Worship

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Youth Bible Study Tuesday Nights 6

Bible College April 6th

Introduction

Surrender

In this series, We only have one week left after today. Here’s what we have talked about so far:

Faith - expressed in sacrifice and self-denial

Enlargement - God’s process of moving us from obscurity to influence. 

Fathering - Imparting values without requiring conformity. 

Wholeness - the process of being “healed in heart and formed for service”

Openness - Embracing the whole body of Christ in every genuine move of God. 

Vision - Prophetic revelation inspiring disciplined obedience. 

Worship - The Expression Of A Surrendered Life

If you were to take a disciple of Jesus and look deeply into his DNA, this is what you’d see a worshipper. You’d see someone with a heart to worship our king.

The message behind this statement today is this…IF we have truly surrendered our life to God, we will worship. Worship is the outward expression of what God is doing in your heart.

Define Worship - It’s music and it’s our daily service to Jesus.

I will use these ideas interchangeably today.

Main Text

Romans 12:1 ESV

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.

1. Disciples Worship With Their Bodies

Present Your Bodies - Paul starts his encouragement with the idea that we should present our bodies to God. This means practically that worship is a holistic thing. It’s not just a spiritual thing, but it involves your body and spirit and in fact, Paul is defining presenting your body…as spiritual worship. For him, spiritual worship starts and ends with what we do with our bodies.

This is different than what most of us think about when it comes to worship.

We think of worship as only connecting to God in spirit. The music hits just right and the lights are low and the band hits the right notes, then that’s real worship. And certainly Jesus talks about worshipping in Spirit and Truth, so we don’t disregard the Spirit, but if we only connect to him emotionally and spiritually, but we withhold our bodies from him, we have missed the mark.

We are not gnostics who think Spiritual equals good and physical equals bad. We believe that God created both and both are good in his sight. And there is a deep connection in what we do physically and what happens spiritually.

Our Physical Actions Have Spiritual Repercussions.

There is a reason that many of the Psalms talk about the postures we should have in worship. When we present our bodies physically toward God, that opens up our Spirits for what God wants to do in us.

The word for worship in the Hebrew language that is used most frequently in the OT is shachah and it could be translated this way - to bow down, to fall flat, to humbly beseech, to show reverence. In other words, worship has a physical aspect to it.

This is why when God gives us instruction about worship in the Psalms, it tells us to:

Kneel Before Him (Ps 95:6)

Bow Down (Ps 5:7)

Clap Your Hands (Ps 47:1)

Shout To The Lord (Ps 47:1)

Dance Before Him (Ps 149:3)

Use Instruments (Ps 150:3)

Worship With Loud Cymbals (Ps 150:5)

Lift Up Our Hands (Ps 134:2)

We Should Worship As God Directs - Too many people I’ve heard say things like, I don’t stand during worship or clap or sing loudly or lift my hands because I don’t feel comfortable. Listen to me, it ain’t about you. It’s about Him! It’s not about what kind of worship you feel comfortable giving, it’s all about what kind of worship HE DESERVES!

To worship God in truth is to worship him as he commands.

- R. C. Sproul

And HE deserves to be worshipped in the ways that HE has instructed us. We don’t get to pick and choose, we must worship according to his word, according to his ways, according to his will.

Imagine a husband and wife. If the wife says, honey I really feel loved by you when you wash the dishes and the husband only brings her flowers and never washes the dishes, what kind of marriage would that be? In the same way, when we sing to God but refuse to lift our hands or clap, we are saying God I know what you said, but I don’t really care.

We worship with our bodies, because we have a model.

Jesus Worshipped With His Body - Jesus, our model, our savior is the ultimate example in discipleship. He’s the master. What did he do? He worshipped with his body.

Not only do we see him lifting up his hands in the gospels, we see that he embodied the fullness of worship which is complete surrender to God and he did this with his body. We hear this phrase repeated about him throughout the New Testament…he was obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

This leads me to my second point.

2. Disciples Worship Through Surrender

True Worship Is Marked By Surrender - Those who have not surrendered to Him, do not worship. They may attend a church service. They may know the words to the songs, they may even sing a little, but that’s not the mark of a disciple, a disciple’s worship is a surrendered life.

As A Living Sacrifice - Paul says present your bodies as a living sacrifice. He is not talking about a sacrifice for sins. Jesus is our sacrifice. We don’t need another and we can’t add anything to our salvation. It’s by grace alone.

Paul here is talking about what the surrendered life might feel like…it might feel like a sacrifice. You are dying to self and that hurts. Your flesh is being put into subjection and you are killing sin through the power of the Holy Spirit…these are literally his words from earlier in the book.

Romans 8:13 ESV

For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

This sounds a bit painful, putting to death the deeds of the flesh. This is what the disciple is called to do. We must kill our sinful desires.

