Worship

Morning, church.

All right.

Hear now the word of the true and living God, Hebrews twelve, starting in verse 18.

For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness, and gloom and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them.

For they could not endure the order that was given.

If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.

Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.

But you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels and festival gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking, for if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.

At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.

This phrase, yet once more, indicates the removal of things that are shaken, that is, things that have been made, in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

It's so cold, I can't believe it.

It's so cold that I felt like to not acknowledge how cold it was would be more strange than acknowledging how cold it is.

So thanks for joining us this morning, braving the cold to get out here.

Let's pray, and then we'll move into our sermon for the day.

Holy Father, we thank you for your loving kindness in bringing us together this morning.

Lord, we thank you that weekly we get to assemble as your body.

Lord, that because of the work that you have done, you have united us as brothers and sisters, and you we can sing truthfully.

That Jesus is our brother.

Lord, that you are interceding on behalf of us even now, that as we gather, we join the angels in their festival gathering to worship and honor you.

Lord, that as we hear your word this morning in your scriptures, that we hear it no less than the Israelites gathered at the base of Mount Sinai heard it.

Lord, I pray that we would understand it with the same force and veracity.

And Lord, that we would receive it even more completely as we understand it through the sacrifice made by your son.

Lord, we lift these things up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So this year marks the sixth year of Redemption Church Denver.

And I should say, before we get started, we had a uh men's poker night on Thursday, and uh it was this uh incredible act of providence that I got to witness.

It was so incredible that I have to bring it up.

Uh the the man Baxter, who won the poker night, the whole night was trying to lose.

So he could go home to his wife and and new baby.

And so he kept going all in.

I think like three times he went all in to try and get out, but the guy couldn't lose.

It was uh it was amazing.

So uh my working theory is that that was the most perfect bluff ever.

Like, I gotta get home, you guys.

I'm going all in, and he just kept winning.

What a player.

This is the sixth year of uh uh it also I wanted to mention part of the reasons for bringing that up is if you uh it was a great time we got to invite a lot of friends that uh aren't a part of our church, and just wanted to say, like, if you invited a friend or um brought them to that night, uh it it's a that's a great way to follow up and say, like, hey, uh see, the you came to that night, that was a bunch of people from our church.

They weren't so bad.

And you could even invite them to church, perhaps.

Uh so that's uh little you know evangelism tip.

This year marks the sixth year of Redemption Church Denver.

And this will also be the year that if all goes according to the plan, we will join a denomination, we become non-non-denominational, and we will join the Presbyterian Church in America.

And so at the beginning of this year, we're taking some time with this series, I'm calling Redemption Story, in which we look at the church itself and we seek to gain an understanding of what the church is.

Now, you don't want to do this all the time.

You don't want to just be constantly looking at and examining the church because when the church is really functioning well, there's an aspect of it which is sort of invisible.

Because when the church is really working well, we're not doing a lot of thinking about the church, we're doing a lot of thinking about Jesus.

And we're doing a lot of loving one another.

And our participation in the church becomes just this means to gain a greater and better understanding and uh participation in our worship of Jesus.

But every once in a while, like when your glasses get a smudge on them, you need to take off the thing that you're looking through and look at the thing you're looking through to wipe off the smudge to get a better understanding of how it's happening, perhaps tweak it and correct your glasses, and then uh put them back on, and then you can see more clearly through the thing which you're meant to be looking through by taking a moment to look at it.

So we're taking that moment to look at the church, to gain an understanding of what it is that's happening here.

What are we doing when we gather as the church?

Why is it that God designed his story of redemption to not just be the rescue of individuals, but that when we are rescued by Christ, we are brought into his body, that he makes us a new people, and that new people is the church.

Last week we looked at the first principle, which is the church's focus, that uniting principle that all of the church centers on, and that is the gospel.

The gospel of Jesus Christ, that Christ is Lord, that it is by his work on the cross that we are saved, it is in his resurrection that we hope in and hope to share in.

And simply by believing in him, in the in the fact of what Jesus accomplished on the cross, we are saved.

That is the central principle.

This morning, we're looking at the central function of the church.

And the central function of the church is worship.

We're going to look at a couple of uh subsidiary functions over the next couple of weeks.

So this week we're looking at worship, which is the central function that all else flows from.

