Sermon on the Mount - Matt 6:1-18
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· 68 viewsTHE WHY BEHIND YOUR WORSHIP MATTERS
Notes
Transcript
Section 1 - Opening
When I first became a Christian, the church in North America was right in the middle of what some of us called “The Worship Wars.” Do any of you remember this?
Two significant worship albums dropped that changed music in church. One was from a new worship group out of Australia called Hillsong - have you heard of them? {ALBUM SLIDE 1] With this album they released massive hits that churches around the world sang every week. Songs like “Power of Your Love,” “Let the Peace of God Reign,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and perhaps their biggest hit, “Shout to the Lord,” quickly became beloved church songs.
Another album {ALBUM SLIDE 1] was “Deeper” by delirious? With tons of 4 chord songs this hit youth groups hard. Songs like “Did you feel the mountains tremble,” “I could sing of your love forever,” Shout to the North, “Happy Song” and many more, teenage worship leaders went crazy for this album and they wanted to sing it during church as well.
And that was the crux of the worship wars: older Christians wanted to stay true to hymns and Gaither music done with an organ, and maybe a piano. Young people wanted a music experience that was based on rock and was fun. It was a clash of generations.
And the war was bloody. Churches fought over this issue like crazy. People left churches depending on where they landed. In my hometown in Vernon, a group of young leaders split the church and tried to start their own over this very issue.
It was a bloody mess that hurt the kingdom of God and hurt God’s people.
Those of us who fought in those wars - who cut down other believers and split churches - we were spiritual hypocrites. We chose style of music instead of unity in the body of Christ. We made worship about us, not about God.
In the years since, I have learned that it doesn’t matter what form your worship takes - whether singing new songs, old hymns, praying, fasting, or any other form - what matters is the motivation behind our actions.
THE WHY BEHIND OUR WORSHIP MATTERS
Starting back in July, we began going through what is called the sermon on the mount. It’s a collection of Jesus’ teachings that he gave to his followers to teach them how to live out the kingdom life he invited them, and us, to enter.
Today, we are going to look through the passage that Brandon read earlier (Matthew 6:1-18) and if our hearts and minds are open to what Jesus is saying here, we are going to see that, to Jesus, THE WHY BEHIND OUR WORSHIP MATTERS
Section 2 - Passage Teaching
Earlier in the sermon on the mount, Jesus says to the crowd…
20 “But I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!
Jesus then gave six examples about what that looks like, using the OT law and the teaching of the Pharisees as a springboard to help his people understand that God’s people live out God’s principles from the inside out. In this section, he continues that thought with three examples of worship and how the why behind our worship matters. The first one is…
Giving
Giving
Tithing is a form of worship. Worshipping is about honouring God with our resources, praising God for what he has done, and sharing the good news of Jesus with others. One of the ways we worship is by tithing.
Tithe = “one tenth”
When we talk about tithing today, we are talking about one thing: giving to the church to further the kingdom of God. But when the OT talks about tithing, it talks about three separate tithes that people would give every single year
The Levitical or Sacred Tithe - Numbers 18:23-24
23 Only the Levites may serve at the Tabernacle, and they will be held responsible for any offenses against it. This is a permanent law for you, to be observed from generation to generation. The Levites will receive no allotment of land among the Israelites, 24 because I have given them the Israelites’ tithes, which have been presented as sacred offerings to the Lord. This will be the Levites’ share. That is why I said they would receive no allotment of land among the Israelites.”
The Feast Tithe - Deuteronomy 14:22-23
22 “You must set aside a tithe of your crops—one-tenth of all the crops you harvest each year. 23 Bring this tithe to the designated place of worship—the place the Lord your God chooses for his name to be honored—and eat it there in his presence. This applies to your tithes of grain, new wine, olive oil, and the firstborn males of your flocks and herds. Doing this will teach you always to fear the Lord your God.
