As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the
sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being
built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual
sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ… But you are a chosen race, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may
proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his
marvelous light.
Have you heard someone use the
phrase, “It is good to be in the house of the Lord today” meaning a building?
Yet, we would all admit that this is not what is really meant because we
understand that this building is not the house
of the Lord. We know that Jesus has replaced the temple and according to Peter,
it is we, the redeemed people of God, the ones who have trusted Christ for our
salvation, the ones transferred from the realm of darkness to the realm of
light, who are the house in which God now dwells.
This has further implications
for us. Take the phrase “let’s go to church.” Being generous, I think we all
know that “the church” is the assembled people of God. Paul confirms this when
he says, “God’s temple is holy and you (meaning the assembled people of God)
are that temple.”[13]
Moreover, this room in which we sit cannot be a sanctuary like the one in the
temple because Christ has replaced the temple and has become to us a sanctuary.
There are no designated priests because all who trust in Christ are designated
priests to God. And if I might say it in passing, there is no such thing as an
ethnic Christian nation, because the only Christian nation God recognizes is
the people who are in Christ right now.
So,
how are we to understand what we do on Sunday mornings? And especially
important in a series like this: how is worship one of the spiritual
disciplines? Remember our working definition for biblical spirituality: “intimacy
with and conformity to Christ.”
My
focus for this spiritual discipline will be to answer the question: what should
we be doing when we come together in a corporate setting like this?
Since
our worship takes on a transformed practice in Christ, we need a definition
that is suitable for all its dimensions of worship: personal and private
worship, family worship and daily living as a living sacrifice. Over the years,
I’ve collected about a half-dozen definitions from a variety of theologians and
near-theologians.[14]
I’m
going to use one definition but apply it to our gathering: “Worship is a way of
gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of his worth. But this cannot be
done by mere acts of duty. It can be done only when spontaneous affections
arise in the heart.”[15]
I
want to leave the definition there for now. It is enough to say two things.
First, all definitions of worship recognize that worship is a response to God’s
initiating work and grace in our lives. Second, worship is rightly said to
permeate everything in our lives as Christians. Moreover, worship is to
permeate everything we do as a church because our worship, corporate or private
is about glorifying God.
So,
why do we gather together? I will answer it this way: “We gather for the
purposes of exhortation, exaltation and edification as the normative practice
of growing spiritually.”
It
seems to me that every believer born of God’s Spirit will want to use all the
means available for growth! Ask yourself, “Do I want to grow in
Christlikeness?” If the response of your soul is a longing, then neglecting
this spiritual discipline is as foolish as neglecting the food you eat.
Lots
of ministry activity took place in the early church in the temple. It wasn’t
just custom or convenience that the new converts gathered there, but a
theological matter: the Scriptures confirmed that the center of God’s
redemptive work would come from the temple. And although Jesus replaced the
temple, the new church didn’t abandon it right away but used it as the place to
proclaim Christ to the nation. So, when Peter and John went to the temple as
they did one afternoon about three o’clock to pray, God used it as the occasion
to heal the lame man so that Peter could preach the good news to those present.[16]
A
bit of a shift takes place in Acts 2:42. The OT practices were transformed into
NT practices: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and
fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” A little further on in
v. 46 Luke tells us, “And day by day, attending the temple together and
breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous
hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added
to their number day by day those who were being saved.”[17]
In this very first account of
Christian worship, I think it is unmistakable that the new Christians – all
Jewish converts -- were consciously aware that what they were doing had taken a
very different form from their former practice. But at the same time many
familiar components of OT worship carried over with them into NT practices.
Praise of God was present, prayer to God was present, so was the sense of
fellowship around a common meal and most centrally, the Word of God was
present.
The major difference taking
place is that what had once been a rigidly structured ritual in which the
worshiper participated from a distance, like an audience member, had become an
intensely personal and inward experience of the soul in response to the
presence of God the Father mediated through the work of the Son and by
application of the Spirit.
I say it that way because at
its heart our worship is a Trinitarian experience of profound personal involvement.
God has brought us to faith in the Son and the Spirit applies what Jesus won in
his death and resurrection to our souls. If the Lamb who was slain was not
slain for me, it would be impossible
for me to offer acceptable worship to God.
