Made To Worship // We are all Worshippers

We are gonna be in Romans chapter one and we are starting a brand new series entitled Made to Worship, Finding Purpose in the Mundane.

And what we're gonna do over the next several weeks is we're gonna look at what the Bible says about worship.

Now, a lot of times when we think of the word worship, we think of music.

Or maybe we have a picture of somebody like in our minds of somebody bowing down before an idol.

But worship really is so much more than that.

In fact, what worship is so we have a definition of worship as we walk through this the next several weeks, it's this worship is ascribing worth to something and valuing that something above everything else.

And here's what I want to propose to you this morning is what you choose to worship will determine everything else about you.

What you choose to ascribe worth to and value above everything else will determine everything else about you.

Some of us in our lives, we would say, Pastor Nay, I am like worshiping God.

Like I just sang three songs.

But it's possible that actually, if we were to dig a little deeper, we actually are worshiping something other than God.

And here's why this is so important, here's why this matters so much.

Is because what we choose to worship will determine everything else.

And like, let's just I kind of feel this in my bones a little bit, and here's why is because a lot of us in the room, we're experiencing consequences in our life, not of things that we've done, but we experience pain and heartbreak and challenges because somebody else in our life, maybe our home of origin, maybe somebody else chose to worship something other than God.

Because when we misplace our worship, it has effects on our life.

And maybe you're here this morning and you're like, man, my life is so hard.

I have so much pain.

I have so much baggage, I have so much difficulty in my life.

And we look back, and it was a decision that somebody made here or somebody made there.

And now we find ourselves here, and we're like, man, how am I ever gonna get through this trauma?

And somebody chose to misplace their worship, and it's affected you.

And here's how this happens: it says in Romans 125, in the middle of the text we're gonna read, it says that they, this is people, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.

Who's ever you've ever exchanged like an article of clothing or maybe ordered something on Amazon?

How many of y'all you like order things on Amazon a little too much?

You know what I mean?

And you sent it back, you exchanged it, right?

Here it says they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the creator who is praised forever, amen.

Now, the word worshiped here does not mean music.

This is what it means, it means allegiance to.

Now, nobody wakes up one day and says, you know what, today I'm just gonna believe a lie.

Like, you don't wake up in the morning, you're like, oh, I just, you know, I just want to live my life in lies.

No, nobody does that.

But what happens is we hear something repeated again and again and again and again and again, and we start believing it as truth.

And sometimes that happens from the outside, but can we be honest?

For some of us, that happens from the inside.

Some of us tell ourselves, you're a failure.

You're a failure, you're a mistake, you're an addict, you're broken, you're this, and you've told yourself that so many times that you have brought that on and you believe that that is the truth about who you are.

Exchange the truth for a lie.

I remember a time when I exchanged the truth for lies when I was in seventh grade.

And if you guys remember when you were in seventh grade, how many of you are thankful that that was only one year of your life and not oh my gosh.

I was gonna put a picture up on the screen of me in seventh grade, but I didn't want to publicly humiliate myself that much.

When I was in seventh grade, there was something I really believed.

I mean, I I mean, I fully believe this.

Here's what it was is that if you were cool, you had to have a girlfriend.

And if you didn't have a girlfriend, you were a loser.

And that's that's that's fully what I believed.

So guess what I wanted?

I wanted a yeah, so bad.

And I started talking to a girl for like two months.

Ready for this?

You ready?

On the phone.

No, no, you gotta know.

Seventh grade.

Two months in the seventh grade is equivalent to like a 30-year marriage.

And after two months, something happened.

I got put in the friend zone.

Any of you ever got put in the friend zone?

Don't raise your hand and embarrass yourself.

All right, the friend zone.

I got put in the friend zone, and I'm like, I'm a loser now.

I was talking to this girl on the phone, we sat together in a class, we had lunch together, and now I'm in the friend zone, I'm a loser.

Not because I was actually a loser, but because I believed that.

And because I believe that, I believe the lie, it affected me.

Now I want us to go to verse 29 of Romans chapter 1, and we're gonna see the effects of what happens when we exchange God's truth for a lie, and we misplace our worship.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Instead of valuing God above all else, we value everything else.

Look at what it says in Romans 1 chapter 29.

If you're ready for it, would you say amen?

Amen.

It says, now you gotta prepare yourself because it's gonna be a lot.

There's gonna be heavy.

So, like, buckle your seat belts here, take a deep breath, because Paul isn't polling and he punches, he just wants to be real.

How many of you appreciate somebody that's real?

Right?

Paul's gonna be real, he's not gonna sugarcoat it.

He's gonna say, This is what life looks like when you choose not to worship God.

