The Heart of Worship

Well, I'd like to ask you this question as we start this morning's message. Have you ever struggled motivating yourself to come to church? Have you ever struggled motivating yourself to come to church? Have you ever felt that you were simply forcing yourself to go, going through the motions? Perhaps you felt like that this morning on an overcast day.

It's a little bit cooler. The bed seems a little bit warmer and nicer to lie in. I guess if we were honest, we might say yes. We have struggled or wrestled with motivation. But what if I said to you that in those moments where we lack the motivation to go to a worship service, that you were focusing on all the wrong reasons to worship in the first place.

If you were struggling to worship, to motivate yourself, you were focusing on all the wrong reasons to go to church. Your eyes were taken off the real purpose of worship. What is the purpose of our worship? What is the purpose of worship? Why do we come to church?

Why do we sing these songs? Why do we read scripture? Why do we hear God's word preached? Why are you sitting here in this pew this morning? We're going to look at a moment where Jesus had a lot to say about worship.

But he didn't say it really with his mouth. He said it with a whip. If you have your bibles with you, let's turn to John 2, and we're going to read from verse 12. John 2 to the end of the chapter, to verse 25. John 2, verses 12 to 25.

If you don't have a bible, we can read it on the screen. John 2, verse 12. After this, he, who is Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and his brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days. When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

In the temple courts, he found men selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves, he said, get these out of here. How dare you turn my Father's house into a market.

His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me. Then the Jews demanded of him, what miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this? Jesus answered them, destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days. The Jews replied, it has taken forty-six years to build this temple and you are going to raise it in three days? But the temple he had spoken of was his body.

After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them for he knew all men. He did not need man's testimony about man for he knew what is in a man.

So far, our reading. You'll remember that last week, we looked at the first half of John 2, the wedding at Cana, a little village in the region of Galilee, where Jesus turned water into wine. Now after this event, we see Jesus going to the Passover feast, and the scholars believe that this was roughly between February and March in the year twenty-seven AD. So just the start of Jesus' ministry. While he was there, Jesus went to the temple as everyone did.

The place, the city Jerusalem would have been absolutely packed with the heads of families often representing their families in Jerusalem for the Passover sacrifices. And so Jesus went to the temple as was the custom and he saw that it was absolutely full of people buying and selling cattle, sheep, pigeons, doves, you name it for the sacrifices. He also saw there the money changers, people selling or buying coins and exchanging them for other coins. Basically, taking the Roman currency that everyone used in the day and exchanging it for temple currency, which was then used to either buy the sacrifices or used for tithing, for giving to the temple. And seeing all this going on, the commotion made Jesus' blood boil.

He fashioned a whip out of cords, the bible says, and he drove out all the animals and all the salesmen in the same go. He overturned the tables with all the coins stacked up there neatly, and you can just imagine all the coins just dashing onto the stones and rolling everywhere. And he screamed at them, how dare you turn my Father's house into a marketplace. Now it's one of the only instances where we see this sort of anger in Jesus. And it made such an impression on his disciples that it's recorded in all four gospels.

It was such a big deal for them seeing Jesus this angry that all four gospels recorded this instance where Jesus cleared the temple. It was a big deal. Now Jesus drove out these traders, businessmen, out of the temple and he condemned the cheap, empty worship that they were promoting. This is what the passage is all about. But the irony is that this worship wasn't cheap.

This worship was actually really expensive. You would go to the temple to buy holy money called Tiberian coins because the money you had been using for your business was filthy, dirty Roman money. So you couldn't use this money to worship God. You had to go and exchange this money for Tiberian coins. Now, you can say that's a nice ideal to have.

There's nothing perhaps wrong with that. The problem was that the money exchanges there used to charge exorbitant exchange rates for these coins. So any poor person trying to worship God through a sacrifice couldn't afford it. It was expensive to just buy a single dove to sacrifice to God. These people were making huge profits off this worship of God.

The other problem with this is that where this took place was in the temple courts. Now, more than likely, scholars say these courts would have been the courts of the Gentiles. And Herod's Temple, I don't know if you've ever seen a photo or, sorry, an image of it, but it was huge. It was massive. The biggest court in this temple compound was the court of the Gentiles.

Everyone, including the Gentiles, could enter into it. Gentiles who may have been God fearers, who may have worshipped Yahweh but didn't go through the ritual of circumcision and so on could worship God in this less holy place. It was a place for second-class believers to go. Now the problem again was that this place would have been absolutely crowded with Jews selling and buying cattle, sheep, doves for the sacrifices. It would have been so full perhaps that Gentiles who were only allowed to worship there wouldn't have been able to come to God.

Unless you wanted to worship and bow down to God next to a pile of steaming hot cow patty. So it was anti-missionary. It was anti-mission for God's people to have allowed this to happen as well. Gentiles were excluded from this. Can you see the problem here?

