Leverage Point #10.1 - Worship in the Spirit Part 1: Philippians 3:1-11, Romans 2:28-29 - Philippians: Joy Leverage

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Cole.

Worship in the Spirit is loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength by the power of the Spirit.

That means that you can be worshiping God at work.

You can be worshiping God in how you parent.

You can be worshiping God in how you take care of your spouse.

Worshiping God by doing a good job at work.

Now we do song worship here.

That's just one small part of it.

Worship is a lifestyle.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on The Road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

All right, gang, we got a lot to cover today.

There's no way we're going to get to it.

So this is part one, and then part two is next week.

I've got all the notes here, but I already know I'm not going to get to them all.

Turning your Bibles to Philippians chapter 3.

Philippians 3 · chapter mention

I want to talk about worshiping God in the Spirit.

It's interesting that we come to this passage in Philippians, Philippians 3.

We're going through the book of Philippians.

If you're a guest with us today, talking about the leverage of joy, that out of 104 verses, 20 times Paul talks about joy and rejoicing in Christ.

So we're talking about the leverage in your life when you learn to walk in joy and happiness in your life and how when you find your joy in Christ, there is this ability to get stuff done, this ability to do things and to be a person that's beyond even your own talents and abilities because there's joy.

You ever been around joyful people?

They may not be the smartest, you know, the smartest guy.

They may not be the most intelligent.

They may not be educated.

They might have all those things that maybe we think are important, but when they're joyful, you just trust them more.

You just look at them more.

You see something within them.

And I think what happens with joy, men and women, is that when you're walking in joy, you reach and have the potential to reach your full talent, your full skill, because everything's engaged.

Now I make the distinction in the past that happiness is often related to outward circumstances, but joy is related to the heart.

It's who you are bubbling up in the heart.

You may not even emotionally feel it all the time, but there's something in you of faith and joy that kind of charges the ions of your cell structure, and then it pervades into happiness even when you don't feel it, because sometimes, i.e., right here in Philippians, Paul is in prison.

The outward circumstances of our life are not good.

Could be going through cancer, could be going through a divorce, could be going through some stuff in your life that you're battling.

But if your relationship with Christ in worshiping in the Spirit begins to take over your attitude, you start to pervade and actually overwhelm and overcome your negative circumstances with this joyful work of the power of the Holy Spirit.

That's joy.

That's joy.

And so we come to this passage in Philippians 3 where Paul really, more than any other passage, I feel in all of Scripture, he's very vulnerable here.

And he talks about his Judaism background, his pharisaical background, his religious background, and he talks about how he had to reorient himself.

How many of you have been through a paradigm shift in your thinking, maybe in religion before?

Like the way you grew up, you experienced Christ in a different way, and you had a paradigm shift.

That means you kind of had a worldview shift in your thinking about God.

So I grew up Lutheran.

I grew up high liturgical Lutheran, almost Catholic.

And so my dad wore the stole, the robes, I was catechized, I was baptized as an infant.

I did all things Lutheran.

And up until 18, if you've cut me, I bled Lutheran, you know?

And so I knew Lutheran.

I just didn't know Jesus.

I knew Lutheranism.

And by the way, Lutheranism has led millions through the years to Christ.

I'm just talking about me.

But I didn't know Christ in a personal way.

And so it was my freshman year at college that I came into a personal relationship with Christ.

Because it all came together and it was a timing of the Lord.

So Paul's talking about his Jewish heritage, and he's talking about these Judaizers, they're called Judaizers, that were coming in at that time in early Christianity, who were Jews who had gotten saved to the resurrection and the cross of Christ.

Orthodox faith.

They believed in Christ.

But then they added to it.

They added something to it, and they began to teach all through the churches that Paul was planting that it wasn't good enough just to put your faith in Christ.

You needed to also become a Jew.

So it was Jesus plus Judaism.

Jesus plus the Mosaic Law.

Jesus plus the Pharisaical law.

And it drove Paul crazy because he had had a paradigm shift, gang.

He had realized the free grace of Christ is all that you need.

And so because of that, he begins to go into this biographical sketch of his own life.

And he didn't have to do this.

I mean, if you think about it, he could have built on his Judaism and had a corrupt understanding.

And I think he probably did in the beginning.

But then we know that between 14 and 17 years, he was out away before he began to teach much.

I mean, he had a few episodes where he was preaching, but really for 14 to 17 years, he says he went up into Arabia, up into Asia Minor.

