Worship by Faith

Jealousy is one of the defining characteristics of true love. Now hopefully that sounds a little bit odd, because certainly we don’t usually use the word jealous to mean anything particularly good. When we say someone is jealous, sometimes it can be referred to as the green monster. It is that sense of paranoia or suspicion that someone feels at being betrayed, certainly in a loving relationship or a relationship that is supposed to be loving. But in Scripture, the God of the Bible is described several times as being jealous. And of course, when referring to him, it is always and only a very good thing, and it is an aspect of his true and perfect love for us. When the living and true God uses this word to describe himself, or when the authors of Scripture describe him as jealous, they mean that he is zealous and singular in his affection for his people. And of course, that is exactly how we want our God to love us. We do not want his affection to be split. But God’s heart cannot be divided. His focus cannot be shifted. And he will never forsake his covenant people. With such an intense and unique love, we can be thankful to our God that he has given us the exact prescription for how we, his people, might love him right back. Think how you would want to respond to someone who is singular and eager to love you. You would be interested in figuring out just how you could return that affection.

And so, last week we discussed the first commandment, the object of God’s people’s worship. And this week we will discuss the second commandment. We learned who to worship, and now we will learn how. There is a sense, of course, where we could say that the entire Christian life is worship. Everything that we do is done before God, to the glory of God, but it is our jealous God who has given us one day in seven devoted to his worship. And he has given us whole books of his Word devoted to songs to praise him with. He has given us the history of the church that we can learn from. Appreciate the hymns and the prayers of the saints who have worshiped God before us. If you’ll take your copy of God’s Word and open to Exodus chapter 20, let’s read the text of the second commandment. And you’ll want to keep your sword at the ready tonight, because we will look several places in Scripture as we navigate the Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 35. Exodus 20, the second commandment starts in verse 4, following that great promise and gospel history lesson at the beginning of the commandments. And the first commandment, Exodus 20:4 says this:

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

The Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 35, question number 96, you can see in your bulletin summarizes and explains the principles behind this second commandment. What is God’s will for us? That we in no way make any image of God nor worship him in any other way than has been commanded in God’s Word. I’d like to say it this way this evening: the holy God is jealous for your faithful worship.

Let’s explain what we mean by that. If we talk about worshiping the living and true God, we are talking about a form of worship that is laid out for us in Scripture. Not because our God is arbitrary. Not because our God loves to set out rules, but because as a jealous God, he wants what is best for his people. He wants to bless us. He wants to feed us. He wants to sustain us week to week as we make pilgrim journeys. And so loving God looks like worshiping him the way that he wants to be worshiped. Of course, God is the authority on worship, because he invented worship, because he is perfect and wise and good. And so, just like the English teacher at school gets to set the agenda for the English curriculum and your English homework, and the math teacher sets the agenda for the math class and the math homework, the God who invented worship and is the authority on the subject gets to stipulate the curriculum and the homework. How we participate in worship is regulated and ruled by our Lord.

At the same time, though, our Lord regulates our worship because like I said, he loves us, and so he knows what will feed us. He knows what sorts of proteins and vitamins and fibers we need to grow in holiness, in love for him, in love for one another, to grow in our courage and boldness to be able to share our faith, to grow in our capacity to serve and to do the good works that he has prepared before us. And we have to look to our Lord God to see exactly how we might love him and thus be fed. I’ve already said this word a couple of times tonight, but this is what the Reformed tradition refers to as the regulative principle – this principle that only what God has positively prescribed in Scripture constitutes proper, God-honoring worship. We must worship according to what God himself has defined and described and commanded in his Word. This is why when I got our worship team and staff together and asked if I could open tonight’s sermon by giving a display of everything that we don’t do in Reformed worship, they vetoed it and extended our session meeting minutes by a long time. You will see no smoke machines on the stage. You’ll see no disco balls descending from the ceiling, and I also will not open by singing “I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner, which is the idea my youth staff had early on in the week as we were talking about this concept. No, it was my idea that I asked them about.

