Summary
Pastor Safrit continues his series on glorifying God, focusing on Psalm 100. He emphasizes that true worship involves acknowledging God's greatness through public, private, family, and corporate expressions of praise. The sermon encourages believers to align their worship with God's will, serving Him with gladness and recognizing that all aspects of life should reflect His glory. Practical applications include making joyful noise, serving together as families, and maintaining a personal relationship with God through daily devotion.
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If you have your Bibles, we're going to be in Psalms chapter 100. If you've got a child that wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, you can do that at this time. And we are looking at our core value number one again this morning,
glorifying God and what that looks like and how that is. I want to just give a quick recap from last week. Glorify God, I simply said it like this, is to give weight to, and it's anything that we're thinking about, talking about, or bragging about.
And so that is what we glorify. And so this morning we want to ask ourselves, what are we glorifying? And then how do we glorify God? Okay, we're going to look at that this week.
And next week we're going to give some practical illustrations, some practical meaning of what it means to glorify God. And this morning we're going to be talking about praise and worship. I'm a little hot in the monitors, guys.
If you could turn that down on the pulpit side, I think. I just got a little echo. And so what does it mean to glorify God this morning? And how can we do that? And so Psalms 100,
you've been up and down a couple times. You can remain seated for this time. We'll read here Psalms 100 and look and see what the Lord has to say for us. It says this, Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness.
Come before His presence with singing. Know the Lord. He is good. He is God. It is He who has made us, and we are not ourselves.
We are His people and the sheep of His pastures. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him and bless His name. For the Lord is good, His mercy endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.
Let's pray. Lord, we love You. Lord, again, we thank You for what You've done. We thank You for who You are. And I pray, God, that You would just be with the words that I say this morning. Help me to magnify Your name this morning.
Lift You up high this morning as we talk about how we can praise and worship You and how we can ultimately glorify who You are and what You've done for us. We love You. In Your name we pray. Amen.
As I was thinking about history, again, last week I shared the illustration of Switzerland and being neutral and how there is no such thing as neutral ground in our spiritual journey.
My mind went to, randomly, how many of you have, like, random thoughts?
Okay, I'm not the only one that just will be sitting there and some random thing will pop into your head and you're like, where did I even get that from? And so, randomly, this thought came into my mind and it fit well.
I actually, normally, most of my open illustrations, they fit really well.
But this one just, I didn't know if it was going to fit well. And so I actually asked Allie.
I actually called a couple of pastor friends of mine and said, hey, I'm thinking about going this route. Does it even sound right? Does it even make sense? Like, oh, man, that's really good. That's good.
So, hopefully, it turns out really good. It may not. It may fall flat like my singing did. But we're going to hope and pray that it does well.
And so, the year that I was born, 1988, 35 years ago,
a group came upon the scene. And this group began to be the pop sensation of the turn of the century, of the 89, 90, and in that turn. This scene, they were from Germany.
It was two men that had begun singing and they were getting popularity like none other had seen before. The duo began to produce music.
They put out what was called records and vinyls. Okay? Have you ever heard of records and vinyls before? Okay? A couple of people. They're actually making their comeback.
Believe it or not, there were more records sold last year than there were CDs in the entire world. And so, if you've got record players, guys, get those back out. They're making a comeback. Okay?
And so, their very first record came to America and three of the first five singles went number one.
So, they were making some huge strides in the pop culture world. Their most popular song came in January of 1990 and it went six times platinum. Okay?
This is a massive amount of sales, a massive amount of records. And in the top ten boards, they had a song in the top ten boards for 41 months.
To get you in that mindset, that's three and a half years. They had some song that they had produced in America in the top ten songs of all that was recorded.
By the end of 1990, their fame, they began to go viral before viral was even a thing.
Okay? People were talking about them. People were thinking about them. People were singing about it. People were buying their music. People were talking about it. And in early 1990, by the end of 1990, they were performing a song.
And while they were performing a song, the CD that they were using skipped and they were found out to be frauds.
This group is now named as Milli Vanilli. Milli Vanilli was lip singing everything they were doing because they weren't really that great of singers. Okay?