The week after that, we'll be looking at nurture, how it is the church's purpose to nurture believers.

And after that, we'll be looking at mission.

The church is not just an insular group, but it is uh a group of people that are on mission.

And then after that, to wrap up the series, we'll be looking at the structure of the church.

How is it that God has ordered his church to worship him, to nurture the saints, and to be on mission for his name.

This morning we're looking at worship.

Worship is the central function of the church because of who God is and who we are.

I'll see you all next week.

In his book entitled The Church, Edmund Clowney writes, Neither worship nor religion can be defined apart from God.

For worship is the response of the creature to the revealed glory of the creator.

That's a helpful definition.

Worship is the response of the creature to the revealed glory of the creator.

And so we can't define worship apart from who God is.

It is the nature of God as our creator, who he is in his being, eternal, infinite, in holiness, goodness, truth, and who we are as his creatures, the ones made by him in his own image, that the way we relate to who God is is by worship.

That is how we participate in who God is.

It is demanded by who he is.

Now, for the more pragmatic among you, that might feel just a little esoteric.

Like the purpose of the church is just worship.

Like what happens when we sing?

What can you measure from our singing?

Well, not much.

It's not that, it's not that type of a thing.

So why would something like that be central to the church?

Perhaps you might think a better center for the church, and you could even imagine a sermon like this, you all are caught up in your worship, and yet you don't care for the poor, or you don't care to evangelize your neighbor, or you don't care to be in acts of service and love for one another, and yet you're just focused on worship.

Those things seem like they could be better measured.

There's quantitative realities to service, to mission, to evangelism.

And we can see how those are those are good and necessary things, but none of those things would take the place as central, the central function of the church.

The central function of the church is worship.

Worship is our highest calling.

Now, what you might be expecting now, if you've heard sermons on worship before, is some sort of turn where I say, see, worship is the central calling of the church, but all of life is worship.

And so all of life is meant to be lived in a way that glorifies God.

So really what I'm saying is not worship is the central function of the church, but living in such a way that glorifies God is the central function of the church.

And so I'm sort of saying something like worship is everything.

And I think when we start to think about worship, we can easily slip into that sort of mode of thinking, that worship is really everything we do.

And of course, there's a sense in which that's true, but there's another sense in which that's completely absurd.

Because there are real times of explicit worship.

Not every day is the Sabbath, not every assembly is the assembly of the church.

Not every person you know is your family, not every speech is a sermon, not all singing is worship.

God calls us to explicit worship.

The real gathered worship of the church.

And so what I'm saying is the real, like what we're doing now, the gathered worship of the church is the central function of the church.

Does that feel a bit more provocative?

A bit more like, are you sure about that?

I I hope to prove it to you this morning.

Now, Paul, of course, in Romans 12, I'll start with a verse that disproves my point.

Paul in Romans 12, after he makes it's like this, the most gigantic therefore in all of Scripture, after Romans 1 through 11, he says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

So Paul is speaking in a way where he says, the demeanor in which we live as a living sacrifice to God is our spiritual act of worship.

This is our rightly ordered duty before the Lord, is to live lives of living sacrifice.

And so it is true that there is an implicit worship in anything that we do, but how could it possibly be the case that you could live a life of implicit worship if you deny participation in the commanded explicit worship of the Lord?

So you could say, all of my life is an act of worship, therefore I would not participate in the commanded, explicit worship of the Lord.

You see, that doesn't make any sense.

We must participate in the explicit worship of the Lord in the gathered church in order that we may in the rest of our lives live lives of a living sacrifice to Him.

How is it that we could implicitly worship, offer our lives up as a living sacrifice if we neglect to assemble together, as is commanded in Hebrews 10, 24 and 25, if we neglect the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, as commanded to us in Ephesians 5, 19, if we neglect the preaching of the word, as is commanded to us in 2 Timothy 4.2, if we do not, if we neglect the participation in communion, as is commanded to us in 1 Corinthians 11, 24, that we are called to do this in remembrance of Him, if we neglect baptism, which is commanded to us by Jesus in the Great Commission in Matthew 28, if we neglect the commanded, explicit worship of God, then our lives cannot be offered as living sacrifices.

How can we tell God, I worship you with the whole of my life, but I do not participate in the way that you command me to explicitly worship you?

