Let’s say that you want to bake a simple, lemon-flavored cake. In order to do that you have two options: the hard way and the easy way. You could mix the correct amounts of butter, eggs, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, lemon flavoring and a few other organic, non-GMO ingredients. Or you could open a boxed cake mix from Walmart, adding only water, eggs and vegetable oil. In that box is almost all you need – along with a host of other unpronounceable things you don’t need.
You may not appreciate this, but our worship can be illustrated in either one of those approaches. We can tear open a worship box, assuming almost all the ingredients are inside. Then we can whip it all together without any genuine consideration of what we are doing. Voila. Or we can worship the Lord from scratch, thinking about how much butter, flour and eggs we are using, mixing in those special ingredients which make our time with the Lord personal, tasty and healthy.
As we noted last week, Psalm 96 is one of many songs of worship we have in the Bible. “O sing unto the LORD a new song; sing unto the LORD, all the earth.” “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name.” “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” Last week I tried to point out the grounds from which our worship should come. I called it “The Knees from which We Worship the Lord.” We should worship God understanding WHO He is – He really is God, the Creator of every one of us. Also we worship Jehovah knowing who WE are – wretched sinners, unworthy to call upon His name. And we should worship Jehovah, remembering all that He has done – and what He has promised to do. He has blessed us with daily care, and He has blessed you and me with eternal salvation through His grace.
Kneeling on that foundation, this evening, let’s consider the worship ingredients which please the taste-buds of God. Please pardon the simple illustration with which I have begun. And pardon me for saying, we must put the ingredients of our worship into clean bowls of the apprpriate size, mixing them together with clean whisks and spoons. Remember, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him MUST worship him in spirit and in TRUTH” – John 4:24. Included in the truth to which the Lord Jesus referred, are “conviction, “fascination,” “adoration” and “oblation.”
The word “CONVICTION” initially takes us back to last week’s lesson.
As Brother Haug has reminded us: we cannot draw nigh unto the Lord, if we don’t know who He is. But at an increasing speed over the last 2 centuries in America, Jehovah has been reduced, modified, edited and amended until even religious people see the Lord differently than Isaiah did in his sixth chapter. As I pointed out last week, some professed “theologians” don’t even use the word “holy” to describe God. For most of the world, the Lord is a cruel, unprincipled ogre, who needs to be mollified on our behalf by either Jesus or Jesus’ mother. What foolishness! For some people God is not strong enough or willing enough to save His people all the way into eternity. For others, the Lord is not sufficiently sovereign or king enough to save those He chooses to save. For much of Christendom, God is a wimpy, namby-pamby, jellyfish Who needs man’s permission to behave like God. How can anyone worship a God like that? That sort of deity needs to be pitied, like poor fallen Dagon.
Drawing from this Psalm we see that the God who deserves universal worship is great, fearful and genuine. He is sufficiently powerful to create everything out of nothing. He is a miracle-working God. He is sovereign and possesses the right to judge His creation, because He has laid out a righteous standard. He is honorable, majestic and infinitely beautiful. He can meet any, and every one, of our needs – physical, spiritual and emotional.
It sounds ridiculous coming from my lowly perspective, but the Lord is worthy of our worship. That sounds as if I have examined Jehovah and concluded that He is good enough to worship. But that is not it at all. I really have nothing to do with it. My opinion in the matter means nothing. God is so infinitely worthy that we – who are nothing more than redeemed sinners – should beg for permission to worship Him. But remember, the Lord, through men like this Psalmist, invites us to come into His presence. We may have confidence in worshiping the Lord, having convictions about His nature and His grace.
I will call our second ingredient in this recipe for proper worship: “FASCINATION.”
Once again, in this I am unworthy and incapable of properly bringing you this lesson. I don’t have the words to adequately express what I believe the Bible to teach. For example, I just used the word “fascination,” but I don’t know that I have any good synonyms with which to augment that word. Should we worship the Lord with “passion?” Is that an appropriate word? Should I use the word “excitement?” Does “preoccupation” or “obsession” restate “fascination” any better? An “obsession” in regard to someone other than your spouse is usually a sin and maybe a crime. But isn’t obsession toward the true and living God something really good? Have you ever looked upon something from which you could not look away? Shouldn’t we be so fascinated with the Lord that we can’t draw our eyes or our minds toward anything else?
Three times the Psalmist says “sing,” and later he adds “day to day” as though these things should be constant. I hope you have experienced this: many, many times I wake up in the morning and my mind is singing one of the hymns we sang the night before or one from last Wednesday. This is a poor illustration toward my point, because I can’t say I am deliberately thinking about that hymn. But it does fill my subconscious; apparently for a while it fills my soul. In addition to these occasions, there are times when I do think of particular scriptures over and over again. And I will say in that regard, those scriptures give me something wonderful to consider. Sometimes the word “fascination” applies to the theme of those verses. Don’t Revelation 21 and 22 suggest the fascination we will have as we enter God’s glorious eternity? One of these days, we shall see our Saviour, and his name shall be in our foreheads – constantly minds. And there will be no need of candles, light bulbs or the sun, because the Lord God will be our light. Everywhere we look there He will be, and everything we will do, it will be in the light of His glory.
