In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of genuine worship and sacrifice in the house of God. He contrasts the worship of choirs that are more focused on professionalism with a mixed choir that spends more time in prayer, resulting in a soul-stirring experience. The preacher also highlights the significance of bringing the best offerings to God, as seen in the Old Testament when people would bring their spotless lambs, pigeons, oxen, and bread to the temple. He questions the current state of neglect and lack of reverence in God's house, where people come with a sense of obligation or to keep their children from sin, rather than with a genuine desire to be filled and blessed by God.

A house of sacrifice. Solomon built a great temple to the glory of God and at the dedication he stood before the altar and raised his hands and he said as the Lord promised I have built a house for the name of the Lord God of Israel. Then he spread forth his hands to heaven in the presence of all the congregation and this is the prayer he prayed. Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold the heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this house that I have built. Solomon had better sense than to call his church the dwelling place of God on earth. How could any man build a place that would be God's exclusive dwelling place? He knew better than that. In fact I believe that Solomon deep inside of his heart must have had the deeper revelation of what God was saying to David. He said I'm going to build you a sure house and that certainly was not Solomon's temple. He was talking about Christ the foundation and the church built on Christ through faith. And I wonder sometimes if God ever intended that particular temple to be built. He was looking beyond that and I think Solomon knew it. I know David knew it in his heart. He saw a tabernacle which is Christ, a church that was built without hands. But in the middle of the night God came to Solomon, gave him a name for his church. Listen to it. And the Lord appeared to Solomon by night and said unto him, I have heard thy prayer and I've chosen this place to myself for a house of sacrifice. You're going to call your church a house of sacrifice, Solomon. And certainly this was a place where sins were confessed and forgiven. Solomon said this was going to be a place where men can find out the plague that's in their heart and they could spread forth their hands and be forgiven. This house was going to be a place of prayer and in answer to prayer God would maintain the cause of his people. That was a part of it. It was going to be a place of singing choirs and praising trumpets and priests that served in holy white gowns. It was a house of prayer, a house of fellowship, of hallowed altars. But first and foremost God said this house of mine will be a house of sacrifice. Now that's God's idea of what the church is. And we marvel at God's manifestation of glory that fell in Solomon's temple. And it came to pass when the priests were come out of the holy place that the cloud filled the house of the Lord so that the priest could not stand to minister because of the cloud. For the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord. Now you look at what preceded that you can understand where the glory came from. The Bible says and King Solomon and all the congregation of Israel that was assembled unto him were with him before the ark sacrificing sheep and oxen that could not be told nor numbered for multitude. And then the Bible goes on to say the brazen altar was not able to receive the burnt offerings and the meat offerings and the fat. You understand now why the glory came down? Because God called it a house of sacrifice. They recognized it a house of sacrifice and the glory fell after the willing sacrifice. What a scene that must have been. No one came to the temple without a gift, an offering, a sacrifice in his hand. There was an excitement. There stood every member of the congregation with his spotless lamb or the fattest pigeons he had or his most prized ox or the woman came with her best baked bread. And how delighted they were to be giving something to God of their very best. And should a person be seen in the crowd without a gift, without a sacrifice, the priest would say to them what no ox, no lamb, no pigeons even, not even a loaf of bread. What have you to offer? Go home, get your sacrifice. Not one came empty handed. Now beloved, this temple was not a sightseeing place. It was not for the curious. It was not a merchandising mark. It was not a place of indifference. This was a house of sacrifices. And only when those sacrifices were giving willingly did God come down in his glory. And what an awesome sight when Solomon and his people went up to the house of God. Solomon's ascent to the house of God was so reverential, so filled with awe, so royal that it took the breath of Queen of Sheba away. She was left breathless, the Bible said. And when the Queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon and the attendance of his ministers and their apparel and his ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her. What an awesome sight. And Solomon had built this into the thinking of his people. We're going up to see a king. And everybody