“Does worship really matter?”, part two...

At the church where I serve, we have been spending our time together talking about the issue of worship. We answered the question “What is worship?” by explaining the timeless reality that we are wired for worship because we all worship something. You see, the question is not whether or not you worship. The question is “what do you worship”? The question is “What do you leverage your life towards as a response of worship?” Because worship, simply put, is a response to what we value most: Worship is a life that is lived in response to what we value most.

If you want to know what you truly worship, simply look at there you leverage your time, your affection, your energy, and your loyalty, because that is what you worship. And regardless of what we say, our worship is more about what we do than what we say. Often what we say we worship is betrayed by what we actually worship with our time, talent, and treasure.

We then asked the question “Does worship really matter?” In answering that question, we discovered the timeless reality that we are wired for worship because worship matters to God. We talked about the reality that the answer to the question “does worship really matter?” is that worship really matters to God because worship is a lifestyle that is lived in a way that is focused on and that responds to the Lord’s character and activity in the world so as to value the Lord supremely.

 

And worship matters because when we live a life that values something other than the Lord as most valuable, we are settling for less than the best. Worship matters to God because we matter to God. And while God is not lacking for worship when we refuse to worship Him, we are lacking because we are living a life that has settled for second best.

This week, I would like for us to continue to address the question that we looked at last week, which is “Does worship really matter?” And to do that, I would like for us to look at two different sections of two different letters that are recorded for us in the Bible. And it is in these two different passages that we will discover another reason why worship really matters. The first passage that we are going to look at is found in a section of a letter in the Old Testament of the Bible called the book of Isaiah. Now the book of Isaiah was written the prophet Isaiah around 700 years before the birth of Jesus.

As a prophet, Isaiah was a messenger from God who proclaimed God’s word both to the Jewish people and to the nations that surrounded the Jewish people. And in a section of a letter that bears his name, we see the prophet Isaiah proclaim a message that God had for the nation of Babylon and their king. And it is in God’s message through Isaiah that we see why worship matters. So let’s look at this section of this letter together beginning in Isaiah 14:13:

"But you said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north. ¹⁴ 'I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.' ¹⁵ "Nevertheless you will be thrust down to Sheol, To the recesses of the pit.

Here we see the Prophet Isaiah address the arrogance of the king of Babylon, which at this time in history was actually the Assyrian King Sennacherib, who ruled over both Assyria and Babylon from 705 B.C.-681 B.C. During this time in history, while Ninevah was the political capital of the Assyrian Empire, Babylon became the cultural and religious center of the Assyrian Empire.

In 701 B.C., King Sennacherib attempted to capture Jerusalem without success. However, during the siege of Jerusalem, King Sennacherib proclaimed to the King of the Jewish people, King Hezekiah “Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered his land from the king of Assyria? Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their land from my hand, that the LORD would deliver Jerusalem from my hand?'"

It was these words by King Sennacherib that led the Lord to send a message to the king through the prophet Isaiah, which has been preserved and recorded for us in Isaiah 14:13-15. The Lord’s message to King Sennacherib, if communicated in the language we use in our culture today, would have sounded like this: “In your prideful arrogance, you have proclaimed that you are the one who is worthy of glory, honor and worship. In your prideful arrogance, you believe that you are going to have a throne of honor over the universe that is over Me. In your prideful arrogance, you believe that you will supplant Me as God and demand to be worshipped as God.  Well, while you may think that will occur, what will really occur is that you will end up dead at the entrance of where those who are dead reside. And no one is worshipped there”.

What is so fascinating is that twenty years after the siege of Jerusalem, in 681 B.C. Sennacherib was assassinated by his sons in a coupe, which would have brought great joy to both the residents of Jerusalem and Babylon. Now this passage is often viewed to be addressing Satan. However, what is much more likely, in light of the context in which these verses are contained, is that the Lord, through the prophet Isaiah, is addressing the arrogance of King Sennacherib, which is reflective of humanity.

This passage is referring to human pride and its desire to be the object of worship instead of worshipping the Lord as Creator. But the issue of human pride and its desire to be the object of worship instead of worshipping the Lord as Creator is not simply an issue that is addressed in the letters that make up the Old Testament. We see the issue of human pride and its desire to be the object of worship instead of worshipping the Lord as Creator addressed in a section of a letter in the New Testament of the Bible called the book of Romans.

The book of Romans was written by the Apostle Paul to early followers of Jesus who were part a church in Rome, which was the capital city of the most dominant military and political power of the planet at this time in history. And the point of the book of Romans can be summarized in one simple statement. And that statement would be that the message of the gospel reveals the reality that God is right.

In Romans 1:1-17, Paul proclaimed that God is right. God always has been right; God always will be right. And the extent that we are right when it comes to our relationship with God is directly related to the extent that our heads, hearts, and hands line up with what God believes is right, because God is right. Paul then stated that the fact that God is right is revealed to all humanity through the message of the gospel.

The message that that while all of humanity was created for a relationship with God and one another, all of humanity selfishly chose to reject that relationship, instead choosing to love our selves over God and others. And it is out of our selfishness that we do things that hurt God and those around us, which the Bible calls sin. The message that reveals that God responded to our selfish rebellion and sin by sending His Son Jesus, God in a bod, who entered into humanity and allowed Himself to be treated as though He lived our selfish and sinful lives so God the Father could treat us as though we lived Jesus perfect life. The message that reveals that Jesus died on the cross, was buried in a tomb dead as a door nail, and was brought back to life as a result of the Holy Spirit’s transforming and supernatural activity in order to be our Lord and Savior. The message that provides the opportunity for all humanity to receive the forgiveness of sin and enter into the relationship with God that they were created for by believing, trusting and following Jesus as Lord and Leader.

Then, in Romans 1:18, the Apostle Paul then shifts from proclaiming that fact that God is right to providing the evidence that reveals the reality that God is right. And it is in the evidence that Paul provides to prove that God is right that we discover another reason why worship really matters.

Tomorrow, we will begin to look at that evidence…