Last week we discovered that for most of us in this room idolatry is the issue. Sin is usually what we focus on, but it’s just the fruit. Idolatry is always the tree from which it grows. So behind every sin struggle that I have, behind every sin struggle that you have, is a false god that is winning the war in our lives.
We asked ourselves some pretty difficult questions last week to try and identify some of the gods that are at war within you and at war within me. I hope that you’ve found that if you struggle with jealousy it is not just that you’re a jealous person; it’s that perhaps you’ve made stuff a god in your life. If you are anxious and worried a lot of the time, it is not just that you’re an anxious person; it’s that perhaps you’ve made comfort and security a god in your life. If you keep losing to lust, maybe you’ve made sex a god in your life. If you struggle with gossip, maybe you’ve made what other people think of you a god in your life. If you are a little bit legalistic and self-righteous, maybe that is because you’ve made religious rules into a god of your life. If you are discontent, maybe it is because you’ve made money a god in your life. If you are proud, maybe it is because you’ve made image a god. If you lack self-control, maybe it is because you’ve turned pleasure into a god. So behind every sin that I struggle with and you struggle with is this false god that is winning the war.
For most of my Christian life, I didn’t understand it that way. Instead, my focus would always be on the sin itself and on my mental determination to stop doing that sin. But we need to get past the surface. If we scratch at that sin and we keep scratching at it, then we’ll find underneath that sin is a false god that is sitting on the throne of our hearts. And until that god is dethroned, we will experience great frustration. Until that god is off the throne of our hearts, we will not know victory.
So we tried to identify some of those gods, and now we’re talking about, “How do we worship the one true God?” For you the question is, “What are some of the gods that you are struggling with? What are the gods at war within you?”
If you’re like me (and most of you are), then you will probably find that some of the hardest gods to defeat are the gods of pleasure. We continually find ourselves bowing down to what feels good. After all, it is the mantra of our culture: “If it feels good, do it!” If you have an appetite, feed it. If you have an itch, scratch it. If you’ve got this pleasure or desire, then go ahead and satisfy it.
So these gods of pleasure are everywhere, and they are some of the most difficult to defeat. In part (this is) because many of these gods are not evil or wrong in themselves. Instead they were gifts given to us by God himself, and we turned them into gods. We took gifts and turned them into gods. We took a gift that God gave us, and we turned it into his primary competition.
Imagine you are a parent and you buy a Nintendo Wii for your child. You take it home and the child is ecstatic. He gives you a big thank you, lots of hugs. It was worth every penny. Your child sets up the Wii and begins to play that thing, and you find great joy in seeing the pleasure that your gift brings them. But then after a few weeks, it seems like that is really all they want to do—play the Wii. They complain about the attachments that they don’t have. Finally you come home from work one day and you want to spend time with your child, but your child doesn’t want to spend time with you because they would rather be playing the Wii. What happened? The gift replaced the giver. At least practically speaking, the gift means more to the person than the one who gave it.
This is what we have done with many gifts of pleasure that God gave to us for us to enjoy. We have turned them into gods. We have made them his competition. These are the gods that can be hardest to identify and to destroy. Listen to these words from John Piper. He says:
The greatest enemy for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for the banquet of heaven but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video but the primetime dribble of triviality we drink in every night. The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemy but his gifts. The most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable. These are not evil in themselves. These are not vices. These are gifts of God. They are your basic meat and potatoes, coffee and gardening, reading and decorating, traveling and investing, TV watching and internet surfing, shopping and exercising, collecting and talking…and all of them can become deadly substitutes for God.
Do you see why these gods of pleasure can be so dangerous? They are gifts, oftentimes, from God himself and we’ve turned them into his competition. If you have your Bibles turn to I Kings 18. We are going to be studying there for most of the morning. We’ll be looking at chapters 16 and 17 as well.
Let me catch you up on a little Old Testament history. Last week we were in Joshua 24. Joshua, at the time, was about 110 years old. He gathered the nation of Israel together at a place called Shechem for what would be his final speech to the people, and he throws down a challenge. He says, “Everybody is going to worship. It is not a matter of if you will worship. You will worship. So choose this day whom you will serve. Who are you going to worship?” And all the people in Joshua 24 say, “Well, we will worship the Lord God.” And Joshua says to them, “Well, go destroy your idols. Go destroy the false gods that you brought with you out of the land of Egypt.” That is where we left off last week.
