Let us turn to our Bibles to Psalm 51, Psalm 51, verses 16 through 19. So I stopped there in Hosea to cover the rest of the commandments because clearly he’s applying them, especially the first table, of course, and there’s a lot of repetition from that perspective. And I wanted to take a look at the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament perspective to show in the Old Testament that they had much depth and of understanding that is the best of them, those who understood by God’s grace that there’s more to the commandments than outward conformity, but of the heart.
And so I had a longer title here. We’re running out of space. I think the second commandment already takes up a third of the line.
So I’m going to spend a fair amount here on the inward worship, of course. The inward worship. The saints of old understood that they were called to the Ten Commandments and their heart first, and of course their hands.
And it was reduced to the outward forms over time, of course, by corruption and lies and sin, not because the Old Testament didn’t teach otherwise. You see it in Leviticus. You see it in Deuteronomy, the call of loving God to cling to him.
And you especially see it, and I’ll have a lot of verses in this series, from the Psalms and the Proverbs of the spirituality of the Ten Commandments there in the Old Testament context. Let us go before him and listen to his word. Psalm 51, verses 16 and following.
For you do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it. You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.
These, O God, you will not despise. Do good in your good pleasure to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem.
Then you shall be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offerings and burnt offerings. Then they shall offer bowls on your altar. Let us pray.
Here, God, we read of David expressing what, of course, Paul recognizes as well, the rest of the saints all over the New and Old Testament, that God, you did call them to have sacrifice and burnt offerings, but your desire at the end of the day did not terminate on those outward activities as though that were satisfying, that was sufficient, but you wanted their heart. You wanted a broken, contrite spirit of repentance, Lord, that submitted to you, and then you would be pleased with the sacrifices of the righteous, of the righteous of the heart, of those who are justified and sanctified and adopted by the Spirit of God, even with burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings. And today that would be baptism in the Lord’s Supper and singing praises and being in worship.
God, we are supposed to fundamentally and primarily in all things do it from the heart. Gracious God, may we learn these truths anew and to see how much depth of spirituality there is in the Old Testament and how it is our Old Testament and part of Christianity. We’re thankful for these truths.
In your name alone we pray. Amen. So this beautiful psalm, especially this latter part, I remember meditating upon it as a young Christian and learning more and more about the fullness of covenant theology from my old dispensational background that, oh wait, the Old Testament wasn’t just externality and never was, that was never the purpose.
It was indeed used, it was more external to be sure, as we know, obviously with the priests and the altars and the like, but that was never supposed to shadow over the fundamental part that God wanted their heart.
Worship and the Second Commandment
And we see this here in Psalm 51 where it sums up the essence of the second commandment, the sacrifice of our hearts is needed with any sacrifice of our hands to give it unto God above. The Lord never gave the outward forms of public worship, clearly that’s what’s being talked about here at the latter part of Psalm 51, which is the second commandment, that the outward forms of public worship were never a replacement for inward motions of the heart, nor to satisfy his divine wrath.
They were given to assist the Old Testament saints in their praise to the Lord, to wake them up, as it were, to stir up their souls with tactile and audio actions as we have in giving of baptism of water and eating of the Lord’s supper, using bodily actions to reinforce our weak faith. That’s what it’s there, and it’s teached about, of course, grace and sin and our great Savior Jesus Christ. So a lot of functions going on there in the Old Testament sacrifices, but also as well in the New Testament sacraments.
Now the topic of worship of the Lord is indeed deep and wide, for our God is infinite in all these dimensions, but I want to review the basics of worship and delve into some details I think relevant here for today, while highlighting again, of course, the spiritual substance of the second commandment that was there in the Old Testament saints. The ten commandments were not just externalities, as Jesus explains later, but always included the heart and the demand of the whole of who we are, mind, will, and emotion. And as such, in explaining these things, we’ll see these verse points, worship and the second commandment.
So more broadly before I get to the two points that couldn’t fit in the title really, which is the external and the internal parts of worship. So worship more broadly, right, and the second commandment. Often we think of worship as such, this is the second commandment, although worship is still part of the first commandment, because more precisely the first commandment is the object of worship, who we honor, who we praise, who we laud and exalt and lift up and submit to, shall have no other gods before me.
The second commandment explains in terms of him being the object, now what? How do we show said honor, said glorifying of God in submission to him? This is what we consider the more overt acts of worship, because it clearly involves the outward parts, because it says what? Make no idols, don’t bow down to them. Those are what? Outward actions of the body. But again, worship is always of the heart as well, because God is the object of worship and God does not have a body, but as a spirit, we must worship him with our spirit first and foremost in all things.
