“Worship and Holy Living”
EPISODE 243
Declare His Worth With Your Life
Welcome back to our “Seven Sermon Summer Surfin' Spectacular”! This week, Bryan dives into a sermon on "Worship and Holy Living". You might know the slogan "Because you're worth it," but have you ever thought about worship as "worth-ship" — giving God what he is truly worth? What does it mean to be God's "fine china," set apart for his purpose yet meant to be used? And if we’re his temple, how does that change how we live on our "holy ground" every day? Join us for a practical look at honoring God's incredible worth!
Takeaways
The Big Idea: When you see God for who he truly is, a life of worship and holiness is the only natural response.
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Bryan: Well, that was a lot of me. Well, hey, everybody. And welcome to the seven sermon, summer surfing spectacular. This is our third sermon in our series here. It is spectacular. And it's a little less spectacular this week because unfortunately, Allen is not with us again. It was a blast talking to him on the last episode. But here it's just Ryan and I, just the Bible geeks hanging out.
I have enjoyed the lightness of this little series. And it's been good to get to talk to you in a way that isn't like fully prepared and activated and engaged.
Ryan: Activate Bible geeks. Yeah. This is fun. And I love hearing you
preach, which I love listening to your lessons and I don't get to do it as often as I used to. But we're here with a lesson on reverence, which which kind of ties into some of the themes in our Square One series.
Bryan: it is hilarious how this is a connection or a bridge. The sermon I'm bringing to this series is effectively one that you and I built together in our cross training series. is basically that idea that we tackled in that reverence series about worship and holy living as a part of reverence.
And yeah, those cross training lessons that we did tie really well in with the square one conversations that we had about the priesthood and about our role in this world and how we live in this world. Also interesting that this episode will probably tie in nicely with the next one when Allen comes back to talk a little bit more about priesthood.
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about that. I love. We'll talk about this some more in a minute. But listening to this to prepare for the conversation here, I did a invitation like that night
Bryan: Oh, cool. Yep.
Ryan: on your point, inspired by your point about China and the different plates that we use. So we'll we'll get into that.
And I'm excited to hear the lesson and then to talk about it some
Bryan: So stay tuned for the end and we will come back for a little bit more.
discussion. This is my sermon that I did called worship and holy living.
Sermon 3: "Worship and Holy Living"
Bryan: If you have a Bible, let's go ahead and turn to Revelation chapter 4. want to share a little bit of a question, thought exercise to kind of start this thing off. Have you ever been so impressed by somebody?
Maybe it was like a mentor or a close family member, like a grandparent, a teacher, maybe even your father? Maybe you've been so impressed by somebody that you wanted to be like them. You admired them. You started to pick up their habits. You started to talk like they did, do the things they did, even maybe start to think about things in the way that they thought about them.
And I think there's a deep truth in that. When we look up to someone, we want to be like them. We want to imitate them and follow after them. I certainly know in my own life, whether I liked it or not, I wound up becoming more and more like my dad than I ever wanted to. Jesus is not necessarily talking about earthly relationships when he says in Luke chapter 6, verse 40, everyone, when he is fully trained, will be like his teacher.
But it's the same idea. When Jesus is our teacher, when we are his disciples, we want to be like Jesus and so, so truthful, so helpful. As we continue this cross training journey together, as we continue this look into all of these aspects and characteristics and qualities of Jesus, we really do get a full picture of who he is and how powerful his example is in our life and how much I want to be like Jesus.
And I want us all to be like Jesus. I think that should be our goal as followers of Jesus. And so today, we're going to continue zeroing in on this idea of reverence that we started talking about a couple of weeks ago. And this idea of reverence is absolutely central to our goal as being disciples of Jesus.
Reverence is this deep sense of honor and respect when we start to feel, when we really do grasp who God is. We understand who God is, what God has done for us, how amazing God is. We start to really have this sense of honor and respect. And last time we talked about knowing God and developing that relationship that he wants with us.