They didn't get the clue that I told them of just to sing no matter what and people are going to make fun of you when you sing. But they decided they were going to produce albums and other people were going to sing in those albums.
And they got up and they performed in audiences all across America, all across the world. And people were talking about them. People were thinking about them. And when that happened,
they were found out to be fake. And oftentimes in our spiritual journey, we have praise and fanfare for things that are ultimately worthless or nothing. And oftentimes in our journey, we have misappropriated praise in our life. We have praise that should be towards something.
Worshiping the Right Things
And it's inevitably towards something that it shouldn't be. And ultimately, everything that we should be praised and worshiping should be the Lord. And we worship things that are wrong. We worship things that are false. We worship things that we should not worship. And this goes back. It's not just America.
It's not just in the 20th century and 20th year, 2024. But this goes all the way back into the very beginning of Scripture. You look at the children of Israel. God is there speaking in front of them. They have the prophet Moses.
And Moses goes up on top of a mountain. And Moses receives direct revelation from God.
And Moses comes down from the mountain. His face was glowing. His body was radiating the glory of God. And what did the children of Israel say? Moses, go hide yourself. We don't want to see that. We don't want to be around that.
And they said, Aaron, will you make for us something that is fake? And we will worship that.
And so they begin to melt down gold. And they begin to melt down all their earrings. And they made a calf, something that was fake. And they said, that's what we're going to worship. Because we don't want to worship God.
And it's happened all throughout centuries, all throughout the Christian church, where we misappropriate the worship and the praise that only God deserves.
And so this morning, as we think through that, I've laid it out three different ways. What does it mean to praise God? What is our focus upon Him?
And then how do we praise Him very practically through this Psalms 100? And so what does it mean to praise God? I read it like this. And this one's on your notes if you want to jot it down.
But it's this, our full participation in worship. And this happens from a desire to glorify God, love Christ, and know Christ. That we will be conformed more and more to the likeness of who Christ is.
Romans 12 simply talks about this in massive amounts of ways where it says that when we are conforming our life to Christ, we are conforming to the will of God, to what God has for us.
And he says that daily we should be crucified in our life so that we will glorify God, we will love God, and we will know Christ. See, when we begin to praise God, it draws us closer to who He is.
It draws us closer to His knowledge, to His love, to what He has for us. And ultimately, it conforms to be more and more like Him. Oftentimes, you'll see this in a marriage,
right? A husband and wife who've been together for 30, 40, 50 years.
And the longer they're married, people will say this, you begin to look like each other. Has anyone ever said that? Have you ever seen that before? Like, the longer someone's married, all of a sudden their husband and wife's beginning. Like, they're not going and having surgery. They're not physically changing their appearance.
But the closer we are to someone, it's something in our human brain, it's something the way God has formed us. We begin to look like each other. I don't know how it is. I can't explain it.
I'm sure there's some scientific explanation for it. But all I know is the closer we are to people, the more we begin to resemble them. And so ultimately, the closer we are to God, we should be resembling what God is. We should be resembling who God is.
And so I put it like this as a practical definition, the work of acknowledging the greatness of God. There's two times in the Old Testament and New Testament where it begins to talk about the greatness of God. And when people experience the greatness of God, two things happened.
It's all throughout the Old Testament, all throughout the New Testament. The first one is this, they were bowing down.
When they came into the presence of God, they could not stand up. They had to bow down. Look at Moses when he came into the burning bush. He said, I can't even wear these shoes. I've got to take these shoes off. And immediately, he bowed down.
And he began to worship the burning bush, which was God. Because he realized that this was a superior being and he had to bow down and worship him. If you have your Bibles open, you can flip back probably one page in your scripture.
Psalms 95 says it like this. Psalms 95 verse 6. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our maker. When people experienced the Lord in the New Testament,
the woman that was of an issue of blood, she could not receive help. She had this issue for 12 years.
And what did she do? She scraped her way through the crowds and she grabbed onto the Lord's hem of his garment in a prostrate position because she said, I'm not even worthy to touch you. Let me just touch your garment.
When the three wise men came to see Jesus as a young child, what did they do? They bowed down and gave him gifts.