So that is Joshua 24. Now we’re in 1 Kings 18. Between that time and this time, hundreds of years have passed in Israel’s history. A few important things have happened you need to know. One, Israel has split in two. They now are the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The Northern Kingdom was first ruled by a king named Jeroboam. Jeroboam had a real practical problem on his hands. That is, Jerusalem, the place where people would go to worship the Lord God, is located in the Southern Kingdom. He didn’t want all of his people in the Northern Kingdom commuting to the Southern Kingdom. He wanted them to stay out of there. So he gathers the people together and he says, “Listen, the traffic is horrible. The parking lot is a mess there. You don’t want to have to go all the way down to Jerusalem. Just stay here and worship. In fact, we have these false gods that you can worship here.” And he unlocks the storage building and he pulls out all these false gods and all these idols. He blows the dust off. And do you know where they are from? They are from the land of Egypt in the days of Joshua. The people didn’t destroy the gods; they just put them in a closet. Does that sound familiar? They just stored it for a little while.
Here we are, hundreds of years later, and those false gods come back with a vengeance. In fact, if you read through Israel’s history you find kings come and go, but they become more and more entrenched as a nation worshipping these false gods. Eventually, 1 Kings 16:29 says, “Ahab son of Omri became king of Israel, and he reigned in Samaria over Israel twenty-two years. Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.” And there had been some pretty evil kings before him.
One of the things Ahab did was he married this woman by the name of Jezebel. She was the princess of the Sidonians. She comes in from a foreign nation, and Ahab essentially puts her in charge of his religious cabinet. So what she does is she finds all the prophets of the Lord God that she can and she has them killed. She has them executed. Then Jezebel sets up this altar to the primary god of her land named Baal. Then she builds Baal a temple in the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Well, God—we saw last week—is a jealous God. Eventually he has had enough of this and he is going to put a stop to it. So he calls his prophet Elijah, and he says to Elijah, “I want you to go to Ahab and deliver a message to Ahab.” So that is what we read about in chapter 17, verse 1. Elijah says to the king, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.” So Elijah the prophet goes to the king and says, “A drought is coming.” Here is what you have to understand: Baal, the god they had been worshiping primarily, was the god of rain. He was the god of weather. So God looks at Israel as a nation and sees that the primary god they are worshipping is the god of rain, and the Lord God says, “Alright, then I am going to withhold rain.”
This is oftentimes what the Lord does. He sees an area that has become too important to us—in fact, it is more important to us than him—and he withdraws his blessing in that area. Does this sound familiar to some of you? Because some of you are the most frustrated in areas of life that mean the most to you because you’ve made them too important, and God has said, “Oh, okay. Then I will remove my hand of blessing from you in that area since I am not the Lord of that area.”
So don’t be surprised. If you’ve put your marriage ahead of God, if you’ve put your work ahead of God, your finances ahead of God, if you’ve put your business ahead of God, if you’ve put your sex life ahead of God, if you’ve put your happiness ahead of God—then don’t be surprised if these are the areas in which you experience the most frustration. Because God says, “Oh, this is your Baal? Okay, I won’t send the rain.”
What Israel was experiencing, as we read here, is what theologians would call “the active wrath of God,” the active wrath. In other words, God is not going to just sit by any longer and let you live in disobedience or in idolatry. Instead he is going to actively do something about it, and he withholds the rain.
Now there are other times…he doesn’t always work this way…other times when we are living in a pattern of sin or we are guilty of idolatry, that we don’t experience God’s active wrath. We experience what is called “God’s passive wrath,” his passive wrath. This is where God says, “I’ll just let you live with the natural consequences that come when I am not the Lord of your life.” We read about this in Romans 1, which is all about idolatry. In three different places in Romans 1 it says, “The people exchanged God for something else.” They exchanged God for this; they exchanged God for that. Every time we read of this exchange they’ve made, we also read this: “And the Lord turned them over…” “And the Lord turned them over…” In other words, God is saying, “If that’s what you want, then that’s what you can have.” It’s his passive wrath, where we live with the natural consequences that come when he is not the Lord of our lives. If you are living in a sinful pattern, if you are guilty of idolatry, then you will experience God’s active wrath or you will experience God’s passive wrath.
