[0:00] All right, Psalm 29. This is a psalm of David. Listen just to these first two verses of how he opens up this psalm. Verse 1.
[0:39] The Apostle Paul writes, and he says, This is the word of the Lord.
[1:18] Let's pray. Let's ask for God's help as we study together this morning. Our gracious God, your word is truth. Your word is our food. It is our sustenance.
[1:29] And we ask this morning that you would feed us by it. Help us to see into it. Help us to see truth. Help us to be changed and transformed by the truth that we see. Show us your son, Jesus. Show us his love for us.
[1:42] And let that be that key element in our transformation. We ask this all for Christ's sake. We ask it by the power of the Spirit. Amen.
[1:54] So as I mentioned last week, we're starting a new series that's going to go for a number of weeks now, probably right up into November, on what we might call the doctrine of worship.
[2:09] I didn't have a catchy name for the series, but we're just going to call it the doctrine of worship. That is the study of worship. Worship. Now when I say that word worship, depending on your church background, you've probably got many different sorts of ideas and images that come into your mind.
[2:25] If I say worship, you think something. And so what I want to do today as we start off this series is I want to start off by setting some of the groundwork, some of the foundation, some of the sort of definitional terms that we sort of need to understand this bigger series.
[2:41] Almost all of the series that we're going to do going forward will be focused on what we would call gathered worship or corporate worship or Lord's Day worship, what we do on a Sunday, what we're doing now in this kind of hour and 15 minutes or hour and a half, depending how long the preacher preaches for.
[2:59] But this time that we come and we physically gather for worship, most of the service is going to be focused on that. Should we worship? Should we gather for worship? What should we do when we worship?
[3:10] Are there things that we should do? Are there things that we shouldn't do? Why are we doing certain things and not other things? Those are the sorts of things we're going to try and tackle as we do this series about particularly Lord's Day worship.
[3:25] But today we're going to start with the groundwork. And we're going to go much broader and establish sort of a big picture definition of worship that extends beyond just what we do on Sundays.
[3:38] What exactly is worship in the broader sense? That's a question I want to try and answer for you this morning. So two simple points. What is biblical worship?
[3:48] And then number two, how do I engage in it? What is it? And how do I actually do it? That's where we're going this morning. And you're going to need those two passages that we looked at.
[3:59] We'll jump around in a bunch of other places, but you need particularly Psalm 29 verses 1 to 2 and Romans 12 verses 1 to 2. We'll start first of all with what is biblical worship.
[4:09] And we'll start in the Old Testament in that first passage, Psalm 29, those first two verses. If your eyes kind of glance down at the rest of the psalm, what you'll see is that it's actually a psalm of King David that describes, it seems like it's describing the Lord's supremacy over some sort of violent natural disaster, like a storm.
[4:28] But at the very beginning of the psalm, he starts it off with something that you will see in a lot of other psalms. He starts it off with a call to worship. In a similar way that we open up every single Sunday morning service with a call to come and worship God, this psalm starts with a call to worship.
[4:49] So like I said, we don't pull our call to worship out of thin air. We've got a precedent in the Bible for why we do that. So here it is. Look at verse 1 and 2. Ascribe to the Lord, you heavenly beings. Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
[5:01] Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. Worship the Lord in the splendor of His holiness. Now, the first line there of the second verse is probably the most succinct definition of worship that there is in the entire Bible.
[5:19] Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. You have to be examined by someone in your theology and they say, what is worship? That's where you want to go and read that line to them.
[5:32] Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. To ascribe is to give something. It is give to the Lord the glory due His name.
[5:43] That is the essence of worship. Give to God the glory that is due Him. That term glory almost literally means weightiness, like heaviness.
[5:55] It pertains to intrinsic worth and value. Give God the intrinsic worth and value and glory that is due His name. Now, I want you for a second to think about how you ascribe glory to other things in life all the time.
[6:13] We all actually do it all of the time. One of my favorite things to do, and I think I've told many of you this. I can't remember if I've ever mentioned this in a sermon, but I know I've definitely told many of you this in day-to-day life.
[6:25] In fact, I've even taken some of you up to see this. But one of my favorite things to do when I have the discipline to get out from under the duvet in the darkness of the morning is to go up Signal Hill and walk my dog on Signal Hill before the sunrise.