Can you see the problem? While it all looked holy from the outside, while it all looked like people were really wanting to do the right thing, the sacrifices, the clean holy money, the tradition, while it all looked faithful to God, it was corrupt and empty and led to people being restricted in coming to God. Though this worship seemed costly, and in some ways it was, it was actually very cheap. In verses 18 to 22, after Jesus drives out these people, they ask him to provide a sign to authenticate his authority. How dare you do this?

How dare you do this? And Jesus replies, you can destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days. But people obviously laugh at this. This is ridiculous. If you've ever seen that compound, if you ever go to Jerusalem to the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, if you've seen a photo of that, massive blocks.

I kid you not, blocks that is almost the size of this wall here, with the foundation stones to this compound. It was massive. And, at that time, the temple wasn't even finished, but it had taken forty-six years to that point to build. So they laugh at him and they say, that's ridiculous. You will not be able to build a temple like this in three days' time.

What did Jesus mean by this? Well, just like Jesus showed at the beginning of chapter 2 that he was bringing a new message, a new wine for new wineskins, Jesus was talking about another new thing. A new temple. A new temple. The resurrection that happened three days after Jesus' death was the beginning of a new temple.

Jesus was claiming, in fact, that he was the new temple. That his body was the new temple. You see, the temple is, was the place where God met his people, or where the people rather met God. It enabled you to meet with God. The Holy of Holies was there.

God's presence was said to have been there. The priests served in the temple, helping you to meet with God, offer your sacrifices, be right with God. But Jesus claimed that he would become the meeting place of God. Jesus would become the meeting place of God. So that in fact, when you met Jesus, you met God.

Worship Jesus, you worship God. After his resurrection, John says, the people started realising what he had meant here. They realised the eternal purpose of his death and his sacrifice on the cross. They understood then what it meant for that curtain between the Holy of Holies and the rest of the temple compound to be split. They understood what that meant.

In Jesus, humanity could have the boldness to approach God freely without fear, without limitation, without guilt of sinfulness and imperfection. The sign was, I will raise this temple in three days. And John says that it was only after Jesus was raised from the dead that his disciples understood what this was all about. Now the question that we ask when we read this is how is worship real or how is worship faith, not forced? Why do we worship God, first and foremost, and why do we meet with God in a church?

Do we give up and say that it's too hard? Why do we have musicians that practise and try to do well in their music? I should say, not try, they do well in their music, Rob. Thank you very much. Jesus condemned showy, cheap worship rooted in mere routine and exploitation for personal gain.

What was Jesus' alternative, however? He condemned that, but what was the other option? If he condemned this worship, what was the ideal worship then that he must have had in mind? Well, Jesus doesn't address it here, however. He talks about it a little bit later in John 4 in a very famous passage that you might know of.

It was a conversation he had with a Samaritan woman at a well. Now this woman raised the issue of where people ought to worship. She said that the Samaritans like her worshipped God on this mountain where this well was, but the Jews like Jesus and his disciples worshipped God at the temple in Jerusalem. And she asked which one is correct? Which one is correct?

Where should we worship? Jesus responded, however, to her that the controversy of where to worship God doesn't compare in importance with the issue of how and who we worship. The issue of where we worship doesn't compare to how and who we worship. His response draws her attention firstly to the how of worship. Jesus said to her in verse 21 to 22 of chapter 4, believe me woman, a time is coming when you will, when we will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

In other words, don't get bogged down in this controversy. It's not important. In fact, Jesus is saying, it is possible to worship God in vain on this mountain as well as in Jerusalem. That is not the problem here. In fact, we know that.

If you know your Old Testament, that God often in the prophets talked about empty worship. You come near to me with empty words, God would say. Your sacrifices don't mean anything to me. The issue here is not where, but how. And this leads him into the next point.

He rivets her attention on the who of worship. In verse 23, he says, a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. Jesus says that her worship is deficient. Now it obviously is because she's living an immoral life, sleeping with a man who's not her husband, has been divorced five times and here she is trying to argue theology and worship practices.

Whether we do Hillsong songs or book of worship hymns. Her question on where to worship is irrelevant and probably is a smokescreen. Probably is something to divert Jesus' attention from her. But the answer Jesus gives her is both an answer for her sin, the problem of her immorality, but also the issue of worship. And that rested on the how and the who of worship.

Jesus said to her, there must be spirit and there must be truth. Now, again, you may have heard this a number of times. What does to worship in spirit and in truth mean? Well, like many of Jesus' teachings in John, there is often a double meaning, a play on words that Jesus uses. Spirit and truth on the one hand can mean, or can refer to the Holy Spirit because God is referred to immediately following this verse as being spirit.