And I think what he did is he studied the Old Testament scriptures.

There weren't New Testament scriptures yet, because he was going to write most of them.

So he's just studying and studying, and it's starting to form in his heart.

So that's our preface for what you're going to read next.

Chapter 3, verse 1.

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord.

I think it's amazing that he starts off with saying, rejoice in the Lord, when what he's about to say is really negative, parts of it are.

But he says, Rejoice in the Lord.

For me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe.

Beware of dogs.

He's talking about the Judaizers here.

He says, beware of dogs.

Beware of evil.

He calls them evil workers.

Beware of the mutilation.

Very interesting term.

He's talking about circumcision.

It's a parody.

He's saying, oh, they say that you, because most of the Philippians were Gentiles, they had not been circumcised when they were infants.

The Judaizers were teaching that you had to be circumcised to be a Christian.

And he said, okay, if that's what it takes, then I'm going to tell you what I think of them.

Let them just mutilate themselves.

I mean, pretty, pretty strong language to show how important it is, church, that we understand that you're saved by grace alone, by faith alone, in Christ alone.

It is not your works that get you to heaven.

Has nothing to do with your Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, charismatic, whatever it is, doesn't matter.

That's a reflection of maybe how you like to worship.

That might be a reflection of some theology and doctrine that you believe in, which is awesome in my opinion, but that doesn't save you.

So he says, it's demonic.

They're like dogs.

Beware of evil workers, beware of the mutilation.

For we are the circumcision.

See that?

Notice that?

Remember, there were no verse breaks when he wrote this.

It was just spontaneously written, extemporaneously written.

So these would have been connected together.

He says, Beware of the mutilation, those who say you must be circumcised to be saved, for we are the circumcision.

Very interesting.

We'll come back to that.

Who worship God in the Spirit.

Underline that, highlight that, whatever you're using, your phone or your hard copy Bible, that's what we're going to camp on for the next couple weeks.

Worship God in the Spirit.

Rejoice in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh.

Now here's what he starts to say.

Though I also might have confidence in the flesh, if anyone else thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so circumcise the eighth day of the stock of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, concerning the law of Pharisee, probably had the five books of the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy memorized.

Memorized.

And then he says of him being a Pharisee, of Pharisees, concerning zeal, verse 6, persecuting the church, concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.

That word in Greek means blameless.

It means he was perfect in every way.

He followed the commandments of God perfectly.

So he did it.

He's the MVP of religion.

He has got it down.

So what things were this again to me?

I've counted all that lost for Christ.

And listen, man, look how many times he's going to mention Christ here.

Yet indeed I also count all things lost for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things.

I count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being conformed to his death, if by any means, any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

There's been this paradigm shift from religion to a personal, vital, intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

And it's so huge to him that he says, all the stuff, I mean, he studied under Gamala, gang.

You can go in your history books today and read about Gamalael.

Gamalael had the Harvard of the Middle East, and he was the main professor there, and Paul was his prize student.

He had everything that the Judaizers could ever teach or believe in.

He had done it, and he said, it's rubbish, it's garbage compared to Christ.

And he gave it all up.

And many women, when we come into faith in Christ, there's a difference between that and religion.

Don't get it mixed up.

Because what happens in religion is we begin to believe that it's outward things that we do that make us a Christian.

It's doing those things well that make us a good Christian.

And so we begin to canonize a way of doing worship, or we canonize some dictates or some doctrines, and we begin to worship that instead of Jesus Christ.

And Paul had his heart empowered by this relationship with Christ.

And so he says, look back at verse 3, he says, we are the circumcision.

Here's the way he explains it in teaching it more fully in Romans.

Romans 2, he says, and I'm going to read this from the New Living Translation, for you are not a true Jew just because you were born of Jewish parents or because you've gone through the ceremony of circumcision.

No, a true Jew is one whose heart is right with God.

And true circumcision is not merely obeying the letter of the law, rather, it is a change of heart produced by God's Spirit, and a person with a changed heart seeks praise from God, not from people.

Men and women, every one of us here are true Jews.

You are truly Jewish spiritually because of coming to know this great Nazarene named Jesus Christ.

Yeah, there's ethnic Jews, but they're not true Jews anymore.

True Jews are those who've come into a personal growing relationship with Jesus Christ and are born again.

And you have, listen, don't miss this, you have a circumcised heart.

You have a circumcised heart.

