“Kingdom of God: The Quality of True Worship” 

The text for tonight is taken from Mt 15:1-9. 

Although this passage is introduced with a short preface that questioned a personal habit of the disciples, Jesus made of it a very intensive point about the quality of worship.    

And this is what I would like to address tonight, as we look at it together: ‘Is our worship quality or is it hypocritical?’ 

I will approach this, first, by seeing, in just a simple way, some of the natural man’s tendencies, whenever and wherever God’s people worship together.

And, then, we will contrast that to the light of Christ within us.

And I trust the Holy Spirit to minister, as He sees fit, to the needs of our hearts in this regard.

We start with the question the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus: ‘Why do the disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash up before eating.’

Jesus countered their inquiry with: ‘And why is it that you break the commandment of God by your tradition?’

And He quoted the commandment surrounding their rules about duty to honoring parents.

And He showed how hypocritical they were in the way they took God’s Word and Will and fit it into their way of thinking about the matter!

Externally, they looked as though they were devoted to God
with their ‘form of religion’, yet Jesus focused on the deficiency in it. 

Their teachings and rules were of their own making.

It did not have the authority of God behind them and there was no ‘heart’ for loving God in them, either.

That is, religious traditions took priority over a real heart devotion.

And that showed up in worship of God which was nothing but a vain, empty, worthless moment of time in the course of their week.

So Jesus boldly uncovered their hypocrisy when He went on to remind them of Isaiah’s prophecy and how it perfectly
described their present condition of spiritual impotence.

They were ignoring Isaiah’s prophetic teaching about themselves, as it was written in Isa 29:13.

There, the prophet quoted the Lord as saying: ‘Wherefore, the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honor me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precepts of men...’.

Isaiah prophesied of those who approach God only in words, honor Him only in lip-service, but their hearts are far from Him, lacking in reverence of Him.

Jesus identified those people as the ones who were standing in front of Him at this precise moment. 

And He summarized the condition of this kind of homage to God by saying: ‘In vain they do worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.’ (v 9)

You see - all He was doing was giving them God’s picture of themselves.

God was seeing them as fully developed hypocrites, honoring God in pretense - only with their lips, with their mouths, in a routine observance of men’s traditions!

Their hearts were far removed - for - gone was a reverent awe of Him that generates pure worship from the heart.  

And Jesus was telling them that their worship was in form only, an exterior show, a ceremony that took place regularly.

What was missing was the presence of the Holy One among them in spirit and in truth.

They were fully disregarding the Word of God and His will of accurate and holy worship.

Had not God spelled out in the most minute detail of how worship of Him in His sanctuary was to be conducted during the old dispensation?

Oh, yes, He did!

It was to be absolutely accurate in every detail.

In other words, worship of Him was not to be performed in a man-devised sort of way that does not accurately honor and reverently fear God with a corresponding offering of the heart.  

Reverent worship must always rest on His Word so that it shapes and directs worship in a genuine, accurate way.

So Jesus minced no words when he used the phrase of ‘ye hypocrites’!

Their so-called ‘worship’ was a contradiction.

What they were doing was an affront to the very heart of God, His Father, and to Jesus.

They professed to know God, yet they did not reverence Him nor His Word.

That is, the authority of His Word did not correspond with the practice of it in their own lives.

They were living a life of contradiction: hypocrisy - is the word!

They were putting forth a religious front only, much the same as the condition Paul described in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, of the quality of worship that will be found in the last days of the age, before Christ’s Second Coming.

Since we are in this part of the ‘last days’, I would like to relate this to ourselves in regard to worship.

For - as it was in Jesus’ day, so it has a tendency to be the same now.

And - today, do not the people of God also have a clever way of deceiving themselves in this matter?

I wonder, sometimes, if we human beings think that just because we gather together regularly, we can package our assembling into acceptable worship and present it to God as our ‘gift for the week’!

How ludicrous and foolish is that!

How many of us find it to be so easy to focus in on everything and everyone else, upon our own frame of mind, rather than to worship in spirit and in truth?  

Faith tends to lie dormant when we neglect to exercise the grace of Christ during this glorious moment of worshipping together.