They bowed down and there was a posture of bowing down. There was a posture of saying, I am nothing. And God, you're great. And this is praise.
This is what it means when we praise God is to acknowledge he is great, to acknowledge he is good. But also as we continue to think through that, there is a thought of understanding. Not only do we bow down, but we begin to serve. We begin to worship through serving.
Psalms 211, you don't have to turn there. I'm just going to read it. One verse is the very, one of these opening passages in our psalm study on Wednesday night is this verse. We just talked about it. In Psalms 211, it says this.
If I can get there, right here. Serve the Lord with fear, trembling and with trepidation. Serve the Lord with rejoicing.
Serve the Lord with fear. Because this is what it means to worship him, to praise him. It means to serve him with reverence, with rejoicing, with trembling of who he is.
Worship Focused on God
Worship this morning, church, is all about God. It's all about what he is and who he is and what he's done for us. There's an amazing passage of scripture in John chapter 4.
I'm trying to give plenty of supporting scripture so that you can understand what it means to worship and praise God this morning. But in John chapter 4, verse 23, the Bible says this. It says that, Church, this morning, we have worship that is God-centered.
And when we worship God as God-centered, the Bible says right there in John chapter 4 that our Heavenly Father is seeking after people that are worshiping him.
God is seeking after us when we worship him. God is seeking after a people, a group of people. This tells me that people are not worshiping God. And God is looking for a group of people that he can say, That's my family.
That's my people. And they're worshiping me. I'm going to go be with them. Because they know who I am. They worship me. They love me.
They care about me. And I want to be in the midst of that. People ask me all the time, Pastor James, there's so many churches. And my father-in-law just moved here.
He's living with us upstairs. And he's from the Chicago areas where he was born and raised. And so he came down here. He's lived in Arkansas.
And again, Arkansas is not the Bible Belt of North Carolina. And he came here and he said, I'm starting to get the lay of the land. And he said,
It's almost like every time I turn, there's another church. I go down a street. And I'm in rural North Carolina. And I turn down the road. And boom, there's another church. I go about a mile and a half.
And boom, there's another church. He said, I've never seen so many churches in my life.
And what breaks my heart is to know that there are so many churches. But yet, why is God not working in those churches? Why is God not working in a group of people? And the only explanation that I can have is, they're not worshiping Him. Because He's not with them.
And if God was with them, then they would be making an impact in their community. And so therefore, church, it tells me that we must worship God in spirit and in truth. And we must seek after what He is and who He is by acknowledging His greatness.
And when we do that, the Bible says that God steps out of heaven and steps into our presence. And we begin to have a communion with God that is like nothing else we'll ever experience.
It's like nothing that we'll ever be able to talk about. Because it's unexplainable, church, to know who He is and to worship who He is.
So that's what it means to praise God. And ultimately, it leads us to the second point. Our primary focus is upon who God is.
Okay, this is our vertical worship. Our primary focus is, again, upon who He is. This is the honor and praise of who He is. Psalms 96. I read one of the verses. I'm going to read another one here. Psalm 96, verses 8 and 9. It says this,
You see, the proper response to deity is worshiping Him because He is worthy. The Bible says that He is the only one due the honor and glory. The glory to His name. And it says here, Ascribe to Him the glory. This goes back to our opening point, our opening illustration of Milli Vanilli.
We begin to sometimes give other people the praise that God deserves. And we need to realign and refocus what is our primary focus. And reassess who we're giving glory to.
But then it doesn't even stop there. It continues on to say, Bring an offering. Come into His courts with praise. Tremble before Him in all the earth. You see, there is a right response when we begin to see who God is. It changes our motives.
It changes the way we live. It changes the way we talk. It changes everything about us. Because all of a sudden, it's not about me. It's about who God is.
And what He has done. Instead of who I am and what I've done. You see, when we begin to think about and meditate upon what God's attributes are. He's eternally wise.
He's all powerful. He's good. When we begin to look at the acts of what God has done in our life.
Transformative Power of Worship
When we begin to focus on who He is. And we begin to worship Him as Father, Son, and Spirit. It completely changes everything about our life. Because we focus on who He is. We focus on what He has done.