We may have disagreements in the bodily things as it were, and we do, and we’ll cover a little bit about that to be sure, but we should all certainly agree that we should give God our heart and all that we are. Worship in the first table of the law is what we’re talking about here broadly, that is, the second commandment is part of the first and the third and the fourth, the first table we call it, and the last six commandments are the second table, or that is, love towards our neighbor, and the first four commandments is love towards God, who he is, how we can honor him, how we honor all things associated with him, his name, and then his day. Worship in the first table of the law.
Worship, that word means to honor, to venerate, to glorify, even to serve, with of course God, the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, all three and each individual one, depending on our mind at the time, as the object of said veneration, glorification, honor, or service. The immediate object, we’re talking about God, that’s an act of worship. I want to bring that up and remind us again, worship isn’t necessarily and reducible only to this time here on Sunday morning.
Throughout the week, if you have thoughts of God, they ought to be holy thoughts of God, just like on Sunday. The commandment not to have images is not just in formal public worship, but in your family life, at home, in your closet, in your prayer life, no images of Christ, for example. So it applies to all of life, the honoring that we ought to have of him.
Now there’s lots of different words, I did a whole science class on it, as you recall. It was 2023, I reviewed some of that. We have here John Colbert, a Puritan, on his book of divine worship.
He says, worship is a respect not merely to another’s worth or excellence, clearly we’re supposed to respect God with respect to his worth or excellence, which is of course infinite worth, infinite excellence. He continues, but to his superiority and power over us. So not just the abstract, or just out there, we had the God-fearers, right, in the Bible.
And these are people usually amongst the Jews, the Gentiles, hanging out with the Jews saying, we kind of like the Jewish way, but we’re not fully Jews here, we’re not fully followers of the Messiah. God-fearers. They would fall into that, respecting another’s worth or excellence, God’s worth or excellence, but not his superiority and power over them, so they’re not converts yet.
That’s what a convert is, we worship God, we acknowledge he’s our superior over us in power. Now he describes it here, which is an old way of describing the word worship, which may seem strange to us. So, worship to, that is, respect the superiority and power over us, whether natural, civil, or ecclesiastical, and such as observance of him as implies subjection, and of course religious.
The ultimate worship is God Almighty. So the old word means honoring, venerating, we talk about old veneration, it’s an old word as well. Talk about your worship, they used to talk about your worship, the judge coming into the courts, that’s what that old word means, and there’s a way to use that in the old sense, although again it sounds perhaps strange in our ears today as Christians, but that’s the old use of the word worship, very broad.
Briefly, we can reduce this to worship as an honoring of God. In its narrow sense, worship is an immediate honoring of God, and that’s significant, because we can worship God more indirectly by fulfilling the second table of the law. We love our neighbor, we take care of our wife, we discipline our children, we’re not thinking about God at that time, it’s not the first and foremost of our thought, it’s dealing with the matter here, working with our co-worker, but why are you doing these things? Why are you taking care of your neighbor and the like? Because of God.
So that’s indirect reference to honoring God and worshiping him with respect to the second table of the law, that’s what that means. Direct or immediate honoring of God, that’s what we have with respect to the first four commandments. He’s immediately in our thoughts, in our words, or something in our actions of some sort, and we’re supposed to show honor in what we do, say, or think.
That’s worship. Anytime, Monday through Monday, Sunday through Sunday, every day of the week, every time of the week, not just right here and now. Now again, I alluded to this a little bit from the Puritan there, the natural worship, or the civil worship and the like, natural worship would be the honor due to your parents, you ought to have a proper veneration or honoring of your parents, not a divine honoring, of course, that’s always under the Lord.
Civil worship, that is you honor the magistrate, that’s all that means. So divine is what I’m talking about, or religious worship of God Almighty, and as I said already, there’s the indirect, and we get this idea of indirect is from 1 Corinthians 10.31. Once we understand this distinction, at least for me, it made a lot more sense when we read these passages. So in 1 Corinthians 10.31, you’ll recognize this, therefore, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do all to what? The glory of God.
Now the glory of God is another way of saying the worship, or honor, or exalting, or whatever, right? They’re all synonyms of God. All that you do in life is under His reign and under His eyes, and we ought to acknowledge that. So if someone asked us, why do you love your spouse? And you say, I love my spouse because they’re wonderful and everything else, but say, ultimately, why? You say, well, ultimately, because God tells me to, and I want to honor Him.