approached that temple. They walked up those steps as though they had a gold embossed invitation into the presence of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. It was awesome. The heathen marveled at the way God's people went up to his house. No spirit left in them. Going up to the house of God was such a special event, demanded awe and reverence. There was so much reverence and so much respect that even the heathen were stirred. This royal possession, entering the courts of the King, their house of sacrifice, they considered to be a house of a king. Everyone approached this in this hallowed ground. Contrast the way Solomon and his people went up to the house of God to the way you and I go up to the house of God. Consider the awe and the reverence and the respect of what we see now. We have turned a house of God into a house of self, where people are taught how to promote self and how to be a success and how to gain prosperity. I think that's so out of the will of God. I think that's so much a foolishness that I don't even talk about it anymore. I believe the Holy Ghost has moved away from that long, long time ago. And whether we like it or not, under grace, the house of God is still a house of sacrifice. Even though we've turned it into a shrine for self, the Scripture says, ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. And ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation of peculiar people. This is God saying just as Solomon and his people went up with awe and respect, you're a congregation, a royal priesthood, called by God to come up to my house with spiritual sacrifices. When was the last time you were so excited about going to the house of God, and it was so clear to your neighbors that you were excited, there was such a reverence in you, that even your neighbors took note of it? The favorite song in our congregations, many congregations today, is, fill my cup, Lord! Here it is, fill it up, Lord! We come to the house of God with our baskets, we come with everything we have to be filled, we come empty-handed, and we're very sorry if we don't go out filled with blessings. We come to God's house to be moved, we come to God's house to be stirred, we come to God's house to be blessed. Few of us come to sacrifice to give or to be consumed. We come empty-handed, and I told you this morning the many times I've stood before congregations and looked at that I dare you attitude coming at me, as people sit there hard as stone and cold as ice, as if to say, I dare you to move me. I've said unto the best preachers and evangelists, give me something sensational, give me something to take home. If you and I went into the house of God thinking sacrifice and giving, we wouldn't worry whether the preacher could preach or not, whether choir could sing or not, you wouldn't be going just to take sermons, you'd be going to give something rather than to receive it, you would be coming to a house of sacrifice. We've got it backwards, terribly backwards. We are not told to go up to a house of sacrifice only to receive, we're to bring something into his presence. It's a place of giving, not just receiving. The scripture says Jesus Christ hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. We are called by Christ to enter his house, believing that that we are kings and priests, and what is the work in the ministry of a priest but to make a sacrifice, to offer something. Even Christ brought an offering of himself to the Father, he our high priest. The scripture says take heed to the ministry which thou has received of the Lord that thou fulfill it. How many of you can sit here this evening and say I have truly fulfilled my ministry, the Lord said I'm a king, I'm a priest, and I'm to come into a house of sacrifice and sacrifice to him, and he said see that you fulfill that ministry. How many of you sit here tonight saying I've truly fulfilled my ministry, I've been coming to the house of God to give. Perhaps we're missing the glory because we've forgotten the sacrifice. How shocking because now we live in the Laodicean age and the church that could best afford it had nothing to bring to the house of God, in fact sacrifice was not even in their theology. This generation has more blessings than every generation in history. We have more bookstores, we have more radio programs, television programs, books, records, tapes, cassettes, video. We are bloated on the gospel. God has blessed us beyond every age in history. We're rich, we're rich and increased in spiritual goods, more Bible translations than any time in history, yet we have less sacrifice, less to give God than any other generation. And I don't say that to condemn you, I say that as a matter of fact, you know it as well as I do. Does the Lord really care that much about how we go up to his house, how we come to church, and is he really checking our motives closely as we sit worshipping and listening to the message? Does it matter to the Lord that we've become so wrapped up in our own business and pleasure that we have only one hour now to give to the Lord in that Sunday morning between 11 and 12? And not a handful of churches anymore with a prayer meeting. I talked to a businessman recently, he said, Brother Deeb, we had a prayer meeting last week