I heard this years ago. And it's changed my life drastically when it comes to worship. Because I love hearing worship music. I love hearing all different kinds of songs you hear me lead. I'm singing.
I sing the power of God. Which is like a 1500 year old song. A 500 year old song written back in the 1500s. I'm singing Christ be magnified. I just love music.
I just wish I could sing well enough to sing it better. I sound really, really good in the shower in the morning. Okay. I don't know what it is when I get up here. Like the words seem to like change.
And they sound different. But when I'm in the shower in the morning. And Hudson's in there watching his songs. And I've got Alexa playing worship music. Man, I sound like Shania Twain. I sound like Reba McIntyre. Like I am the best singer known to mankind. But somehow things change.
And somehow we begin to focus on who we are. And the Bible says no, we need to focus on who he is. And remember what he's done.
It's not about how well we sing. It's not about how great our voices are. But it's about what we are bringing to him in that moment of worship. You see, we must bring ourselves.
This is where I was getting at. I heard this years ago. We must bring ourselves face to face with God. Hebrews says that when we do this, we recognize his reverence. We recognize his all.
We recognize who he is and what he's done for us. And you begin to remind yourself this simple fact. That you are not the center of the universe. God is.
And when we begin to think about God is the center of all things. And everything that flows from the universe is from him. He's spoken into existence.
I believe it was last week when we read that passage in Genesis where he made the stars also.
It was just an afterthought for him to make the stars. And yet when he did that and he took the time of making creation, he spoke the world into existence. And he spoke the animals into existence. And then he gets to his prime creation.
You and me. And what did he do? He stepped out of heaven. And with his hands he formed man out of the dust of the ground.
And he didn't say man come to life. The Bible says he knelt down and he breathed into man the gift of life. See, God has an intimate relationship with us.
Do we have an intimate relationship with him? He stepped out of heaven. And he made us and he formed us. And he said, I've formed you in your mother womb before you even knew you were in existence. I formed you and I made you for a purpose.
But do we have that same respect of God back at him? You see, this is the contrast of having a casual, flippant attitude toward God. Flippant attitude. I didn't say a bad word. Trust me. Flippant attitude.
But this is a casual attitude into a presence of saying, God, I want to be like Isaiah when I stand in your presence. I cannot even stand.
I want to be like Peter when Peter sees Jesus standing on the seashore and he's out rebelling against God.
And Jesus came to the sea and he said, Peter, I'm here.
And Peter looks out and he sees Jesus after he had denied him. And he said, I can't stand to stay on this boat. I'm going to swim. And when I get to the seashore, I can't even stand up. I've got to kneel.
I've got to crawl to my God because he's coming back to me. And he's welcoming me back into his home.
This is the attitude that we must have when we come before God through praise and worship.
Which leads us to our text. That was all my introduction. That was all introduction, church.
Okay? Leads us to our text, Psalm 100. How do we praise him? How do we get to the point where we can say, God, I want to praise you like Moses did. I want to praise you like Isaiah did.
I want to praise you like the disciples did. I want to lift your voice, my voice, so that it worships you. You see, there's various forms that happen.
There's various ways this takes place. And we're going to talk through all that. But I want to preface all what I'm saying is this. All of life is meant to be worship.
All of life is meant to be praise to God. God doesn't seek his worship for just a couple of hours on Sunday. I shared this with our Sunday school class this morning when I talked. I said, imagine,
again, this is teenagers. So they're dating. None of them are married. I don't think they are when I had them there this morning. I don't think any of our teenagers were married, right? No, they weren't.
Okay, so I was using this as an illustration of dating. So for you, it may be a parenting application.
Worship in Relationships
It could be a husband and wife application. But I said this. Imagine you're dating or you're married.
And I said, imagine that you told your wife or your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend, hey, I'm going to give you Friday. Every Friday, I'm going to talk to you.
I'm going to spend time with you on Friday. But every other day of the week, it's me.