His presence is depreciated among the assembly. We tend to be so unaffected with, and unconcerned about, Him.

We forget how easy it is to slight the means of righteousness Christ is to us to make use of it in worship.

We let coldness set in - we become inattentive and reckless, as well.

And we indulge ourselves with vain, idle excuses to cover our neglect and indifference.

And - I might add - we find it so easy to sin against the great amount of light and knowledge He is to us.

And we find ourselves going contrary to the life and the light God has given.

By these carnal tendencies, we reach the peak of deceitfulness, dishonesty, and insincerity before God!

We do not realize that we are laying aside and neglecting the righteousness of Christ in true worship. 

To sum it all up, our carnal, lazy frame of mind and spirit is content with a show of things - that’s all.

Do you recall the story Jesus used of those who were invited to a wonderful, sumptuous wedding feast?

They gave excuses of why they could not attend.

One had bought a piece of ground, another had to take care of his oxen, and a third married a wife, so they declined the invitation.

It was against their worldly profit. It was too hard. It cut into their ease and pleasures. 

It showed they sought their own things more than the things of God. 

It just showed they valued their worldly interests more than they did the blessing Christ is.

It showed they preferred the world and its offerings more than His presence among His people.

How does Christ take this?

His insistence about the hypocrisy of those scribes and Pharisees gives us the answer!

Perhaps you are already aware of the great consternation today’s Christian community faces about this very problem.

One of the hardest problems it sees is about true worship and the difficulty of bringing together the ‘walk’ with the ‘talk’.

Generally, it seems hard to grasp how the righteousness of Christ must so fill the heart and life that worship of God in Christ becomes its natural upsurge.

And it seems difficult to see how His righteousness is designed to bring man into centering on God Himself. 

It is almost as hard to see how true worship of Him  stabilizes that absorption and immersion in Him with divine accuracy.

But this is what truly sustains worship and makes it ‘holiness unto the Lord’. 

It is not just being together but it reaches an absorbing, intimate depth with God Himself.

Can we see how the righteousness of Christ stands in this matter?

Do you suppose His righteousness should lead us to worship God in spirit and in truth?

Yes, of course it should!

His righteousness deserves to be honored in the very act of worship of our God!

Let me ask you: Do you think His righteousness would allow the sitting in judgment of others as worship progresses?

Do you think His righteousness would allow letting our thoughts entertain distractions?

Do you think His righteousness would allow boredom and disinterest?

Do you think His righteousness would make us ungrateful for the wonderful feast of His Word and of the communion table He has given on our behalf?

I think not! 

I wonder if we have been made aware yet that there should be nothing more important nor more valued than the sense of the presence of Christ and His righteousness guarding and directing worship of heart and life.

In worship, we are together in the very presence of God and each other.

We bring into that assembling a living, Spirit-infused power that cannot be reproduced - nor exactly and precisely imitated ever again.

We share that in a ‘give and take’ with one another that is filled with Christ and His righteousness.

This is the ‘secret’, if I may put it this way, of ‘accurate’ worship.

And the loser of this divine mystery is the one who refuses to let that righteousness direct and lead him to become ‘one’ with the assembly.

This is why gathering together is such a necessary part of the true worship of God.

To the extent that we think it is unimportant and ‘worship’ in a mechanical way, to that extent we lose the sense of worshipping as ‘one’ in Christ, in ‘holiness to the Lord’.

And, thereby, we miss the mark of the divine accuracy of worship.

It is this quality of divine accuracy that is anchoring. 

It centers God within the universe, as He is, and we are the blessed ones to have been accepted into such a high calling of the worship of Him.

To that, our hearts join the psalmist who wrote: ‘God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are about Him.’

It is there that God’s presence overwhelms the heart in holy and reverent homage!

This is the living Christ we worship and Who fulfills worship in us! 

This is the God with Whom we are occupied!

The scribes and Pharisees had built up for themselves a system of hypocritical worship of Him!
 
Jesus saw it. He spoke against it. 

I pray the Lord will never have cause to do that in our worship of Him!

If He sees any deficiencies among us, I pray we will willingly and openly cooperate with His Spirit in clearing them away.

May our worship of Him resound before Him in accuracy and holiness always!

To that end we pray! Amen.