That is a strange sentence.

And oftentimes that is the function that that's the ramification of our explaining worship as everything.

We're very good in our culture of flattening distinctions.

This is what one of the like intuitive moves that we make in our culture is to gain insight by flattening distinctions.

So we say something like, you know, really, worship is everything you do.

Really, it's everything you do.

And what happens there is we lose the category of explicit worship that's commanded to us in Scripture when we do that.

We need to hold both because Scripture holds both.

Scripture describes to us an explicit call for the church to gather and worship God.

And it describes the whole of your life as an act of worship.

But those two must be wed together in order for us to experience either.

A cursory reading of the Old Testament shows us that God is deeply concerned with how we worship him.

When this series is done in February, we're going to go through the book of Exodus, which is gonna take years.

It'll take longer than the Exodus took.

And we are in working through that after like a couple of years, and we go through the Exodus story, we're going to hit the part that I'm most nervous about, which is Exodus 20.

And from Exodus 20 on, we get the story of the Ten Commandments, then we get a bunch of laws and a bunch of case law that Moses experienced, and then there's a huge section about instructions for how to build the tabernacle.

If you've haven't read through Exodus lately, you'll get to that part and you'll be like, this like action movie about running away from Egypt just became like furniture design school.

And the detail which will be conveyed in this for how you are to draw close to God.

It's incredible.

It's it's it's shocking.

And you'll even learn about the craftsmanship that goes into all of the different uh forms of the tabernacle and the clothes that the priest will wear, and the uh the different literal pieces of furniture that will be there.

One is like a big bath, there's lampstands, there's an ark with angels and wings, which you've seen if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So we can start to think in the new covenant, when our worship is like this, you know?

Like it's this feels very, very ordinary.

Played play the this furniture, you know, the design of this pulpit you find nowhere in scripture.

The design of this building, this this used to be a mortuary, you know, and half of it's a school.

We don't even really own it.

And by really, I mean own it.

That wasn't like a, you know, because of the mortgages you don't really own.

I mean like another, like the school owns it, we rent this space.

You know, there's uh you you won't, there's no, there's no book of Leviticus for the New Testament that describes these practices that we participate in.

And and the the music that we'll hear, I also learned at the poker night that Jonathan Peterson, people at work call him JP.

He's got this whole other identity that we didn't even know about.

You'll hear his musical stylings later, and you'll think that's the musical stylings of a guy who makes satellites for a living.

But those are not commanded in scripture, they are not explicitly laid out in the way that the the in the old covenant, the way that you would approach God was in detail absolutely laid out.

And so what can happen in our minds is we can think worship in the new covenant is less important, it's less meaningful to God.

He cares less about how it is that we approach him as an assembled community than he cared in the old covenant.

But it it's it's precisely the opposite.

You see, what was happening in the old covenant, all of these patterns that are laid out in tangible things that could be participated in in the the old covenant worship before Christ, these are pointers, right?

These are shadows of what we're doing this morning.

These are just vague images of what we get to do explicitly right now.

We are participating in a level of worship this morning that the high priest in the old covenant, clothed with you know gems and medallions and beautiful things woven into his clothes and this, you know, who had purified himself before he would enter the Holy of Holies, we enter something more complete than that man was able to enter.

And you might miss it because just to come this morning, you had to negotiate with yourself because it's so cold.

And so it's easy, it's easy to miss this reality.

We the pointers of the Old Testament were just that.

They are shadows of what we get to do for real this morning.

We are doing the thing itself.

All of that furniture was really more like insulation.

Insulation that God had to put in place between his holiness and the people who he sought to draw to himself.

And God's desire to be present with us, but that we might not be destroyed, he created these patterns of insulation until we could enter the throne room of God with confidence.

That's what we are able to do now.

It looks like less.

It is far more.

That's what I want us to see this morning is the depth of what we are doing when we come together on an ordinary Sunday like this to come into the presence of the Lord as he has explicitly commanded us to.

That this is the central function of the church.

And thankfully, in Scripture, this very point is is made.

Many times I think of points I would like to make, and then I search the scriptures to try and make them.

No, that's like the that's like the opposite of what I'm supposed to do.