You have a circumcised heart.

You can't even worship in the spirit without a circumcised heart.

You ever been around someone whose whole faith is about outward religion and they come into real worship?

Real worship's happening, they don't know what to do.

They do not know what to do.

Because their heart has yet to be circumcised by the Spirit, they haven't been born again.

So, church, don't miss this.

The circumcision of the heart is through the scapel of the Spirit.

The circumcision of the heart is through the scalpel of the Spirit.

Do you realize that when we give our hearts to Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to live with you and to have an abode with you, and you have a new heart?

That old heart of flesh is done for, and now you have a subtle, soft, beautiful heart through the new heart that the Spirit provides.

And so we now have the capacity, he says.

Look, I'm just reading it.

He says, Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the mutilation, for we are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit.

In other words, you can't be, you can't worship God in the Spirit without being of the true circumcision.

And the circumcision comes through giving our hearts fully and repenting of our sin and coming to Christ, and then we can rejoice in Christ.

Here's our leverage point.

Here's our leverage point today.

By the way, you that are new here, we welcome you.

Glad you're here.

You may not know what I'm talking about yet, but we're in the book of Philippians.

We're talking about leverage.

So each sermon over the last 10 weeks has been a leverage point of how we find joy.

So leverage point number nine is this joy comes.

Joy is released when we worship in the spirit.

Joy is released through worshiping in the spirit.

If you don't know how to worship in the spirit, keep coming because we're going to keep learning and growing here theologically and in practice.

So this transformation has come to Paul.

Worship in the Spirit.

Let me give you a definition of worship in the Spirit.

Here's what I think worship in the Spirit is.

Worship in the Spirit, listen, is loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength by the power of the Spirit.

Worship in the Spirit is loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Do you understand that?

That means that you can be worshiping God at work.

You can be worshiping God and how you parent.

You can be worshiping God and how you how you take care of your spouse.

Worshiping God by doing a good job at work.

Now we do song worship here.

That's just one small part of it.

Worship is a lifestyle.

Worship is what we do all the time.

Now, when we come in here and we worship with some songs, some old and some new, which we love both, hymns, as well as some of the more recent courses, that's part of it.

It's a beautiful part of it.

On Friday night, we're going to come in and we're going to do baptisms and worship here.

And it's going to be a time where we're going to have a mic where people can pray and seek the Lord.

But we're going to come into song worship together, and it's so important to God that if you look at what David did immediately when he became king and he came to Jerusalem, is he put together thousands of worshipers.

He had thousands of instrumentalists.

He had thousands of singers.

He had thousands of people who gave praise and worship 24-7 to the Lord.

God loves that.

We love that.

Say amen if you understand what I'm talking about.

Okay.

And so that kind of worship is important.

It's huge in the economy of God.

But more important than that, and the purpose of our song worship together when we're here in spirit and in truth, is that when we walk out of this room, we go do it at work.

We go do it in our relationships.

We go do it in our parenting.

That's real worship.

Worship happens all the time.

And so the challenge for all of us is to take what happens on Sunday morning, translate that into a practice of the presence of God that rises up within us power to believe, power to trust, power to love, such that it pervades our whole life.

It pervades everything that we do.

And so worship in the Spirit is a lifestyle that we have.

The joy of God moving.

So I have so much here.

I'm not even going to come close.

I got so many arrows and so many circles in my Bible right now.

It's pathetic.

Look at verse 3.

And I want you to just, if you have a pen, if you want to do this, you can.

If you don't, it's fine.

But look where he says, For we are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit.

Rejoice in Christ Jesus.

I circled rejoice in Christ Jesus and I drew a line down to verse 7, where he says, those things, meaning all the religious stuff that he mentions in 4, 5, and 6, he says, and he begins to talk about this inward heart change, this losing everything for Christ.

Look at it, in the excellence, verse 8, the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus.

Then look at the end of verse 8, he says, that I may gain Christ.

Now look at verse 9, faith in Christ.

Verse 10, that I may know him, know him, and the power of his resurrection.

Now, turn to John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

So everybody turn to John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

Turn to the left.

You'll come to John.

John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

And last week, Bobby talked about the woman at the well.

I want to talk about the very last part of that encounter with this woman at the well.

He did a masterful job of communicating about her and what God brings out to us in our own lives from that passage.

But look at verses 23 and 24.

He's asked her for water.

He's told her about living water.

He's made her thirsty.