We talked about fearing him. And that fear is not a cold, gripping, our knuckles white sort of fear about God. It's a respect, as we talked about. And when we truly grasp who God is, it's not a stuffy or formal thing. I want to be real clear about that. Reverence is honor and it is respect, of course. But it is not a cold and distant kind of relationship.
And that's what I wanted to highlight last time about knowing God. God wants an intimate relationship with us, like that intimate relationship he had with humanity when we were in the garden with him. Being with him, being around him, he wants that relationship with us. And so it's not so cold and formal as to be stuffy.
But it's what happens when our hearts see his greatness and it just naturally flows out into two key areas of our life that we'll talk about today, which is worship and holy living. Worship and holy living. And let's get right into it and talk about worship. Because worship is bowing before the Almighty Creator.
Worship is acknowledging his sovereignty, his importance. And we need to worship our God. But I want to talk about worship in general in this conversation of reverence. And I want to talk about it from the lens of a 70s shampoo ad. So you remember a long time ago there were these L'Oreal commercials. I don't even know if they're still on TV.
But the goal of the L'Oreal commercial was to try to get us to buy their expensive shampoo. They use this tagline, "Because you're worth it." "You should spend more money on our shampoo," they said, "because not the product is worth it or the product will do amazing things, but you're worth it." And honestly, haven't we all done that before?
I mean, maybe not with shampoo or whatever. But haven't you, like, splurged a little on a gadget or, like, you know, you went and you're like, "Oh, well, let's go have a fancy dinner, right? I've worked hard. I'm worth it." You know, those pampering kind of moments where we just take care of ourselves. And for our time here this morning, let's flip the script and ask ourselves this question.
What if we paused and said, "What would we give not for ourselves, but for our God who actually is worth it?" I mean, you could say you're worth it sometimes, and that's fine. But you know who is actually worth it? God is actually worth it. And it's interesting because this idea of worship is very closely connected to this idea of worth.
And so sometimes you can think of it, I like to think of it, worship is really worth-ship. How much do you feel that God is worth? And what will that cause you to do in response? And how will you express that to Him? And that is the heart of worship. You worship what you find valuable. You worship what you find worth it.
And so that leads us here to Revelation chapter 4. And you know, on the screen is verse 11, but I want to back up here just a little bit to verse 8 of Revelation chapter 4. Where God through John says, "And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around within, and day and night they never cease to say, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.'"
"And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before Him who is seated on the throne and worship Him who lives forever." "They cast their crowns before the throne, saying, 'Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.'"
Now we don't have time to get into the imagery behind the book of Revelation in detail, but understand that one of the core tenets of Revelation is this idea of God on His throne. And the worship that is offered to God on His throne. And can you see why it makes sense to worship God with these kinds of words?
"Worthy are you, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power." So how do we do that? How do we express God's worth? How do we tell God how much He is worth to us? One of the main Greek words in the New Testament translated as worship is this word proskaneia. And it literally means to bow down. And if you think about this word for a minute, you can start to understand why bowing down is a good form of worship, is a good form of showing someone their worth.
When you bow down, you are physically making yourself lower than the other person. By the way, that's also a very vulnerable position, right? If you are a person of power, if you're a king, let's say, and someone bows before you, you as the one bowing are in a very vulnerable position before the king. You humble yourself, you make yourself lower, and in a very nonverbal way, you are saying, "You are great, and I am not."
That's how you're posturing yourself in this idea of proskaneia, in this idea of worship. It is a total act of respect and submission. That's what worship is often talked about in the New Testament. And people did this to Jesus all the time, by the way. Remember how many times people threw themselves at Jesus' feet, worshipping Him?
They worshipped Jesus. You don't do that unless you understand, unless you truly believe that Jesus is God, because that kind of worship is only dedicated to someone who you view as God, especially if you were an Israelite at the time. Oh boy, you were not to bow down to anyone but God Himself. And this was something that they took very seriously.
