Form and Freedom in Worship
Deuteronomy 12:1-32
This chapter opens the next major section of
the Book of Deuteronomy. So far we have considered the first four chapters
which we said were an historical introduction or prologue, an account of the
previous relationship between the parties to this covenant, the Lord and his
people
Chapter 12 begins with regulations governing
the right worship of God. You will have noticed as we read that these laws are
designed for the life of
Now, this chapter has a very important
message for us today. I never cease to be amazed at how the situation of the
church today is so very similar to what it was in Moses' day and how the same
warnings Moses gave to his contemporaries are as timely in our day as they were
then. In this matter of worship we live in the church amid circumstances which
could hardly be more like those which faced
What is that counsel? What does the Lord
here tell his people about his worship? He tells them that in true worship
there is no conflict between form and freedom. That is, though the church must
worship God in a certain way, according to rules he has laid down, the worship
does not, for that reason, need to be without vitality and sincerity and
pleasure. Let me show you what I mean in two points.
First, notice how worship itself in this
chapter is identified with the sincere and joyful engagement of the heart. Did you notice how regularly the worship of
Israelite people at the sanctuary is described as an act of joy? In v. 7, the
people who brought their sacrifices -- and note that, characteristically, they
worshipped not as individuals but as families -- they were to come and rejoice.
Then in v. 12, when they come to offer sacrifices and pay their tithes -- note
that tithes and offerings were part of their formal worship of God in those
days too -- they were in those acts of worship to rejoice before the Lord
your God. Once again, in v. 18, as they eat their sacrifices and special
offerings at the tabernacle and temple they are to rejoice before the
Lord with their families, servants, and the Levites who are there to assist
their worship.
The worship which God desired that his people
give to him was not to be, was forbidden to be a mere performance, a going
through of motions, a series of acts done in a spirit of mere duty or
obligation, without the heart and without enthusiasm. No, the God who looks
upon the heart and weighs the heart has from the earliest times demanded that
the honor and worship which his people pay him be as much a matter of their
heart as of their performance of certain rituals and duties. He had done great
things for them, was their most merciful Savior and most kind and loving Father
in heaven. What they celebrated when they came to worship him was nothing less
than the forgiveness of their sins and God's gift to them of himself and of
everlasting life. Surely any true worship, any true thanksgiving would be offered
with joy.
And, contrarily, worship which was joyless,
sacrifices and offerings without joy and gladness of heart, must be insincere,
must be given without a true appreciation of what they mean and how much they
mean and how glorious is the salvation which they were intended to depict and
represent and illustrate. That is as true today as ever it was in the days of
Moses. If we come into this house of worship on a Sabbath morning and sing our
hymns and offer our prayers and listen to the Word of God with no
real pleasure, with no real sense of the glory and the wonder of what God
has done for us and of what God has promised to give us in the future and of
the marvel that it is to be his children and to belong to his family -- if, I
say, we do not rejoice before the Lord when we are at worship, then our worship
is not good and not right and not fitting and cannot be pleasing to Him, who
deserves not motions from us, but joy in our hearts for knowing him.
I don't deny that sometimes many of us come
into this house of prayer with every kind of distraction, bowed down with every
kind of sorrow and pain. But when we come into this room, and the Lord is set
before us as he is when the church is truly at worship, and when in our hymns
and in the Word of God and in our prayers we give our hearts and minds to
thoughts of the divine majesty and the love and compassion and unlimited grace
of our God and Savior and the marvelous life which will soon be ours in heaven,
I say, other sorrows notwithstanding, it is only right that here of all places
we should rejoice before the Lord, indeed especially rejoice before the
presence of our Father who has ensured and who has promised that he will carry
us through all our sorrows, employ them to the greatest good in our lives, and
then finally convert them into unadulterated and unmitigated joy in his
presence in the heavenly city. Knowing what we know about God and about his
salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord, you cannot name the situation or the
circumstance, however heavy, however dark, in which we in this church, together
and each individually, ought not to have joy in our hearts when we are before
the Lord God worshipping him.
That is the first thing: worship is to be
offered with a truly joyful heart.
But notice a second concern in this
chapter about the right worship of God: That worship must be offered according
to the directions and the specifications of God's law. In our day, there are many who feel that this second
point is the contradiction of the first. They believe that worship ought to be
joyful, but they also believe that it cannot be joyful if you have to offer the
worship in a strictly ordered and stipulated way. If, they say, we have to
worship according to a set of rules, and are required to do this and that and only
in this way and not that, where will be the spontaneity, where will be the joy?
You cannot love according to a rule book, they say. Law stifles love. Love must
be free to find its own way and to express itself in its own manner. You can
have joyful worship or you can have ordered and regulated worship, but, so many
are saying today, you cannot have both.