So the question is, “What is the Baal in your life?” Is there an area that has become too important to you where you are now experiencing God withholding a blessing in that area? If you will turn it over to him, if you will make him Lord of that area in your life, then he will oftentimes send the rain.
I’ve seen this as a pastor many times. One example I can think of is recently I talked to a young lady. She wanted more than anything else to get married. That is what she had wanted for years, desperately praying, “God, please send someone into my life. God, I want to be married. It’s my dream to be a wife, to be a mom. Please.” And there just came a point where she said, “Okay, Lord, I am going to be content in you. I am going to find joy in you. And whatever your timing is, is okay with me. I’ll keep praying about it, but this is no longer what is most important.” And she said it was about that time that God sent someone into her life. She stopped worshipping Baal and God sent the rain.
Now let me be really clear here. This is not a guaranteed formula, okay? (Laughter) And it’s not something where you can go to God and say, “Okay, God. I am going to make you first in my life, and then you bring that someone into my life. That is what I really want.” No, that’s not how it works either. He knows our hearts.
But he often does operate this way. We talk to countless couples every year at the church who would say to you, “We couldn’t give. We didn’t have the financial resources to tithe. It just didn’t make sense for us. But we finally decided to step out in obedience and faith and give God the first of our finances, and when we did God blessed us in that area.” …in one way or another. Not saying that they’d get rich, but that God protected them and provided for them. You stopped worshipping Baal and God sent the rain. Don’t be surprised that if in your life, if there are some things that have become too important to you, God sends a drought.
Is this true for you right now? Are you experiencing a work drought? A financial drought? A marriage drought? A sex drought? A happiness drought? Because God is wanting to draw your attention back to him. Because God wants to make certain that he is the Lord of this area in your life. Then you turn to him and you look up to him and then you feel a drop of rain fall on your face.
I read this week about a young girl who walks into a department store, and she sees this pearl necklace. It’s not real; it’s fake, kind of gaudy and tacky really. It costs about $10 but she loves it. So she goes home and she saves up her money until she has ten bucks, comes back to the store. She buys these fake pearls and she just wears them everywhere. I mean, all the time she wears these fake pearls. They look tacky and a few of them go missing after awhile. Finally, her father comes to her one night and says, “Honey, do you love me?” and the little girl says, “Dad, you know I love you.” And then the father says, “Then I want you to give me those pearls.” And the little girl says, “Dad, you can have my favorite toy, but you can’t have my pearls.” He comes to her the next night and says, “Honey, do you love me? Then I want you to give me your pearls.” And she says, “Well, you can have my favorite doll, but you can’t have my pearls.” The next day she comes down the steps. She’s got some tears in her eyes and she is carrying her gaudy, tacky pearls in her hand, and she says, “Daddy, you can have my pearls. I want you to know how much I love you.” And then the father pulls out of his pocket a velvet case and he opens for his daughter a real pearl necklace. See, he was waiting for her to let go of the imitation so that he could bless her with the real thing. He was waiting to see that he as the father meant the most and then he would give her the best gift of all. I wonder how often we are missing out on God’s blessing in a certain area of our lives because we’ve made it too important, and if we’d just give it back to him then God would send the rain.
So God sends Elijah and he says to the king, “Listen, there is going to be this drought in the land.” A few years pass; there is no rain. God has made his point. He sends Elijah back to Ahab, and basically Elijah sets up what you could call a cage match between God and all the gods of Baal and of Asherah. In 1 Kings 18:19 Elijah goes to Ahab and he says, ‘“Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table.’ So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel.”
Now Carmel was kind of an ancient location where God had been worshiped and they had brought sacrifices to the Lord from years ago. So they decide to meet on Mount Carmel. Verse 21 says, “Elijah went before the people.” So he stands in front of this crowd of probably thousands, and he says…This is what he says to the people: “How long will you waver between two opinions?” Does this sound familiar from Joshua 24? How long are you going to go back and forth? “If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”
Then it says this: “But the people said…” what? “The people said nothing.” Now you have to ask yourself why? Why were they silent? I see myself in this. They were silent because they didn’t want to have to choose. They wanted both. So they thought it best to just say nothing at all. If they wanted Baal instead of God they would’ve said, “We choose Baal.” If they wanted God instead of Baal they would’ve said, “We choose God.” They wanted both and so they said nothing.