So when they were throwing themselves at Jesus' feet, they were saying to Him, "You are great, and I am not." But there were so many times throughout the Bible, even in the beginning of the book of Revelation, where someone will throw themselves down at the feet of a man, or at the feet of maybe some angelic being, and the man in that case or the angelic being in that case is responsible for saying, "No, no, no, no, no.
Don't you worship me. I'm just a man. I'm not God. I'm not worthy of worship. I'm not worth it." And so this idea of proskuneo is about us laying ourselves down at the feet of someone. And I think there's a verse in Psalm 115 that really helps me, because the psalmist there is talking about how when we worship idols, how when we lay ourselves down at the feet of idols, we are actually becoming like them.
And that idea of who we worship is who we want to become like. Who we worship, who we lay ourselves down in front of, that's who we want to be like. And so we were made to worship God and God alone. And so we need to remember that. This idea of proskuneo helps us to see that, and maybe throughout the week we can reach out and ask each other on this question of idolatry.
Because by the way, idolatry is not something that's relegated to the Old Testament, where there are these little statues that we lay ourselves before. Idolatry can be anything that we value as more worth it than God. And we've all dealt with idolatry, I think, each and every one of us. And so we can lean on each other and ask this question, "What idols have you dethroned from your heart to keep God at the center?"
We can learn from each other's experience, and understand how better to take idolatry seriously and get rid of it in our life, and lean on each other's experience in that way. But there's another word that's used in the New Testament for this idea of worship, and that word is latreo. Latreo, it's not a word that's about a posture, like I'm going to bow and I'm going to get down low.
This word is about a life posture. It's about a posture of our whole heart and our whole existence. It is about religious service. It is about worship and duties like temple service in the New Testament. It's talking about our physical day-to-day activities that we do. And it was often used to talk about Levitical priests in the New Testament and in the Old Testament.
And it's where it gets really personal for us, because in Romans 12, verse 1, Paul urges us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Present your bodies a living sacrifice. As we're going to read and we're going to talk a little bit more about today, we are priests in God's service.
This idea of worship, this idea of presenting our worship to God like we're laying our bodies on the altar of sacrifice, we are priests. We're compared to priests. We're called to be the Lord's arm of action in this world in which we live. And how do we offer priestly sacrifice? And there's so many ways.
I mean, we could literally spend the entire rest of our time talking about how to be priests in this world. But one of the ways we can do that is by our prayers. Our prayers are like sweet-smelling aroma coming before God, like the altar of incense in the Old Testament, in the tabernacle and in the temple.
We offer our prayers to God and they come up before him, a fragrant offering. And in fact, on that idea of fragrant offerings, not just our prayers but also our financial gifts. Now, I'm always very sensitive about this because in the world, sometimes religious people and the church specifically are viewed negatively in regards to money, like we're out there just trying to get money and we're trying to get your money and give us all your money and that kind of thing.
But specifically in Philippians 4 verse 18, Paul does call financial gifts a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God. Because what you give your money to is what you show your worth for. You say to that L'Oreal spokesman, "Yeah, you are. I'll give you my money because I'm worth it and I think that thing is worth it."
And so you give your money for it. And in our sacrifice, in our financial gifts, in our time, in our attention, we are saying, "Here is my sacrifice. Here is what I'm giving." And that is a sense of worship as priests that we are. In Hebrews chapter 13 verse 16, the Hebrews writer tells us that even simple acts of doing good and sharing what we have, our sacrifices, are pleasing to God.
And so there are a lot of things that we can do, that we can give, that we can offer that are wrapped up in this idea of Latreo and this idea of worship as priests, as ones who lay our offering down at the altar. This is why Jesus told the woman at the well that it's not where we worship that matters the most.
Because she asked the question, "Where are we going to worship? We as Samaritans, we worship over here. You as Israelites, you worship over there. Where are we supposed to worship?" And Jesus tells her, "The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know.
We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." And it's a little theological lesson he's giving to her there. "But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."
What he is saying there is we worship, we will worship, not in a place, not in a building or a school or a location. We will worship every day out of our heart, out of our spirit, from our innermost parts, and we will align our actions, our priestly service with the truth of what He's called us to. We will worship it.