These are some of the consequences that can happen.

It says, They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, wickedness, they're full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice.

You get all that?

They are gossips, verse 30, slanderers, god haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil.

So now there's like making up evil things to do.

The next line is for the parents in the room.

Disobedient to parents.

Parents are like, amen, my kids need to worship God above everything else.

Verse 31 senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful.

Needless to say, guys, misplaced worship has devastating consequences.

Now, now let's look at this a little deeper.

First of all, it has economic effects on our life.

How many of us have felt stress, anxiety, tension in our homes when it comes to money?

Not because we don't have enough money, but because we want too much stuff.

Because we value having all of these things.

So what do we do?

We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.

It affects us financially, it affects us socially.

How many relationships have we had that have been really affected and in some cases destroyed because somebody gossiped about us?

Because somebody was intentionally deceitful to go around our backs, and because of that, you're like, I just can't do this anymore.

Relationship affected.

It has a spiritual effect.

How many times has arrogance and pride crowded God out of our life?

It's like, God, uh your role is to be there when I have my emergency prayers and things go hard.

Things are difficult.

But in the everyday life, no, no, no.

Like I'm doing my thing and I'll consult with you.

Pride.

There's a family effect.

And here's what Paul is saying is that when we misplace our worship, it affects every single part of our life.

And the consequences we can't choose.

But the consequences are real.

And Paul is trying to tell us this, and you can mark this down.

You can choose what you worship, but you can't choose the consequences of it.

I was reminded of this watching a movie on Netflix.

It's the movie Deepwater Horizon.

I'm curious.

Anybody ever seen that movie, Deepwater Horizons?

That's a good one, right?

It's a good movie.

Here's a story.

2010.

There was an oil company, they were drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and they said, we want to save some time and we want to save some money, so we're gonna we're gonna cut some corners.

We're gonna do some things that, you know, maybe we shouldn't, but it's gonna help us financially.

In April 22nd, 2010, the unthinkable happened.

The oil rig exploded.

Eleven people dead.

Millions of barrels of oil spilled into the ocean.

The company was sued for millions of dollars because of the effect of a choice that the people made.

And you can choose what you will worship, but you can't choose how it'll affect you, your relationships, or your future.

But Paul tells these people that we can choose to worship God.

Here's why we can choose to worship God.

Because God has revealed himself to every single one of us.

It says in verse 19, since what can be known about God is evident among them, God has revealed himself to us, or um, it's evident among them because God has shown it to them.

For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world.

You say, How can I understand?

Like, how can I see these things?

Look what this says being understood through what he has made.

So you can go and look at a sunset, you can go to the beach, you can go take a hike and look out over mountains, and it shows you and it tells you that there is a God, there is an all-powerful God.

God has revealed himself.

So, because of that, look what it says.

It says, as a result, people are without excuse.

For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude.

Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened.

So here's what this text tells us is that God has made himself known and available to you.

God has shown all of humanity how powerful he is and that he can be known.

God has given us that ability to know God.

You're like, no, Pastor Nate, you understand?

Like, I was not raised in the church, like I was raised in a very dysfunctional family, and like my dad was absent and I had all these things.

Pastor Nate, I just don't get all this stuff.

So I have an excuse to not believe in God.

I have an excuse to not follow God.

Paul says, No, you don't.

Paul says, what has been known of God is clearly seen.

So his invisible attributes, you can know them, so you are without excuse.

Now, typically, what we do is when it comes to God, we can ignore God and maybe suppress God in one of two ways.

The first way is through an what I would call an irreligious way.

You can say, I don't really believe that there's a real God, or I'm just gonna kind of party it up and like wild it out, I'm gonna do my thing.

But there's also, which is more common for most of us in this room, is there's a religious way.

And what that is, is that's compartmentalizing God.

God, you can have this over here, but you may have in this area or this area or this area.

God, I'll give you a Sunday or two a month, but uh don't touch this area of my life.

And then what will happen is the Spirit of God will speak to you about this area right here, and you'll push the Spirit of God away.

You'll hear a convicting message where God uses his word to convict you in the area of your life where you compartmentalize God and you're like, ooh, I don't like this.

And then we make excuses about why we can't.

Oh God, I can't because I'm too busy right now.

God, I can't because of the baggage I carry.

God, I can't because of how much things I have going on.

God, you don't understand.

I have this, I have that.

And what we do is we compartmentalize God.

And what we're doing is we are suppressing truth because God reveals his truth to us and he wants us to take steps of growth.

He wants us to walk in humility, he wants to speak into this area, the uncomfortable area of our life.

