What's Really Important?
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I want to ask you a question this morning, and I know you’ll have a quick answer to it, but what I really want you to do is to challenge yourself a bit to get below the quick response and into a deeper truth, perhaps even to something that looks a little ugly.
So, here’s the question: What’s important to you? I mean, what’s really important to you?
Today,
During these days of increasing isolation because of the coronavirus, I think each one of us has had the experience of losing — if only temporarily — something that we had considered important, and I have been wondering if God might be using this crisis to teach us something important about those important things.
How is your retirement account doing right now? How about your favorite sports team? What about that club or community organization that consumes so much of your time?
If the last few weeks have taught us anything, it is that nothing in life is certain, and many of the things that we have considered to be most important in our lives can be taken away just like that.
Now, I do not want to suggest that any of these things have no place in our lives. What I want us to do is to consider what we might have pushed aside or moved to the back burner to make room for all these important things that we now find ourselves living without.
You see, when something’s truly important to us, there’s a sense in which we serve it.
Think of your job, your education, maybe even your favorite sports team. A level of devotion to any of these things requires that we give them our time, our attention, and often our wealth.
You won’t get far in your career if you’re not willing to devote your time to it. You won’t get far in your education if you’re not willing to devote your attention to your teachers.
Any devoted sports fan will tell you there is a level of sacrifice involved in keeping up with your teams. It takes time, and sometimes it takes extra subscriptions to special television bundles. This might not be the sacrifice your family would prefer, but it is, nonetheless a sacrifice.
This idea of service — and even sacrifice — is at the root of the first Hebrew word for worship that we find in the Old Testament. It’s in Genesis, chapter 22 and verse 5.
Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you.”
Now you may recall what’s going on in this passage: God has told Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and offer the life of Isaac as a sacrifice.
The command was a test both of Abraham’s faith and of what was most important to him.
Abraham dearly loved his son, Isaac, and knew that God had promised to build a nation through the Isaac’s line. Isaac was clearly important to him.
Yet Abraham gave his son the wood for the burnt offering, and they hiked up the mountain together. When Isaac wondered about the fact that there was no lamb for the sacrifice, Abraham said that God would provide the lamb.
Then, after arriving at the place where God had directed them, Abraham built the altar, arranged the wood, bound up his son, laid him on the altar and raised his knife for the sacrifice that God had commanded.
For Abraham, even though Isaac was important to him, his relationship to God was more so.
If you know the story, you know that this was the great moment when the angel of the Lord intervened.
He said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
Then Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket, the lamb that God provided.
There’s a couple of things going on in this passage that I want you to notice.
The first thing is back in verse 5, where Abraham tells his servants that he and Isaac are going off to worship.
In Hebrew, this word means to bow down in reverence or respect to a superior, much as a servant might bow to his master.
So the idea is that whatever Abraham and Isaac are getting ready to do is an act of reverence and a symbol of submission to one who is worthy of both reverence and submission, the One True God who had first commanded Abraham to leave his home and his country and his family and to go to a place that He would show him.
The second thing to notice is that this act of reverence and submission entailed a sacrifice.
Throughout Scripture, we see that worship entails sacrifice. Here in the story of Abraham and Isaac, even after the angel of the Lord saved Isaac, a ram was sacrificed as an act of thanksgiving.
When a plague came upon the people of Israel, King David was commanded by the angel of the Lord to build an altar to God on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite in what we now know as Jerusalem.
When David found the man and asked for the plot of land to build the altar, Ornan offered to give it to him free of charge.
Then the angel of the Lord commanded Gad to say to David, that David should go up and build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
But King David said to Ornan, “No, but I will surely buy it for the full price; for I will not take what is yours for the Lord, or offer a burnt offering which costs me nothing.” So David gave Ornan 600 shekels of gold by weight for the site.
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David understood that worship involved sacrifice.