The person who is alive in
Christ will have an inward, heartfelt impulse to worship God in “spirit and
truth.” I take “in spirit” to point to an inward personal experience; a rise of
our affections for God not unlike what happens when we admire a beautiful sunset
or the attributes of our spouse. And I take “in truth” to mean an intellectual,
and cognitive understanding of the true things about God revealed by his Word.[18]
This means that we must worship
God as he is and not as we’d like him to be. We worship him as he is: a God of
mercy and justice; of love and wrath; a God who pleads with sinners to come to
repentance and condemns into hell those who refuse. The popular phrase, “I like
to think of God as a God of love and not as a God of wrath,” tells us more about
who you are then who God is.
This is crucial in our day of
anti-doctrinal or sub-biblical thinking. Without a truthful understanding of
the nature and ministry of Jesus Christ, our worship will be skewed if not
misguided. Knowing what Jesus has done for us, and treasuring him guards us
against the ultimate killer of worship namely honor[ing] the Lord with our lips
when in reality our heart is far from him.[19]
I chose Revelation 5:1-14 today
because our worship is of the Lamb who was slain and is alive again. When we
worship corporately, this message brings us together and identifies our first
purpose for being together: exhortation.
The OT temple was the place where God met
with priests and people and where prophets revealed what was on God’s mind.[20]
This theological understanding was true for the apostles[21]
and is still true for us today.[22]
Therefore,
preaching about Christ has to be at the heart of all true Christian worship.
Anyone concerned about God-glorifying worship will be concerned about the
proclamation of the gospel in the church as much as in the world; in private
conversation as well as public proclamation.
We
need to hear the good news every week about the Lamb who was slain. The topic
of the blood of Christ has become an indelicate topic today – even by some in
the church. But if we take our cue from the OT, we will understand why the good
news is good.
When
the OT priests worshiped they were well aware of the presence and the need for
the blood of the sacrifices. It was everywhere as they went about their duties.
Every morning and evening, a lamb died as a reminder of the need for daily
pardon of sin if God is to be present with us. The blood of the lamb was
sprinkled on all the furniture of the temple. The blood was on the altar, on
the veil, on the hangings, on the floor – no one could avoid seeing it. The
abundance of blood was to show clearly how thoroughly sin has completely
polluted us. Without God’s provision of the Lamb of God, no one would be able
to approach him. We come to him by way of his Son or we don’t come at all; he
will send us away.
This
gospel of Christ offers pardon for the sinner and is the ground of hope for the
believer. Believers need this reminder that though we are in the world, and
though we are not perfect, our lives are covered by the good news of Christ’s
blood shed for us. This truth, this true event, is our great blessing.
However,
if you are not a Christian, it means that the blood of Christ is not covering
your sin and you are exposed not to blessing from God but to his condemnation.
This
gospel is offered to you this morning. If you will, come to Christ. Only in a
new relationship with Christ – your old one will not do -- you will receive the
blessing of sin’s forgiveness and acceptance with God. You don’t need to go to
a special place or perform special actions. This promise is as near to you as
your own breath. Here is the direction of the promise: turn away from things
that are turning you away from receiving this Word of salvation and turn in
trust to Christ and you will receive the gift of eternal life.
When
we gather together, and God’s Word is preached or taught, God is at work. Think of God as a workman who works on us
through his Word. God promised that his Word will do everything necessary to
accomplish his will in our life.[23]
Isaiah gives us a picture of it: God’s word is like rain and snow coming down
from heaven watering the earth, making wheat grow so that farmers and bakers
can produce bread to nourish the body.[24]
God’s word comes like rains
that comfort and nourish the inner spiritual nature. God’s word melts cold
hearts or transforms the stony heart. God’s Word sanctifies. God’s word
perfects our faith. One writer said that the main goal of preaching God’s word
is that God is glorified in the restoration of his image in the souls and lives
of those who hear.
Since
God’s word is powerful enough to do all this, we should listen well. I will
suggest four things for productive hearing on Sunday mornings:
1.
Come expecting
that God has something specific to say to you.[25]
2.
Receive what
is preached with joy; study it later and pray about it often.[26]
3.
Commit
yourself to practice prayerful attentiveness; before, during and after each
sermon.[27]
4.
Commit
yourself to do something with what you hear.[28]
I
want to suggest to you a way that you will know that you’ve heard from God
during a corporate gathering. You might say something like this: “You know when
I went to FBC this morning, I was proud and kind of irritated with everything.
After the service, I left humble and thankful. I went with some fleshly stuff
rising in my heart; I left more heavenly minded and gracious. I left today
freer in Christ than last week!”
God’s
people gather in order to exult in God. There are two words that sound alike
but have somewhat different meanings and serve different purposes when applied
to corporate worship. The first, exaltation, means “to extol,” or “to promote.”