But what we do is we say, No, God, I'm suppressing that.

I'm ignoring you in this area.

And what happens when we do this is we claim to be wise, but we become fools.

Verse 22.

Verse 23, it says, This we exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal men, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

Therefore, God delivered.

The word delivered means to hand over to somebody.

Translation: God let you decide.

God's given you free will.

So He has let you choose, given you over to the desires of your hearts, to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves.

So now it's saying, okay, I'm just gonna have sex with whoever I want, whenever I want.

I'm just gonna do me.

I'm not gonna live with any sexual boundaries.

And this is what happens their bodies were degraded among themselves.

The consequences of choosing to misplace worship.

How did this happen?

Back to verse 25.

There was an exchange, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what's been created instead of the creator, who is praised forever.

They worshiped and served what has been created instead of the creator.

You say, Pastor Nate, no, no, you don't understand.

Like, I don't worship anything.

Like, I just I don't do the God thing, I just do me.

I just say everybody is a worshiper.

Every one of us values something above everything else.

Some of you, it's your hobby, some of you, it's your money, some of you, it's your job, some of you, it's the success of your kids and your kids being exactly what you want them to be.

Some of us, it's having comfort, it's retiring as soon as we can, it's travel.

Every one of us will worship something.

And if we rightly understand who God is and God's character, it will only make sense to worship God.

That God isn't like out to get you.

God isn't like this angry judge that sitting up in heaven is like, I want to make your life miserable.

And in some of our minds, like, there's no, in our minds, the way we think, like, there's no plausible way that God could actually be a good God.

Maybe because of how we were raised, maybe because our earthly father was not what he should have been.

So because of that, we have just translated that up to our heavenly father.

So because of that, we're like, man, he wasn't very loving.

There's no way that he loves me.

We read things in scripture about boundaries that God has put in our life, and we say, see, God is trying to keep me from something.

See, the reason why God tells me that I shouldn't just do this, or I shouldn't have sex with all these people, the reason why he's doing that is he wants to keep me from having fun and living it up.

And our default thinking is to push away from God.

But God's commands are prison bars, they're train tracks to abundant life.

And going outside of God's commands doesn't lead to freedom, but to a train wreck.

We read earlier the verses of what happens when there's misplaced worship.

And many of us are living or have lived in the train wreck of somebody else's choices.

And many of us come from family lineages and family lines where there's dysfunction and there's addiction and there's brokenness.

And we're living in that.

And it has become generational on our life.

And now we're at a place in our life where we look back and we're like, man, there's not a godly heritage to follow.

I don't come from a place where the Bible was even read.

I don't come from a place where we ever went to church services.

I don't come from a place where God was a priority.

And here's what I want to say: you can break that chain in the life of your family and for future generations.

You can be the one that breaks the generational dysfunction and breaks the generational addiction and breaks the generational pains that have been passed on from family to family.

And you can be the one that can stand up and say, Ask for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

You can't choose what's happened in the past, you can't choose what's happened to you, but you can choose what you will do.

And let me say this: I'm really speaking to men in the room that are more passionate about their hobbies and they're more passionate about their sports teams, and they're more passionate about all these other things rather than worshiping God with their lives.

Because while this isn't society like popular in our culture, this is the reality, as goes the men, as goes everybody else.

And a lot of the problems in society is a result of bad men that are weak men that won't stand up and follow Jesus passionately.

That's what it is.

And if you're a guy in the room, man, I don't even have time to get through the rest of this text.

I'm so disappointed.

If you are a guy in this room, I I'm just gonna camp out for a second.

If you're a guy in this room, listen, listen, the world is gonna tell you, the world is gonna tell you that if you're gonna lead in any way, if you're gonna lovingly lead and carefully lead and maybe challenge some people and do some things, then you are the problem.

But God has designed men to be godly and loving and care and lay down their lives for other people.

And that takes integrity and that takes character.

And that takes men that value God above everything else.

That's what it takes.

Because when men will prioritize God, so many other things will fall into place.

Verse 26, I'm gonna pick this up.

It says, For this reason, God delivered them over to disgraceful passions.

Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.

The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another.

Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.

And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over, allowed them to make the choice to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right.

I wish I had more time to spend in these verses.

Caleb Kaltenbach last week, Faith in Sexuality Sunday.

If you didn't weren't here, watch it online.

A great message about this.

And God's design for sexuality is a covenant marriage between a man and a woman.

And God says, God says, as the creator of sex, as the creator of sex, I want you to thrive sexually.

So because of this, God has created boundaries in this area.

And we live in a world right now, especially, and if you're not Jesus follower, you you don't have to listen to this, you can like tune this out.