We don’t like to be forced to choose. This is why many people don’t come to church. Do you understand? I mean, they would say if you asked them, “Well, I love God. I really do. But I don’t go to church.” Well, why? Well, if you get down to it, I’m telling you, this is it. They don’t want to have to choose. They don’t want to put a throne on their hearts where God sits. Instead they…and I can do it too. Instead of a throne we prefer a loveseat… a loveseat…where we invite God to sit on the loveseat of our hearts. “God, you are welcome. We want you on the loveseat of our hearts. Just understand that you are expected to share that space with something or someone else.”
So this is what some of us do. We say, “God, here you are. You can have my loveseat and you are going to have to share that space with television.” That is what some of you have done. You’ve said, “It’s God and it’s television.” And just understand. God doesn’t even like some of the shows you watch. He doesn’t watch HGTV. Are you kidding me? God doesn’t watch that stuff. He doesn’t watch Nashville Star or I Survived a Japanese Game Show. God doesn’t even like the stuff you watch. So we put God on the loveseat of our hearts.
Maybe you have said, “God, I am going to share you with sports.” Or worse yet, maybe we try to share him with something that is completely contrary to who he is. You don’t want to have to choose between God and pornography. And you don’t want to have to choose between God and alcohol. You don’t want to have to choose between God and fixing up your car or decorating your house. You don’t want to choose between God and golf.
Many of these things that we share our heart with are not evil and wrong, but remember what we have said: When good things become God things then it is idolatry, and God won’t have it. If you think you are sharing God with something else in your heart, God is not sitting there. He wants you to choose. He is a jealous God.
So the stage is set. The people are all watching to see who is going to win this great battle, this great war between the gods. It’s one prophet, Elijah, with the Lord God. There are 850 false prophets with the gods of Baal and Asherah. You know, there is a lot of excitement. Somebody starts the wave. It’s exciting on Mount Carmel. 1 Kings 18:25 says, “Elijah says, ‘Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first.’” He’s giving them home court advantage. “You get the ball first.” “Since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god, but do not light the fire.” So they are looking for their god to supernaturally light this fire.
Verse 26, “So they took the bull given them and prepared it. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. ‘O Baal, answer us!’ they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made. At noon Elijah began to taunt them.” So he is trash talking. You’ve got to like this guy. He starts trash talking and he says, “Shout louder! Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or (he is) busy.” This is a very kind translation. What Elijah says is, “Maybe your god is relieving himself.” That is the way it should be translated. It really should. I am not making that up, in case you are wondering. Then he says, “‘Maybe he is traveling. Maybe he is sleeping. Maybe he needs to be awakened.’ So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed.”
Do you get the picture here? They dance; they shout. Eventually they cut themselves until the blood flows trying to get the attention of their god, hoping for some kind of response.
Now our instinct is to say, “How primitive is that?” But I think we bleed for our gods too. Some of you have bled for the gods of pleasure. You have sacrificed your family to a god of pleasure. You have sacrificed your career. You have sacrificed your finances. You have sacrificed your future. You have sacrificed your reputation. You have sacrificed your relationship with God for a god of pleasure. We have bled for these gods.
And I understand…and I struggled with this to decide what god of pleasure to talk about, because there are many we could choose from. But I studied through the New Testament and here is what I discovered: Every single time the word idolatry is used in the New Testament…every single time…in the same sentence you find the phrase “sexual pleasure.” Every time.
So what we have here with sexual pleasure is a gift given to us by God, and it is beautiful as a gift but it is horrific as a god. Some of you know what a cruel god it can be, because as your god it has taken power over you. It now controls you. It’s what you think about when you wake up and when you go to bed. It’s not even what you want to do, but that’s what you find yourself thinking about when you are at work. And it has power and control over your life. You’ve spent money on it. You’ve risked your career for it. You put your marriage on the altar of this god. And every day…you’ve got the Lord God over here and you’ve got the god of sexual pleasure over here. You’re going back and forth, and sexual pleasure wins.
Listen to what C.S. Lewis writes on this issue. He says:
You can get a large audience together for a strip tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress onstage. Now suppose you went to a country where you could fill a theatre simply by bringing a covered dinner plate on the stage, then slowly lifting the cover so that everyone could see just before the lights went out that it contained a lamb chop or a bit of bacon. Would you not think that something had gone wrong in that country and their appetite for food?