However widely this opinion may be expressed
in our day, even among evangelical Christians, it was not shared by Moses or by
any other author of Holy Scripture, nor is it the opinion of the Holy Spirit by
whom Moses and the other authors of the Bible wrote the Scripture. For, as we
saw, he insists that worship be joyful, but, in this same passage, he is still
more insistent that
He makes this general point as an opening
thesis in v. 4: 'you may not worship the Lord in the manner in which the
Canaanites worship.' And in the rest of the chapter he reiterates this point
with specific reference to a variety of matters.
In vv. 2 and 3 he orders them to destroy and
never to use the venues for worship and the instruments of worship then popular
in
In v. 5 he says that they cannot worship in
various places as the pagans do, but only where God says.
In vv. 6-7 they are told that they must
worship the Lord in the specific ways they have been taught: with certain kinds
of offerings and gifts to be given in a certain way.
In vv. 9ff. the point is reiterated,
especially again with regard to the demand that the offerings be brought to the
appointed place only.
In vv. 15ff. more regulations are mentioned
touching these sacrificial meals and the proper way they were to be taken, and
so on to the rest of the chapter.
And then it is all brought to a conclusion
in v. 32 where the Lord says again that
Verse 8 summarizes all of this material in a
nutshell: 'You are not to do as we do here today,
everyone as he sees fit...' (literally, 'each man
doing what is right in his own eyes').
There is hardly a better way to describe
evangelical American worship in our day than to say simply that everyone is
doing as he sees fit, that each church is doing what is right in its own eyes.
But, the Lord is here telling us that he will be worshipped as he sees fit,
and not as we choose. After all, does that not make perfect sense. How would you know, how could we know how the
Almighty wishes to be worshipped? Does anyone here presume to be able to tell
us what God wants to be done when his people worship him and how he would have
them do it? Do you so know the mind and character and glory of God yourself
that you can say how he ought to be worshipped and what is fitting and
appropriate for his worship? How could we ever answer such questions unless God
should tell us himself how he ought to be worshipped and he has,
comprehensively in his Word? And why should worshipping according to God's
rules kill joy and pleasure? Rules protect the pleasure. A baseball game is not
more fun when the rules are forgotten or ignored or broken. A marriage is not
more loving and happy when God's rules governing marriage are broken.
God wants our worship of him to be full of
true joy in our hearts, but he wants it to be offered according to his Word and
law. He clearly does not see the two things to be in contradiction at all: true
worship is to be at one and the same time, joyful and lawful.
Now, I want to speak to the young people
especially this morning about what God is teaching us in Deuteronomy 12. This
is a lesson especially hard for young people, I think -- though it is hard
enough for adults -- but one that is most important to learn. And we not only
want you to learn it, but to love it and embrace it for your whole lives. We
want nothing more for you than that you should become true worshippers of God
and should prize the assembly of the saints for the worship of our Holy God.
And if you heed for all your lives the Lord's commandments here in Deuteronomy
12, we will have no worry that this church will be a church which truly
worships God for generations to come. And that will be our blessing, for the
Lord has said that those who honor him, he will honor.
Now, this is what I want to say to you
children and young people. We could have a much more exciting and entertaining
service on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings than we have now. For example,
we could do what some churches do and install a large screen here in the front
and show a Christian movie or some other kind of video program as part of our
service. Or, we could do what a number of other churches are now doing and hire
some talented folk who would give little plays as part of our service, drama
sketches which teach something about God or about the Christian life. And we
could sing differently than we do, with lots of choruses and real peppy music.
Many churches are doing this. We could have professional singers too, come and
perform a number of songs as part of our morning service or have special guests
from the Christian community and have me or pastor Skogen
interview them, and have them speak about their accomplishments and answer
questions about what the Lord means to them and so forth.
This church has enough people with high
standards and abilities so that we could, I'm sure, put on a very interesting
Sunday morning service that would be a lot of fun to attend. Frankly, I don't
doubt that we might be able to attract many more people to our church with such
a service than now come to our Sunday worship. Many churches are putting on
these services and are doing them so well that not only are many more people
attending but there isn't a bored person in the house from the beginning of the
Sunday service to its end.
Perhaps some of you are thinking: I'd enjoy
such a service, with a movie or a play and some special musical numbers and
famous guests being interviewed on the front platform. I would really be happy
to come to church for a service like that! Well, that's natural enough. I'm
sure I would find such a service very interesting and entertaining too. In
fact, I've been to some services like that and they were very interesting and I
wasn't bored once!