We will worship our God the way He has called us to. And in both of those ways, we fulfill Jesus' expectations for worshippers to give of ourselves, to lay ourselves on the altar of sacrifice. Now you might have thought in this whole lesson we're going to talk about worship, and I'm going to give you like five important acts of worship that we do only on Sunday mornings when we're here.
But I think as we start to see the picture of worship in the New Testament, it's huge. It blows the boundaries of Sunday morning or Wednesday night. It blows the boundaries of a fixed location and a place. It encompasses everything. Worship is our life. And so let's think about some practical things that we can do as we look at God's splendor all around us, as we see what God has done for us.
We need to use our words and our songs as offerings to the Lord. Hebrews 13, verse 15 calls our worshipful words the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name. We can sing our praises to God. We can, as we go back to the Psalms, we can read the Psalms, read this beautiful poetry of psalmists long ago who were praising God in all the ways that they did.
We can read these. We can store these in our hearts and meditate on them. We can even sing them in our songs that we sing. We can take these secular words that men and women for centuries have written and sing them reflecting on the truths that are contained within them. Singing is such a huge way of worshiping God, of telling God just how much we appreciate what He's done.
But even so much more than singing, it's our words. It's what we say. It's how we express ourselves. We don't neglect getting together with fellow believers. When we come to the first day of the week, there is one place we will be, and it is with other believers, worshiping our God, partaking of the Lord's Supper, as we see the example in Acts 20, in verse 7.
We will be together with the saints. We will be together honoring our God. We are collectively proclaiming His worth. And here's what I love. I love that Christ is the head of the body. Christ purchased the church with His blood. Agreed? We're on the same page with that? And if He did that, doesn't it make sense that we collectively come together to worship Him?
That if He purchased all of us, we all together come together to honor Him with one voice. I think it's a powerful and reverent moment when we come together and commune with our Lord. It's something we don't want to miss. And that puts a highlight, that highlights this important aspect of our lives, that's worship.
But then we move on to this idea of holy living. Holy living is another part of reverence that we need to consider, and this is where we set ourselves apart for God's special purpose. We are a tool useful for our King. You know, when my wife and I were married, we inherited this beautiful set of Sherilyn's family's fine china.
Just this amazing set of china. It's gorgeous. It has huge sentimental value. And guess where it is? It is packed away, safely, in a box, in the garage. And I guarantee you, I've never eaten off of it. I've never been allowed to eat off of it. It is somewhere safe because I don't want to chip it. We don't want it to get broken, and we don't want to mess it up in any way.
Because when we find something to be valuable or special, oftentimes, we put it in a little case. We set it apart. And we put it over there, just so that it doesn't get damaged. And I think we all know that. I think we all have those kinds of things in our life. But don't you know that God has a set of fine china as well?
God has his own set of fine china, and it's us. It's you and me. We are the ones set apart for a very special purpose. And that is what Paul is talking about in 2 Timothy 2, verse 21, when he says, "If anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work."
When we clean ourselves up, really, when the Lord cleans us up, we can only do so much, of course, without his grace. But when we're cleaned up, we will be a vessel for honorable use. We will be that piece of fine china that is special, and that is set apart, and that you just want to place so much value on.
But the amazing difference is that God doesn't put us in a box and stick us in the garage, so that we won't be chipped or damaged. God wants to use us. God wants to use us. You have things in your house that you use, right? My wife and daughter were away for like a week and a half, and I used a pan, and I got the pan dirty, and I tried to clean the pan as best as I could.
But when they came back, she looked at the pan, and she said, "What did you do?" And as best I could, I tried to, you know, but my response was only, "I used it," right? Because when we use something, it's going to get messed up. It's going to get dirty. It's going to show signs of wear and tear. And God's okay with that.
He wants to use us. He wants us to be clean. He wants us to be cleaned up, but he also wants to use us and not for us to be packed away in a box somewhere. And that is where maybe a challenge throughout the week is to read some powerful verses about this idea of holiness and our usefulness to the king.