[6:43] Now, there are some mornings when you get up there and there is no wind. It is dead, dead calm. You can hear the sort of gentle hum of the city down below. The occasional siren as well because we're in a big city.
[6:55] But it's not the sound that's a big attraction. It's what you see. At first, if you get up there, and you get up there in the dark, what you see is the lights of the city.
[7:08] The buildings all lit up against the backdrop of pitch dark. But then very slowly, you get a glimmer of light. It starts to come up over the mountains that are on the far eastern side of the city.
[7:22] And then what you get is one of the most impressive natural displays of color that you will ever see. Blue, purple, pink, orange, and every kind of variation of those colors.
[7:39] Every 10 minutes or so, the sky's a different color. It changes. Sometimes if there's a bit of clouds as well, it makes all sorts of incredible things to look at. And while nature's sort of showing off all its colors with this light show, Table Mountain, which is on your right as you're looking out over the city, Table Mountain starts to light up.
[8:02] What was just at first this kind of big gray shadow starts to light up and come alive in detail and color. And you can see things on it now. The crowning moment then comes when the sun peaks over those mountains in the east.
[8:19] And from the top down, Table Mountain gets bathed in light. And so I just sit there. My coffee. My dog.
[8:31] In a kind of sense of awe. It's like, look at what I'm watching. Most people in the world never get to see anything like this. And we have it now in our backyard. It never gets old. No matter how many times I witness it, it's a glorious sight.
[8:49] Now do you see what I've just done there? I have just ascribed the glory due to the Signal Hill sunrise experience. See, we, in a sense, we actually worship all of the time.
[9:06] All of the time we worship. In that we ascribe glory to different things constantly. We're often praising different things. We might praise experiences that we've had.
[9:16] We might praise people that we've met and encountered. We might praise a piece of visual art that we've seen. Or praise a piece of music that we heard. Or praise a performance that we witnessed.
[9:28] We're always ascribing glory. It's what makes up the bulk of a lot of our conversation when we engage in small talk. Whenever we see and experience goodness and beauty and truth and power, we tend to ascribe glory.
[9:47] Now here is the key when it comes to understanding biblical worship. The worship of God. The key in our text right here.
[9:58] It's that little word, due. D-U-E. Ascribe to the Lord the glory. Due his name. Now it's not actually a standalone word in the original Hebrew sentence there.
[10:11] Because the language of Hebrew works a little bit different. But it's clearly implied in the way that the sentence is constructed. And so your English translations that put that word in there are completely spot on to put it there.
[10:22] Due. Due. It's that word, due, that makes biblical worship something that transcends all the other kinds of worship. All the other kinds of ascribing that we do day to day different.
[10:36] Because lots of the things out there are due worship. There are lots of good, beautiful, wonderful things out there that are due worship. In a sense, it's completely appropriate to ascribe glory to wonderful things that we see and we experience.
[10:47] But there's only one thing, one being to be precise, who is infinitely worthy of worship. All of the other worship, all of the other praise that we might give to something other than God is finite.
[11:04] Because it is necessarily limited by the thing we're praising, which itself is finite. But God is infinite. We can't exhaust our praise in ascribing glory to Him.
[11:22] You can't like over sing praise to God. You can't say enough good about Him. You can't pronounce, you can't have a big enough sense of awe and wonder at Him.
[11:38] Because He's infinite. Think about question four of the Shorter Catechism. Since so many of you clearly memorized the Apostles' Creed, I'm sure many of you have memorized the Westminster Shorter Catechism as well.
[11:52] So you know exactly what question four is. The question four is, what is God? And the answer that the Westminster Divines wrote down was, God is a spirit. Infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being.
[12:06] Wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. It's those words. Infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. It's those words that set God apart from anything else that we can possibly worship or ascribe glory to.
[12:24] Just category differences right there. He is the creator. Everything else is the creation. The created things. There's this fundamental distinction there that helps us understand what true biblical worship of God is.
[12:40] It's exactly what the psalmist actually tells us in Psalm 100, verses 2-3. The psalmist says, Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before Him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God.
[12:52] It is He who made us and we are His. So He makes that distinction. Worship Him because He's the creator and you're the creation. He made us.
[13:02] He's in a different category. Worship Him. Worship Him. Think about that distinction for a second. The creator-creation distinction. Think about the most awe-inducing, glorious experience you've ever had in your life gazing upon the natural world.