for the first time in seven years and there were five there. Does God, is he concerned that we've so neglected his house, so unwilling to sacrifice our time, that it doesn't matter anymore? Does it matter to God? Does it matter to God that we've clocked our services and limited the Holy Ghost to a clock? Is God concerned about people who sit there anxiously waiting for the service to get over because they've come only to keep their children from going into sin or they came just as a sense of obligation or duty? Is that an example for the family? Is God really taking close account of choirs that sing half-heartedly? Thank God that wasn't what I saw here. Thank God for the worship that came from behind me here this morning and tonight. I rejoice in that, but all over America now we have choirs more interested in being professional and good than to be instruments of worship and praise. I can take you up to New York City and I'll show you a choir made up of blacks and whites, Spanish. It's a mixed choir. Those people spend most of their time praying more than practicing and you can tell it when they sing, it moves your soul. Hallelujah. Is God really taking note of those who sit in the house of God covering secrets here? Positively yes to every one of these questions and the proof of it all can be found in the way God dealt with the church in Jerusalem. The church of Jerusalem was absolutely totally into sacrifice. They came to God's house sacrificing, in fact, everything they possessed. The scripture says of the church in Jerusalem, neither said any of them that anything of the things that they possessed was his own for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the Apostles feet and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. Now I'm not about to lay a guilt trip on you and tell you that God's best for us is to go out and sell everything we have and give to the poor because those scriptures are balanced by others that suggest that if a man does not provide for his children, that he's out of the will of God. If he neglects his house, he's worse than an infidel is denied the faith. There are many, many scriptures that balance that. You see, the issue here really isn't sacrifice at all. It's half-hearted sacrifice. It's really about not, it's really not about those who came and sold all they had. It's about two people who kept back part of the price, who had an inadequate sacrifice, an incomplete, half-hearted, self-willed sacrifice and an essence of fire scheme to give just half their heart, half their spirit. And why did God strike them dead? This is New Testament. This is in a time of grace. Why? Oh, that's frightening to read that in a New Testament church, two people can drop dead in the presence of God before the servant of the Lord. Now I've heard preachers say that Ananias and Sapphira certainly did not go to hell, that God would not send them to hell over this. This was the destruction of the flesh that the soul may be saved. Because in Corinthians, the man who was turned over the destruction of the flesh, that the soul may be saved, sinned more grievously than this. I'm not going to get into the theology of that. What I'm trying to say is God's making a statement here. He's not going to permit half-heartedness in His house. And He's saying in this whole story, if you want to keep everything you have, you can live. Go ahead, God won't judge you. But if you're going to come in my house and call yourself a servant, a king or a priest, you give me all or you give me nothing. And because you give me half of it, I can't take it. Now Ananias and Sapphira could have kept everything they had and lived, and God would not have judged them. But it was standing before the holy altar of God in this nonchalant attitude, in this attitude saying, God really doesn't care about my motive or about my attitude or how much or where I give. It was that nonchalance about sacrifice that God would not permit. God's made it very clear in His Word that He simply will not accept second best or half-heartedness in His house. You go back to the Old Testament, you hear this, if you offer the blind, this is Malachi, if you offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? And if you offer the lame and the sick, is that not evil? Go ahead and offer it to your governor. Would he accept thy person to be pleased with thee? In other words, you try to treat your government the way you treat me and see if they'll put up with it. He said, you brought that which was torn and the lame and the sick, thus you brought me an offering. Should I accept this of your hand, sayeth the Lord, but curse it be the deceiver which hath in his flock a male and vows and sacrifices unto the Lord a blemished thing? For I'm a great king and my name is dreadful among the heathen. He said, you come to me with those half-hearted sacrifices because you really don't believe that I'm the king. You don't believe that my name is dreadful among the heathen. The Lord's talking about a principle here because it'd be so easy to stop right here now if I were a pastor and tried to use this passage to justify my big building program and say, aha, there it is. You see, God deserves the best. Let's build him the biggest best thing we can build. Let's not