So anyway, Hebrews 12 is uh a bringing together of these two very of these two realities of of the initial assembly of the church, which is at the foot of Mount Sinai, when God takes this group of people and he says, You are my people, you're a nation now, you're united together now.

And the event that took place then, with all its glory and wonder, and then he and then he says, but now, in this ordinary gathering, you are participating in something far greater.

So let's see that this morning.

So we're gonna look at two mountains.

We're going to look at Mount Sinai and we're looking at Mount Zion.

Here, the writer of Hebrews describes that first encounter with God after the Exodus at Mount Sinai.

Hebrews 12, verses 18 to 20, actually through 21, says, For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire in darkness, in gloom, and a tempest, the sound of a trumpet and a voice, whose words made the hearers beg that no further message be spoken to them.

Hebrews 12:18–20

For they could not endure the order that was given if even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.

Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.

This is the first assembly of the church.

The people of God recently rescued through the waters, having been parted, and their enemies, the Egyptians, have been washed away, and then God calls them to the purpose of their rescue, which is you may remember, it's let my people go, worship me in the desert.

Let my people go, so that they might come worship me.

So now they've gone, and they've been brought to the point where they might worship God.

And so God, at the base of Mount Sinai, after calling his people through a time of fasting and cleansing, it's time for him to meet his people, to introduce himself to his people.

And what do they see at the base from the base of that mountain?

It's a blazing fire.

The mountain is covered in a blazing fire of God's glory.

When uh, like my freshman year at CU, Mount Sinidas caught on fire in a bad way.

And it I remember like standing on campus and it seeing the mountain in flames.

And it's it was a horrifying, a horrifying vision.

The Israelites gather together and they see a blazing fire and darkness and gloom.

And there's a tempest.

Above the fire, there's a raging storm.

There's descriptions, Nexodus 19, of the lightning and thunder.

So look at what they're looking up to.

Compare that to this morning.

Like right now, you can be like, this is pretty good.

I'm gonna take a sip of coffee.

While I continue to just listen to this dude speak, it's very different than the blazing fire, the roaring tempest of the mountain that they were beneath.

They heard the sound of a trumpet.

There wasn't a trumpet player.

They're just looking for a description, like this loud blast, like a call to war, announces the highest possible royalty.

God himself at the top of the mountain coming to speak to his people.

And the voice of God Himself, what was that voice like?

It's like the voice that made existence.

It's the voice which nothing responded to and became light, which the oceans hear and hear, okay, I'll stop right here and let there be land the rest of the way.

It was a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them.

You could imagine, perhaps, there's an alternative story in which the hearers hear the voice of God and they say, Oh, this is pretty nice.

So what are we going to do this weekly?

We'll gather at the mountain and then we'll just hear directly from God again.

But such was the voice of God to the gathered people that they begged Moses, don't ever let God do that again.

We can't bear to hear him.

It's the weight of God's voice coming from that mountain.

Moses, it says begged.

Moses, please, never again.

It would ruin us to hear again.

They heard the command and they could not endure the order that was given.

That if even a beast touches the mountain while God is revealing himself to you here, that animal must be stoned.

Do you see that in the presence of God, what's constantly being reinforced is his distance.

That in his proximity to his people, he's saying, if I am going to draw close, you must understand completely that I am utterly transcendent.

In my presence, I am beyond what is thinkable or imaginable.

And so when I gather, so that I could be understood by people, so that I could reveal myself to little things that live for a little while and then die.

The flaming mountain, the sound of trumpets, the voice that you can't bear, if even animals touch the mountain, they are killed.

That's God toning it down.

Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.

The high priest, the one who all the people look to, as our leader, the one who will lead us before the presence of the Lord.

He himself says, I trembled, I tremble with fear.

Who could be the intercessor?

Now that mountain is, in a sense, that moment before God speaks and before he gives the commandments in the next chapter.

This is the first church service.

This is the first assembly of the people of God.

But we come to a better mountain.

We come to something which is more powerful than that.

We come to something which is more immediate in our coming to God than this revelation at Mount Sinai.

We don't go to that mountain.

The writer of Hebrews continues, but you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels in festal gathering, into the assembly of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven, into God, the judge of all, into the spirits of the righteous made perfect, into Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, into the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

We have come to Mount Zion.

I hear the worship song that we sing when I say that.

Also, it's gotten extremely hot in here, hasn't it?