Like if we see each other in school, I'm not going to talk to you. If we're at the lunch table, I'm not going to even acknowledge that you're there unless it's Friday. If it's Friday, man, we're going to hang out. We're going to have a great time. We're going to go get dinner.
We're going to hang out. We're going to watch a movie. We're going to have a great time. But if it's any other day of the week, no, I'm not going to do it.
And imagine that it would be your wife would come to you and say, you know what, Terry, I'm only going to spend Friday with you. Every other day, I'm just going to go and do whatever I want to do. We would probably not be in that relationship long. Right? You saw your girlfriend.
You're walking down the hallway. You're a senior boy or a junior boy. And you're like, oh, I'm in love with this person. I'm going to marry this person. And you've got to wave to them. And they're just like, cold shoulder, walking the other way. Maybe grabbed even another boy's hand. Walking.
Like, this isn't going to happen long. Like, this relationship is going to end.
But how often is that our relationship with God? And we say, God, I'm going to give you Sunday. And on Sunday, I'm going to not do anything else.
I'm going to come and I'm going to worship you. But Monday through Saturday, that's me.
I'm not going to think about you. I'm not going to glorify you. I'm not going to praise you. I'm just going to worry about what I want to do on those six days. But I'll give you one day, God. God says no. Worshiping him is every single day. 365 this year, 366 days,
seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Everything we do, we honor him by the way we work, by the way we raise our families, by the way we play, by the way we entertain. Everything we do is to glorify God.
The purpose of our life is not about personal accomplishments, but it's to glorify who God is and to worship him in everything we do. The Bible says it like this, whatever you eat or drink.
And then he says, well, maybe that didn't cover everything. Whatever you do, do it for the glory of God.
This morning, church, it's to be a constant reminder everywhere we go. You go on vacation. I've never been on a cruise before. I've heard they're really nice. I've heard they're awesome,
like you get to eat more food. My wife told me the other day, I think every time you've preached in the last 13 or 14 weeks, you've mentioned food. I said, I like food. Okay?
And so all of a sudden, it comes to me again. I've heard that the cruises have like some of the most amazing food, and they've got entertainment, and they've got all these things. And you say, well, Pastor James, I'm going on a cruise this summer. How can I glorify God on that cruise?
Maybe you're out snorkeling. Maybe you signed up for a dolphin excursion.
And that's what my wife wants to do. She wants to swim with the dolphins one day. And so you're out there, and you begin to look into the beauty of what God made.
You begin to see the vastness of the ocean. You begin to see the creation that He made for you. You see how the different animals work in harmony. They work in unity together to keep the water perfect.
You begin to see the mountains off to the left, and you see how God created this perfect unity.
And all of a sudden, on your vacation, you begin to worship God on your vacation because you see the beauty of His creation.
Maybe you're at work, and you go out to eat with a friend, and you realize as you're sitting at that table, I wouldn't have this food if God didn't create animals.
And you begin to immediately turn that meal back into a praise of God, a blessing from God that we're able to sit in our homes with heat.
We're able to sit in our cars with heat. God created us with a mind to be able to hit a button on our key fob to turn our car on in the morning when it's cold. And we walk outside, and it's heated, and it's nice.
I don't have that, by the way. I've heard that it's really nice. I don't have it. And you walk outside, and you're like, man, I've got heat here. God gave someone with enough brain power to do this. And you immediately turn the praise back to God.
This is what it means to praise God. This is what it means to acknowledge Him in everything we do. And so I've laid it out four ways in Psalms 100, verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, and 4, and 5. Five verses simply of how we praise God in our everyday life.
The first one is this, publicly.
Verse 1, we'll read it again. It says this, and make a joyful noise unto the Lord all the earth. I don't know about you, but it's hard to make a noise without other people hearing. It's hard to make a noise without, or the other day, yesterday, we're riding down the road. We're in the car. We're going to Sam's.
And we've got all three of the kids in the car. And Jade's making a little noise over here. And Brody's making a noise over here.
Hudson's making a noise in the middle. Then the noise begins to get louder. It begins to aggravate Mom and Dad a little bit. Mom and Dad, you've been there before. Okay?