bring him a blemished thing. Let's make it grand. I'm not against building programs if that's what God has called you to do. And I'm not against your thinking God needs everything first-class. But I don't like that kind of theology. It's not that God wants everything first-class. He wants your best. He wants everything that you have when you come into his presence. No, you see, it goes much deeper than that. I'm not even talking tonight, when I talk about the house of God, I'm not even talking about a building. We've become attached to our buildings. We're almost making shrines out of them. He's not interested at all in buildings. God's not interested in your building. Now, you may not like this, but God's not interested in those pretty windows, those stained windows. He's not at all interested in your beautiful organ here, not interested at all. It's so much deeper than that, and I want you to see it with me tonight. We're talking about an attitude among those who gather together in His name. It has to do with a lack of respect, giving the Lord what remains of our time and energy. And I want to see if I can take you a little deeper into that, because you see, we come into His presence not realizing that we are the sacrifice. The Scripture says, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that I present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy except the one to God, which is a reasonable service. Did you ever think of that when you come into the house of God? I am the sacrifice. I'm walking in here tonight, and just as Jesus was on the earth, so am I. As He was on the earth, so are we, the Scripture says. Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and has given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor. And soon I'm going to show you that side of it, Christ the sacrifice. But in a manner of speaking, you and I, when we walk into the house of God, we are walking in as a lamb. We're walking in as Christ did to His Father, who willingly laid down His life on the altar to His Father. We walk in before the altar of God to present ourselves to Him as a living, holy sacrifice. Oh, but I see so many that come into His presence blind. He said, you offer me the blind, because we've not spent our week or any of our days shut in with the Word of God, to fire all souls with the Word and to come into the house of God with the fire of His Word blazing in our hearts. Oh, no, we want the man of God to stand there and pump us with it, some new thought, some new idea. No, we come into the house of God spiritually blind, because we do not read His Word much. I love you, and I'm putting a guilt chip on you tonight, but how much of God's Word have you read this past week? Did you spend your afternoon watching football today, or were you on your knees shut in the secret closet of prayer, so that you could come here tonight with your heart renewed before the Lord, and you'd walk in here not as a spiritual, lame, blind sacrifice, but a sacrifice that is alive and well, and you bring with you the Spirit of the living God. You walk into the temple of the Lord with expectancy, because He has already met your need. You don't need a preacher to meet your need. He has already met it through the Word and through prayer. I talked to one minister who confessed to me he hadn't prayed in one year. He had devotions. I talked to a board, a deacon board recently, chairman of a pulpit committee trying to find a pastor. They'd interviewed five pastors and only found one of them who really prayed, and he prayed 15 minutes a day. And if it's not being done in the pulpit, what hope is there in the pew? We're not a praying people anymore. Oh, we're a praising people. We love to come to the house of God and praise around the sacrifice, but we don't bring a sacrifice. We don't come alive. And if the pastor and the choir can't aliveness, we go out blaming them. It was dead. We bring in our lame spirits. Do we come to God's house spiritually blind and weary and tired and bored and lazy? Now it's true that we're to present ourselves on the altar just as Isaac did. He presented himself. Isaac did not fight. He laid willingly on that altar as a living sacrifice. But you realize that Isaac didn't die. God provided a sacrifice. He said, present your body to me a living sacrifice, but you and I don't do the dying. He's provided a sacrifice. Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. Hallelujah. The Bible says the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou will not despise. Now I think, first of all, David's speaking of Christ. That was Jesus who came with a broken heart and a contrite spirit and willingly offered himself to the Father as our sacrifice. But that also speaks of our spirits being broken also. That we come into his house of God seeing him as the sacrifice. And when I talk to you about a house of sacrifice, I'm talking about Christ the sacrifice. I think it borders on absolute blasphemy for a minister or congregation just to try to build up bodies in their church to get a big count, to say we have a large church, a large congregation. I think it borders on blasphemy just to send buses around town and count numbers and count heads. That's blasphemy. And God's going to hold every minister and