Sorry.

I forgot I was clipped to it.

Oh man, this is like a dream now.

I have a recurring dream that I get tangled in my microphone cord.

Here you go, Sebastian.

And as I'm trying to untangle myself, everyone slowly walks out.

Literally, I have this dream like every one quarterly.

I don't think it means anything.

Mount Zion is a real mountain.

A real mountain in Jerusalem.

It's the Temple Mount.

And so in that sense, it is something that can be touched.

You know, it says that you've come to something that can't, you don't come to something that can be touched like Mount Sinai.

Mount Zion, throughout Israel's history, it takes on the symbolic significance of that highest point of worship, the place where God really meets his people, where the heavens truly meet the earth.

And so it becomes this future hope for the people of God, especially during their exile, when they aren't in Jerusalem and they long to return to Mount Zion.

And the return to Mount Zion will mean God will have gathered his people to himself, he will offer them his atonement, he will draw close to his people, and he will live with them and dwell with them.

And they will be his people and he will be their God.

And so that is this future hope that Mount Zion becomes the connotation that Mount Zion connotes as they looked forward to this place.

And that is the place, that future hope, which was that hope of home that the exiles looked forward to.

That is what we come to this morning.

The gathered church.

We come to Mount Zion, that highest hope of God dwelling with us.

It is the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is depicted in Revelation as like descending from heaven like a bride.

And that is a picture of what the church is.

The Spirit comes, sent by the Father and the Son from heaven to indwell us, his people, and we become the city of God.

Citizens of the city of God.

Yes, not fully realized across all the earth yet, but we are true citizens of the city of God.

So when we gather together, the city of God is there.

Mount Zion is realized.

Who is it that we gather with?

Right now.

We gather to innumerable angels in festal gathering.

So it's like the angels who we're participating with this morning went in, they're in festal gathering.

They went and put their nicest attire on.

I don't know if they have attire.

But they did something like that.

Because they were gathering to worship the Lord, to come into the direct presence of the Lord.

And we join them this morning.

We join the host of heaven.

The host of heaven is like the stars.

You know when you go camping and you look up at the stars, there's dozens of them.

It's overwhelming.

We gather with them this morning.

We are gathered with them to worship the Lord.

We are the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.

I love this phrase.

The assembly of the firstborn.

This is Christ's assembly.

Jesus is the firstborn from the dead.

We join him as his assembly.

Joining him as the firstborn from the dead, the ones to whom death cannot hold.

Because the power of death is sin, and we have been atoned for in Christ.

We are enrolled in heaven.

Enrolled in heaven.

You know, you enroll in college, right?

And you can enroll when you get in.

You are enrolled in heaven.

Consider that.

It should go in your Twitter bio.

You are enrolled in heaven.

You show up, and there's a list of names.

And you check the list of names.

Yes, you're on the list.

Yeah, you're not in heaven now.

The closest you can get in this life is West Virginia.

It's almost heaven.

But your name is on the list.

You're enrolled.

And to God.

What do we come to?

And to God.

God Himself.

We come to the creator himself.

What type of ritual?

What type of furniture?

What type of structure must people like us need to come into the presence of the living God?

You just drove and parked and walked in, and here we are.

It might seem like less, like less than Sinai, but it is more.

It is more glorious.

We come to God immediately, meaning unmediated.

The one who mediates between us and God is God Himself.

So we directly come into the presence of God.

God, the judge of all, the one who truly parses right and wrong, the one who establishes the reality of the categories that he has placed us in.

So that we might find freedom in the constraints that he has given us.

God, the judge of all.

All else you hold next to him will find its reality when it is held up in his glorious light.

Into the spirits of the righteous made perfect.

Our own spirits are made perfect by what God has done.

The high priest into his cleansing and fasting, before he could one time a year enter the Holy of Holies and be able to offer atonement on behalf of the people, after first offering atonement on behalf of himself, so that he was able to enter.

So that by his offering our spirits are made perfect.

Because Christ has done it.

There is no more dressing to be placed on it.

Because the thing itself has happened.

And we gather here this morning to worship the one who has done it.

And his blood still cries out.

And to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, we come to Jesus.

Jesus is better than Moses.

Jesus is the one who stands before God, eternally united with the Father.

True God from true God.