Something has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong. What God gave us as a beautiful gift for marriage we have taken and we’ve turned it into a god, and it is a horrific god. Instead of accepting his gift, we clutch our imitation pearls and we miss out on the real thing.
In some ways sex has become the religion of our culture. It struck me when I was driving across the country and I noticed alongside of the road you see a few things. You see three things really as you drive through the country. You see churches, and you see adult bookstore. You see churches and adult bookstores…and Cracker Barrels…but that doesn’t really apply to what we’re talking about here. (Laughter) Why? Well, because these have become our temples. These are where we go to worship.
Maybe you would never go into an adult bookstore, but maybe you enter into a website and it is this pagan temple where you go to worship. For many people the god of sex has become a functional savior. It’s become a God substitute. This is where you go for comfort, and this is where you go for peace. This is where you go for joy, and this is where you go when you’re down. This is where you go when you are lonely. This is where you go when you are rejected. This is where you go when you get angry. This is where you go when you are bored. And it has become for you a god.
It has become one of the most popular gods in our culture. We spend incredible amounts of money on pornography. Last year it grossed more than country music, classical music…which probably isn’t saying much but still…country music, classical music, rock music all combined. Pornography grossed more than professional baseball, professional football, professional basketball all put together. It made more money than ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX all put together. According to the research I did, it is the number one search word on the internet. Seventy percent of pornographic internet traffic takes place between 9:00 in the morning and 5:00 p.m., which is when we’re supposed to be working. You’re telling me we haven’t bled for our gods of pleasure? We’ve bled. We’re hoping for some kind of response, because it always demands a little bit more.
Some of you have bled for the pleasure of alcohol. You’ve sacrificed your marriage to that god. Some of you have bled for the pleasure of food, and you’ve sacrificed your health to that god. You’ve bled for the entertainment of cable TV, and you’ve sacrificed your relationships with your children for that god. So we bleed. We still bleed for our gods.
Verse 29, “Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.”
So they try and the altar does not light on fire. So now it is Elijah’s turn. Elijah doesn’t build a new altar. He rebuilds an altar. In other words, he reuses these stones that had once been used to build altars to the Lord God from years past. He rebuilds an altar, digs a trench around it and then he puts the wood on it and he puts the bull on it. Then he has people come and bring gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of water. He floods this altar. He floods it until the trench fills up with water. This is Elijah’s way of saying, “My God can beat your god with both hands tied behind his back.” That’s what he’s doing.
After there had been this dancing all morning, and there had been chanting and pleading and cutting, Elijah steps forward and he doesn’t dance around. He doesn’t flail around on the ground; instead he prays a simple and humble prayer. In verse 36 he says, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have brought them back to yourself.” So his motivation is God’s glory and that the people would be brought back to him.
Verse 38 says, “Immediately the fire of the Lord flashed down from heaven and burned up the young bull, the wood, the stones and the dust. It even licked up the water in the trench. When all the people saw it, they fell face down on the ground and they cried out, ‘The Lord-he is God! The Lord-he is God!’”
So God, the Lord God, wins the war. It really wasn’t much of a challenge to be honest. But the people see the power that the Lord God has. They destroy their false idols. In fact, they slaughter these false prophets. They turn to God himself and they put him back in his place of glory in their nation.
This is the challenge for us. How do we defeat these gods of pleasure? Because let’s just be real honest. Though a lot of people in this room don’t know it, some of you have a god of pleasure that now sits on the throne of your heart. You have tried again and you have tried again to defeat it and dethrone it, and it just crawls back up on there. So where is victory found?
I want to introduce an idea to you that, because I’ve talked too long this morning, I will only get to mention. We’ll talk more about it next week. But I believe this idea has the truth that will set some of you free for the very first time. I came across it. I was reading an old sermon by a man named Thomas Chalmers. And when I say an old sermon, I mean like 150 years old, right? This guy died in 1847, so it is an old sermon. It’s the truth that I think can set us free. It’s found even just in the title of his message. The title of the message was “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” In other words, the only way, the most effective way to expel a false god that has a grip on your heart is to replace it with a new God, a God of greater affection. When we try and gain control of a false god in our life by rejecting it, by focusing on that god, it just gives that god more power. When, as a preacher, I get up and I say, “Well, here are the consequences. Here is what happens when you worship this false god,” it might lead to repentance and conviction, but it rarely leads to long-term change. Why? Because there must be an expulsive power of a new affection. It is not enough just to resist, but you must replace. You must replace.