Philippians 2, verses 12 to 18, this is where Paul talks about being blameless in the midst of a crooked world. You know, we could hide. We could hide ourselves away and just sit in our houses and never go outside. But Paul tells us, "Get out there. Go out and show the world the glory reflected of God in your life."
Second Timothy, chapter 2, verses 15 to 22, Paul is dealing with this idea, this very same idea of honorable vessels. It's a lengthy reading, but I think if you take it on this week, it's helpful to see that we are set apart for a special purpose by God. And 1 Peter, chapters 1 and 2, I mean, the whole idea that 1 Peter is getting at is really about this idea of, like, our influence in the world, our work as holy priests out in the world, and he's giving us a reason for showing our good conduct in the world.
We are to be used. And these verses talk very, very much about that. But what does it really mean to be holy? Holiness is important for us to understand what we are and are not talking about. Because sometimes when people hear holiness, they hear holier than thou. Right? Oh, they hear the people who just look down their noses at everyone else.
But again, going back to our last discussion, didn't we just talk about how we are humbling ourselves before the king? So let's talk a little bit about what it means to be holy. And first, I think we need to understand that when we talk about holiness and we think about God's holiness, we need to understand that he is on a whole other level in terms of holiness.
Now, the Bible will clearly tell us to be holy for I am holy, but guess what? You're never going to be holy like God is holy, because God is described in 1 Samuel. Samuel says there is none like the Holy Lord. There's no one holy like God. No one gets to be holy like God. He is completely different. He is unique.
He is separate from everything else. And it is why, as we read in Revelation 4, the angels cry out, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God." But because of sin, and because we messed up big time, not just Adam and Eve, but me and you, because we've all messed up big time, we have a distance between us and the Holy God.
The Holy God cannot be in the presence of those who have messed up their lives with the dirt and filth of sin. And so that's why when we get to Hebrews 10, we see the blood of Jesus allows us access into the most holy place. The blood of Jesus now lets us draw near to God. And at last, we can finally have this incredible restoration of a relationship with God because of what Jesus has done.
We are not holy in and of ourselves, but Jesus can clean us up. The blood of Jesus can clean us up. And it is like we were welcomed back into the garden after we had been kicked out because of our mistakes. And so when we think about holiness, you first need to think about God, and you first need to think about that God is holy on a level that we will never be able to be.
But also we need to see that holiness means to be uncommon, different, or unique. And we always talk about it like, "What does it mean to be holy? It means to be set apart." Well, yes, of course. It means to be uncommon. In the Old Law, we see this idea of, in the Torah, in the teachings, in the Old Testament, we see this huge distinction between what is holy, what is the opposite of holy.
You might say unholy. Okay, fine. What are you talking about there? A lot of times people will refer to it as like holy versus evil things. But I don't think evil necessarily conveys the idea very clearly. I think when you look to the Old Testament, you see the idea between holy and common. Holy and common things.
Because if you think about the temple, like the tabernacle or the temple when it was established, we'll just use an example of like a cup, right? You've got a cup, you know, a red plastic cup, a red sola cup, or you have a little, you know, paper Dixie cup. So you've got these cups you use at home. These are your common cups.
If you were to just be like, oh, hold on. And you take that red sola cup and you bring it into the temple of the Lord, uh-uh, that's not going to work. There are vessels, there are cups used only in the temple of the Lord. They're dedicated for that purpose. It's not that the red sola cup is evil, although today it can be evil.
It's not that like Dixie cups or like common cups are evil. It's that they're just common, they're normal, they're everyday cups. We don't bring them into that place. And so the idea of holiness is about being uncommon. It's not, it's useful for a very special purpose and it's not like everything else.
That's the idea. And so when we get to like 1 Peter 2, 9, Peter says it loud and clear, "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession." We have been set apart from the common for a very uncommon and special purpose. That is what holiness is about. But it doesn't stop there because if God was going to live among us and he's going to work through us, then we need to reflect his character accurately.