The Blessing Tithe - Deuteronomy 14:28-29
28 “At the end of every third year, bring the entire tithe of that year’s harvest and store it in the nearest town. 29 Give it to the Levites, who will receive no allotment of land among you, as well as to the foreigners living among you, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, so they can eat and be satisfied. Then the Lord your God will bless you in all your work.
Being generous has always been a hallmark of God’s people. But, like all things, over time, even something good, like generosity, can become corrupted. They were doing the right practice from the wrong motives. It was good to give to the poor. It’s commanded by God to give to the poor. But what Jesus is calling out are people who were giving, not because they cared about the poor, but because they wanted to be SEEN as being generous. He uses this hyperbolic language about blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to teach us that the value of humble, quiet giving.
The why behind our worship matters. Yes, we are called to be faithful stewards of our money and to give both to the work of the kingdom and to the poor. But we are also supposed to do it with right motives. That’s why Jesus says we should give our financial gifts in private, not making a show of it.
That’s one of the reasons we don’t take an offering up during our worship service. As a church, we believe in generosity - we believe that if you call this church your church home, you should be giving regularly to it. But we want your giving to be between you and God so we don’t have a time where people come around and collect your money. If you want to give, you can either drop your offering in the boxes at the back of the sanctuary at your convenience, or you can give online by e-transfer.
Giving is a form of worship and the why behind our worship matters - are we giving generously from a heart of gratitude and worship, or are we giving so that others see us and praise us?
19th-Century preacher Charles Spurgeon and his wife had a bunch of chickens on their property in London. Every week they would sell all the eggs their chickens laid. Often, people from the church or his neighbours would ask for some free eggs but they refused to give away. Even their close relatives were told they had to pay full price for them. As a result some people labeled the Spurgeons greedy and ungenerous.
The Spurgeon’s accepted these criticisms without defending themselves, and continued the practice for many years. It was only after Mrs. Spurgeon died was the full story revealed. All the profits from the sale of eggs went to support two elderly widows. Because the Spurgeons where unwilling to let their left hand know what the right hand was doing, they endured the attacks in silence, knowing that God would be honoured by their offering.
The why behind our worship matters.
The first form of worship Jesus gives as an example of that truth was giving. The second form is...
Praying
Praying
When I was in Bible college, I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Helen Roseveare, a renowned missionary who served in Zaire, speak. She tells an amazing story of God’s provision through prayer.
She said, "A mother at our mission station died after giving birth to a premature baby. We tried to improvise an incubator to keep the infant alive, but the only hot water bottle we had was beyond repair. So we asked the children to pray for the baby and for her sister. One of the girls responded. 'Dear God, please send a hot water bottle today. Tomorrow will be too late because by then the baby will be dead. And dear Lord, send a doll for the sister so she won't feel so lonely.'
That afternoon a large package arrived from England. The children watched eagerly as we opened it. Much to their surprise, under some clothing was a hot water bottle! Immediately the girl who had prayed so earnestly started to dig deeper, exclaiming, 'If God sent that, I'm sure He also sent a doll!' And buried near the bottom, found one. Our heavenly Father knew in advance of that child's sincere prayer, and 5 months earlier He had led a ladies' group to include both of those specific articles."
Prayer is the ultimate form of worship. In prayer, we praise God for what he has done, we discern what he is doing now, and we trust God to fulfill his good will in the future.
But like giving, prayer - a crucial practice for God’s people - can become corrupted when we seek to be seen as pious and religiously awesome. The why behind our worship matters. If our outer Christianity - the version we project out to others - is holier and more devout than our inner Christianity - the form of faith we have when it’s just us and God - we become the very hypocrites that Jesus criticizes here in this passage.
I want to be clear though - Jesus isn’t condemning public prayers. He himself prayed publicly when he was on earth. Jesus is condemning the attitude - the motivation - of those who pray grandly in public. He is calling out their showboating. And so, the remedy for this is to live out a secret prayer life. To find a place and position where you can be alone with your father in Heaven, bringing him your praises and your requests. By doing this, you honour God by showing you trust and adore him, more than you desire the praise of others.
