Worship: All or Nothing
Genesis 18:2
Genesis 22:17-18
Intro
A few years ago, a young lady had moved to London, England and had bought herself a nice little flat on the top floor of a tenant building to live in. She had brought her share of great dreams to the great city. But what happened next was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
The building that she had called home had caught on fire. All of the exits were cut off by the flames. The crowd on the street watched as this poor lady looked out her window, knowing that she only had few minutes left to live. About that time a ladder came up out of the smoke to her window and a brave fireman extended his hand to rescue this lady and carry her to safety.
But the story doesn’t end there. Once this young lady had recovered in the hospital, she called the fire department to find her rescuer. And over the phone she finally and generously expressed her gratitude. The two young people began to chat, and an on going friendship formed, and that friendship grew into love, and love led to marriage.
To this day she still tells people about how she knows she would not be alive if it were not for her husband saving her that day. But rescue and romance are two separate worlds. The fireman had become more than a lifesaver; he had become the object of adoration.
I think the problem most of us have with worship is that we’ve never made that “phone call” – the one where we seek to discover more about the One who has saved us. Many of us have a vague awareness that we’ve avoided hellfire, but we don’t feel any particular emotional attachment to out rescuer. Of course, we do give Him a call every now and then, whenever we need another rescue. “Help, Lord! I’m stuck in financial problems!” Or, “Lord, please get the ladder again, I’m out of work!” We see God as someone who answers 911 calls, slides down His silver pole from heaven and comes to rescue us from the flame and then disappears. We never take the step from salvation to adoration, from brief encounters to a deep relationship for everyday and every moment.
If you and I can’t imagine giving our lives in such a way, perhaps we need to have a deeper experience with the Man on the wooden ladder – the Man who stretched out His arms to show how much He loved us.
All of this brings us to a man named Abraham and the first worship.
I. First Worship (Gen. 18:2; 22:5)
a. Those who study the Bible in a serious way sometimes refer to the Law of First Mention.
i. It’s not so much a law, as a common principle in the Scriptures.
ii. If you select an important biblical word to study -- say worship -- you’ll find that its first biblical appearance sets the tone for all the richness of meaning that will emerge.
iii. The First mention gives us the essential picture.
b. So what of worship?
i. We initially find the word in Gen. 18.
ii. Abraham entertains three strangers who turn out to be the Lord and two angels.
iii. The Scripture says that when he saw them, he “bowed himself to the ground.”
iv. The Hebrew word for his action is the one that we recognize as worship, and it’s an essential understanding of the concept.
c. But the Scripture’s first mention of the word worship as we understand it in a more formal sense – the intentional act of worship – is found four chapters later.
i. Gen. 22:5, Abraham says, “Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship.”
ii. Abraham has climbed the mountain with his son, whom he intends to offer in sacrifice.
iii. Most of us recognize this story with a twinge of pain – one of the most gut wrenching accounts in all the Scriptures.
iv. God has allowed Abraham to wait for many years to have this child – not only his beloved seed of the promised nation – an now Abraham is asked to palace the boy on the altar and give him back to God.
d. How have you responded to life’s most frightening moments?
i. Those are the times that identify what we’re made of inside.
ii. At the very moment when Abraham’s horrible time is at hand, Abraham had called it worship.
iii. Can you imagine a more profound, more moving portrait of the power of faith?
e. It’s an all-or-nothing commitment – complete dedication.
i. There’s no way for us to be half-crucified with Christ.
ii. There’s no way to pick up half the cross and follow Him.
iii. There’s no way to be half refined by the fires of purification
f. True worship is true sacrifice.
i. It’s hard truth, but it’s only the beginning.
ii. Let’s delve a little deeper
II. Recognizing His Voice
a. We’re told from the very beginning, in the first two verses of this narrative, that God was testing Abraham.
i. An entire nation, God had told him, would proceed from him.
ii. The children of Abraham would out number the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore.
iii. What kind of man was worthy to sire such a race?
iv. Abraham had to be tested in preparation, and he had to pass the most difficult test of all.
v. You and I can see clearly enough; how well Abraham could see it at the time, we may never know.
b. God calls Abraham and tells him exactly what to do.
i. It all began with his Master’s voice.
ii. Worship comes as a command, not a suggestion.
iii. God tells Abraham where to make a sacrifice and what the sacrifice should be.
iv. Worship comes not as the fruit of our impulse, felt need, or creativity; it is the specific command of God.
v. Worship is God’s idea.
vi. It comes from the depths of His heart with the fullness of His passion.
vii. The beginning of our journey to know God better, is by His voice calling us to come and worship.
c. Abraham recognized His Master’s voice.
i. Do you recognize the Master’s voice?
ii. You never will if you don’t spend some time with Him and form a relationship.