And so our moral purity, our stand for obedience to God's ideal standard needs to be in place so that when the world looks at us, we don't misrepresent God to them. And that happens too often. It happens too often with me. I know people who are well-meaning and earnest disciples of Jesus who say things in the moment, out in the world, that they don't mean to say, that they don't think that they're saying, they don't mean to present their faith in that way, but they misrepresent God's character.
Because they're not thoughtful of their impact as a royal priesthood. They're not thoughtful of their impact to reflect the good character of God into the world. Let's ask ourselves this question maybe this week. Have I set myself apart for God's purposes? Am I useful for his purpose? Am I uncommon in the way that I live?
And we've been talking about holy living, so let's get practical. We need to clean up. We need to clean up our heart. We need to clean up our habits. We need to clean up our house. As James says in James 4, verse 8, very bluntly, by the way, "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded."
He just called me a sinner. And he just called me double-minded. But isn't that the case? Can't you connect with that? Can't you connect with being a sinner or being double-minded? Because you know what you should do, right? You know you should live holy before God, but we're not perfect, and we mess up all the time.
But this call to action, I think, leads us to honestly examine our hearts, our habits. What are we watching on TV? What are we listening to? How are we treating people around us? Like these people that God has put into our lives, what are we doing for them? The time has passed for living like the Gentiles do.
The time has passed for living like the rest of the world has done. It's game over. It is time to clean up. No more foolish talk. No more wasted time. We need to take this on. And it's not about earning our salvation, too. I mean, there's a whole discussion here. It's not like I knuckle down and like with my willpower I get it done.
It's about responding to salvation. When I really see what Jesus did for me, how am I supposed to respond? How do I show his worth with my life? And so we need to go into every interaction with the intention of shining God's light. This is about holy living every day. In the little moments, in the big moments, how is holy living affecting the community around us?
Every little interaction I have at the grocery store, at school, at my job, like wherever I am in those in-between moments of my day, I can pause and remember that the holy God is with me, that I am his temple. And if I am his temple and God dwells within me, then that means like he told Moses at the burning bush, wherever I go is holy ground.
There is holy ground with me when I am a temple of the Lord, when I'm a priest of God most high. And so the more we remember that truth, I think the more our lives are going to shine his goodness out into the world. And as Hebrews 12, verse 14 says, we need to strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
Without living lives of holiness, you are never going to see God. Without committing to being a special set apart member of his community, you are never going to see God and I'm never going to see God. So is reverence important? It's not just a feeling, it's not just something that overwhelms us or something that like comes out of us, but it is action.
Reverence is action. It's bowing before our creator in worship, declaring his infinite worth with our words and our songs and our time and our resources, our very lives. And it's walking through our days as people who are set apart, people who are cleansed and pure and ready to be used by the master. It is a life that says in everything that we do, God is worthy.
God is worth it. He is honored. He is revered. That's what I want my life to be. And I want yours to be that too. My prayer for all of us is that we're going to take this to heart, that we are not just going to hear these things, but we are actually going to be doers of these things. We're going to put these things into practice in our day-to-day walk following Jesus.
Discussing the Sermon
Bryan: Well, that was a lot of me.
It was great to give that sermon. I've actually really enjoyed this year preaching through the cross training series. And it was a real challenge early on to figure out like how to break it down because you really want to like nail down every single aspect of the cross training series, you know, week to week.
But I didn't really have that many opportunities to preach. So I kind of had to combine them into like two into one sermon. So this is kind of how it goes. Like you get your worship and you get your holy living. We kind of break it in half there. But it's awesome to see pair them together that way, how connected these ideas are talking about reverence.
Ryan: Absolutely. Yeah. When I preached through it years ago, when we were doing the cross training series, I did all four points in one lesson. So
Bryan: wow. Game on.
Ryan: two points that went with worship and reverence?