[13:19] Maybe it was on Signal Hill. Maybe it was somewhere else. Maybe you were in the Alps somewhere looking at the sun setting over a snow peak or something like that. But think about the most awe-inducing experience you've ever had gazing at the natural world.
[13:35] The kind of experience you would want to ascribe glory to that you have to go and tell people about afterwards. Think about that Signal Hill sunrise I described. All the color. All the glory.
[13:46] All the beauty. All of that comes from the mind of God. Remember the song we sang right at the beginning?
[14:00] Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all Thy works Thy hand hath made. I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
[14:11] What is the response? Then sings my soul. My Savior God to Thee, how great Thou art. How great Thou art. Every single bit of goodness and beauty and truth and power that you see and that you experience in this life and that you ascribe glory to.
[14:36] Well that is all only just a little taster of the goodness and the truth and the beauty and the power that is in God.
[14:48] And so that little word, D-U-E, makes all the difference. Because there is absolutely nothing in this created universe that comes close to the glory due to the creator.
[15:06] So that's worship. If you want a baseline definition of what worship is, that is what worship is. Ascribe the glory due His name. Now most of you are probably pretty practical.
[15:21] And so you say, okay, tick, got the definition down. What do I actually do then? Like so how do I worship God then? What do I actually do? If I see a magical sunrise and I enjoy that, then I go and tell people about that.
[15:35] That's how I ascribe glory there. But what do I do in the worship of God? Well God tells us how to worship Him. And this is really important. We're going to build on this theme all the way through the series.
[15:47] God tells us how to worship Him. And first of all, at the kind of wide angle lens view, it starts with all of your life.
[16:00] And so here's where we go to our other reading in the New Testament. Romans chapter 12. So you can flip forward to that passage. Romans 12. Here's the second point. How do we engage in biblical worship?
[16:13] Look at what Paul says in Romans 12. Verse 1. He says, Offer your bodies as living sacrifices.
[16:50] This is your true and proper worship, he says. Now work backwards with me for a second here from verse 2 back to verse 1. Verse 2 at the end there, Paul says, Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
[17:06] And why must we be transformed by the renewing of our mind? Well, he says, then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is. His good, perfect, and pleasing will. So the logic of the passage there is that if you have a renewed mind, you'll be able to tell what God's will is, and then you will be able to be this living sacrifice that Paul speaks about in the previous verse.
[17:32] So it starts, it would seem, with a renewed mind. It starts with knowledge of God. Knowledge of God.
[17:44] He's not talking with the renewed mind there. He's not talking and going some sort of meditation retreat where you do a mind detox. He's talking about knowing God. What we actually just simply call theology.
[17:57] The study of God. The filling up of your mind with the things of God so that you might know Him intimately. You might know what He's like. You might know what He wants from you. You might know what He wants and expects from this world.
[18:09] That is where worship starts. Knowing God. You do not have to work in an office full of theological textbooks and have the title reverend in front of your name to be a theologian.
[18:24] To know God. Every Christian is actually supposed to be a theologian. Theology is for the ordinary Christian. In one sense, the study of God, the knowledge of God, should actually be the logical pursuit of any life lived in this world.
[18:43] For all people. Christian or not. And the vast majority of people in this world believe there's some sort of divine force out there. Pure, pure atheism is actually very, very rare.
[18:55] But the vast majority of people think, well, there's some sort of God out there. Most people think there's a God out there. There's some sort of powerful divine being or beings. And yet, many, many people are just fairly apathetic towards religion and the study of God.
[19:10] But think about that. If you believe some sort of God is out there, you believe He, She, or It, or whatever you want to call it, has something to do with the creation of this world.
[19:21] The reason why there's something rather than nothing. You must then believe that He, She, or It, or whatever you want to call it, is more powerful than you. Because I can't create this world. You can't create this world.
[19:33] You must also believe that He, She, or It, or whatever you want to call it, has a better vantage point of everything that's going on in this world than you. If that's the case, wouldn't it be the height of foolishness and inconsistency to not at least try to seek out that God?
[19:53] To not at least try to seek out to know that God and His view of the world? In the quest to know God, there really should be no apathy, no procrastination, no lack of motivation.
[20:10] If there is a creator God out there, there can be nothing more important in this life than to know Him. Nothing. In fact, to not pursue knowledge in God, knowledge of God, wouldn't just be foolish, highly foolish.