He is the one who goes before the Lord on our behalf, fearlessly before God, because He is God, to advocate on our behalf.

We have a true advocate.

We gather this morning together, covered by his blood, which is said so beautifully here, into the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Do you remember when Cain killed Abel in the story of Cain and Abel?

And the blood of Abel cried out from the ground to God's ears.

And what did it cry out for?

Vengeance.

The blood of the innocent one who was murdered.

The murdered older brother cried out for vengeance.

The blood of Jesus, the truly perfect murdered older brother, cries out now on our behalf to the ears of that very same God for our forgiveness, for our atonement.

Why do we gather here so plainly?

Because the thing itself that all those other things pointed to has happened.

And so we now participate in the thing itself.

And it feels so ordinary you might miss it.

Because you look around and you just see these ordinary people, your own family members, your own friends, you watch the same shows, you listen to the same podcasts, you get fed the same stuff by algorithm.

And these people's names are enrolled in heaven.

The names you call them.

Enrolled in heaven.

But here's the thing: you're doing the thing itself.

No pointers to it.

But we are able to come in now into the presence of God as the assembly of God to worship Him, the one who cleansed us, the one who draws us to Himself.

We can now approach Him.

No insulation.

We've been covered by the blood of his son that cries out.

So we are now called to offer acceptable worship.

What is the remember, worship is the response of the creature to the revelation of the creator.

So how is it that we respond?

The writer goes on, as if anticipating that we would consider what is what is it that we ought to do then with this understanding?

He says, See that you do not refuse him who is speaking.

Do not refuse the word of the Lord.

For if they did not escape, when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.

That generation that was rescued out of Egypt and gathered beneath Mount Sinai and looked up and saw the flames and the smoke and the lightning and the trumpets, and they heard the voice of God that they begged to stop.

That generation refused to hear the voice of God, and they did not enter the promised land.

They did not worship.

Do not refuse the voice of the one who doesn't just cry out to us from the mountains, but cries out to us from heaven itself.

At that time, it says in verses 26 through 27, his voice shook the earth.

But now he is promised, yet once more, I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.

This phrase, yet once more, indicates the removal of things that are shaken, that is, things that have been made, in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.

Here is why it is so important that we must center ourselves on the worship of God.

It is because you were designed to worship.

So if you don't worship God, you will worship something else.

And it will be something that you think of and understand, something that even is good.

It will almost certainly be something that is good.

During COVID, we had a, we COVID was like the most ritualized, it was like the most explicit that our secular our our secular religious intentions have become that I've seen.

Those are not bad things.

Safety and control are not bad things.

I want those things for my kids.

But if you worship them ultimately, they become tyrants.

If you worship freedom, ultimately, you will find yourself under a tyrant which allows you no possibility of entering the constraints which real relationship requires.

Try and love your children while you worship freedom.

Freedom will become a tyrant which demands that you do not love your children, but that you love it instead.

Imagine that you worship peace.

And you will find yourself stunted, an inability to enter any of the places that your relationships need to heal.

Peace is good.

But you cannot worship it.

It will be shaken and it will go away and become a tyrant if you worship it.

Imagine if you worship your body, it's already fading, a substance.

We see that most clearly.

You know, you know what, those things have particular images.

You know, there's there's images that come to mind.

You can see the face of someone who has worshipped a substance.

You see, that substance has become a tyrant to you.

Imagine the the worship of money.

How can you uh offer the joy, uh participate in the joy of generosity when you're you worship money?

And if you and you'll you'll start to, and you'll you'll start to see like almost everything is out of place at the worship of at the worship of money, the worship of being able to have whatever it is that you want.

You'll suddenly become surrounded by desires that are making ceaseless demands upon you.

Why is it that we must gather?

We must explicitly worship God, we must explicitly worship the highest of all of them, the one who is goodness itself.

The one who, even if you didn't think through all this stuff, here's a good enough reason to w to worship him.

He died for you, that you might live eternally.

None of those other good things did that.

So when we gather to worship God, all of those things find their right place.

We get to love our children, enjoy our freedom, use money rather than be used by it.

Those things find their right place, and they no longer are tyrannical.

Because God is above them.

All those other kingdoms will be shaken, but our kingdom, the kingdom founded in Jesus Christ, will not be shaken.