Bryan: Yeah. So this was the second part of the two-parter that I did on reverence. The first part was knowing God and fearing the Lord. So kind of that idea of the close relationship that we develop with God, but that same fear and what that fear isn't, you know, not like a terrified, white knuckle fear of the Lord, although that's, you know, can be part of it.
But this was the second part in that series talking about worship and holy living. So more the action side of it and the community outreach part of it that we focused on in those cross training lessons.
Ryan: Yeah. And, you know, it builds nicely from that idea of, you know, God deserves our fear, our just our awe. Right. We're talking about what it means to know you are living before mighty God and and understanding who he is. I mean, it takes me back to all those moments when God would, descend into the tent of meeting and people would have both joy and fear at the same time.
Like this reverend awe that is just so overflowing. And I love your your points about worship, the idea of worth ship and building around this idea of worth to recognize that there's there's no one worthy of everything we are like God.
Bryan: I tried to camp out on that here a little bit in the lesson. And I think the idea all the other things we give our time and attention to, all the other things that, you know, as we mentioned there, what we bow before, what we give our time and our attention to really is who we want to become like, you know, throwback to Samuel and that idea of, an idol.
If you bow down to this idol, you're going to want to become like that, like Psalm 115 talks about it. These mute idols around us, if we try to become like these things, then we're really missing the boat. And so what do we place our worth for and what are we giving our time to? And I think, you know, we think about worship and I think about worship so often as like a very specific thing.
Like worship includes five different things we do in a specific place we must be. And struggle with that when I'm really thinking about the broader context of what worship is in my day-to-day life how I live. It's about like who I value most and how does that change, the actions I'm taking every day.
Ryan: Yeah. Like back in Deuteronomy, often worship and serve who serve the Lord only and worship him alone. You know, those two go together, serving and worshiping. And absolutely, we there are certain acts of worship that are distinct that we, you know, we can go and worship like Abraham went and worshipped God at a particular times when we particularly devote ourselves to.
So expressing his worth. But as you bring out in the lesson, our spiritual act of worship, according to Romans 12, one is presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. It's like giving ourselves to the Lord is expressing his worth from our from our heart, from our whole life, telling him who he is and how worthy he is.
And I really appreciated you pulling out these two different Greek words, Latreo and proskuneo. We spent a lot of time here at North many years ago, seven, eight years ago in a study of worship and really camped on those two words The idea of, as you say, bowing down, but really expressing and honoring, giving homage to God, lowering ourselves and lifting him up as as that proskuneo worship.
But also the more priestly service of worship where, you know, the priests weren't just focused on God. They were focused on taking the sacrifices of others and presenting them. They were focused on doing particular actions to tend to the bread or the, the candlesticks and different things that they were doing as service.
So whenever I'm speaking to others as an act of service in song, you know, that is also a priestly act of Latreo, of worship. And so there's all these different ways that we can worship God.
Bryan: And, you know, you were talking about using this idea as a as source, I guess, for an invitation you gave. And I think you were talking, you were talking about this idea of China. And I love this comparison, you know, just that we know what it means for something to be valuable, for something to be special to us.
We all understand what that is. And I don't, you know, a lot of times I think we use Bible words in like these very, no pun intended, holy ways, like these very like we over holy holy sometimes, you know, we over we over emphasize the distinctness of this word and it can never be used anywhere else. But it's like we all understand what this idea of holiness is just at a basic level.
And we have these things in our own life that we feel we feel are special. We value. We want them to hold us a special place in our heart and in our homes. And it just that idea to think about how God gives us the option or gives us the ability or even extends that to us at all to become that kind of people is how cool is it that we just get to be if we want to be his special people?
Ryan: it's so it's so cool. My favorite line in your whole sermon, I think, was when you said, and God has special China, too, and it's us. And it was just really well set up with your illustrations about about getting stuff from the way we have the same thing. You know, we got all this crystal and China and different things and then you never see it again.
But God's China is meant to be used because, you know, every meal before the Lord is a special occasion.You know, we are meant to serve. We are we're not decorations. We're dishes right in the metaphor. And so we're meant to be used to serve food. We're meant to be used to serve before the Lord.