That’s the idea here. You do it for His glory, right? You have multiple objects in your life, multiple purpose in your life. One of my purpose in life is take care of my wife and she and me, but that’s just this level.
The highest level is, why are you taking care of one another? Because we want to honor and glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That’s the chief end of men. There’s lots of secondary ends, or purposes, or goals in life.
They’re good and proper in their place, but they’re always subservient to the greater goal, which is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. So all these everyday things, eating or drinking, those are purposes and goals. I better have those.
You better have that. You’re going to die. You got to eat.
You got to drink, and that’s perfectly acceptable, but why are you eating and drinking? And you’re saying, I’m doing this because God calls me to do it, and I want to be a good citizen of His kingdom, and I want to take care of my body. He tells me to take care of my body, and that means eating well and drinking well. And I do it for His glory, that is for His honor, because I submit to Him.
It’s an act of submission. For the unbeliever, it is not an act of submission. It’s whatever, an act of defiance sometimes even.
I’ll eat whatever I want, whatever I want, however I want. So that’s indirect worship or honoring of God. Again, that’s the second table, the six commandments there, loving your neighbor and the like.
You love your neighbor because that’s God’s command, even if it’s not immediately the first thing in your mind. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t make you any less of a Christian.
You just have a finite mind and can only think of one thing at a time. This is what it means to be human. It’s okay.
But the direct worship is a conscious act of honoring the Lord, right, whether in thought, word, or deed. That’s worship proper or more immediate or more direct, however you wish, adjective you wish to put before it. Now, as I said already ahead of myself, many think worship is what is done on Sunday.
Others think worship is what they feel or what the songs they sing or whatever the case may be. Now, that’s formal public worship and formalization, however, doesn’t make it more worshipful per se. And another way of looking at that is, again, formal public worship has its place.
It’s important. It helps us grow and the like. Amen.
But it has the same rules you would have outside of formal public worship with respect to God. I can’t have images of God in worship that is formal public worship, nor throughout the week when I worship him and think about him. The second commandment applies everywhere.
That’s the point. And people have this strange approach, I’ve seen it even in Presbyterian circles, that somehow there’s different rules here in honoring God. There are in one sense because it’s a formal public event, but we do that with what? Other formal public events.
You dress up a little nicer, a little more careful how you present yourself. You don’t have a lot of chaos going on here, right? That’s that formality idea there. That doesn’t make it, again, more worshipful, although it may help you become more worshipful in your mindset, that’s true.
Makes a difference how you dress up and how you think sometimes, doesn’t it? That’s why businesses often, at least historically, were like, you need to dress up a little nicer, please, when you come to work. So you put yourself in the right mindset. That’s our human limitation and God is kind enough to grant us this setting to help us overcome that limitation, formal public worship.
Now, divine worship is both inward and outward. I think that should be obvious and I don’t know how much I want to go into that because you’ve heard this before, you know it, but it’s good to be reminded again. Our heart, that is our purpose, our love, our faith, our fear, our joys, and the like, should be unto the Lord our God in our worship and honoring Him.
And that, of course, those details I went over in the first commandment in the last sermon, specifically I went over the fear of the Lord and trusting in Him, that all the other motions or movements of the heart are part and required of God and honoring Him. Outwardly, the acts directed towards honoring God, the hands, the mouth, the body posture, and the like, that includes divinely sanctioned acts like baptism. You don’t have the right, that’s why I mentioned that this morning.
Where’d that office come from, apostle or a pastor? It came from God. Jesus Christ made that office and that falls under the third commandment, things where God has His name put upon it, right? The name of God, the name of God is on His church and on His office, on His ordinances and the like. And so they ought to be taken care of and taken seriously accordingly because they are with respect to God in a way other things in the world are not.
Although all things are, of course, with respect to God because He created all things. Other acts like standing or bowing your head, these fall under a category we’re going to talk about shortly, natural worship, things you would do ordinarily when you show honor to other people anyways, you would do towards God. God doesn’t give us, in other words, a specific list of what it looks like to honor God in the Bible.
Do you stand up during the prayer? Do you sit down during the prayer? Do you put a hat on? Do you take a hat off? You read the commentaries and the history of the practices of the churches, there’s a lot of variety and they say, you know, in our culture, you’re supposed to stand up and take your hat off when the, you know, the elders come in. Other people say you’re supposed to sit down or do whatever, different variety. But what’s common in all these things, the act should be simple and not distracting because you’re not supposed to be distracting.