God has set out the design for our worship of him in his Word. And I want to close our time tonight by looking at these specifics, but I want to keep focusing on the principle of the command here, because it’s not just the answer of the Heidelberg Catechism that is revealing and helpful to us, but also the question itself. If you look back at 96, what is God’s will for us in the second commandment? When we read the second commandment, of course, it comes across as something that we must not do. And yet, the authors of the catechism are helpful to show us that God’s commands reveal his desires for his people. And so, how God prescribes our worship reveals how he wants us to live and what he wants for us. If I could use what may be a more bleak and painful illustration, if you have ever experienced anyone in your life, someone you cared about, who has an eating disorder, whether they are not eating or eating too much, and you have to see them over a course of time, eat poorly and neglect to eat, that is an incredibly painful experience. Even if it’s someone who doesn’t have an evening eating disorder, but some kind of sickness where they lose weight, and you see over time that their body suffers because they aren’t getting the nutrients they need. The Lord our God is trying to protect us from that very same spiritual fate when he outlines how we can best honor him with our worship. God designed you and I to feast on his Word and on his means of grace. And so, he wants nothing less than that for us, for us to come and eat at his table and to be blessed because of it. In fact, last week, Pastor Eric stole a great sermon title, Why Settle for Less? We could use that same one again this week. Why would you try to worship God with anything less than perfect, God-honoring worship, than acceptable, God-honoring worship?

A much more positive example – if you think back, parents, to the some of those earlier times when you took your young children over to someone else’s house for lunch or dinner, my guess is that most of you coached them up on the plate that might appear in front of them when they sit down at the host’s table. Hey, you guys may or may not like every single thing on that plate. You may or may not like anything on that plate, but what you will not do is shove that plate away, is feed it to the dog under the table. You will take a few bites, and you will show that you appreciate our hosts’ hospitality, because their goal and their energy was given toward feeding you, whether or not you have the maturity to appreciate it. The one thing my parents let me turn away at other people’s houses was creamed spinach. That was the only thing that they said I was justified in not eating. God wants to bless us, and so he brings us to a nutrient-rich table of worship that he has outlined in Scripture.

Besides feeding us with life-giving food, though, God also gives us this commandment to protect us and to protect us from our enemies and some of our worst instincts. Sadly, we don’t have to go very far in the history of the people of God to see them rebel against this command. Most of you are probably very familiar with the episode just a few chapters later in Exodus 20. While God is speaking with Moses, delivering these commandments, his people at the foot of the mountain erect an image to worship of a golden calf. Skip a few books over instead, though, to Deuteronomy chapter 4, and let’s listen to God explain this phenomenon through his servant Moses. There are very, very real stakes when we approach God in worship, and he lays those out for us in Deuteronomy chapter 4 as Moses goes to deliver the law a second time to a new generation of Israelites, who are hopefully interested in being faithful as they get the opportunity to take the promised land. Deuteronomy chapter 4, beginning in verse 15:

“Therefore, watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire. Beware, lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. And beware, lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are to this day. Furthermore, the Lord was angry with me because of you, and he swore that I should not cross the Jordan, that I should not enter the good land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance. For I must die in this land. I must not go over to the Jordan, but you shall go over and take possession of that good land. Take care, lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make a carved image, the form of anything that the Lord your God has forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”

We see the stakes of our worship and our approach to God laid out in that text – stakes so high that when Moses had already previously approached God in a dishonoring way, he was disciplined and not permitted to enter into the promised land. The problem here is that we prideful men are tempted to worship God according to our own desires.

Three ways that this can pose a problem for us that I want to mention here. First of all, you heard in the text, when we let our own hearts guide our worship and dictate our worship, we can forget the Lord our God. The danger was that God’s people in the old covenant dispensation would look around the world and find other things to worship, other things that were glorious right in front of their face and neglect the Lord their God who had previously brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage and of slavery. Certainly, there are some hearts that can be hardened towards the right worship of God, who can disdain entering into the house of God to sing praises with God’s people and to approach God in prayer and to receive the Word.

My sense is that most of you here for an evening worship service are not in that position, but if that is you – if you find yourself week after week being disgruntled and discontent to be here in church singing God’s praises with God’s people – you need to repent, because you are treading dangerous waters. More likely for you and for me this evening, though, the people of God can have right worship of God squeezed out of their life by the many demands of the world around them that press on us day in and day out. It wasn’t just that there were other things that would make God’s people forget his right worship and be tempted to decide how they would worship their living and true God. It was that they might get into the promised land and become consumed with the needs of the animals under their care, the children they needed to feed, the enemies that they needed to go and fight and remove and lose sight of the God who had already won great victories from them, not because of something that drew them away all at one moment, but because of the demands of life squeezing out their affection for a jealous God.