And I thought that was so great. And you're exactly right. We get to be special, but special for a purpose, special for the service of
Bryan: And in the context of reverence, you know, to be in the presence of God, that our whole lives change when we are in the presence of God.
when he's near us and we're drawing near to him, that really does change the game in terms of how I look at the things around me, how how importantly I view my decisions.
when I'm really thinking about God's presence with me, I don't get to just be flippant and treat things like they're not important. And it's one of those reasons why so often it's like the words you say. I mean, I could say whatever to somebody. And if I'm not thinking about it, things could come out that aren't close to what I even intended or they're not thoughtful words, they're not helpful words.
And so often for me, that's one of the big tells is like, like, am I treating my words flippantly? Am I treating the things that speaking to other people in a way that that doesn't understand or acknowledge that like, yeah, I'm in the presence of God? It's just a sobering reminder, maybe.
Ryan: Yeah. You know, we closed our Square One series. Our last Into the Book, diving deeper reading was Second Peter One and that list of virtues. And I remember years ago in we used to have these Tuesday night studies. You remember those
Bryan: Oh, yeah. Yeah,
Ryan: different groups and different homes? And we did a study of these different words and it just opened my eyes to these different virtues.
And and one of the words that jumped out at me was this word godliness. means godlikeness.
Bryan: right.
Ryan: being like God. And not that that isn't part of the idea. That is a byproduct of the concept of godliness. But what the word means is reverence and worshipfulness. It comes from understanding what you just said, that we are before mighty God.
And if I realize that that doesn't just happen when I'm taking the Lord's Supper. That doesn't just happen whenever I come to God in prayer. And now I am carefully, reverently, soberly thinking about life and aware that I'm in God's presence. And I need to treat this moment as special. No, as God's temple, God's priest, every day, every moment I'm living before him.
And it brings this sacredness to life that is so beautiful and enriching and transformational to the choices you make. The more, I mean, I forget about it all the time. It's not like it's present with me all the time. But the more I bring that idea, that awareness, that watchfulness that comes with thinking about living before God as his temple.
The more sacred every moment, every meal, every, you know, preparation for bed, brushing my teeth. I'm thinking about and aware of the choices that I make, the heart I need to have, and the life I'm preparing for in eternity.
Bryan: and it's that balance, right? Holding it in tension to not be overly stuffy about it all, you know, because it's because God doesn't want us to to exist in this world in such a cold and lifeless way. It's like there is a there's a richness to life. There's an ease and a lightness to life.
There's a acknowledging that the yoke is easy and the burden is light as we think about the grace that he's extended to us and all the ways he's called us to live. It's just our responses. Like, how can I how can I respond to all the amazing things that God has done for me in any sort of reasonable way that would show that I really do value what he's done?
And so thank you for helping work through this stuff with me as we as we put all this stuff together for cross training. And if you haven't checked out cross training, you should definitely do it.
It's a very helpful, at least for me, going through it over this last year and preaching through cross training. It's so helpful to go back and just think about sitting at the feet of Jesus and asking him, "What am I supposed to do today?" and watching the answer.
Ryan: yeah. And it goes with what we have been talking about of becoming, you know, we talked in our first sermon, becoming more and more, growing more and more into what we need to be and doing that work on ourselves. And so, yeah,
you know, can I say I'm proud of cross training? I feel like it's something that, you know, the Lord blessed us as we prayerfully work through the word. And I feel like it can be a blessing to others as they, like us, work through these really important truths.
Bryan: So you can see the theme kind of weaving its way through here and the connection that we had back to square one. On the next conversation, there will be a very distinct connection between this episode, and the next one where we have Allen back on to talk about the priesthood again. And I'm really excited about that conversation.
Conclusion
Bryan: Thanks so much, everyone, for tuning into the Seven Sermon Summer Surf and Spectacular And until the next episode, may the Lord bless you and keep you. All
Ryan: Shalom.