In a New Testament context, the writer of Hebrews implores us, through Jesus Christ, to “continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name.” The idea is that Christians, even in the midst of suffering (perhaps ESPECIALLY in the midst of suffering), are to be praising God, to be worshiping Him and His Son, Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the ram in the thicket sent to be sacrificed in our place. We who are sinners — and that is every one of us who has ever committed an evil deed or thought an impure thought, so all of us — we who are sinners are under the sentence of eternal separation from God because of our sins and because of the sin that goes back all the way to the first act of rebellion in the Garden of Eden.
But God sent His perfect and sinless Son to take our sins upon Himself on a cross at Calvary. He received the just punishment for sin that we deserve so that we can be saved if we turn to Him in faith that His sacrifice is our only way to be made right with God.
Even the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ was an act of worship. He gave Himself to bring glory to His Father.
You see, God is perfectly holy. He is perfectly just. And He is perfectly loving. Because He is perfectly holy, He could not allow His perfect justice to fail, no matter how perfectly He loves mankind.
Without someone to redeem us — to pay the ransom that would free us from condemnation because of our sins — we would be doomed. We could never make ourselves right with God. Only He could do that.
And so, He sent Jesus, His Son from all eternity, to pay that price.
But the story did not end at Calvary. God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice as full payment for our rebellion, and He honored His Son’s obedience to His plan by raising Him from the dead and bringing Him back to heaven.
Jesus He now sits there at His Father’s right hand, waiting for the day when God sends Him back to earth to take home with Him those who have followed Him in faith.
Even the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ was an act of worship. He gave Himself to bring glory to His Father.
And so, we followers of Christ are called to worship as He worshiped, with praise, with honor and with a self-sacrificing spirit.
Of course, the vast majority of us will never be called to give our actual lives in sacrificial service to Christ — though there still are many Christians around the world who do so even now.
But if you are a Christian, then your very life should be an act of worship, and therefore your life should demonstrate some semblance of self-sacrifice.
So just what does all this have to do with the tumultuous times in which we now find ourselves? What does all this have to do with your retirement accounts, with cancellation of sports from the professional level all the way down to Little League?
What does it have to do with the fact that you’re all watching this message on computers and phone screens, instead of sitting here with me in this sanctuary?
Just this: We have allowed ourselves to be distracted by all these things from the One True God, the one who said to the people of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before Me.
We were made to worship this God, to bow down before Him, to give our very lives as a sacrifice to Him and to His Son, who gave His very life for us.
But we have bowed to so many other things. We have treated with reverence our wealth and our health and our careers and our education and even our church buildings, when we should give reverence only to the God who gave us all of these things as tools to use in bringing glory to Him.
In truth, we have made these things our idols, and we have praised these things and given them credit for who we are, instead of giving credit to God.
When Moses brought the 10 Commandments down from Mt. Sinai the first time, he found the people of Israel worshiping a golden calf that they had made, and they were saying, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.”
But this golden calf had not brought the plagues on Egypt that finally convinced the Pharaoh to release them. This golden calf had not parted the Red Sea so they could escape the armies of Egypt when the Pharaoh had changed his mind.
This golden calf had not provided the manna for them to eat each day or the water that they would drink. God had done it all for them as gifts of His grace.
Brothers and sisters, do not be fooled. The very breath in your lungs is a gift of God’s grace. The food on your table may be there because of the paycheck you earned, but the job by which you earned that paycheck is a gift of God’s grace.
And grace is, indeed, a gift. God is under no obligation to provide anything for us.
I wonder if the God who commanded that we make no idols to worship and serve and bow down to is now teaching us a lesson about those things that we have put before Him.
“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.
I wonder if God is now telling the church that has been built upon the foundation stone of Jesus Christ that our self-reliance and our idolatry are weakening the structure.
We have mixed wood, hay, and stubble into the church’s mortar, and now we are seeing it all being burned away.
Perhaps our wood, hay, and stubble is the way we cling to the trappings of religion with little regard for the true religion that God accepts as pure.
Wood, hay, and stubble are easy to get. It doesn’t require much of a sacrifice to gather those things. But carrying stones is a different story.
And a church built on the stones of sacrifice will survive the testing of fire. It might be scorched, but it will stand strong.
