How Then Shall We Worship Pt. 2

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. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

I need a sidebar here. How many times do we as a church need to hear the phrase

Renewal of the Mind

Here is where I’m at with this right now. I had no idea this study would use this verse when I began it. We have heard this phrase or part of scripture over and over again on Sunday mornings and now Wednesday night. I want to hear a, “it just so happened.” right now.

Here is what I’m going to tell you. There are people in our family of believers who aren’t getting this. If they were, we wouldn’t be hearing this again tonight. I will also tell you right now, it’s the people who are sitting there saying I hope other people hear this.

WAKE UP - THIS SCRIPTURE IS FOR YOU

Renew your minds. Every day is a new day. We need to start each day worshipping our Father for the day He is giving us. We need to start the day fresh and allow those around us to start it fresh as well. It means we need to forgive those who have wronged us or we feel have wronged us. If you are holding grudges against others, let it go. The only thing that is going to do is keep you in the seat of the scoffer like we heard a few Sundays ago. If you stay there too long, it will become the bed of the scoffer, and it you wait even longer, it will become the casket of the scoffer.

Get over yourselves!

Why are we hearing this so much. My bet is, it isn’t those who are new in faith or new to the church that are having the issues. It’s those of us, me included, that have been in this church so long, we feel we have ownership. I have news for you,

This isn’t your church, IT’S GOD’S!

We need to start acting like it.

Enough of the preaching, let’s get back to the Bible Study.

Whole-Life Worship

These scriptures take place after the first twelve Chapters of Romans that talks about the wrath of God, the redemption of man, and the plan for Isreal and the church.

As he talks about what God has done for us through the sacrifice of His Son and the mercy that was shone to us through that gift, the only way we can respond to that is to offer ourselves as living sacrifices.

Peter does the same thing in 1 Peter

1 Peter 1:2–5 ESV

according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

In Chapter 2, Peter tells us what our response should be.

1 Peter 2:5 ESV

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.

It is the same thing that Paul presented. We should be offering ourselves as living sacrifices of worship.

Hebrews 12:28–29 ESV

Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

Our priority in life should be to worship God for all He has done and provided for us.

The Order of Priorities

Hebrews 11 gives us a list of people who were heroes of the faith. The first on the list is

Abel

His life was a life of worship.

He was a true worshipper. So much that his brother was jealous of him.

Really the only thing we know about him is that he offered his sacrifice according to what God had prescribed and his offerings were acceptable to God.

The second person is

Enoch

A single word to identify him would be walk.

He was a godly man who walked with God and lived by his faith. His life was dedicated to God so much so that one day, he went from earth to heaven.

The third person is

Noah

If you think of Noah, you have to think of the work this man did in order to follow the will of God for his life.

Even though the list of these men falls in chronological order, there is much more to it than that.

They also lay out the priorities we should have within the church.

Worship, walk, then work.

Look at the layout of the Tabernacle.

When you left the Tabernacle, the next group of people were the priests whose responsibility to the people and God was to lead in worship. After them on the next layer out from the Tabernacle was the Levites, whose job was to serve.

At the center of everything was worship. We should make sure our church has the same priority.

AP Gibbs said that, “ministry is that which comes down from the Father by the Son in the power of the Spirit through the human instrument. Worship starts in the human instrument and goes up by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Son to the Father.”

The priority of the church should be worship, then ministry. It should always start with that.

Luke tells us the story of Mary and Martha

Luke 10:38–42 ESV

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

Here, Jesus was trying to tell Martha she was allowing of the things she was doing to serve people was getting in the way of her worship. Hmmmm.

There’s another story that comes out of the same house and the two sisters.

John 12:2–8 ESV

So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

Go into the details of Mary’s sacrifice.

Judas was the leader of the scoffers.

Jesus rebuked them and commended Mary for her true act of sincere worship.

How are we doing?

MacArthur tells of a story he read of a family who was holding a party after the christening of their baby. After the party had been going on for some time, some of the people asked where the baby was. The mother remembering when they had put the baby down for a nap in their bedroom went running in to find the baby dead in the middle of bed where all the coats had been laid.

Is this the way we are treating God in our church? Is He overlooked by all the things we have going on in a worship service when we are supposed to be praising Him? If so, we are heading for a catastrophe.

If we aren’t careful, the ministries will overshadow what we are truly supposed to be about, worshipping our Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit they provided us to help us worship.

"We are too many Marthas and too few Marys. We are so deeply entrenched in the doing that we miss the being. We are programmed and informed and planned and busy, and we slight worship! We have our functionaries, our promotions, our objectives, our success-driven, numbers-conscious, traditionalisitic, even faddish efforts. But too often acceptable, true, spiritual worship eludes us.”

AW Tozer calls worship, “the missing jewel of the church.”

Worship according to the word of God is internal, sacrificial, active and productive. Sadly, this is the only kind of worship that God will recognize, but there are so few churches that offer it. This is the kind of worship that should be offered up in our daily lives. The kind that the Lord will find as a sweet aroma. This should be “expressed continuously in our lives by sharing with others, doing good works, and offering praise to God.” It’s the kind of worship God wants.

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