Besides forgetting, leaning on our own desires to define how we worship God is dangerous because there are real spiritual enemies who want to steal glory from the Lord and curse you. If you were to look back at the book of Leviticus, chapter 17:7, this idol worship that God describes as being prohibited for his people, one of the things that he notes is that when you worship idols, you are making sacrifices to what Leviticus 17:7 refers to as goat demons. In the New Testament, Paul reminds his people of this same phenomenon. 1 Corinthians 10:20, he says, “I do not want you to participate with demons.” God is spirit, but he is not the only spirit. You and I have real spiritual enemies who will try to hurt you because they hate your God. And if they can do that by pulling you away from the God-honoring worship of the living and true God, they will.

Finally, the most relevant problem in this section for us tonight, I think, would be most likely that you and I in our pride would not forget God, would not try to serve other gods, but would, through our worship, try to fashion a God who looks like us. This is our great pride as sinful, fallen man, that we think to ourselves that God is just a little bit bigger and a little bit better than us, and so he must be pretty much like us. Numbers 15:39 describes this phenomenon this way: God warns his people not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes like you are inclined to. When you and I elevate our preferences over the principles of worship laid out in Scripture and say things like, “Well, I really like this kind of worship song, so I assume that is what will honor God as well,” we are following our own heart and our own eyes. When it is fear of man that motivates us to pick and choose our favorite parts of God to emphasize in prayers and in worship, then we are fashioning a God after our own heart. We are not respecting the balance that his Word presents him with.

Again, I won’t name any names to implicate him, but one worship pastor at this church has made the funny observation that if you listen to modern worship songs, just about every one will mention the phrase “break the chains.” Every single song that is on whatever Christian radio station you guys are listening to this day probably has that refrain coming up at least a few times. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that idea. I don’t want to be in chains, but it is a good example of a phrase and a concept that is especially palatable for our day and age, where there are rich and historic hymns that present God and present aspects of God’s character and God’s work in history that are less palatable. And so, we have to take great effort that it would not be fear of man that motivates how we worship the living and true God. The tragedy here is that this is another kind of slavery. Though making a worship service, worshiping God in ways that we prefer, that we are comfortable with, might feel like a certain kind of freedom, the constant pursuit of more comfort at church, of bigger attendance, or broader acceptance, or higher and higher emotional experiences is a kind of slavery to our own selves, the very kind of slavery that God promises to free us, his people, from.

Thankfully, the Lord God has not left us without hope. He has not left us without the antidote to this prideful inclination to follow our own hearts. Our jealous God will make us and will make our worship acceptable to him. Turn with me to the book of Zechariah, chapter 1. When God’s people need hope, and when they need reassurance, God makes them promises, and he acts on their behalf. And in Zechariah chapter 1, we are diving into the beginning of a prophecy where the Lord makes just such great promises to his people. If you look with me in verse 12 of chapter 1, Scripture says this:

“The angel of the Lord said, ‘Oh Lord of hosts, how long will you have no mercy on Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, against which you have been angry these 70 years?’ And the Lord answered gracious and comforting words to the angel who talked with me. So, the angel who talked with me said to me, ‘Cry out, thus says the Lord of hosts: I am exceedingly jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion, and I am exceedingly angry with the nations that are at ease, for while I was angry but a little, they furthered the disaster. Therefore, thus says the Lord, I have returned to Jerusalem with mercy; my house shall be built in it, declares the Lord of hosts, and the measuring line shall be stretched out over Jerusalem. Cry out again, thus says the Lord of Hosts: my cities shall again overflow with prosperity, and the Lord will again comfort Zion and again choose Jerusalem.”

Here we see a great promise that God will return to a humble and contrite people and that he will live with them. And when he lives with them, he will bring them blessings, because it is the same holy jealousy that moves God to regulate our worship that moves him to choose you and to comfort you every time you approach him with a contrite heart. The measuring line mentioned in this prophecy is an interesting phenomenon as well. If we were to keep reading in Zechariah, we would see this picture, this vision, of a man with a measuring line, stretching out that line over the city of Jerusalem where God is promising to return and dwell with his people. And eventually what happens in the scene is that the city of God is so overflowing with God’s people that the measuring line is no good. It can’t measure, because Jerusalem is a city without walls. There are so many people flocking to it and enjoying God’s presence.