There is only one problem with Sunday
services like that. They are not the worship we are taught in Holy Scripture to
offer to God. They are full of things you cannot find in the Bible and lack
much of what the Bible tells us to offer to God in our worship of him. And
whatever people may try to claim to the contrary, services like that are not
really for God; they are for us. People like them not because they know that
God is pleased with such a service but precisely because they like such
services and find them a pleasure to attend. They might still call them worship
services, but they are not really worship, they are services for those who
attend. Some churches are honest enough to admit this and have another service
for worship on some other day of the week, but the Bible says that the Sabbath
is the day of sacred assembly and Holy Scripture has not left us free to change
God's rules in that way.
Mark Twain has Tom Sawyer say '
It's the same today. What are the services
of present day paganism? What are the equivalents of the Canaanite high place
services in our day? They are our great forms of entertainment: the play, the
movie, the celebrity and so on. And so, more and more, church worship services
are full of plays, movies, and celebrities.
But where is God in all of this? Where are
the laws he laid down according by which he is to be worshipped. What must he
think as he looks down upon a service which is supposed to be for him, but is
really for the people themselves?
When I was a lad of nine or ten years of
age, I gave my Dad a record for his birthday -- this was in the days before
CDs. The truth of the matter was that the record was one that I wanted to have,
but was not one my Dad would ever have chosen for himself or be likely to
listen to. I suppose when I bought it, I thought that if I liked it, then he
would like it too. But, and I remember this very distinctly, as if it were
yesterday -- the feeling has stayed with me all these years -- I remember being
very ashamed when he opened my gift, because, at that moment, it was so obvious
that the gift I had supposedly given to him, I was really giving to myself. He
got that record because I wanted to listen to it.
And I think the same thing is happening more
and more and more in churches today. Christians are ostensibly worshipping God,
say they are worshipping God, but what they do is really for themselves.
The question that is important to them is not whether this is what God has said
is right and fitting for his worship but is rather whether this is interesting
and helpful to me, to us, or to others.
God has told us to worship him on the
Sabbath day, to order the parts of the worship service in a meaningful way, to
sing to him songs of praise and love and faith which are like the Psalms and
meet that standard, to give offerings, to offer prayers of confession and
penitence, to raise our petitions to him, to renew before him our faith in
Christ and his salvation, to read with reverence his holy Word and to listen to
it preached to us. To kneel and to raise our hands and to do
all that we do with our hearts as well as our voices and bodies. Much
more could be said about what God has taught us in his Word about true worship.
Now, I am not at all saying that all worship
which is offered to God according to the laws of Holy Scripture will look or
sound exactly the same. There is much room for differences of style, of
culture, of manner. But true worship will conform to his rule as well as be
joyful in heart.
Don't think that this is a small thing, or
not an important issue. It was this problem, this wanting worship
to be more entertaining and exciting and interesting, which finally ruined the
faith of
That takes preparation before we come to
church that our hearts may be warm and right before God and wanting to worship
him and it takes determination of will from the beginning of the service to its
end to force our concentration to remain upon God only and to do every act --
whether a prayer or a hymn or hearing the Word -- before the Lord and for the
Lord and as an offering to the Lord. And all the while, one must practice true
joy in the Lord so that nothing is done as a mere duty, but all is happily a
work of love and thanksgiving to God. It is work, hard work. But, those who
have learned to worship God this way, will all tell you that it is the most satisfying
and the most happy work they ever do. It is work so rewarding as not to be thought work at all.
Perhaps not so many people will come to such
true worship, as would come if we remade our service to be entertaining and
interesting to them. Unbelievers will certainly find it less appealing, but, we
will be worshipping God and that is all that matters. Otherwise, no matter what
we say, we are only giving our Father in heaven a gift we really intend for
ourselves.
But, some may say, I need a service that
helps me! Yes, you do. But where does true help come from? He who loses his
life.... He who honors me.... All these services for men have left men weaker
and weaker; the old services for God made men and women strong in faith and
love.
I'm reading these days a biography of
Charles Simeon. Simeon had a very high view of worship. He taught that it is
not worship if it is not given joyfully to the Lord from the heart. But, he
also taught that worship, to be true and right, must conform to the standards
and rules set in Holy Scripture. He lived in a day when most worship was simply
going through motions. People paid no attention to what was being prayed, sung,
or said. And Simeon would have none of that! If God is to be honored, the
church must mean everything it says. But it must continue to say all that it
should say to God according to the Scriptures. Simeon was a firm believer in a
worship service or liturgy which had everything in it which Scripture commands
and in a meaningful order and in which the congregation addressed everything
directly to God. He used to say that 'The finest sight short of heaven would be
a whole congregation using the prayers of the Liturgy in the true spirit of
them.'
Much of the rest of the church is going
another way. Let it not be so here! Let no church surpass us in vitality and
joy; but let our joy flow through those acts which God has ordered to be part
of his worship and through the channel of a worship which is from him and to
him and for him from beginning to end.