He's made her ask questions.

She's very religious.

We know that.

She already knows the forms of Samaritan religion and Judaism.

She knows the difference between the temples.

She's very religious.

And he shocks her.

He shocks her.

And sometimes the religious need to be shocked a little bit.

Jesus seemed to make it one of his, like his MO was to shock the religious.

Nobody was more religious than the Pharisees.

No one's more religious today than Orthodox Jews.

And so and so Jesus comes, he shocks her.

Not going to talk about all the ways he does that, but then he says this.

So there's okay, he can he can quibble with her.

Whether worship is at the mountain in Samaria or Jerusalem, he can quibble over who's got the right and the most effective worship, the Jews or the Samaritans.

But this is what he says is forget that.

Just like Paul just did.

He said, Look, I can tell you, man, I did it all.

I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews, I'm a Pharisee, I'm blameless in righteousness in every area.

And so Jesus cuts through the religious talk and he says, This the hour is coming and now is.

The hour is coming and now is.

Why does Jesus do that?

One sentence is the hour is coming.

Oh, it now is.

I don't know, the interesting way he spoke.

The hour is coming and now is.

When the true worshipers, who here wants to be a true worshiper?

The true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit.

Now notice that's a small S.

That's not the Holy Spirit.

That's your spirit.

That's your heart.

That's your spirit.

Remember, we have a circumcised heart now.

You have a heart, church, that has the capacity to do what he's about to say because you have a new heart.

If you're born again.

Now, if you're not born again, if you cannot remember any time where you've ever put your faith in Christ, if you've never had a passion for the word or the spirit, you're probably not saved.

Now you might be up to here with religion, and that may be what got you in the door today.

And that's great, it's a good start, but it won't get you to heaven.

It won't get you to heaven.

Because it's the blood of Christ shed for you, not by the works that you've done, but by the works he's done, and he's in the business of taking really bad works and making them good by the fact that we submit and surrender under the cross to him, and we take on all of his righteousness into our life.

That's how we become born again.

But the hour is coming and now is when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit.

That's your spirit and truth.

For the Father is seeking such to worship him.

God is spirit.

Now that's capital S spirit.

God is spirit.

Those who worship must worship in spirit.

Don't miss this now.

Put those two together.

Here's what he's saying.

He's saying that worship is when your spirit gazes upon the Son, the Father in this case, because Jesus has not died and risen from the grave yet.

But he's saying, when you gaze at me, my spirit, and your spirit connect, that's worship.

That's us lining ourselves up with the Holy Spirit, with our spirit, connecting with him, and in so doing, God enlivens us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, even physically.

John Piper writes, When we come to Christ to drink, what we drink is truth, not dry, lifeless, powerless truth, but truth soaked with the life-giving spirit of God.

The word of promise and the power of the Spirit are the living water.

Men and women, at the road, we want the word of God to be enlightened by the power of the Spirit, wherein our spirit connects even with the mind of Christ, and in so doing our affections are affected and impacted.

No one understood this better, I believe.

If you could say this is modern times, because this is written in the 18th century, by Jonathan Edwards, who in 1746 wrote a treatise called A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.

He had been a part of the Great Awakening.

So imagine this.

Here's a guy who wears spectacles.

And he comes up and he's still nearsighted.

And he and he reads his notes like this.

He just reads his notes like this.

And the Holy Spirit falls.

People start falling out of their seats.

People start confessing their sins.

People start, I mean, he's the original holy roller.

And they're on the floor, and stuff starts happening, and it begins to saturate all of Northampton, Massachusetts called the First Great Awakening.

Some say that America never could have become the America that it is if it hadn't been for the First Great Awakening.

And so with liberalism flowing in, theological liberalism coming in from Germany and England and through the Enlightenment and stuff, Christianity was struggling, especially in the congregational churches, and Jonathan Edwards gets up.

Kind of like this.

You know, he had a little thing here.

This is before they had clerical collars like my dad wore.

That's why I swore I'd never be a Lutheran pastor because it looks so uncomfortable.

And so he would come up and he would go like this and he would read his sermon, and the power of God would come.

So he saw emotionalism.

But he also saw changed lives.

So he wrote a treatise on it because there was so much controversy.

He was deep in controversy.

So in 1746, and I just picked out four of the ways in which he describes affections.

And there's a difference between affections and emotions.

There's a difference.

But listen to what he says for us as we think in terms of word and spirit.