[20:28] It would actually be a cruel thing to do to yourself. Here's how J.R. Packer, a famous Anglican theologian, explains it in his famous book, Knowing God, which is a great place to start if you're trying to figure out how to know God more.
[20:42] Read that book, Knowing God. It's all in the title. But this is what he says about the cruelty of not pursuing the knowledge of God. He says, As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square, and leave him as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it.
[21:12] The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and understanding of what surrounds you.
[21:33] This way you can waste your life and lose your soul. So it's not only ludicrous, and cruel, to on the one hand, believe in the basic existence of God, which most people in this world do, and yet fail to then strive to know that God.
[22:02] Sorry, it is. I said it's not only. It is. It is ludicrous and cruel to do those two things, to hold those two things together, or attempt to hold those two things together. Believe that God exists, and then not strive with every fiber of your being to try to know him.
[22:17] So we start there. We start with the knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is the bedrock of worship. We cannot possibly know how to engage in worship if we do not know the God that we are worshiping.
[22:29] You know what the number one pastoral issue is that I deal with in terms of frequency with which it comes up?
[22:41] This is in almost two decades of pastoral ministry. Number one issue that I will have conversations with people around. It's not dealing with people in crises.
[22:53] It's not marriage counseling. It's not parenting advice. Nobody comes to me for parenting advice. They've seen my kids. It's a... No, my kids are... They're good. I mean, that's me.
[23:04] It's not issues related to people questioning their faith. The number one most frequent pastoral issue I deal with in conversation is people telling me like they feel like they're stagnating in the worship of God.
[23:20] like they're flat in their experience of the worship of God. And time and time again when I start to sort of like probe and scratch beneath the surface and I ask about well, tell me about your personal habits in terms of cultivating this worship of God.
[23:43] So, for example, making sure that you're sitting regularly under the teaching of God's word at worship services studying the Bible and community with other people studying the Bible personally at home through private devotion reading maybe some good Christian books some good theological literature.
[23:59] When I probe on whether or not the person deliberately and purposefully engages in those sorts of activities their response is almost always really spotty.
[24:11] and they admit that they don't have a real plan for a sort of an intentional approach to making those activities a key part of their life.
[24:25] Now, friends, I don't want to be kept in obvious here but I think you can see where this is going. people who have really, really spotty attendance at worship services where we study theology and we try and grow in the knowledge of God when they tell me that their hearts are rarely, if ever, sore in worship to God I'm not exactly falling off of my chair in surprise and shock and horror.
[24:50] You don't need to go to seminary and sign up for a degree but you do need to be deliberate and intentional in ordering your life to prioritize sitting under the word of God each Sunday studying the scripture with a group of people somewhere reading it in private maybe reading some good literature around it some theological literature and if you're a Christian this is not like an optional extra as in, well, this might be some helpful advice for you this might be a good thing to add to your general spiritual experience.
[25:23] This is a command according to Paul. Paul says do not conform to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so worship starts with knowing God.
[25:40] But worship is not just an intellectual exercise. So have a look at the first verse. So we're working backwards verse 2 now we've got to verse 1. Therefore I urge you brothers and sisters in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and pleasing to God.
[25:58] This is your true and proper worship. The living sacrifice there is an image Paul uses to describe an entire life lived in the service of God.
[26:12] If you go back into the Old Testament and you look at the way that they worshipped in the Old Testament sacrifice plays a really really important part. The act of sacrifice plays an important part in Old Testament worship. Generally some sort of animal on an altar for a bunch of different reasons.
[26:27] So you would offer an animal sacrifice to atone for sin. You'd offer it to give thanks. You would offer it as a general symbol of your devotion to God. You would offer it sometimes as a declaration of peace.
[26:38] And so there are a bunch of different reasons to be offering a sacrifice in worship. Now Paul I think takes all of this rich imagery and he uses it as an illustration as a picture for us to look at of a life lived in obedience to God.
[26:55] So you think about that. That's a life that is well it's a life that avoids sin. It must be. It's a life that avoids sin and pursues holiness. A life that seeks peace. A life that gives thanks.
[27:06] A life devoted to the service of God. All those different things that are wrapped up in Old Testament sacrifices. sacrifices. But instead of killing an animal to symbolize all of these things Paul says well you be the sacrifice yourself.
[27:21] You actually be the representation of all those things. You be the animal on the altar. Let your life your obedience be the sacrifice.