I've been there multiple times. And all of a sudden, the noise begins to get louder and louder because they're making noise. Everyone can hear it. We're walking through Sam's, and it wasn't perfectly quiet.
Everyone was making noise. It's public. The Bible says that our noise should be a joyful noise unto the Lord all the earth. And church, this is not a recommendation.
The psalmist is not saying here, if you feel like it that day, make a joyful noise. No, he makes an emphatic statement with an exclamation point at the end. Make a joyful noise unto the earth, to the Lord all the earth.
We should make a noise, and we should worship the Savior everywhere we go. In front of others, in our workplace,
at the restaurant we go to, everywhere we go, we're making a noise that's worshiping back to Jesus. In Idaho, we were there for four years. And I remember so vividly, my office was upstairs in the education building.
We had a Christian school. And there would be days that I would come in, and normally me and Allie, we got there 7, 7.30 every day.
And we'd get there. And I remember specifically this one day where I was sitting in my office, and the building was a newer building.
But, you know, sometimes we cut corners on the way we make things. And you could sort of hear through the ductwork all the different conversations that was going on in my office.
And so I'm sitting in my office upstairs and just trying to focus, trying to study. And all of a sudden, I heard a whistling. It was ear piercing.
And it just began to almost annoy me a little bit. Like, why are we whistling? Like, we're at a school. Someone shouldn't be whistling right now.
And so I left my office, and I'm walking around, and I'm hearing the whistling get louder. And all of a sudden, I walk into the kitchen. Allie knows this. Lady's name's Linda Fogle. And Linda's in there, and she's whistling, and she's just working.
And as I got closer, I realized it wasn't just a whistle. It was she was whistling psalms, and she was whistling hymns, and she was working everything she was doing for the glory of God.
And as she was working, as she was preparing the spaghetti, if it was spaghetti that day for the kids, she's whistling, and she's just worshiping the Lord. And I walked in in a harder spirit because I was going down to reprimand someone. Why are you making all this noise? You're distracting me.
You're distracting these kids. They're testing. I can't believe you do this. And I walked in, and immediately in my spirit, I was smitten because she's worshiping God in every little thing she does.
And I'm the one with the bad attitude. And the Lord just broke me there. And he said, that's how I want you to worship me.
Whether you're praying, whether you're reading, whether you're coaching a team, whether you're out doing whatever it may be, you should be turning praise back to me. She's sitting there, and she's cutting hamburger meat. And in that moment, she's praising God through whistling.
See, it looks different for every single one of us. It looks different for the way you're going to worship God and the way I worship God. But the simple statement is this.
It's got to be publicly. It's got to be making a joyful noise so all the earth can hear. And then it continues on in verse 2, and it says this. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before his presence with singing.
And as I begin to think through this thought of serving the Lord, my mind, again, marriage and family begins to come to me, and I see it's family worship. You see, God instituted marriage as the very first covenant.
The very first promise that God gave in the Bible was for a man to love a woman and for them to be joined in holy matrimony for the rest of their days. And immediately when that happened, you know what God did after that?
He said, now go out and be fruitful and multiply and bring kids into the earth.
Immediately, God began to institute the family. And he said the family is the way we serve together. It's getting everyone involved in ministry. My kids know this.
They get here at 8 o'clock in the morning with me on Sundays, and they're opening doors, and they're turning lights on, and they're setting books up, and we're serving together.
Brody will be here next week with me for men's breakfast, and we're going to serve together because worship in the Lord is not solo ministry. It's serving ministry, and it's getting everyone in your family involved.
Family Worship Practices
He says like this, come into his presence. It says gathering our family together, gathering our family together to say, hey, we're going to worship together as a family, and it looks different in every family. You see, in our family, we've done it in multiple different ways. We've done the catechisms. We've read books together.
We've read through the Easter story where we'll start in December and we'll read all the way until Easter, and we'll take a chapter, and we'll just read the story leading up to Easter. There's hundreds and thousands of different ways to have family worship.
Maybe you're an empty nester, and the kids are out of the home. Well, now it's just a husband and wife just serving the Lord together and reading, and me and Allie just talking through, hey, I read this today. How did that apply? What does it mean? How can I apply to my life?