That is why we must in our hearts gather together to make explicit our worship of God, to together as a people say there's one thing over all of us.

That is God Himself.

He is real.

He is the judge.

It is to him that we owe our worship and our praise.

All else will be shaken.

Therefore, gosh, don't you just think Hebrews was written by Paul.

Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

A kingdom that cannot be shaken.

I'm redoing our bathroom.

Paint, new, new vanity, you know.

And I was picking out things to put there.

And I and it's all kind of like a little minimalist y.

And I was picking these things on Amazon.

You guys ever use that store?

It's great.

And it occurred to me, this is just kind of like millennial stuff.

Like this stuff that I'm choosing now is just like millennial trendy.

I don't know why I like this stuff.

It's because like I'm a I'm a millennial guy.

And so like this is this is kind of the stuff that I like.

It's j and then and then it occurred to me, oh my gosh.

My kids are gonna grow up and they're gonna look back at pictures of this house, and they're gonna think, oh my gosh, can you believe everybody just had those like black faucets back then?

They didn't even know about purple faucets.

And it will look dated.

And it will, it'll even, it'll have like all these little connotations, you know, that I can't see now, but I can kind of see, but I started to sense coming, and I realized like I'm putting all this effort to make this house feel like this way so that it'll feel feel nice and just add time, and it will feel dated and lame.

This is how fickle our lives are, our world is.

I like the way the bathroom's coming out, by the way.

But I like it because of course I like it.

Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

What I'm saying is anything else that you subtly put your hope in, there will come a time where it will just be shaken.

And thus, let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

Our God is the one that will reveal all of the other gods that we've let rule our hearts instead of him will be utterly consumed in his presence.

There's a way to avoid the terror of that moment.

Worship Him.

Come into His kingdom.

Now that's not just a principle that you can grasp and understand and say, yes, I affirm the principle of worship.

That's not the way, that's not what you're like as a person.

Your marriage is not just a principle that is sufficiently executed once the vows are taken.

It must be participated in, nurtured, lived with.

You must relate.

And such is the case with God.

And what is worship?

It is the definition of the response of the creature to the creator.

This is how we relate.

And so we show ourselves as his people by worshiping him.

We remove those other tyrants from our lives and they find their right order as they look up to him on that high mountain.

Our first principle, which we looked at last week, was the gospel.

That Christ is Lord.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him.

After he was utterly humiliated on our behalf, treated as a criminal, put to death, and that was to atone for us so that we might be brought in.

He was cast out.

This is the highest revelation of the God that we worship.

So what is the response to that?

It is worship.

So when you get the first principle, then you get the main function of the church.

So we gather together here to a better mountain, to a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Don't miss it.

It looks so ordinary, you might miss it.

But this is the thing itself.

That's what we participate in here.

It is the main function of the church.

I don't have time for a question.

I mean, none of us do.

It's not, I'm not like particularly busy this morning.

This is my job.

This is, you know.

So with that, let's move into our time of communion.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, for I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Part of our worship is being invited to a meal with the Lord.

Being brought in, the very God who was terrifying from the mountain, invites us to his table.

The one who, if you just touched the mountain from which he was speaking, you would be put to death, came and put himself to death on our behalf, that we might come to him.

So he invites us to this meal.

We eat and remember.

What are these other gods that I'm worshiping?

None of those died for me.

There is one God who is worthy of my worship.

I eat with him.

So if you are a Christian, we invite you to the table this morning.

It's easy to be a Christian.

You simply trust in Jesus Christ for your salvation.

If you're not a Christian, we'd ask that you would abstain from coming to the table this morning.

The voice you've heard this morning has just been mine.

But insofar as it is expounded the truths of the scripture by the Holy Spirit, it is made the voice of God from heaven.

Do not refuse his voice.

Don't refuse his voice.

Come to him in true worship.

Holy Father, we pray that you would bless this meal.

Lord, we praise you.

You are worthy of glory and honor.

Lord, our hearts are made to respond rightly to you.

Let us see you clearly how you have revealed yourself to us, and let our hearts not refuse a right response, but let us join together as a body this morning to rightly worship you, for you are worthy of glory and honor and praise.

We praise you, Lord.

We thank you for your loving kindness towards us.

Lord, how thankful we are for a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.