But if you are a follower of Jesus in this room, many of us need to surrender this area of our sex life to the Lord.

And we need to say, God, I'm gonna believe what you say about sex.

For some of you in the room, you're having sex with somebody that you're not married to.

There's not judgment from me.

But here's what there is there's a loving challenge that says, hey, make that right.

Like if you've been living with somebody for years, like, bro, put a ring on it, man.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, come on, like, that's what God's design is.

And this whole thing of like, oh, I don't know, I'm not ready, bro.

You've been living with her for five years, man.

Right?

Like, goodness gracious, grow up, dude, right?

Like, this is what God's design is, is that we will be in line with him, uh, in line with his ways sexually.

And when God is valued above all else and we worship him above all else, all these other things in our life will fall into place.

I want to end with this story about a time I uh I learned about this, is I was uh I was a teenager, and I'm growing in my faith, and I'm I'm reading God's word.

And y'all see me as like y'all see me as a pastor, right?

But man, I was a knucklehead teenager, and it seems like it wasn't that long ago.

I was growing in my face and I was reading the Bible, and I was working, right?

I had a job, and you know, I have this little thing that I really like.

They're they're called chews.

Um, so if I wanted to buy Nikes, I had to work, and so I had to work and buy Nikes, and and I had um I had learned that if God was gonna truly be the one that I worship, then part of that is worshiping him with my finances.

So I had learned to give 10% of my income, a little 15-hour a week job income to the Lord.

Which by the way, that's that's a big deal if you're a teenager.

That's a big deal if you're anybody, you know what I'm saying?

And and I learned to do that, and our church had a special offering for I don't even remember all the details of it, but I do remember this, that God put something on my heart to say you should give to that offering.

And I'm like, God, I'm just a teenager.

God, I already give 10%.

God, what more do you want?

And I wrestled with God, but I surrender, I said, God, I'm gonna give financially.

And I just time out, time out.

When you decide to take a step of growth in your faith and get out of your comfort zone, there will be challenges.

And the enemy will fight.

I made this decision, and my plan was is I'm gonna work the summer, and while I work, that's gonna be part of how I'm gonna give what I've committed to the Lord.

Well, here is a problem.

I broke my ankle and I couldn't work.

And I'm like, what in the world do I do now?

I'm like, God, are you messing with me?

Like I just I just made a commitment to you.

Like I'm a teenager.

I just like, and it wasn't like$20.

It was a lot.

I don't know if you ever felt like you ever felt like God, are you messing with me?

I'm trying to obey you.

And it wasn't just like a simple break where it's like six to eight weeks.

No, I like tore ligaments.

I'm in a cast for like three months.

This is terrible.

I couldn't even like walk, you know, and I'm like, God, I know you want me to do this, like I'm just gonna do this.

And I had a little bit of money in savings, so I gave, but that still wasn't enough.

And and I'm at this place where it's like my faith is being tested, and I have every reason in the world to like not like to back out and say, uh, you know, things are difficult.

But I was like, God, and I'm I'm I'm just growing on my faith, and I'm like, God, I'm gonna trust you right now.

This is like the biggest faith test of my entire life.

Like, I'm so scared to death, but I'm gonna trust you, like, I'm gonna give.

And I remember five months after my ankle injury, my ankle was healed up, and my friend basically gave me a really good job, like, put it on my lap.

I didn't have to apply to it.

And I was able to not only fulfill the commitment that I'd committed to give, but also have extra money on top of that.

And and and and here's what I learned.

When you choose to worship God above everything else, and you value Him above everything else, even when it's hard, even when you feel like quitting and you feel like giving up, that God will make a way.

When the night's dark and the emotions are heavy and the fear's real, and you feel overwhelmed, and you feel like quitting, and everybody else, it makes sense to quit.

Then you say, No, no, no, I will worship you, I will value you, that you are gonna have a testimony of the faithfulness of God in your life.

And I was a teenager, and I learned right there that I can trust him, that I'm gonna worship him.

And friends, if you will choose to worship him, if you will choose to not compartmentalize your life, if you choose to lay down your life on the altar and say, You have it all, he can do more with your life than you could ever imagine, he can do more with your story than you could ever imagine.

You can't choose what everybody else will do, but this is what you can say.

Ask for me, Lord.

I worship you.

So here's my question that we're gonna have a baptism.

My question, if we can get on the screen, is this is what's the area of your life that you've compartmentalized to God and you need to worship Him with.

What's that area?

Is it a relationship?

Is it money?

Is it I don't know?

I'm not your Holy Spirit.

But would you lay that down before the Lord?

Let's all bow our heads and close our eyes and