The picture for us tonight is that God does not see limits where you and I do. And so, when you attend your PCA church, week in and week out, it can be easy to ask questions about our worship and our worship style. And certainly when you bring your in-laws in, I’m sure you have to answer questions about our worship and our worship style. But the encouragement for us who are seeking to follow God’s regulative principle is this, that God does not see limits where you and I do. And so, when you ask, can preaching from the Bible instead of mentioning cultural issues week after week really change people? The Lord’s answer is yes. Can a non-believer really walk in off the street to a PCA church and be blessed and fed by the worship here? God answer is yes. Can you really benefit from worship when you don’t personally feel moved by the service? God’s answer is yes.

God’s unlimited and unrelenting power, then, to bless his chosen people brings us to our time of application. And I want to spend the rest of our time here with three biblical points about how to worship God and honor this command. Altogether, my points are simple. You worship God by faith, in spirit, and in truth. Three parts. You worship God by faith, in spirit, and in truth.

First, we worship God by faith, and faith is contrasted with worshiping God by sight. We worship by faith and not by sight. The best attitude that you can bring to the worship of the living and true God is that he will feed you with what you need. This brings us to 97 and 98 in the Heidelberg Catechism here. You can look back at your bulletins there. An explanation of that first part of God’s command about worship – that we in no way make any image of God – 97 asks a further question. May we not make any image at all? God cannot and may not be visibly portrayed in any way. Although creatures may be portrayed, yet God forbids making or having such images in order to worship them or to serve God through them.

Second question here, which many of you probably already have in your heads: may not images as books for the unlearned be permitted in churches? The more modern question for us today is what about images of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ when he took on the form of a man? I want to pause and say that this particular issue is one that wise Christians have disagreed on. Whether it is a faithful application of the second command to prohibit the making of all images of Jesus Christ, specifically in his humanity as the human Son of God taking on human flesh, or whether that is something that is appropriate for Christians to do, wise Christians have disagreed. Members of this church staff disagree, and it’s not something that I want to draw, necessarily, a dividing line on tonight. But before you think to yourself, before you make the decision – yes, of course, Jesus as a human, it’s okay to make pictures of him and use pictures of him; or well, when I’m in a teaching capacity, it would be okay to use images of him – before you make that decision, I’d like you to consider just a few points about the vision of our Lord Jesus Christ.

First of all, it is very, very difficult, especially when it comes to images of Jesus, to separate teaching and education from worship. In fact, that would be the end goal of our teaching and our education about our Lord Jesus Christ, that those who know him might worship him and worship him richer and fuller. I do think it’s interesting that when you’re on Facebook reels or YouTube and you see those clips of The Chosen that pop up, they almost always have some title like “Watch as this teacher totally destroys the Pharisees,” or “click on this link to see Jesus totally eliminate the corrupt priests” or something like that. It’s not what I would use to title a sermon, but that kind of language is, of course, trying to motivate you to click on a video so that you can get some emotional reaction, right? It is trying to stir up affections and emotions about an actor playing the character of Jesus Christ. And so, I do think it would be a good idea for you to click those three dots up in the top right corner and say not interested when those come through your feed.

Second point to consider is that Jesus was a human. He did take on human flesh, and yet what makes him Jesus Christ is his deity – not that it is over and against his humanity, but Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.

Third thing to consider, God took on visible forms. He took on visible appearances in the Old Testament. And so, the coming of Jesus Christ as a man doesn’t necessarily override this second commandment in any way, because God had appeared, as he already mentioned, out of the fire, for example, to his people when he delivers this second commandment.

Last thing to consider on this particular issue is this: we get very little in Scripture in terms of descriptions of Jesus, and the one I want to draw our attention to is in Isaiah chapter 52 and 53. If you’d like to look there, you may. It says that “many were astonished at you,” referring to the Lord’s promised servant, “his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of the children of mankind.” So, the physical description of Christ being such that we cannot recognize him. Isaiah 53, also helpful here. Verse 2, “He grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form of majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him.” One pastor, Jim McCarthy, put it this way: “Everything that is beautiful about Jesus can only be seen by faith.” And so, I would ask you to consider that as you reflect on your own worship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Is it something that depends on a visual, or is it something that is taken up by faith? And hopefully you guys can thank me after for not having the same level of snark as the Heidelberg Catechism does in question 98, there. You can read it for your own enjoyment later on.

One practical point, if we do know and we do affirm that it is inappropriate for us to use images to worship the true and living God, parents, that means that you must teach your children the Word of God, because that is how he wants to be heard and known and experienced by his people. Don’t be the substitute teacher who rolls in, turns on a movie, and sits at the desk for the rest of the day, right? Use the Word of God together as a family. Learn it. Memorize it as you have opportunity to do so. If you ever want any kind of help or practice with that, you may have a youth pastor at this church who would love to join you in that endeavor. So, we worship by faith and not by sight.