every congregation responsible for just trying to build up a number to get on a telephone and call another preacher and say, how many did you have in church today? And then gloat when the number you have is a little larger. Oh, that's the worst kind of blasphemy I can imagine. It doesn't matter to God whether you have 250,000 members in your church or 25. What the Lord is really concerned about is that those who gather together in his name are discerning the body of Christ, that he was a true sacrifice, perfect before God, and that he answered for our sins and we've been set free, transformed out of the kingdom of darkness into a kingdom of light. He's concerned about those coming to the house of God who deserve him as the sacrifice and who rejoice in the finished work of the cross. I believe the Holy Spirit guards the door of every true fellowship. He guards the door and when you come in you'll hear him whisper to your heart, this, my child, is a house of sacrifice and Jesus Christ was that sacrifice. Rejoice in it, sing about it, preach about it, enter into the glory of it, and keep focused on that sacrifice. Keep Christ the center. Hallelujah. When an Israelite brought a sacrifice to the tabernacle of the temple, the priest didn't examine the man, he examined the sacrifice. The man could be lame, he could be blind, he could be a hulk. We've got it all backwards. We sit in the house of God, we examine people, we forget the sacrifice. God's eye is only on the sacrifice, on the lamb. Can you imagine the priest seeing a man with a perfect lamb and he said, well your lamb is perfect, but you're not. Didn't matter to the priest what that man looked like. The priest was concerned only in a sacrifice. You understand what that means? That the Lord is only looking at Christ, our Father's looking at Christ, the perfect sacrifice for sin. Hallelujah. The Spirit, the first thing you'll do in a Holy Ghost meeting is to reveal the power of Christ's shed blood. If you ever keep bringing us back to the perfect sacrifice of Christ, then you can walk out, once you've been in that kind of meeting, you can walk out saying, I've been to a house of sacrifice and I leave this house of sacrifice resting on what he did. Please turn the tape over for the this message. I told you that I'm not seeing it all as clear as I want to see it, but after I prepared this and God had given it to me, Lord said I want to take you deeper if you're ready to receive it. Now I want to share with you the deeper truth in this, because after I thought about all the ways that we come into God's house without reverence and awe and respect, how lazy we are about the things of God, how people would rather stay home Sunday night than go to the house of God. They're parked in front of their TV watching Dallas and all kinds of filthy soap operas, and there's a deadness in so many hearts. There's an apathy. Sometimes I want to stand up and just scream about it. I want to get up and rail against it and say we're all backslidden, we're all not seeing it the way we should. We're not into that New Testament relationship that this early church had. We've lost something. I sometimes just want to get up before congregation and spank everybody, including myself. But you see, that's not the deeper truth, because in actuality and all how this afternoon God's been dealing with me about this, that God really doesn't have much confidence in our flesh. Even Paul said, I know no man after the flesh. This flesh has nothing to give to God. There's not one good thing in the stinking flesh of ours. As long as we live, we're going to be lazy about the things of God. As long as we live, we're going to backslide on the things of God. As long as we live, we're going to have that moment of laziness. As long as we live, our flesh is going to fail us, and God cannot expect us anything good out of us. It's deeper than that. And after I've spent a half an hour telling you about how to go up the house of God and what you should do, along comes the Holy Spirit to me and says, David, that's just only a little part of it. That's so small. The bigger picture, if you're ready to receive it, is this, and I want to share it with you now. The real truth of the matter is that we must never look at His sacrifice as being part of the price. You remember what I told you that Ananias and Zephira kept that part of the price? Remember when I told you about bringing the lame and the blind and the whole sacrifices? Remember what Malachi said? He said, you give me the second best. Your heart is really not in it. It's not a complete sacrifice. The truth of it all is that God is looking beyond us. He's looking beyond anything that we could do, because even if you came to God's house every time the doors were open, even if you came in having prayed up and read up and confessed up, and you were a fireball and you sat in the house of God singing the praises at the top of your voice, you still haven't come to the truth of this until you recognize that Christ, the finished sacrifice, was not part of the price, but He was all the price, a complete sacrifice that satisfied the heart of God, that you cannot say, it was a lame sacrifice, it was a blind sacrifice. He was saying, this is your attitude toward me, toward