III. Responding to His Command (Gen. 22:3)
a. This verse tells us that Abraham “rose early in the morning.”
i. He made all the preparation for his journey, saddling his donkey and summoning two servants, waking his son.
ii. Think of how melancholy all these tasks must have been.
1. Each have him an opportunity to reconsider and to rebel.
2. Perhaps he had imagined that voice from heaven.
3. Perhaps he could procrastinate and wait for better weather or for God to change His mind.
4. Perhaps Abraham could pretend he’d never heard the command.
5. Put yourself in Abraham’s sandals.
a. What if the voice of God came to you today with such a request? What would you do?
iii. I know for myself that if God called me with such a command, it would take me two minutes to be on the phone to my circle of pastor friends, asking them to please help me interpret what I had heard from God.
1. Hoping that I interpreted it wrong.
2. I would take some time to pray and reflect, trying to rationalize the simply command of God.
iv. But not so with Abraham.
1. Abraham rose early to get a head start on this difficult task.
2. He didn’t call in sick
3. He didn’t look for loopholes.
4. Abraham set out for what the Lord had defined for him as worship, and he did so without question.
b. See worship is a verb
i. It isn’t a feeling or a thought process.
ii. It’s something much greater than a mere emotion.
iii. Worship, is an activity we pursue in obedience to God’s directive.
c. For many of us, worship has become as participatory as an NFL football game.
i. Perhaps we watch the game on T.V.
ii. Perhaps we venture out to the stadium to sit in the stands.
iii. But the only experience we have of professional football is the vicarious kind.
iv. Similarly, many people sit in pews or watch televised preaching – but that’s spectator sport, not worship.
1. It’s casual and detached.
2. God calls us forward from the sofa, the pew, and the aloofness by which we keep a safe distance.
3. He calls us, as He did Thomas the doubter, to step forward and feel the wounds in His hands.
4. He calls us to confront the mystery of His manifestation.
5. He calls us to take a central and dynamic role in the adventure, the lifelong quest, of knowing Him.
6. It only happens when we take our worship not as a noun, but as a verb and get busy doing it.
d. God called Abraham to step forward, and no matter how reluctant he might have felt, Abraham obeyed.
e. We must respond to God’s command with the initiative of physical action.
IV. Returning Our Best (Genesis 22:2; Hebrews 11:17-19)
a. This second verse is hard for me to read as a father.
i. God says to Abraham, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.”
b. As we’ve seen, Abraham’s boy was everything to him.
i. We all love our children, and every single one is special and unique.
ii. But this one was especially special; this one had been waited for, prayed for, hoped for, and finally rejoiced over when he arrived after many decades of anticipation.
iii. Only to be given as a burnt offering.
iv. The mind’s of obedience and reason aren’t always in perfect harmony.
c. This is a passage we struggle to comprehend as we read it in Genesis.
i. It is not until the book of Hebrews that we get to see that missing piece of the puzzle, of Abraham’s rest during this time.
ii. Hebrews 11:17-19, “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, “In Isaac your seed shall be called,,” accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.”
d. It’s quite simple: Abraham had received a promise from God.
i. God told him that Isaac would be the seed of a great line of people to come.
ii. God doesn’t break His promises; so the only conclusion left open to Abraham was that the Lord would have to raise Isaac from the dead!
iii. This was the trusting spirit of Abraham, willing to literally put his faith under the knife.
e. Abraham had to come to the altar completely as he was questions and all.
i. “Here am I, Lord,” he must have said. “I don’t understand. I’m not without deep fear and misgivings. But obedience is my true sacrifice. It’s obedience that I lay on this stone before you. Obedience and trust. You will never fail in Your promise, and I must never fail in my obedience.”
ii. Abraham laid it all down on the altar.
1. His questions, his confusion, and his emotions.
2. His faith and his obedience.
3. It was all a test of priorities, to reveal what finally stood, What Abraham would cling to when all else was stripped away.
f. How would you pass such a test?
i. Would you worship in complete obedience if all else in the world were removed – if your every worldly possession, relationship, fond hope and dream were lost to you?
ii. What would God ask you to place on the altar of testing in your life?
Closing
It’s quite a question for you and for me, but perhaps it’s the central question of worship. I don’t know where your primary place of worship is, whether in your quiet study or here at church. It’s probably a very comfortable place. But what if it weren’t quite so comfortable? What if worship demanded of you the thing that you valued most in the world? In that moment you would find our a great deal about yourself. You would hear the voice of Jesus whispering over your shoulder that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
See worship is a all-or-nothing commitment. It’s pursuing the object of adoration right into the flames. The Lord longs to bless us when we worship Him truly; Abraham found that out. It was a moment of surpassing holiness, and I believe that particular mountaintop became, at that moment, holy ground.