But it's simply bringing us together as a family, and it says serving one another, coming in his presence.
You see, in the Hebrew time as they grew up, in Deuteronomy, Moses wrote it like this, and Joshua wrote it like this in Joshua, and I'm going to share it. In Deuteronomy, it's called the Shema.
Okay? It's a hard A, Shema. Okay, when you would say it, and this is what it says. Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 9, if you want to write it down, it says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one.
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These words which I'm commanding to you today shall be in your heart.
Moses didn't stop there. He continued on. And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk to them while you sit in your house, and while you walk by the way.
And when you lie down and when you rise up,
you shall bind them on the side of your hand, and you shall put them on the frontlets of your eyes, and you shall write them on your door passes of your house, and on your gates. So, here in Deuteronomy, Moses tells us how to have family worship. You ready?
Teach them diligently when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. This is how I practically put it. You ready? When you sit in your house. This is sitting there at family dinner.
We don't do this often, much as families anymore. Me and my family, we try to sit down every single night and have family dinner. It's crazy sometimes. Sometimes with work schedules, and funerals, and ball practices, it doesn't always happen.
But as much as humanly possible, I try to sit down at 5 or 6 o'clock in the afternoon at night, and we have a family meal.
And you know what my first question is to the kids? They could probably answer it here. How was your day at school? That open-ended question leads into whatever it may be.
It could be them talking about how someone was bad to them, or mean to them, and immediately I turn that back into, well, how would Jesus respond? What would Jesus have done in that situation?
We have these times where we pray together at the dinner table, and we have God worship with us at the dinner table. This is sitting in our homes.
It says, When you walk by the way. Now, most of us don't walk around like the Hebrews did, but we have vehicles, and we get in our vehicle, and we drive 20, 30 minutes to a work destination, or whatever it may be. This is what he's saying. When you're driving in your vehicle,
are you worshiping the Lord through song? Are you talking about the Lord as a family? And then it says, When you lie down. I have done this to the best of my ability almost every single night of our kids' life. We lay down. This was even when they were little bitty babies.
When we lay them down, we would have a moment of prayer with them as babies. Even now today, we'll have a little song that I sing to them, and I've got a poem that I quote to both my son and my daughter. Hudson is not quite old enough.
And then I'll finish, and I'll pray with them, and I'll say, God, be with them tomorrow. Work in their lives tomorrow. It's not a long, lengthy, 25-minute prayer.
It's just a simple, small, 30-second to a minute prayer where I begin to pray with them.
And I teach them, and I model them what prayer is.
And then they get up before I get up because I take care of Hudson, so I leave the rising up to Allie, however she wants to do it. She takes them to school, and whatever she wants to do with them. But this is just practical ways
where we say, How are we doing family worship? It doesn't always have to be. All right, kids, get together. Time to read the Bible. And time to talk about the Bible. That's good, and that's important.
But sometimes it's just simply throwing the worship video on the TV and saying, You know, we're going to worship the Lord tonight by having some worship song played, and the kids are dancing, and they're having a good time. Worship as a family is so important.
And then it continues on for sake of time.
Not only is family worship, not only is public worship, but privately. Look at verse 3 again. Know that the Lord, He is God, and He is the one who made us. Again, this is specifically to one person, and not we are ourselves.
We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture. And so it's bringing this into a moment of personal devotion to God. Private worship.
The psalmist says it, that when He lays in His bed, I meditate on you as I watch through the night. You've been my help, and you've been my shadow as the wings go, and as I sing for joy. One way that I've heard it is the Acts method, A-C-T-S. Adoration.
This is the singing alone. When you're by yourself, you've got Caleb playing, or Joy FM, or whatever worship station you've got playing in your car, and all of a sudden, you're adoring the Lord by yourself.
Spoke on that a little bit last week. Then it's the thought of confession, where we begin to, as we worship, understand what we've done wrong. And that song, or that scripture that we're reading,
begins to drive our heart to confessing the wrong things that we've done. Lord, I've done this wrong, and I've sinned, and I said this hard word to my kid the other day, and the Lord begins to remind us of what we've done wrong. Then it transforms into thanksgiving,
where the Bible says, and everything we should be doing is through prayer and thanksgiving. Through prayer and supplication, which is the last one that I would write down there. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.