the true Lamb of God. If you really believed it was the full price that He paid, if you come to my house of sacrifice and you believe it was complete, you'll not sit there carrying the burden of sin a moment longer. You'll rejoice because that sacrifice completely satisfied the heart of God, and if God is satisfied, I am satisfied. That the devil can't point a finger at you, that you don't have to sit in this service now saying, oh Lord, have I done enough for you? It's not what you've done anyhow, it's what He has done for you. If we all got what we deserve, we'd all go to hell. We're all mud balls. We'd go right to hell. We deserve judgment, we deserve wrath. Even the best of us, most pious among us, we deserve hell and judgment. But bless your heart, this is a house of sacrifice, and we come to this house to acknowledge that Jesus paid the price as a perfect Lamb, not part of the price, but all the price. If you walk out of here tonight not rejoicing the forgiveness of your sins, you're saying in essence it was part of the price. You want to add something to His sacrifice? But you see, to the Israelites, the story of what God had done became boring. How many times have you sung so deep as you did tonight about the sacrifice? And I'm so glad the Holy Spirit was trying to tell us in our singing tonight, we sang about the sacrifice of the Lamb. But did that really dawn on you? Were you really discerning the perfect, completed sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the whole world? And that all you have to do is confess and enter into that, and discern it, and rejoice in it, and receive the benefits and the glory of it. That's what should make us rejoice when we come to the house of God. We come to a perfect sacrifice. Hallelujah. I said, well Lord, you mean I can't lay a heavy burden on a congregation then? You mean I can't rail against the laziness and the lackadaisical attitude? And Lord said, no, not until you get it out of your own heart. You see, when it's all said and done, God's not really looking at you. He's not concerned about where you go to church as much as He is you discerning His sacrifice. He's not really all that concerned about how many times you attend the house of God. He's really not as much concerned about how much sacrifice of praise you give Him, the sacrifice of joy, the sacrifice of thanksgiving, the sacrifice of broken heart and a contrite spirit. Those are all wonderful things. Oh, but the real message of it all, this is what I told you I haven't seen in its fullness and its glory, but one day when I see it, you won't be able to hold me in this platform. I'll be preaching up and down these aisles because I'll have a true vision of what God is wanting out of us when we come into His house. He's wanting us to sit down in His presence and say, Jesus, you are my full sacrifice and God looks down from glory at me, not seeing me, but He sees me through the sacrifice. He doesn't expect me to be perfect. He doesn't expect me to have somebody pushing me, pulling me. I don't have to live under the laws and rules and regulation ordinances of men to please you. I come to God my Father through a perfect completed sacrifice. This is the house of His sacrifice. Glory to God. And when you gather together with the believers, you're to rest on that sacrifice. Hallelujah. Remember when Paul went down to the house of Cornelius? He got to preaching and when he got to the place where he said, and they killed him and he was our sacrifice and he was raised and he has forgiven all freely, and the scripture said before you could go any further, the glory fell. The sacrifice and the glory. Perhaps we're missing the glory because we're not understanding or discerning the perfect sacrifice. I really believe that this is what God, the Holy Ghost, is going to have being preached from our pulpits more and more these last days. God's going to strip men who stand in the pulpit, turning the house of God into house of merchandise. He's going to strip and humble those who mislead his dear people into the materialistic vision of prosperity and wealth and all of these things. How abominable to say that Jesus died to make you rich with dollar bills. How abominable in the sight of the Holy Ghost. No, he died to make you rich in the knowledge of his sacrifice. Rich in the knowledge of the things of God that really fatten your soul to see you through hard times. Brother, sister, hard times are coming. Difficult times are coming and the thing that's going to keep you and me is this perfect rest we have in a perfect sacrifice. Glory be to God. I glorify you tonight, Jesus, for that perfect sacrifice. Jesus, and let's praise him for a moment. Jesus, we thank you. We lift our hands as Solomon did and say this is a house of sacrifice and he is our sacrifice. Christ, the Lamb of God, is our sacrifice. Glory to your holy name. Would you just for a moment discern Christ as having forgiven your sins, that you're under the blood, that the devil cannot accuse you, and if you're not right with him right now, let me pray with you. Don't come unless the Holy Spirit's drawn you, but say, David, I've really not known Jesus the Lamb as a sacrifice. I'm carrying a load of guilt and sin and shame and I want to lay it down tonight.