It’s not supposed to be about you and the things that you do, but about God when you talk about Him, when you’re worshiping Him, when you’re honoring Him, when you’re thinking of Him, when we’re singing praises before Him. They should not unduly draw attention to ourselves or to others. That’s a simple rule of thumb there.
Worship is discovered from two sources. You’ve heard this already from natural revelation, from special revelation. Natural is what we know of God’s will outside the Bible, and that’s a fair amount, although it’s, of course, suppressing unrighteousness, but that suppression isn’t such that they are no longer culpable.
Think about that. There’s a level, a threshold in which, yeah, they’ve suppressed it. They’re lying about it.
They’re deceiving themselves and other people, yeah, but it’s not so much deception that they can walk around and claim, I’m completely ignorant. I don’t know who God is. I don’t know what sin is.
I don’t, murder? Why is that wrong? They know it’s wrong. It’s suppressed, but not suppressed so much that they’re no longer morally culpable. They are morally culpable.
Romans 1, very clear about that. Psalm 19 as well. So natural revelation, as much as sometimes we may knock on it, is still used by God, of course.
It’s fallen, but it’s not completely eradicated, destroyed. There’s enough there that they feel guilt, and they respond accordingly by hiding from the truth or being angry with the messenger of the truth or whatever. There’s all kinds of varieties of reactions to what God declares from his law and from the church preached to them.
Special revelation, of course, is additional revelation of the nature. You see lots of things. Proverbs is an excellent example of that, so I’m going to go through Proverbs a number of times in the series, in which you have these short, pithy sayings about moral truths or relationships and the like that you’ll find in other civilizations, lying and cheating and honesty and honoring your parents and the like, because they know these things.
This is written on their hearts as much as they wish to tear it off their minds. And so you, in other words, have natural revelation, truth, the law of God, here in the Bible, but of course, with more clarity, praise be to his name. We would never know another way of looking at this with respect to worship, because pastor, you’re talking about natural worship.
Now, natural worship tells you what? There’s a real God. He doesn’t have a body, because he’s omnipresent. He’s omnipotent.
He’s infinite. That’s the only thing that can sustain the finite is the infinite, because we’re going to fade away. Everything falls apart without it.
They recognize these things, and therefore they know they ought to submit to God in their heart, by their spirit. That’s what natural revelation teaches, but natural revelation does not teach make an altar, build a temple, give a priest. You had to get that from special revelation.
You had to get that from the Bible, from Moses, from God telling the patriarchs, make this offering, the olah offering. It’s one specific word all the time in the Old Testament until you get to Moses, and from there you have four or five other sacrifices added on to it, the trespass offering, the peace offering, the free will offering, and the like. These are additional things that come from where? Come from divine instituted worship found in the will of God, in the Word of God specifically.
It’s called instituted worship. It’s based upon his will. Jeremiah Burroughs, another Puritan from the 1600s.
Now, God has written the law of natural worship in our hearts. We know there’s a God, and we should submit to him with our heart. As that we should love God, fear God, trust God, and pray to God.
The list is longer in the confession. This God has written in our hearts, believer, unbeliever alike. We know this.
But there are other things in the worship of God that are not written on our hearts. That is not natural worship from natural revelation. That depends upon the will of God revealed in his Word.
And these are of such nature as we can see no reason, but only this, because God will have them. So traditionally, the distinction is there’s a natural moral reason, and unbelievers would see the reason and say, that makes sense. You shouldn’t murder people.
I don’t need a lot of thinking about that because that creates chaos. It’s dangerous to come back and hurt me. So you have all these reasons.
That’s true. But there is no reason you can come from nature, unbelievers would ever find, or believers for that matter, that would give us a temple, that would give us a bloody sacrifice. Why would you think that would appease God? It doesn’t.
It came from God’s will, will only. And his will took it away, and now it’s gone. Book of Hebrews says it’s all gone.
That’s the difference. That’s the distinction. So this is important because in reading the Old Testament, many acts of the Old Testament are what? Instituted worship acts.
The temple. Coming to the temple. The men coming once a year to the temple.
The Passover. All that. You would not have gotten any of that from nature without a Bible.