[27:34] See because when you've had your mind renewed by the word of God and you know God you'll be able to do as Paul says in verse 2 test and approve what God's will is.
[27:45] That is you'll know now what obedient living looks like. You've known God. You've read his word. You've understood his word. You know what this life looks like. You know what Christian ethics looks like. You know what's right and wrong in terms of Christian living.
[27:57] And so the worshipping Christian is not just a person whose head is kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger with knowledge of God. but the worshipping Christian is a person where that knowledge is fundamentally changing the way you live now.
[28:11] Impacting upon your life all the decisions you make. The different people and the different groups that you relate to in life. So how you relate to your family. How you parent your children. How you honor your parents.
[28:23] How you relate to things like romance and sex and dating and marriage. How you manage and you use your finances your wealth your material possessions. How you engage in your work in your career.
[28:37] How you serve as a citizen of this country of this city. How you manage your own inner thought life. How you deal with things like lust or anger or bitterness or pride.
[28:50] How you manage your time and your energy. How you build self-discipline. How you rest. How you treat people.
[29:02] around you. Knowing God has to inform and shape all of that if you're going to be a living sacrifice. If you're going to be this worshipping Christian.
[29:16] Now Paul uses this language very carefully when he describes the Christian as a living sacrifice. That adjective living there is not just there to kind of say well you're not a dead hunk of animal meat on an altar.
[29:30] you're actually a living person. It refers back to the fact that you as a Christian and this is in Romans preceding this but you as a Christian have been made alive by the gospel. That is the mercy of God in view of which you offer your life.
[29:46] The way he starts that whole sentence. You as a Christian have been made alive in the gospel. He makes this explicitly clear a couple of chapters earlier. Romans chapter 6.
[29:58] Listen to this. He's basically saying the same thing again that he says in Romans 12. If we died with Christ that is we believe the gospel and we've been united with him in his death. If we died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him.
[30:11] For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again. Death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died he died to sin once for all but the life he lives he lives to God.
[30:22] In the same way now count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
[30:35] Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.
[30:49] For sin shall no longer be your master because you are not under the law but under grace. This is a longer version of saying what he says in chapter 12.
[31:01] You have been made alive in the gospel. Through Jesus Christ you've been made alive now offer a life to God that has the signs and the indications of being made alive. Alive in holiness.
[31:14] Alive in truth. Not dead in sin. Not dead in deceit. Paul says back to Romans 12 this is your reasonable or actually literally in the original language this is your logical act of worship.
[31:31] This is your logical act of worship in response to the mercy of God. Why? Why would he say that? Why is being a living sacrifice a logical response to the mercy of God?
[31:43] Well because if you are a Christian this morning you have benefited from the ultimate sacrifice. If you're a believer then a life has already been offered on an altar to save you from death.
[32:03] The sacrificial lamb has already been storted and offered on your behalf. Jesus Christ has died in your place on the altar of the cross of Calvary. That is God's mercy to you.
[32:18] The sacrifice of Christ to save you from your sin and so the logical response of worship to that sacrifice is to offer yourself as a sacrifice.
[32:31] You see his mind? You see what Paul is thinking about there? I remember a youth pastor teaching once in the subject. I don't remember much that youth pastors taught me because I was quite a rebellious teenager but I do remember this one thing.
[32:44] I remember a youth pastor at some sort of youth rally somewhere teaching on this passage in Romans 12 and he said you know what the problem is with living sacrifices?
[32:56] They're alive and so they keep crawling off the altar. Every time the fire gets hot or the priest's blade comes a little bit too close it's hard to stay on the altar.
[33:09] He said. It is hard. It's hard. It's hard to be a living sacrifice day in and day out in obedience to God and so in order to keep us on the altar to so move our hearts in worship so that we will not crawl off of the altar when life gets tough in order to keep us on that altar Jesus firmly nails himself to the altar.
[33:32] through his wrists, through his legs. A life lived as a living sacrifice is a logical response of worship to the sacrifice of Christ.
[33:50] But there's actually another sense in which it's a logical response. Let me explain it this way. If I'm driving down the road in my car and I see the temperature light come on and then I see the engine light come on and then they both not just come on but they start flashing and then I see smoke starting to come out of the bonnet.
[34:13] I know at that point I need to pull over to the side of the road and so even I with my incredibly limited mechanical knowledge can look at the car and go the car is broken.