Because the why of our worship matters, we need to pray not only with our hearts directed properly toward God, but also with our minds.
There’s a cool story in the OT in 1 Kings 18, where Elijah challenges 450 priests who worshipped the false God Baal to a pray-off - a contest to see whose god was real. The Baal priests went first and let’s pick up the story there
26 So they prepared one of the bulls and placed it on the altar. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning until noontime, shouting, “O Baal, answer us!” But there was no reply of any kind. Then they danced, hobbling around the altar they had made. 27 About noontime Elijah began mocking them. “You’ll have to shout louder,” he scoffed, “for surely he is a god! Perhaps he is daydreaming, or is relieving himself. Or maybe he is away on a trip, or is asleep and needs to be wakened!” 28 So they shouted louder, and following their normal custom, they cut themselves with knives and swords until the blood gushed out. 29 They raved all afternoon until the time of the evening sacrifice, but still there was no sound, no reply, no response.
Then it was Elijah’s turn. He built his altar, piled wood on it and the bull that they sacrificed. Then he dug a trench around the altar and had 12 large jars of water poured over the wood and offering. There was so much water, it filled the trench he dug. And then he prayed.
36 At the usual time for offering the evening sacrifice, Elijah the prophet walked up to the altar and prayed, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, prove today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant. Prove that I have done all this at your command. 37 O Lord, answer me! Answer me so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God and that you have brought them back to yourself.” 38 Immediately the fire of the Lord flashed down from heaven and burned up the young bull, the wood, the stones, and the dust. It even licked up all the water in the trench! 39 And when all the people saw it, they fell face down on the ground and cried out, “The Lord—he is God! Yes, the Lord is God!”
Jesus is condemning the style of prayer that the Baal priests did - where there was mindless repetition because they thought if they did it enough, their god would answer.
Jesus says that we can pray simply and completely by following the pattern he lays out in what we call the Lord’s prayer.
On Friday, we had our first drop-in Bible study and after catching up, we looked at this passage. Unfortunately, we only got through the first three words before I had to run home quickly because Hannah had a seizure. By the time I got home, Hannah was totally fine and out of it and so thank you to those who came to the drop in for praying for us. But all that is to say we are going to look at this prayer model that Jesus teaches in more depth at our next drop-in Bible study on Friday, Aug. 16.
For today though, suffice it to say that Jesus gives us a model - a framework for how we can pray in a way that honours and worships God with our hearts and our minds.
10 But I, the Lord, search all hearts and examine secret motives. I give all people their due rewards, according to what their actions deserve.”
This is true of our prayers. The why behind our worship matters. And so when we pray, we need to check our hearts. Do we pray - or do we not pray - because we care about what others think about us or are we praying because we adore and trust the Lord our God?
The first practice Jesus uses as an example of how the why behind our worship matters was giving. The second was praying. And the third is…
Fasting
Fasting
Richard Foster, author of the book “Celebration of Discipline” says that …
Fasting is the voluntary denial of a normal function for the sake of intense spiritual activity. - Richard Foster
The most common form of fasting is from food, which is what was practiced in the OT, through the time of Jesus, and by people of various faiths in the centuries since. In today’s world, one might fast from food, but they might also fast from screens, from social media, or from caffeine, to cite but a few examples.
I don’t know a lot of Christians who practice the discipline of fasting with any regularity. Or maybe I do and they are really good at following what Jesus says here in our passage.
More than most other spiritual disciplines, fasting is the one I think is most neglected. We live in a world today where advertisements for food are everywhere, where we watch cooking shows and eating shows like they are sports events and where most of us have access to so much food, we get to be picky about it.
But in the ancient world, fasting was an important part of religious life. People practiced a variety of types of fasting
Normal Fast (like Jesus did) - food, not water
Partial Fast (like Daniel did) - he did no meat or wine
Absolute Fast (Like Esther or Paul) - No food or water
Corporate Fast - usually fasting was private, but sometimes the God’s people fasted together.