But exultation means “to glory in” or “to boast.”
Boasting
is something the Scriptures warn against. No one I know suffers the braggart
patiently. They talk incessantly of themselves and their accomplishments. When
they brag, they are making the confession that they can stand on their own two
feet without the help of anyone. Their self-exultation is a kind of
emotional-Vesuvius erupting in self-congratulations for their wonderful selves.
Worshipful
exultation calls us to boast in the Lord. So, we might say that when the church
gathers, we do so to boast in Jesus Christ:
·
Far be it from
me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.[29]
·
For we
[Christians] are the real circumcision, who worship by the Sprit of God and
boast in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.[30]
When
we come together on Sunday morning, how do we boast in Christ? I want to focus
on just one way we do that on Sunday morning, though it’s not the only way. The
first thing that comes to mind is that we use music for this purpose.
Therefore, we must consider two things: what we sing and how we sing.
We
give thought to the words of songs for their theological content and how they
serve to reflect the doctrinal themes or direction for the service. They are
not randomly chosen; they are not preferentially chosen because they are snappy
or upbeat or somebody’s favorites. The words of a song are intended to convey a
message – a message about who God is or what Christ has done like we see in the
Revelation passage. Therefore, it only makes sense that we want our songs to be
Bible-saturated, Christ-centered and theologically sound; just as we want our praying,
or sermons.
Why?
We are instructed to sing God’s Word to one another for the purpose of
exultation and education. Paul tells the gathered church in
Music’s
function seems to be the most important biblical consideration. Perhaps this is
why it has become so divisive. If we consider the passage from Revelation, then
we can understand the role music plays on a Sunday morning. Notice the dense
theology of the song to the Lamb: the focus is on redemption through Christ who
alone is uniquely qualified to restore fallen creation and the only one worthy
of such exclusive worship. There is enough theology here to sustain weary and
persecuted saints and edify the church in the hope of Christ’s victory over
death, hell and sin. There is enough glory here to convict every sinner who
ignores the work of Christ’s cross and at the same time make uncomfortable
those who oppose Christianity’s exclusive claims of only one God with all
authority over heaven and earth. This is the kind of song that will be forever
sung by the church in eternity. It is the kind of song that is more than
relevant, it is essential to the life and faith and witness of the church.[32]
When
we come together on Sunday morning, we know that we will sing together. Singing
is not a spectator sport but an exercise of our faith. How then should we sing?
I will commend to you four ways to sing, but remember that our singing is a
matter of the heart, fueled by the truths of Scripture that fill our heads.
1.
Sing in robust humility. Exultation in the Lord is always accompanied by a
humble attitude grounded in the fear of the Lord. But humility does not mean
uncertainty. Robust humility gets its confidence from looking away from our
failures in sin and toward what God has done, knowing he will keep us. This
cannot make us proud people but humble people recognizing that God gets the
glory for what he has done for us in Christ.
We
can hear this in two verses from Deuteronomy:
·
You shall fear the LORD your God. You shall serve
him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise
[you could put the word “hymn” in this place][33].
He is your God, who has done for you these great and terrifying things that
your eyes have seen.[34]
·
And the LORD has declared today that you are a
people for his treasured possession, as he has promised you, and that you are
to keep all his commandments, and that he will set you in praise and in fame
and in honor high above all nations that he has made, and that you shall be a
people holy to the LORD your God, as he promised.[35]
2.
Sing in confident dependence. Ps 5:11 captures this attitude of confident
dependence upon the Lord: “But let all them who take refuge in you be glad, let
them ever sing for joy; and may you shelter them, that those who love your name
may exult in you.”
3.
Sing in self-surrendering thankfulness. Again, with Paul we can sing and testify to the
powerful work of the gospel in our lives. Paul said, “By the grace of God I am
what I am . . . what do I have that I did not receive?”[36]
Therefore, I boast in what he has done and continues to do.
4.
Sing in joyful sufferings. When you come to church on a Sunday morning and
your heart is heavy from some devastating news or costly affliction that has
come crashing into your life, be determined to sing the way Paul sang, “more
than this we exult in our sufferings. . .[why?] because God’s love has been
poured in to our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Because while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died . . . for us
[and] we have been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him
from the wrath of God.” You may crawl in here on your hands and knees weighed
down by a spouse who left you for another or a child who screamed, “I want
nothing to do with your God!” What will you do? You will say, “O my God, in you
I trust, do not let me be ashamed . . . You are my portion and my salvation; I
stand firm in your steadfast love; and though you slay me, yet will I put my
hope and my trust in you.”