[34:28] Seems like a pretty simple easy deduction to make right? But remember that Amazonian tribesman that J.I. Packer mentioned in that quote? Imagine I was able to get into a time machine go back to the 10th century and find such an Amazonian tribesman.
[34:48] Imagine I brought him and I showed him the car on the side of the road with the smoke coming out of it and I asked him to make a deduction about the state of the car.
[35:00] He might look at the car and you know what he might say? He might say this is fantastic. I can cook food off of the shiny surface without having to make a fire. So hot.
[35:11] This is perfect. It's got lights for nighttime. This is great. It's got this thing that you press in and makes a noise and chases violent animals away, dangerous animals away.
[35:23] It's even got wheels. I haven't invented wheels yet but these things look good and I can push it. It's got wheels. This car is perfect. It's fantastic.
[35:35] He wouldn't necessarily conclude that it was broken at all. The fundamental difference between him and me is that I know what the car is supposed to do.
[35:47] I know what it's designed to do. Friends, listen to the first question in the shorter catechism. I think this is the one that almost everybody memorizes.
[36:00] What is the chief end of man? The answer? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. We are designed to glorify God.
[36:15] God. It is what you are for. If you want to find the manual that says how do I work? This is what it says in that manual.
[36:26] We are made for worship. When you have had your mind renewed by God's word, then you see that the infinite, eternal, and unchangeable God created you to sing his praises.
[36:38] The tragedy is that you don't do that. We didn't do that. I didn't do that. You didn't do that. In sin, we turned away from him and we sang our own praises.
[36:51] Instead of offering a sacrifice of praise to him, we place burnt offerings on the altar of self worship. What was his response to that?
[37:05] What was his response to our wicked idolatry? Paul tells us, it's right at the very first part of verse 1 there, mercy. That's his response.
[37:17] Mercy. In mercy the Father sent his son to be a sacrifice of atonement. To atone for all of the worship that we have failed to give him and to atone for all of the worship, the supreme worship that we've given to the wrong things.
[37:32] It's all mercy. And so if you this morning will flee to that mercy by faith in God, faith in his son Jesus Christ, then he will restore you and he will turn you into what you are made for, which is the worship of God.
[37:52] You were made for worship. Let me close with these famous words from St. Augustine. He uses these to begin his book one of his famous confessions. He says, great are you, Lord, and greatly to be praised.
[38:07] Great is your power and of your wisdom there is no end. And man being a part of your creation desires to praise you. Man who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that you resist the proud.
[38:24] Yet man, this part of your creation, desires to praise you. You move us to delight in praising you for you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.
[38:40] You were made to worship God. That is your purpose in life. It's where you will find your deepest happiness, your deepest contentment, and your deepest fulfillment. Conversely, you will live a life of frustration and disappointment and discontentment until you take everything that you do, everything, and you bring it all into submission of the single overarching goal of ascribing to God the glory that is due him.
[39:20] Friends, run to that mercy of Jesus this morning. Gaze on his sacrifice. See his love. God. See his compassion. See all of that goodness and beauty and truth and power of the infinite, eternal, unchangeable God that comes onto display in that moment of cruelty.
[39:42] It's better than any natural wonder you'll ever see. Savor it. And then you will start to become a living sacrifice. Let's pray together.
[39:53] Amen. Our gracious God and our heavenly Father, we ask that you would make us worship us this morning.
[40:06] That you would teach us how in our weak and limited way teach us how to ascribe glory, the glory due your name.
[40:17] Help us to bring every single area of our lives into submission of that one bigger goal. God, that is what we were made for. And it is through your mercy, the mercy of your son Jesus Christ and his sacrifice that we are enabled to come and bring this glory in the first place.
[40:34] Lord, I pray for any person here this morning who doesn't know that mercy, who's never repented of their sin and trusted in Jesus and said, save me. I have given false worship to false things, save me.
[40:46] I pray that you would save them this morning and bring them to a place of repentance and faith. for the rest of us, grow us in worship. Lord, for those of us whose hearts are weak in worship right now, help us to give ourselves to the knowledge of God.
[40:59] Help us to know you. Help us to savor that moment on the cross more and more that we might have our hearts renewed, that we might have that fire rekindled within.
[41:13] May we be living sacrifices, Lord, in the truest sense. we ask this all for Christ's sake and his glory. Amen.