They got it from God’s word and a prophet. And so the kind of worship honoring God of the heart, you can go there and you can understand now why the Puritans would give a proof text from the Old Testament about worship. You’re like, how can that be relevant to me when the Old Testament worship forms are done away with? Because the part they’re referencing is natural worship that they would have done without the temple anyway, and they did before Moses came along.
Abraham had it. He prayed to God. You don’t have to pray with your mouth either.
Pray in your heart because you’re supposed to worship God in your heart. But we naturally, because we are finite human beings of the body, it’s going to come out of our mouth eventually. We’re going to pray.
We’re going to praise. This comes without a Bible. You know you’re going to have to do this.
You want to do it, as a believer especially. But the Bible gives us special directions and encouragement in that way because of course we can sometimes deceive ourselves. But the point being you can go to those proof texts and it makes sense when you realize, oh that’s natural worship.
That’s what you would have done anyways without God telling you in the sense of having a prophet. You didn’t need a prophet. You just have general revelation.
God designed it such that you want to praise and praise before him and give prayer before him and give him your heart, the inward worship. And those are the texts they use. And of course the book of Hebrews tells us all these things are done in a way with inward and worship and the second commandment, the second point, a heart of worship.
Inward Worship and the Second Commandment
Psalm 51, our text before us, for you not desire sacrifice or also a giving. You do not delight in burnt offering. Now clearly this is poetic license we like to say today and I mean that in the best sense that is it’s hyperbole.
Obviously God gave the commandment to have sacrifices. I mean it comes right out of the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. What’s the psalmist saying? What’s David saying here? He’s saying this isn’t the heart of the matter.
At the end of the day this is but temporary. He understood this because it’s a physical thing and God isn’t interested in physical things. He’s interested in what? Your heart.
That’s what it means to worship him in spirit and in truth. And so this beautiful psalm here he’s highlighting with this great contrast. God doesn’t want these outward things, fellow Jews.
What God wants are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, one who acknowledges their sin and their need of a savior. Then you shall be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness. Verse 19, with burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings.
Then God is pleased with your baptism, with your Lord’s Supper, with your church attendance, because you come with your heart and you haven’t left it at home. You come with faith in other words and trust and reliance and love in him. That’s what he’s talking about.
It’s one of the clearest examples of the Old Testament that they are called to offer their heart. They always knew this and the Jews of Hosea’s day, of course, had lost sight of that and reduced things to outward forms of worship and even that they weren’t satisfied with and they mutated it and molded it into Baal worship. Proverbs 21.3, to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.
So here again is another emphasis in the Old Testament. It was never about the external acts. The external acts were subservient to the greater purpose here of righteousness and justice.
That if there’s a conflict, the outward acts of the sacrifice will give way to saving life, for example. It’s okay to go to the showbread and grab that food, as David did, the showbread and fed his men in fulfillment of the second table of the law or the sixth commandment. He violated the second.
Christ brought that up and his point was, you missed the point. It was never about externality. Externality, when it conflicts with justice of the second table of life and the like, I’m sorry, just sorry, you’re done with it.
Take that bread. Take that sword. Took Goliath’s sword that was there in the temple.
That’s what he’s talking about. Now, of course, otherwise, when there isn’t a conflict, you ought to do what God has told us. Sacrifice no more today, but what we have is go to church, take the Lord’s supper, things like that.
Our sacraments are two, baptism and Lord’s supper. Their sacraments are many. All the sacrifices were their sacraments or signs and seals of the covenant of grace.
So there’s a priority therein from the external versus the internal. And of course, the inward acts of worship, loving God, trusting him, fearing him, rejoicing in him, are never to be submissive and second place to anyone else. That’s always first place.
Always. The second table falls way behind God. Everyday worship.
So that’s obedience versus sacrifice. Everyday worship. Proverbs 15, 29, the Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.
That’s just not a worship on Sunday or their day, Saturday. What’s prayer? It’s an act of worship because you’re talking to God. God is the object of your honoring him with your words and asking for requests as his child.
And that can happen anytime throughout the week, but the Lord is far from the wicked who opened their mouth and pray for deliverance as we know of some of the Old Testament kings, but their hearts were far from him and God responded accordingly. Inward worship of God was paramount in the Old Testament. As Proverbs 21, 3 and 15, 29 reminds us.
Outward Worship and the Second Commandment
Outward worship in the second commandment, the saints understood the 10 commandments and that is the best of them. We’re about a handle or a short summary of many things. And we have two parts of the second commandment as we have the two parts of all the 10 commandments.