God is spirit, and truth being referred to as Jesus. In John 14, verse 6, Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, the life. In several instances in the gospel of John, Jesus refers to Himself as the truth. And therefore, worshipping in spirit and in truth refers to worshipping God the Father through the enabling power of the Holy Spirit only being achieved or made possible by the atoning death of Jesus Christ the Son. So here we have the Trinity enabling us to worship God rightly.

But the other meaning that Jesus also insinuated to worshipping in spirit and in truth may refer to the personal heart of worship, the personal motivations for why we worship in the first place. When spirit is referred to here, the same word is used for the soul, for the inside of us, for what makes us tick, for the emotions inside of us. And truth refers often to the cognitive intellectual side of the human mind. So there's both emotion and intellect involved in worship. So in order to worship in spirit, that is the opposite of worshipping in merely external ways because the spirit is inside of us.

To worship in spirit is the opposite of empty formalism and traditionalism. But then worshipping in truth is the opposite of worship based on an inadequate understanding of God. In other words, worship heart and head. Worship must be both heart and head. It must engage emotions and thought.

And we can see that today, can't we? In some of the divisions in churches over worship. Because it tends to swing from one to the other, the extremes. Churches tend to swing from one to the other. So for our reformed tradition perhaps, and I don't want to bash us too hard, but we may have the tendency to swing to truth without emotion, which can lead to a dead orthodoxy, chasing after ticking all the right boxes, and leads to a church filled with artificial admirers of God.

Artificial admirers of God. People who would like to admire God from the pew and inspect him like a science project. They can be like people who write hallmark anniversary cards. They can say sweet, true things about someone they know nothing about. On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and fake cultivated emotion.

This can lead to a church filled with spiritually stunted fetus-like Christians who refuse their discipline of rigorous thought. They can be like those oversentimental aunties who hug and kiss and squeeze your cheeks the whole day at a family reunion, but then has nothing to do with you until that next family reunion. You can't help but feel that it's empty, fluffy emotion brought on by the occasion. An article by Jeremy Del Rio and Louis Carlo that I read gives five really good practical points for worship that is in spirit and truth. The type of worship that Jesus wanted to encourage.

There's five points and they all start with us. So if you are writing down notes, this is going to be helpful. The first one is to refocus our worship. Our problem is that we exist in a society with a reductionist Western approach to worship, which loses all the sense of awe and the reverence for God. And instead, fashions God in our image.

Fashions God into our image. Fashioning worship of God into what we want it to be, what we want it to be reduced to. And Jesus hated the system of worship in his day because it looked exactly like that. It was cheap. It was cheap.

We may say to ourselves, look at how much I'm giving up for this church. Look how much I'm tithing to this church. Look how much I have to sacrifice on a Sunday to be at church when I could be out out on a jet ski. But that's not worship. That's not worship.

You can buy all the sacrifices you want. You can exchange all your money into Tiberian coins. You can donate as much money to the church as you want, but if you don't have a heart of worship, you miss out on the significance and the meaning behind why you do it. If it's hard to motivate yourself to come to church for any other reason except to meet with the living God and to worship Him in community, you're missing the point of worship. Worship can be faked.

Just like it was in Jesus' days in the temple. It can be faked. Author Mark Levitan writes in his book, The Dangerous Act of Worship, just how easy it is to become for the Western church, to move away from worship of God. He writes, the God we seek in the Western church is the God we want, not the God who is. We fashion a God who blesses without obligation, who lets us feel His presence without living His life, who stands with us never against us, who gives us what we want when we want it.

The first point is let's refocus on who really matters, not on what. The second thing they say is to repent. The failure to incorporate real lament into our corporate settings underscores sometimes that we misunderstand what worship really is. It is neither the rhythmic pursuit of a euphoric high nor the somber embrace of silent reflection. Because Jesus described true worshippers as those who worship in spirit and in truth.

In other words, we cannot cultivate, we cannot cultivate, in any sense, true worship through good music, through a nice streamlined worship service without any mistakes, without great greeters at a door that makes you feel welcome, and a cup of coffee that is not too hot and not too cold. You cannot cultivate it. You cannot recognise it in such a way because once you do, you've cultivated it and you've grown it out of what God wants. You've taken God out of that service. Paul says, do not conform to this world, the trendy fashions, the nice lights, the good guitar solos, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is good and acceptable and perfect in the eyes of God.

Where our will conforms to the world's patterns and prompts God's will, let's repent for rejecting true worship. The third thing is to remember. And we have spoken about this in the past. But the holy God we revere is also our righteous King who exacts justice on behalf of us, His people. Time and time again in the bible, in the Old Testament, worship is started by people who remember what God has done.

