A Life of Worship

A Life of Worship

“The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. And the LORD said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the people of Israel: ‘You have seen for yourselves that I have talked with you from heaven. You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold.  An altar of earth you shall make for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen. In every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.  If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it. And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.’” (Exodus 20:21-26, ESV)

Recently I prayed to God about my worship and asked Him to renew my understanding of what it means to worship Him with my whole life, not merely through music. Musical worship is Biblical but can only be the expression of something that comes from the eternal depths that God placed in the heart of every person. What I seek to guard against in my life is singing songs about worship while not seeking to bring my life into harmony with God for the purpose of worship.

Exodus 20:21-26 details some of the first instructions that God gave to Israel in regard to worship. God delivered these people from Egypt for the purpose of being His inheritance. The psalms say that no other nation was given the privileges that Israel was given in God revealing Himself to them and giving them His laws to walk in so that they might know His ways. They were saved by God’s gracious intervention in Egypt not because they merited being saved but because He remembered the covenant He made with their forefathers. After God delivered them from their oppression He led them into the wilderness to show them the purpose for which they were delivered. He also came down in His manifest presence to dwell with them: “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of Him may be before you, that you may not sin” (Exodus 20:20).  God was revealing His holiness and their sinfulness and showing them He desired to dwell with them without compromising His holiness.

The first thing that God addresses is the tendency in people to fashion for ourselves false gods. Making an idol takes the mystery away from God and ceases to acknowledge His distinct glory as God. Dietrich Bonheffer once said “A god who allowed us to prove his existence would be an idol.” We can point to the evidence of God’s existence but to truly know Him we must come to Him and allow Him to reveal Himself to us and believe that He desires to do so. That is the crux of the Bible and it’s why we cannot interpret the Bible without the Holy Spirit. The Bible is not primarily about applying things to our lives – it is about revealing the person of God in Jesus Christ in all of His beautiful, majestic glory.  God made it clear that He also has good intentions for His people: “In every place where I cause My name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.”

What also stood out to me was what God said in regard to the altar and the way to approach the altar of worship: “you shall not build it of hewn (human-carved) stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it. And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.” They had to use stones that weren’t shaped by their craftsmanship and they couldn’t approach by steps. Steps would imply that it is something they made to approach God. The theme of being naked runs throughout the Bible and is synonymous with exposing sin. Adam and Eve covered their bodies because of the sense of being unclean within. Jesus spoke to the church of Leaodicia to come to Him for white garments so that the shame of their nakedness would not be revealed. The danger of the church is they didn’t know that they were naked and in need of being clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. We cannot approach God without His provided way of approaching Him through Jesus Christ. Works done in self-righteousness in relation to God are the equivalent of being a white-washed tomb. We clean the outside to hide the death inside. God is saying to His people “you cannot approach me this way. Your sin will be exposed and you will die.”

In the Old Testament, laws were given to punish disobedience and create order and blessings were associated with obedience. In this day and age we tend to look at some of the penalties of transgressing the laws under the Old Covenant as severe but Hebrews states: “Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.  How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10:28-29). The Old Covenant was pointing to a greater reality that has been established in the New Covenant. The Old Covenant provided a way for God’s people to live in light of their national salvation and be spared God’s judgments and the New Covenant provides a way for all of us to live in light of God’s complete salvation from God’s final judgment. Knowing what we have been saved from and saved for is at the heart of why we give thanks and praise to God as “saved” individuals.

I believe the easiest thing to lose sight of in worship is God Himself. The only way I know to remedy this is to fix my mind on who God has revealed Himself to be in the Bible. In Colossians, Paul magnifies the person of Jesus in declaring that He is the source of all created things, pre-eminent in all things, the image of the invisible God (1:15-20). In Him are the treasures of the knowledge of God (2:3). Rather than skipping past that to the “application” part of the letter (i.e. the part that applies to me). I realized the Holy Spirit wanted me to stop and behold Jesus and just worship Him for who He is. There is no one like Him who is the very expression of God. I was made to be fascinated and enamored with His glory. Secondly, we are to praise Him for His wonderful work of salvation in which He revealed the Father’s desire to deliver us from darkness to be His own precious possession. In Him we have redemption – we are redeemed from every lawless deed to be able to serve Him. In Him we have eternal value and our works are precious to Him. I have experienced first-hand that when I worship God this way that I often don’t feel different immediately but over time my emotions come more in alignment with God, I become more enamored with Him and less enamored with lesser things.

In light of this great salvation, Colossians states that taking in God’s word and everything we do in this life can be an act of worship: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (3:16-17). In Christ, we have the privilege of being able to put to death the works that don’t glorify God and which all amount to idolatry (3:5). We can by faith appropriate an inward righteousness, a new nature that “is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (3:10). In Christ we have more than behavior modification – we have spiritual life within us through Jesus by which we can know God and find pleasure in doing what we were divinely designed to do: worship.