We will never worship properly – our worship will never be what the Lord really deserves – if we aren’t truly fascinated by the Lord – saturated with Him and fully occupied by Him. We should be excited with the opportunity to come into His presence with thanksgiving and praise. I don’t believe Psalm 96 was sung in a monotone, even if the singer didn’t have the skill of an opera star. It was sung with ardor and passion; it was sung with excitement and joy. And that excitement didn’t come because the tune was catchy or thrilling. The excitement came because the lyrics were heavenly, and the message was about the saint’s first love.
Think for a moment of the “Hallelujah Chorus” a common sound at this season of the year. There is only one way to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and that is with all the gusto our guts can give us. In 1743, when the British King first heard it – after sitting through dozens of other great and noble parts of Handel’s “Messiah,” when he heard the words “Hallelujah, Hallelujah…” he jumped to his feet. Apparently his heart was bursting with excitement in the consideration of the Great God and our Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ. Today it is tradition to stand during the “Hallelujah Chorus,” but it is like so many other things, it is done only because it is tradition. The worship we should give to the Lord, should be so exciting that good things flow out of us spontaneously
In addition to conviction and adoration, a third ingredient in our worship should be ADORATION.
What is it to “adore?” Simply put it is to love. But isn’t there more to adoration than simple love? If we adore someone, it should be with more than all our heart. It should be with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength. Adoration takes fascination to a higher level; a sacrificial level. Adoration is love that has reached a level of white heat, melting everything it touches.
It said that David Brainerd, the early missionary to the Delaware Indians, in order to be alone, would often go out into the winter weather and kneel down in the snow, oblivious to the temperature, the wind and the snow. There he would begin to pray and to worship the Lord. He would be so lost in his fellowship with Christ, that the snow would melt around him in a circle, growing wider and wider as his adoration for the Lord was expressed.
I have read of a man named Fletcher, who had a little room into which he would go to worship His Saviour. It was literally his prayer closet. There he would spend hours expressing his love for Christ. When the man eventually died, going to be with the One he loved, his family finally went into his prayer room and found that his knees had actually worn two grooves into the floor boards. Don’t these things express adoration?
Judy and I have been married more than 5 decades. I wonder how many times I have told Judy that I love her? Yes, I will admit that she has probably told me more often than I have told her. And yes, she will quite often say it to me, before I say it her, but I do sometimes take the lead. Despite all those times in all those years, I don’t think I have ever said to my wife that I “adore” her, and I don’t remember her using that word toward me. I love my children, but Jackie will probably tell you that I have never told her that I “adore” her. There is only one in all the universe who deserves that very special verb of endearment.
The Lord deserves to be “adored.” Isn’t that word synonymous with “worship?” This adoration carries with it a desire to be poured out at God’s feet – all the heart, soul, mind and strength. In adoration we yearn to be emptied that we might be filled with the one we love.
One more thing: true worship should include something I’ll call “OBLATION.”
Verse 8 – “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts.” The Hebrew word translated “offering” in this verse is rendered “offering” 164 times, 75% of the time. Its next most common translation is “present,” and then “gift” followed by “oblation.” “Oblation” is a synonym for “offering.” So this verse could be translated “bring an oblation when you come into the courts of the Lord.” Interestingly, only five times, only 2% of the time, is that Hebrew word translated “sacrifice.” It is not that “sacrifice” isn’t an appropriate translation; it is that there is a better word for that.
How is a sinner like me going to be admitted into the throne room of the holy God? There is only one key, one passport, one access code – the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. A righteous and perfect sacrifice is necessary for any of us to be able to worship Jehovah. That goes without saying.
But I think with the word “offering” or “oblation,” the psalmist is talking about something beyond that sacrifice. When we come before the Lord, in the beauty of holiness, and through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, we should come with those things which actually cost us something. It is not that we are trying to replace, add to, or duplicate what the Saviour has provided us. It is that in our adoration of our Heavenly Father, we should be willing to expend ourselves. As David said to Araunah, in II Samuel 24:24 – “neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing.” Just as WORDS of love are cheap, so are words of worship.
But the Lord has no need for your coins or your houses and lands. He who owns the cattle on a thousand hills says in Psalm 50, “I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds.” Rather He says, “Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High. And call upon me in the day of trouble.” The Lord says through Paul, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Peter said in I Peter 2:5 – “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.” The Psalmist says, “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts.” What is that oblation? It should be the sacrifice of ourselves to the one we worship. We need the oblation; we need the act of giving to God our gifts and oblations.
Conclusion:
If we have a recipe for a cake, or cookies, bread, or pastry, and we follow the directions to the letter, a tasty treat should be the result. But if we omit one ingredient, depending on what it is, we may have something totally inedible. In our worship, the Lord deserves, at the very least, our “conviction, our “fascination,” our “adoration” and our “oblations.”