Next point is briefer than the last. We worship by the Spirit, and the Spirit is contrasted with the flesh. We worship by the Spirit, not the flesh. Worshiping by the Spirit means that our hearts are engaged with God’s ordained means of feeding us. Our hearts have to be involved in the worship of the living and true God. He has set out the elements of his worship. He wants us to read and to hear and to preach the Word. He wants us to approach him in prayer. He wants us to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. He wants us to fellowship together with him at his communion table. He wants us to witness the sacrament of baptism. Each one of those elements of worship given to us by God require our heart to participate in. We don’t approach them as ceremonies or traditions handed down to us by men, by people we respect, and so we plug them and play them here at this church, but they require our heartfelt participation. And you can ask the Lord’s Spirit to do that. I worked at a summer camp many years while I was a student in college, and when you’re at a Christian summer camp, it’s great to have a dance. There’s only so many dances Christians are allowed to do, and so, I learned a lot of line dances when I was a counselor at this conference, which means I know the steps, I know the counts, but as my wife will tell you, I’m very bad at using my hips when I dance. And I’m not brave enough to come out from the pulpit and give a visual representation because that’s what this sermon is about. But the heart is to worship what the hips are to dancing. We will miss something when you do all the routine steps without the most important part, the part that brings the energy and the joy and the life. This need for spiritual worship that engages our heart, and this gift of spiritual worship that engages our heart from our Lord God is why we use Scripture so much in our worship services – why it is shot through at every part of the liturgy if you look through the bulletin from the morning or the evening worship – because through his Word, God’s Spirit is speaking God’s will to us. This is why we pray so many times and sometimes for very long in our worship services because through prayer, God’s Spirit is lifting our desires back to God and, through prayer, conforming us to God’s will. When we pray, the Spirit is involved in making us want the same things that the Lord wants. This is why we both give and protect the sacraments in God-honoring worship, because God’s Spirit is using baptism and the Lord’s Supper to confirm and to assure us of God’s promises to his people. God’s Spirit is moving in us to accomplish spiritual ends. Man-made innovation is simply not powerful enough to lift us to heaven.

Finally, we worship in truth, and truth is contrasted in God’s Word with darkness. When Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter 4 that God is seeking worshippers who will worship him in spirit and in truth, it is very easy to think to ourselves that that means that God wants worshippers who their spirits and their hearts are engaged in worship, and they get things right in worship. But when Jesus is bringing that message to the Samaritan woman at the well, he is actually contrasting the truth with her confusion about shadowy figures from the Old Testament and the Old Covenant. There were parts and principles and practices of the Old Covenant law that God laid out that were good, that were necessary for his people, but they were incomplete, and they were shadowy. And so, when Jesus invites his followers to worship him in truth, he’s not necessarily worried about us getting everything right – we don’t have to slave away week after week to figure out what Jesus’s favorite hymn was and sing that every single Sunday. Jesus is interested in us worshiping the true God through a Savior that we know, that we can talk to, whose work we know exactly what it was and exactly what it accomplished. To worship the one true and living God through his only Son and mediator Christ Jesus – that is worship in truth. God’s Son Jesus Christ opens the way to honor him in worship. Psalm 145:18-19 say it this way, that “the Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him. He also hears their cry and saves them.” When we approach the living and true God through his only Son and mediator, he is pleased with our worship. And so, the practical point here is worship that honors a jealous God is not scary. It’s not confusing, and it’s not burdensome. The bar may be high. There may be new words to learn in the hymnal. There may be long prayers to participate in and pay attention to, but worship that honors a jealous God is clear, and it is true. It has a clear object and a clear goal, that the people of God would be blessed as the name of God is glorified in our hearts, in our families, in our churches, and soon across the whole earth. Let’s pray and praise God for that.

Gracious God, we thank you again for this house, these pews, these musical instruments, hymnals full of rich hymnody, Bibles that we can read in our own language. We thank you for faithful elders who will administer and guard the sacraments. And Lord, I thank you especially for a people interested in honoring your whole Lord’s day. Help us to worship you in a way that honors you, Lord. Protect us from false idols, from the inclination of our own hearts. And Lord, receive the worship that we offer in spirit and in truth. We know you are seeking more worshippers like that. We ask that you would make them and bring them to yourself. It’s in Christ Jesus we ask all this. Amen.