What is required in second commandment that is receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire all such religious worship and ordinances as God has appointed in his word. What he’s appointed in his word is of course preaching, sacraments, and the like. And we are supposed to keep those unless there’s a conflict with life and death in the second table.
That is, these are the outward forms especially, right? But never the heart. Negatively, this is Shorter Catechism question 51, what is forbidden in the second commandment? This says second commandment forbids the worshiping of God by images or any other way not appointed in his word. If he had given us a command to worship him with images, we ought to have done it, but he did not.
He gave us quite the contrary in Deuteronomy 4, which explicitly said neither male nor female should you make an image of to represent me because God in both the Old and New Testament is still God of the spirit and not of the flesh. That is, he doesn’t have a body. And so we cannot worship the true God with false items or false manner, but always the true God with true worship that he has given us.
Proverbs 21, 27, the sacrifices of the wicked is an abomination. How much more when he brings it with wicked intent? And there is emphatic to show that those coming before God in worship of him, here a sacrifice being a picture of worship, which of course could be prayer as we read elsewhere in Proverbs 21, whatever it may be. They come with ill intent, of course, being wicked, they’re going to come with ill intent is the point here.
What they do is never pleasing before God, both in their heart and their outward actions. Again, God wants the heart. And then lastly here to give some examples for modern day for the rest of us from a different perspective or a different thought.
Because again, the larger catechism has a lot of detail. I picked this one out, disproving all false worship. Isaiah 30 verse 22, you will also defile the covering of your graven images of silver and the ornament of your molded images of gold.
You will throw them away as an unclean thing. You will say to them, get away. So this is a prophecy of God to the power of the spirit, to the Jews saying, you’re going to, as we say, spit on your own sacrifices.
You’re get away, we will say to them. Our conversion to Christ means turning away from false worship, false ways of honoring God or false gods for that matter, a combination of both. And it’s a natural act.
What I mean by this, if there were monuments of foreign invaders, the natives are going to throw down those monuments. It’s just what you’re going to do because you love your country and you don’t care to be invaded. Thank you very much.
How much more for the honor of God Almighty. The larger catechism, it says explicitly in the American edition as also the disproving, disapproving, excuse me, the disapproving, detesting, opposing all false worship and according to each one’s place and calling, removing it and all monuments of idolatry. What does that look like? From verbal disapproval, of course, to outright preaching against it, maybe even writing to your Senator, I don’t know.
We’re called, I think, in other words, from this description of Isaiah, it’s a proof text from our own confession on this matter, what I call a controlled zeal for God’s honor. We’re not called to run out randomly and what they call iconoclasm and start tearing down everything we see wicked around us. Although you may, especially the young guys, feel very strongly tempted to do that.
There’s a time and place for everything and going to jail is not the time nor the place for you. So there’s a lot of things you can do there. Zeal here, I have the idea, of course, of eager to protect God’s name and His glory and His worship.
So you dislike the cursing of His name. Gross violations of the Lord’s day grieves you. That’s good and proper.
You ought to have that natural reaction that is the spiritual reaction. I mean that sense of natural second nature being born again, right? A controlled zeal, that is, it’s not overbearing, but what do we talk about this morning? Gentle, fruit of gentleness, that is, one who has a position of strength and authority by God, of course that’s relative, accommodating to the weaker. And so you can give your concern to your neighbor about misusing the Lord’s name, for example, or explain gently to your relative that, no, I cannot go to that false worship.
I’m not going to go there. Sorry. You don’t need to be aggressive about it.
But I think we should not lose that zeal because it’s hard, brothers and sisters, because we are surrounded by much false worship. And like lots, it can vex our soul, seeing these wicked things around us. So be aware, but don’t look for trouble.
Pray specifically for yourself, the family, the church to be true to His worship, to pray for revival and free access to the gospel. We’re thankful that we have that access. We’re not forced to worship false gods and false churches.
And of course, avoid blasphemy, places of blasphemy as best we are able. To sum it all up, you should worship God with all that you are, especially in our hearts, eager for His honor and trusting in His grace in Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.
Let us pray. Our God above, help us, Lord, to renew and go through these ideas and these verses, many more could have been covered, in which we are called, God, to give our whole hearts to you. It’s not about the sacrifices.
You do not desire sacrifice at the end of the day and burn offerings as though that would satisfy you, but you want our whole heart, a heart of love and commitment and joy to you. Give us more of your spirit, God, more grace that we may do these things. By the blood of Christ we pray, amen.