Congregational
worship is from start to finish boasting, meaning that we together declare the
mighty deeds and marvelous works of God whether in song, or prayer, or
sermons.
I have a homework assignment for the
leaders of each ABC this morning. Before you begin the normal routine in your
ABC, start with reading 1 Cor 14 and, ignoring the obvious questions about
tongues and prophecy, just focus attention on how many ways Paul says we should
do everything to “build up the church.”[37]
In fact, he says whenever we are together we should strive to excel in building
up the church.
Notice
what makes building up happen: instruction and contribution to learning about
Christ with encouragement of the heart and consolation of the soul. Also,
notice what happens to unbelievers who may be present in a Christian gathering.
The Lord, who is present, opens up the heart, reveals the secrets that are in
there, the Spirit convicts them of their alienation from God by their sin and
their need for the Savior God has provided. No one sees that work but it is
going on because of the exhortation of the Word, and it leads that person to
fall on his face, worship God, and declare that God is present.
This
is how our ABCs are like little churches fulfilling the same mandate of Hebrews
10:24: to stir one another up to love and to do good works for each other.
Jesus
is the Head of the Church[38]
who himself has promised to build it.[39]
He uses various means in his building program through many different kinds of
people. His building includes offices and gifted people to serve one another.
But no matter what gift or service each one has our resource is Christ, “from whom the whole
body [is] nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments [that would be through Christians serving
each other], grow[ing] with a growth that is from God”[40]
who is present with us when we gather together.
The next time anyone says to
you that they can worship so much better at home or in the mountains or on the
golf course, let them know that you have never seen exhortation, exultation or
edification happen in those places the way they happen when the people of God
come together to serve the Lord on a Sunday morning.
[1]Exodus 20:2-6.
[2]Ex 32.
[3]Exodus 30:9, 38. The punishment for ignoring or dismissing this command was death.
[4]Lev 10:1-2.
[5]See Ex 29:42-46.
[6]I Kings 8:1-21. All the furniture in it for the performance of worship was likewise holy and sacred. All the people set apart for the service of the temple were holy and sacred.
[7]John 4:20-24.
[8]John 1:14; 2:19.
[9]See Luke 5:21-24.
[10]Matt 1:22-23; John 1:14.
[11]Rom 12:1. My italics.
[12]Heb 13:15.
[13]1 Cor 3:17.
[14]Any definition of worship belongs in the category of theology that describes the nature of the church.
[15]John Piper, Desiring God, (Sisters: Multnomah Books, 1986), 83.
[16]Acts 3:1-10; 4:1; 5:21
[17] This practice of meeting together for common meals and instruction went from the Jewish converts to the Gentile converts and can be seen in Acts 20:7ff reporting on one of Paul’s missionary journeys. The church came together the first day of the week – Sunday – for table fellowship and a lengthy sermon by Paul.
[18]This idea is take from John Piper, Gravity and Gladness on Sunday Morning: The Pursuit of God in Corporate Worship, (Minneapolis: Desiring God Ministries, 2000), 8-9. Also from Donald Whitney, The Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1991), 83-85.
[19]Matt 15:8-9.
[20]See how God used Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel to prophesy while in the temple about the temple and about the sins of the people against their God who dwelt in the temple.
[21]Acts 2:46; 3:11-26; 4:2; 5:42. See also Hebrews 1:1-4 for what’s on God’s mind about Christianity as the only saving faith.
[22]The Word of God was to come from Mt. Zion (Pss 9:11; 14:7; 48; 50:2; 53:6; 87:5, etc.)
[23]Jn 17:19.
[24]Isa 55:10f. The image should also remind us that Jesus is the true bread from heaven that we need most because we don’t live by bread alone but by every Word that comes from God’s mouth.
[25]1 Sam 3:9. “. . . if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servants hears.’”
[26]Acts 17:11. “They received the Word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”
[27]Ps 130:5. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits and in his word I hope.”
[28]Jms 1:25. “The one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty and perseveres being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”
[29]Gal 6:14.
[30]Phil 3:3.
[31]Eph 5:19.
[32]See Eph 3:10.
[33]The Hebrew word is t’hillah meaning “laudation; specifically a hymn.” Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary, e-Sword.
[34]Deut 10:21.
[35]Deut 26:19.
[36]1 Cor 15:10; 4:7.
[37]See vv. 3, 4, 5, 12, and 17.
[38]Eph 1:22; 4:15; 5:23; Col 1:18; 2:10.
[39]Matt 16:18.
[40]Col 2:19.