Colossians 3:5 ESV

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

There are many here in this church who are living in the flesh. You are participating in sexual immorality, with alcoholism, with gossip, with covetousness. You have to put to death the deeds of the flesh. Make war against your flesh.

Paul calls this a living sacrifice. You are still alive, but flesh must be killed. In a sacrifice something has to die.

Why do I think this?

Look at what he says after this term living sacrifice - Holy & Acceptable:

Holy - If you are still living a sinful life, let me tell you, there is nothing holy about that. Holy is the absence of sin.

Acceptable - This is a Greek word that means pleasing. Your life should be a life that pleases God.

Now let me give you a caveat here. You cannot do this apart from Christ. Paul spends the first 11 chapters of this book talking about how Christ’s sacrifice is what makes us holy and acceptable.

So what’s he doing here, if Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient, why is Paul begging me by the mercies of God to be a living sacrifice myself? Great question. This is Paul’s way of saying what he says in his other letters, walk in a manner worthy of the gospel you have received.

Paul employs the idea of a ‘living sacrifice’ deliberately because the sacrifice he has in mind is not martyrdom, but rather lives that are pleasing to God.

- Colin G. Kruse

In other words, Paul wants us to live like Jesus, a holy and pleasing life, a life fully surrendered to God and his purposes for us.

Surrender Is All-Encompassing. Typically we start by surrendering only part of our lives to God. It’s like we give God a cup of water when he wants the whole well.

Surrender is intentional and it’s done by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How it looks in my life - God will highlight an area of my life that I have not surrendered to him. Say finances. Perhaps I’m giving $100 a month, but what he wants is for me to give 20%. The Holy Spirit then convicts me of my lack of surrender and asks more from me. It could be money, it could be a job, it could be my service, it could be possessions. It could be anything. He asked Abraham for his son. He will ask for you to surrender anything that you love more than Him.

Jesus Modeled Surrender. This again goes back to Jesus on the cross. His ultimate act of worship was his full surrender to the will of God. He certainly wrestled with this, i.e. the Garden of Gethsemane prayers, but he submitted himself to the father and surrendered to his will.

3. Worship Is Expressed In Service

Many of us know that worship, and I mean true worship, is not only about the music or what we do here on a Sunday morning. This hour is typically called worship. Now, I don’t want to minimize this aspect of worship, but worship is so much more.

Worship is Service. In our passage in Romans, Paul says that if we present our bodies to God, as a living sacrifice, which is full surrender to his will and his ways for our life, this is our spiritual worship.

If you have a different translation of the Bible, you will see that word for worship is often translated as service. It may say “this is your reasonable service.” Or your spiritual service.

The Greek Word Is Latreuo. This is a very interesting word. This word is often used in conjunction with what is know as priestly duties.

Hebrews 9:6 ESV

These preparations having thus been made, the priests go regularly into the first section, performing their ritual duties,

The word here ritual duties is this same word that is translated worship in our passage. It’s the idea that it was a service preformed for God. The ritual duties that a priest would preform were his acts of worship. These are one in the same.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. Remember our main word in this passage today is living sacrifice. What was it that the priests did? They offered sacrifices to God! Paul here is drawing these two ideas together!

Our ritual duty, our true spiritual worship is living a life of surrender. It’s becoming a living sacrifice!

Worship Is Expressed In Surrender - Our service to God is not performing ritualistic sacrifices, it’s a life of full surrender to God and his ways. This is the message of the cross and it’s the message of Romans and its the message of the hour.

Abiding in Christ means a constant receiving of His Spirit, a life of unreserved surrender to His service.

Ellen White

Are you surrendered to God? Our worship, meant to be a bodily service to God, is exemplified by surrender to Him. You cannot worship God truly if you won’t surrender to him fully.

Judas is an example of partial surrender. Judas followed Jesus. Judas had the best teacher of the Bible ever. He attend synagogue regularly. He learned to pray from Jesus himself. AND YET, He wasn’t fully surrendered to Jesus! He was in fact, still fully surrendered to Satan and in the end Satan entered his heart and he betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and hung himself having been used by Satan to kill the King of Glory.

In other words, it’s possible to be here today and sing the songs, give in the offering plate and still be surrendered to Satan.

Decision

If you are here and you have not fully surrendered your life to Jesus, which is the ultimate act of spiritual worship, I beg you, make today, the day. Repent and put your trust in Jesus. I’m going to give you some time as we sing this morning to respond. Please come up front and let me pray with you. There is nothing more important that full surrender.

If you are here today and you have not fully surrendered certain areas of your life, perhaps you are living in sexual immorality or you are given to too much alcohol or drugs. Today is a day of grace.

If you are here today and perhaps you heard me talk about presenting your bodies as an act of worship, that surrender starts with obeying God’s commands to worship him in Spirit and Truth and that we should worship God in the way that he WANTS to be worshipped, as we sing together this morning, I want you to respond accordingly.