Although the OT Law required only one fast a year - on the day of Atonement - people fasted for a variety of reasons: Repentance, seeking God’s will, and national emergencies.
In fact, some people made fasting a big deal. They not only practiced it a lot, they did so with a bit of a dramatic flair. Jesus tells the story of two men who go to the temple to pray one day. One man was a Pharisee and the other was a tax-collector.
The Pharisee prayed “Thank you God, I’m not like all these sinners - especially that tax-collector. I fast twice a week and always tithe.”
The tax collector stood a distance away. He prayed “O God, be merciful on me, a sinner” and it was him who Jesus says was justified by God.
Even though the Pharisee fasted twice a week and always gave his tithe, God saw through his show and saw that his heart wasn’t contrite before the Lord.
And that’s what Jesus is teaching us here in the sermon on the mount: that our spiritual practices, including fasting, have to come from the heart with the right motives. The why behind our worship matters.
I believe that fasting can have deep spiritual benefit to us. When we fast and then spend that time, or a more dedicated time in prayer, we tend to hear God’s voice a little more clearly. Our spiritual eyes open and we see what God is doing around us. Our intimacy with Jesus often improves.
But for these things to happen when we fast, we have to approach it correctly. We need to ask ourselves if we are fasting for our glory or for God’s. We need to not just deprive ourselves of whatever we are fasting from - we need to turn to God with a humble heart- praying and seeking him.
Fasting is a form of worship and the why behind our worship matters.
Section 3 - Living it out
You see, church, the main thing that Jesus is trying to communicate in this passage is that false faith is about performing so others see you. True faith is about being faithful to God when no one is looking. In Jesus’ time, a lot of the religious life of the Pharisees and teachers of the law was performative - it was for others to see and marvel at how holy they were. Jesus wants our faith life to be genuine, heartfelt, and focussed on him alone.
Since most Christians today don’t cover themselves in ashes when they fast, or make big announcements when they give, I was contemplating what living this out looks like today. In the style of 90’s Jeff Foxworthy, let me break it down:
If you pray more at meals or in public than you do at home, you might be a spiritual hypocrite.
If you give money and expect recognition for it, you might be a spiritual hypocrite.
If you fast, but are more concerned with how much weight you lose than connecting with Jesus, you might be a spiritual hypocrite.
If you refuse to pray at small group or Bible study because you are afraid that others will judge you, you might be a spiritual hypocrite.
If you raise your hands when you sing with the hope people will see how spiritual you are, you might be a spiritual hypocrite.
Most of us have been a spiritual hypocrite at one time or another in some way. But there is good news - that even though we have been unfaithful to God, he has never been unfaithful to us. His love for you and I is so great, that he sent his son to die in our place so that all the hypocrisies that we do can be nailed to the cross with Jesus and we can be resurrected to eternal life.
But even though we all fail - we all make mistakes and sin and act like a hypocrite - we are still called to strive towards growth. We are still called to die to ourselves and re-orient our motives for worship toward Jesus. If we come to worship Jesus with anything other than gratitude, adoration, trust, and/or repentance, then our worship becomes about us, and not him.
THE WHY BEHIND OUR WORSHIP MATTERS
Section 4 - Conclusion
What would it look like if a whole church embraced this ethos?
A generous spirit would abound that would change the world as the church fought against poverty with an abundance of resources and the gospel was unleashed around the world, changing lives.
A people who pray the kingdom of God down to earth and we would see the Lord’s will be done here, as it is in Heaven.
A people whose connection with God is real and intimate and from that connection, would become more fully alive in Christ and share his love with others.
Our passage invites us to self-reflect and, if necessary, re-align ourselves back to Jesus so that we can offer him true worship instead of empty ritual.
After all, THE WHY BEHIND OUR WORSHIP MATTERS.
Pray.