True religious affections are primarily founded on the loveliness of the moral excellency of divine things.

A love of divine things for the beauty and sweetness of their moral excellency is the first beginning and the spring of all holy affections.

You see what he's saying?

He's saying that when you focus on beauty, when you focus on Christ, when you focus on moral excellencies, it lights a fire even in your emotions.

Another phrase, he says, true religious affections rise from the mind being enlightened rightly and spiritually to understand or apprehend divine things.

He goes on.

True religious affections tend to and are attended with the lamb-like, dove-like spirit and temper of Jesus Christ.

They naturally beget and promote such a spirit of love, meekness, quietness, forgiveness, and mercy as appeared in Christ.

As we start to worship this way, focusing in on the love of God, the meekness of God, he changes us to be more Christ-like.

Lastly, with true religious affections, the higher gracious affections are raised.

So our actual emotions are raised as our minds are enlightened, the more is there a spiritual, I love this part, listen, the more there is a spiritual appetite, longing of soul after spiritual attainments increase.

Now, men and women, do you realize you don't have it all yet?

God wants us hungry and thirsty for him on a whole new level.

You start praying that, and God will give you new appetites for him.

And so we see with the woman at the well, when he's challenging her, he talks about this water, this living water.

You see what he's doing?

He's stirring up her appetites.

He's making her hungry for God.

Some of you men in this room need your heart stirred through holy word and spirit worship with a new desire for new spiritual attainments in your prayer life, in the word, that you'd wake up in the morning and be excited about reading God's word.

Some of you women need that in your life.

You young people, we saw it one Sunday.

We saw it one Sunday.

And only one Sunday.

Where those kids came after that D now retreat, they were all packed up here, they were fired up in worship, they began to cheer.

When the worship team came out, where'd it go?

Where'd it go?

Well, I'd like to hope and pray that it went deep and they're growing as a result of that to be disciples.

But my experience in church ministry all these years, and my experience with young people in particular, is that you just get back to your video games.

You get back to your TV sitcoms or whatever it is.

And so what happens, you guys, is when we have so much of junk food that we're not hungry for the real food.

And so, as parents, we train our kids, you know, don't eat that and don't eat that, because then you won't be, you won't eat the good stuff at the meal and all that stuff, you know.

And then, but we don't do it spiritually.

Huge mistake.

We need to be training our kids to be hungry for truth by inspiring them with good programs, good uh uh work coming from you as a parent as you're training them in the word and gaining in them an appetite for good food, for solid food, for biblical food, for spirit-saturated food.

Because if you don't, the devil's on the move.

And he's winning them by the tens of thousands every day.

And it's demonic.

And it's killing their souls, and they're committing suicide because they know in their heart it's wrong.

They know in their spirit that something's not right because God, I'm gonna talk about this next week.

I'm gonna talk about a lot next week.

I'm not even coming close to this message.

I'm on page two out of 12, just so you know.

So, so when we eat tons of the junk food that we eat, we fill ourselves up with junk food.

We have headaches, we have diabetes, we go through all the different things we start having because you're not taking care of yourself.

And then you go to the doctor, and doctors probably love it.

I mean, it's job security for them.

Keep shoveling in the sugar, man, because we'll get more cancer patients and we can get more money on the surgeries.

I'm just saying.

But when we start becoming men and women who eat healthy food, we start becoming healthy, and you don't go to the doctor much.

You know, when you start having healthy food that your mind and your heart's being fed by, and that's why we started Outlier University, that's why we want to train all of us to be word-rooted, spirit-alive, and culturally engaged.

So I brought this.

This is outside in our lobby.

Um, we believe we are passionate to be Jesus' disciples who are word-rooted, spirit-alive, and culturally engaged.

So here's what we believe at the road.

We believe that we enlivened our mind with truth.

That's why we start with the word.

We teach from the word.

Now we're gonna go into spirit, that spirit worship.

Worship with great lyrics, and sometimes they're great and sometimes they're not, but and well, same with me.

I mean, sometimes my sermon is good, sometimes it's not.

But when our hearts and our minds are enlivened with the fire of God, we come alive.

That's why you've heard me say, churches that are all word, no spirit, dry up.

Churches that are all spirit, no word, they blow up.

Word and spirit, we grow up.

We need both.

And so the reality is this: that God is actually looking for churches that worship Him in Word and Spirit.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.

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Go to theroad.org, click on the ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.

Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.