A little experiment I read about…we’ll try it here. Right now in your mind, whatever you do, do not think about snakes. Okay? No one. Do not. Seriously. Do not think about snakes. Don’t think about the black snake that could be crawling around. I heard there was one loose in here. Don’t think about that snake. Don’t think about the cobras. You know, the cobras that go up like this? Don’t think about that snake whatever you do. And don’t think about the little rainbow colored snakes that are little but scary that could be building a nest under your bed even as we speak. Don’t think about these snakes. Don’t do it.
Now how many of you right now honestly are thinking about snakes? Raise your hands. Okay, for those of you who aren’t, that’s impressive. You’re ruining it for me, but good job anyway. Feel very proud of yourself.
Now here is what I want you to do. Switch gears. I want you to think about your grandma’s apple pie, okay? Her apple crisp that comes out of the oven… You get a piece of it and you put a scoop of Vanilla Bean ice cream on it, just so, and it melts just enough to cover the apple crisp. And when you take your first bite it is just the right combination of hot and cold. Then picture in your mind a hot chocolate chip cookie coming out of the oven. You break it apart and the chocolate is melted so that it keeps the two pieces glued together with chocolaty goodness.
Okay, now how many of you right now are thinking about snakes? Right? See, it’s not enough just to resist. Sometimes focusing on what we shouldn’t do gives it more power. Instead we must replace it. It’s the expulsive power of a new affection. This is what is required in order to break free from these false gods. Thomas Chalmers puts it this way. He says, “It is seldom that any of our tastes are made to disappear by a mere process of natural extinction.” If you have a false god on your heart, don’t buy into this idea that it is just going to naturally go away if given enough time. It almost is never done by mental determination. You are not strong enough mentally to just make it go away. “But what cannot…” Here it is right here: “But what cannot be thus destroyed may be dispossessed. One taste may be made to give way to another and to lose the power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind.” So one taste gives way to another.
So here it is: God must be our greatest pleasure. When God is your greatest pleasure, all the lesser gods of pleasure just fade away. The Bible says in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
So we find our pleasure in God. There are a lot of ways we can find pleasure in him. I believe that to know him is to love him, and the more we know him, the more we find pleasure in him. But one of the best things we can do is to worship him. And as we respond to God for who he is and what he’s done for us, we experience the pleasure of being his children. He becomes our greatest pleasure.
The response I had to last weekend’s worship after the message was pretty overwhelming. I just heard from so many of you who said it was such a meaningful experience. I was not surprised by that, because this is what we were made for. We were created for it. Worship isn’t really that exciting to me if all I do is see it as singing songs. I don’t even like to sing that much. I don’t really listen to much music. I am a talk radio guy. Yet, if we see it as more than singing songs, if it’s talking to God, if it’s ascribing to God the words he is due, then we find pleasure in it.
So when we worship God…I don’t mean when we just sing songs. I don’t mean when we sit and worry about what other people around us are thinking. And I don’t mean when we look at our watches and wonder, “How soon ‘til we’re done?” That’s not what I mean when I say worship. But when we give our attention and focus and glory and honor to God, we find pleasure in him.
One of my favorite responses was from a young woman who said she realized last week for the first time that worship is not singing songs and listening to specials; it is putting God in his place. So that is what we want to do again. After our song of decision, we’re just going to spend some time worshipping God for who he is and what he’s done. And we’re going to together experience the pleasure of being his children.
Unless it is absolutely necessary, and I know for some of you it is, but again I ask you not to leave until we’re finished. If you are here and you’re not a Christian, then what you need in your life is the expulsive power of a new affection. This is what you need. You cannot do it without it. You need to make God your greatest affection by accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Maybe like the people on Mount Carmel there is something within you that says, “Don’t do anything. Just sit and be quiet. Just remain silent.” But Joshua says, “Choose this day whom you will serve.” And Elijah says, “How long are you going to go back and forth here?” And Jesus says, “Just come to me.” So if you want to talk to someone about making Jesus the Lord and Savior of your life, or if you are ready to make this your church family, you can meet me down front over here as we stand together and as we worship.
