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Worshipping the Lord
I. Inspiration rather than perspiration.
A. Perspiration speaks of expended energy of the flesh.
1. Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, "God is a Spirit
and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit
and in truth."
2. There are times when we might be doing a service for
the Lord that will create sweat.
a. In the building of these facilities that we
might have a place to come and worship the
Lord we put in a lot of sweat.
b. We read of Jesus in the garden as He was
agonizing in prayer, that His sweat was as
were great drops of blood falling down to
the ground.
c. After sin entered the world the curse upon
man was that he was to earn his bread by the
sweat of his brow.
d. When the children of Israel were in the hot
wilderness and the cloud would begin to move
signaling that it was time to break camp, the
Tabernacle had to be dismantled and carried
to the new location. I imagine that in that
desert heat, there was a lot of perspiration.
3. But when it came to worshipping God, He desired that
the worship flow freely from an overflowing heart.
B. The Lord does not want you to feel that serving Him is a heavy
burden that He lays on you.
1. Some speak of the great sacrifices that they have made
to serve the Lord.
a. They speak of the things that they gave up to
follow Christ.
b. I do not find that in the New Testament in
those who chose to follow Jesus.
c. The closest thing that comes to a reference to
the past life that was deserted to follow Jesus
was made by Paul, as he wrote of his former
life of a Pharisee and his endeavor to please
God through the keeping of the law. He said,
and those things that were gain to me I counted
loss for the excellency of the knowledge of
Jesus Christ, for whom I suffered the loss of
all things and do count them as dung, that I
may know Him and be found in Him.
d. It is like some poor street person becoming the
big winner in the lottery, and going out and
buying a bay front home in Newport Beach, and a
new Mercedes car, and when you come to
interview them about their new life, they
spend the whole time telling you how they had
to give up their life on the streets, their
special mattress under the bridge where slept
at night and they had to sacrifice their
shopping cart loaded with all of their
possessions to live this new style of life.
e. In coming to Jesus, you give up a lot of
junk that is destroying your life, and in turn,
you become a child of God and if a child then
a heir of God. You are never required by God
to give up one worthwhile thing to follow
Jesus Christ.
2. In the days of Jeremiah, there were false prophets
that were going around always saying the burden of the
Lord, the burden of the Lord. The Lord warned Jeremiah
about using that phrase, He said that He was tired of
hearing them say the burden of the Lord when He had
not put any burden on them.
3. Some people speak of the heavy burden that God has
laid on them, as though they were about to be crushed
by the enormity of the things that they were doing for
God. Jesus said, "My yoke is easy and My burden is
light."
4. God does not want my service to Him to be done in a
grudging or complaining way.
a. Paul in talking about our giving to God
declared that it should never be done
grudgingly or out of necessity for God loves
a cheerful giver.
b. I believe that this refers to giving myself
in a service for the Lord as well as the
giving of my money.
c. Sometimes people have volunteered to do
something for me and then I hear from others
how they were griping about how much time
it took them, or of some inconvenience that
they experienced, and I go to them and
say, just forget it, I do not want you to do
it.
d. We had a fellow volunteer to do some work
for the Lord
just anything, he wanted to just serve the
Lord, then we heard from others how much he
was complaining about all that he was doing
without getting any reimbursement.
We finally figured out approximately how
many hours he put in and paid him just to
shut up his griping mouth.
e. I wonder just how God must feel when we start
complaining about what He has asked us to do
for Him?
f. The attitude in which I do a thing is far
more important than the thing that I do.
God loves a cheerful giver.
II. There was not to be any service to the Lord done under a false
stimulant.
A. They were told that they were not to drink wine when they
entered the inner court.
1. Back in Leviticus we read that when the Tabernacle
was all prepared, and they began the worship of the
Lord, that as Moses and Aaron came out of the
Tabernacle, that the glory of the Lord was
manifested before the people as the fire came from
the Lord and consumed the sacrifice that was on the
altar. A the people were rejoicing over this
manifestation of the presence of God the two sons
of Aaron, Nathan and Abihu took strange fire in
their censers and rushed in to offer the strange
fire unto the Lord, and that the fire came from
the Lord and consumed them.
a. In context with this event the Lord spoke
to Aaron and told him not to drink wine or
strong drink neither he nor his sons, when
they went into the Tabernacle, lest they die.
b. It would appear that God does not want
anything offered to Him under a false
stimulant.
2. I see how much strange fire is being offered to the
Lord today.
3. There are many who under the pretense of serving
the Lord are ripping off the saints of God. They are
not motivated by the love of Jesus Christ, but by
their own greed.
4. Jesus warned His disciples to take heed that they
did not their righteousness before men with the
motive of being seen by man. If this were the case,
the applause of man would be all of the reward that
they would ever receive for their service.
He encouraged them to be secret service agents.
Go into your closet to pray, and your Father that
seeth in the secret places will reward you.
B. I have repented before God for my endeavor in the early
years of my ministry to seek to motivate people to serve
the Lord under false stimulation.
1. We used to have contests with rewards for the
person bringing the most people to church over a
given period of time.
2. We used to pit the men against the women, and the
reds against the blues to stir up their carnal
competitive zeal to bring the most to Sunday School.
C. God does not any you to feel pressured to worship Him, He does
not want you to be whipped up into an emotional frenzy to
praise Him. He desires that your praise and worship flow from
a heart overflowing with love for Him because of His
manifested love toward us. No sweat, no false stimulant, just
a pure natural outflowing of expressions of thanksgiving and
love. In the psalms we are told to serve the Lord with
gladness, and be thankful unto Him.
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