It's meditating on the word of the Lord, and allowing his word to work in our life. And then it's simply just saying, how is that looking like in our life?
How are we spending time daily saying, God, I need to worship you more privately. Maybe it's when you're sitting there with your cup of coffee, or your oatmeal, or your cereal. Again, my mind goes back to food. It's just how I'm wired. Okay?
And so all of a sudden, it's maybe sitting there for lunch or dinner, and you begin to just focus on the Lord and what he's done for you. His help he's given you in those hard days. And you begin to privately have a communication with God.
Oftentimes, we study the life of Jesus, and we will eventually. Jesus had to have his public ministry, but there were many, many times where the disciples would wake up, and Jesus wasn't there. Why wasn't Jesus there? Because he had to get away privately to spend time with his father. He's modeling for us
that we also need to have private times where we ourselves get alone with the father.
Where we get alone, and we say, God, I need you. I can't raise my family on my own. I can't raise these kids and grandkids on my own. I'm going to fail them. I'm going to do wrong. I need you, God.
It's simply going to him and saying, God, I need your help. So it's privately, it's family, it's publicly, but then lastly, it's corporately. Verses four and five.
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving. It's the thought of we're coming together and into his courts with praise and be thankful to him and bless his name. Why? Because the Lord is good. His mercy endures forever. He's faithful to all generations. Psalms 111 says, Praise the Lord.
I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart in the company of the upright and the assembly. We, church, must come together corporately and we have to come together in his gates with praise and thanksgiving because he is the only thing that matters.
Preparing for Corporate Worship
He is the only thing that we should be giving praise and honor to. Why? Because his mercy endures forever. He's faithful to all generations and the Lord is good. You are not preparing for corporate worship if you've not been preparing all week long.
If you haven't been preparing privately and publicly and with your family, there's not even a point in coming in here corporately because your heart is not going to be right with God. It is an all week long of saying, God, I can't do today without you.
I can't take a step tomorrow without you and I need you in my life today. It doesn't just happen on Sunday where we magically change gears and we acknowledge God. It's every single day
where we wake up and we say, God, I don't even want to take a step out of this bed unless you're with me.
It's saying, God, I don't even want to walk into my classroom unless you're with me. I don't want to say the first word to my kids if you're not empowering me today.
That is what it looks like every single day and when that happens every day, we come in here corporately and it's just like God's blessing falls on us because God says that's the people that I look for in
John chapter 4 where he says they're seeking after me and I want to go seek after them.
Church, I'm so passionate about this because this is what it looked like when Jesus was on this earth. He did all four of these. He had a family of disciples. He did it publicly.
He did it privately. He showed them what it looked like corporately as he taught because this is the ministry of Jesus and if church, if we're not going to be about the ministry of Jesus,
then there's no point in coming and praising him because that is what it's all about. It's about lifting his name high and looking and seeing what he has to say. Look at what Joshua says in Joshua 24, 15 and I'm almost done. If it is displeasing to you to serve the Lord,
then choose you this day who you're going to serve. If it should be the little gods of your fathers, serve them by the river or serve the gods of the Amorites where you're living now. And then Joshua makes this declarative statement. Yet, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
And God's looking for a group of people to say, as for me and my house, as for me individually, as for me and my church, we're going to serve the Lord. As Terry comes and we begin to go in this time of invitation,
Aligning Our Worship Correctly
I simply want to ask you one question today. Is your worship aligned correctly today? Or is your worship misaligned? Have you been worshiping in vain? Something empty like Milli Vanilli? Remember, they were not singing. They were not doing anything of themselves. But yet, people were worshiping them. People were buying their albums.
People were flooding to their concerts because they wanted to be a part of the big thing until all of a sudden they realized the big thing was nothing. And I'm afraid, church, that we're worshiping something that's empty because we've got our minds and hearts away from God.
This morning, maybe you need to come and just renew your praise. Renew your worship to the one that deserves our worship.
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