A church built on true religion looks different from the lost world around it. The lost world looks to its bank accounts and its stock portfolios and its careers and its education. The lost world is caught up in the pursuit of long life.
But the church has the promise of eternal life in Jesus Christ. As such, the church MUST be about something far greater than a few songs and a sermon on Sunday morning.
Perhaps God has allowed the church to suffer along with the world through this crisis, because the church today looks so much like the rest of the world, only with a few religious rituals thrown in.
But James, the half-brother of Jesus, tells us what true religion is supposed to look like.
Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Today, in the midst of this global crisis, we have an unparalleled opportunity to practice pure and undefiled religion.
Today, orphans and widows are among the groups most at risk from both the coronavirus and from the global economic meltdown.
Today, the church has the opportunity to walk past the wood, hay and stubble of worldly cares and pick up the heavy stones of the Kingdom of God.
God has taken away so many of the things that we have worshiped in His rightful place. Perhaps He has done this so that we will realize that we have no place to turn but to Him.
If we do so, then I believe we will find great blessings, both for the church and for those whom the church is called to serve.
When Moses found the people of Israel worshiping that calf, God brought punishment upon many of those who had so quickly turned from Him.
But God is gracious, and Moses knew that, and so he called on those who remained to turn back to God and away from their idolatry.
Then Moses said, “Dedicate yourselves today to the Lord—for every man has been against his son and against his brother—in order that He may bestow a blessing upon you today.”
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You see, God wants to bless us. He wants to bless His church. He wants to bless mankind — that’s why He sent Jesus to provide a way for us to be reconciled to Him, to be made right with Him.
But God’s blessing on the church of Jesus Christ is conditioned upon the church’s obedience to its calling.
As long as we allow ourselves to be stained by the world, we cannot expect those blessings. As long as we see the church as a place to go and act religious, we cannot expect those blessings.
Only as we follow the commandments of Jesus Christ — to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and to love our neighbors as ourselves — only as we present ourselves as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God, are we performing the thoughtful and spiritually dedicated service of worship to which we have been called.
So many of us have wrung our hands and worried about the fate of the church during these days of social distancing and isolation.
Friends, this place is not the church. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then the church is right where you are sitting. And if you are the church, then you have been called to do the work of the church.
Reach out today to someone who is lost and afraid because of this crisis. Tell them about the Great Physician who will heal all sickness and wipe away every tear in heaven.
Tell them why you have hope in the midst of all the chaos.
Find a way to provide food for those who don’t know where they’ll get their meals during this time. Call an elderly neighbor to make sure she’s OK and doesn’t need medication or simply a person to talk to. Wheel her trash can to the street on garbage day. Offer to pick up her medications.
You can do all these things without endangering her or yourself. You can do all these things without breaking the law. We WILL do these things as a church, because that is what we are called to do.
Right now, the world is lost in the darkness of fear. Let us resolve to be people who shine the light of Christ into that darkness.
Let us resolve to be people who are not stained by the fears of the world, but instead people to whom the Spirit of God has given a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
In these dark times, may we be the light of the world. May we be a city on a hill that cannot be hid. And may we ever remember that we are none of these things because of anything that we have done.
Every one of us is a sinner. Each of us has rebelled against God. And each one of us will be judged by this perfect and holy God. We will be judged either according to our own righteousness — our own goodness — or according to the perfect righteousness of the sinless Christ.
If you have not followed Jesus in faith that His sacrificial death is the only way for you to be justified — to be declared not guilty in that judgment — then the hope of His resurrection is not yours to claim. Before His perfect Father, nothing you have done can be good enough to save you.
But if you will believe that Jesus is who He said He is and will do what He said He will do — that He will return and take home those who have followed Him — then hope will be simply the first of the blessings you will receive.
His light will cast out the darkness. The life He promises will overcome death itself.
Idols
Money/wealth
How can we not worship such a Savior?
Whatever you may consider to be important to you today, I want to suggest that there is nothing more important than this.
Church buildings
Do not wait. You can pray with me now.
Social gatherings
Sports
Movies
Health — and fitness
Knowledge
Careers
Education
Freedom