Worship is started by remembering who God is. Moses and Miriam remembered and they praised God for demonstrating justice in His dealings with Pharaoh and liberating His people in Exodus. Hannah, the mother of Samuel the prophet, remembered when she thanked God for giving her, a barren woman, a son. King David remembered when he declared the Lord reigns in his psalm and declared a heavenly King who would rule above Him and all others in Psalm 110. We worship God rightly when we remember, when we remember who He is and what He has done.

And the thing is we need to remember over and over and over again. It's not a once-off thing. Fourthly, we need to reconnect. Worship is about connection both with God and with these people sitting next to you. No longer should worship gatherings embrace the first part of the Great Commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind, your soul, your strength.

At the expense of the second part, love your neighbour as yourself. Let's reconnect His love into a coherent whole. If love is the centre of worship, which it is, which it is. If love is the centre of worship, love includes not only love for God, but love for others. And that's why I tell people that watching a YouTube clip on a Sunday morning of someone preaching or a televangelist at 2am is not worship.

It is not communal. It is, in my opinion, cultivated. It's good for understanding. It's good for increasing knowledge, but it is not the same as being in a church. It's not the same as communal worship which we partake of today.

It's like, a friend said to me, it's like being in Antarctica, putting on a YouTube clip of a fire and pretending you're warm. It's not the same thing. Connection with one another is important in worship. Lastly, we are to realign. Worship at its core deals with power.

Worship at its core deals with power. We say that we are not powerful, but God is very powerful. We worship God because He is powerful. Powerful to create, powerful to heal, powerful to save. When we worship God by emphasising God's kingship, His rule over all creation, His impeccable character, we intentionally create space for Him to address our fallen powers.

The fallen powers of our lives, the fallen powers in our society, of our government, of our agencies, of this nation, of this world. Worship is about realigning ourselves over and over again. Realigning, coming back to the centre. Coming back to the heart of worship.

That is what worship is. It's a continual habit of realignment. Since our hearts are so good at turning away from God, turning our backs to Him, doing our own things, we must physically stop and bring ourselves and our lives to Him again, and again, and again. Jesus said that He was the new temple. He was the new temple.

He wasn't going to create a new physical place. He is the new temple and He has become both the means of worship, but also the place of worship. Jesus has become the centre of our worship. And that must mean we realign ourselves to Him over and over again. Destroy this temple, Jesus said, and I will raise it again in three days.

Now we know how the story ended. Right? We've got the benefit of hindsight. The people did destroy that temple. They took the temple and they nailed Him to a cross.

He died but that temple was rebuilt three days later. Jesus is that temple. He is the object and the affection of our worship. In the end, our heart of worship does not simply long for God's good gifts, but for God Himself. To see Him, to taste Him, to know Him, to abide in Him.

That is the soul's greatest pleasure. And if you don't know that, hear me today. You will find your greatest fulfilment in worship of Jesus. Our hearts cry out with David as he wrote in Psalm 27, verse 4. One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek, that I might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His temple.

May that be the cry and the desire of our hearts to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to know Him forever. Let's pray. Lord, what intimate words these are to speak of the powerful Creator of the world as beautiful. Not simply awesome and fear-inspiring. Not simply terrifying in His majesty and holiness, but beautiful.

Something we want to behold, something we want to see. Lord, our worship is so far from what You deserve. Lord, and as we condemn with You those people that turned Your house into a den of robbers into a marketplace. Lord, we realise that we have done that as well. We may not be money changers.

We may not sell sacrifices. But Lord, we focus on the wrong things. And our lack of motivation to worship You with family and friends, brothers and sisters who also belong to You as a people under You. That lack of motivation is brought on not by our lack of loving You, but by our focus that is far from You of what worship really is. Worship is not about us feeling good.

Worship is not about us getting a nice handshake coming through that door. Worship is not singing in tune. What worship is proclaiming Your worth, declaring Your praises because You are the One that called us out of darkness into Your marvellous light. You deserve all our affections, Lord. You deserve all our attention.

And Lord, thank You that not only do You deserve that, not only do You require that of us, but that we are blessed in doing that. That in worship of You, we will find the deepest, richest joy that we can ever experience. In Your presence is the fullness of joy, the psalmist wrote. So, Lord, we thank You for that. We thank You that this is not a one-way street.

We thank You that we can be in this communion with You and with one another. We repent of our ways. We ask, Lord, to realign ourselves with You. We want to refocus. Lord, we want to realign.

Pray, Lord, that You will work through us and in us by the power of the Holy Spirit who is the spirit and who is the truth that You spoke of and Jesus Christ who is the truth that You referred to. Thank You for enabling us and tearing that veil asunder that we may approach You without fear of implications of sin and guilt, but that we may worship You and see You as our God. Thank You for that, Jesus. Amen.