Faithful Worship

Faith pleases the Father because God is faithful. When He sees faith, it reminds Him of Himself. He sees that it is good because God is good; all the time, and every time, God is good. When you declare that God is faithful you are saying that God can be trusted, that what He says, He will do, because first He says it, then He does it, every time. God works according to His word, without fail. He is faithful.

But what exactly is faith? Where does it come from? What does it mean to be full of faith and what kind of faith do you want to be full of? Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” This verse teaches that faith is a substance. The Greek word translated “substance” is hoopo-staice. It is made up of two Greek words, hoopo, which means “under,” and staice, which means “to stand,” or “solid structure.” Faith is a foundation upon which life rests and is built. It is the unseen strength of life, like the unseen foundation and inner structure of a building, when it rests upon the word of God.

But faith does not have strength in and of itself. Faith in a lie rather than the truth is the exact opposite of strength. It can be the source of all kinds of evil when it becomes the foundation for what God has not said. But when it connects with what God has said, and rests upon His word, God goes to work and builds upon it. The strength of faith comes from the truth of God’s word.

God’s word is in invitation to know Him. God reveals Himself in His word. He reveals what He desires to do. His works declare who He is. Since God is faithful, His word carries the seed of His faith in it. His faith is an invitation for His activity. This is what God searches for, an invitation to go to work upon His word!

As you hear God’s word and receive it as the truth, God’s faith in His word becomes the eternal structure and strength in your life. God builds upon His Solid Rock, the Life that is well pleasing to Him, the Life that He has already chosen, the Life of the Lord Jesus Christ. As God builds more and more of Himself in you and with you, more and more of His Life is seen and known through you and as you, before Him and the watching world around you. This pleases God. This is what it means to be full of faith. This is what it means to worship the Father in spirit and truth.

Today, hear God's word by listening to it, reading it, studying it, memorizing it, meditating on it, and then watch God do it! 

The Assurance of Worship

A covenant relationship is based upon promises, which is received only by faith. Trust gives a covenant relationship the capacity to grow. In a covenant relationship, there is satisfaction in knowing someone and there is growth in that relationship. In a contract, the relationship is based upon the completion of duties, of work. As long as the work is completed on time and with satisfaction, the relationship remains. The main object in a contract is the project, not a person. God desires to enter into a covenant relationship with you, not a contract.

The covenant relationship God desires with you is within the covenant relationship the Father has with the Son. This was pictured and predicted in the Old Testament in Genesis 15 when God promised Abram that his offspring would outnumber the stars and He promised him the land of Israel to dwell in (15:5 – 7). At the time, Abram was in ninety-nine years old, was childless, and was an alien in the land, but he trusted that what God said, He would do. God was pleased with Abram because he trusted Him.

In that chapter, Abram asked for assurance, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it (the land)?” God told him to prepare sacrifices for the covenant. In Abram’s day, when two parties entered into a covenant relationship, sacrifices were cut in two pieces and the parties involved would walk through the middle of the sacrifices. This bound them together by saying, “May I be torn in two like this sacrifice, if I break this covenant.” Sounds gruesome to us, but we can be gruesome in our own ways in tearing apart personal relationships.

Abram obeyed God and prepared the sacrifices and then waited. While he waited, the Bible says that God showed him the future of his offspring and when they would possess the land. Then Abram watched as “…a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” The cloud and fire of God entered into a covenant with Himself that day. Abram was included as a witness. His assurance would be found as he trusted what God revealed to him concerning Himself and His own faithfulness! What a worship service that must have been! It pleased God that day to include Abram in what He said He would do because Abram trusted God.

This episode in Abram’s life points forward to the New Covenant in Jesus Christ, when God made an eternal covenant with Himself and included you as a witness. As you see Christ on the cross giving His life for you, in order that you might have His, God was entering into a covenant with Himself for you and inviting you to watch. He would save you, if you were willing to trust that what He said, He would do. God makes His vow to Himself as you watch, just like Abram did. When you trust God, that He would make such a vow, and be faithful to Himself, you enter in to the relationship, His relationship and covenant with Himself, for you!

In your relationship with the Father, through faith in the Son, it is not your faithfulness that gives assurance, it is His! You are a witness at the cross, seeing and trusting that what God said, He did and will do. You are invited into the covenant relationship between the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son. As you see yourself in that relationship, God is pleased. This is what it means to worship the Father in spirit and truth.

Today, meditate on the new covenant between the Father and the Son for you, and know that it is not about a performance or project, it is about a Person that you can trust.

Worship in the Wilderness and the Trail of Graves

God delivered the nation of Israel out of the bondage of Egypt to take them into the land that He promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He brought them out in order to take them in. Moses was chosen by God to lead the people even though the people resisted him and God almost every step of the way. A year after they left Egypt, the nation of Israel was camped at the southern border of the Promised Land at a place called Kadesh-barnea, ready to receive the long-awaited promise of God.

Moses sent twelve spies into the Promised Land and for forty days they traveled all the way to the northern tip and back. When they returned, they reported that the land was flowing with milk and honey and brought back a huge cluster of grapes and other fruits. But they also said, “However, the people who dwell in the land are strong and the cities are fortified and very large…we saw the descendants of Anak, the Nephilim, there…so we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers to them.” Numbers 13:28 – 33

But Joshua and Caleb gave a minority report. They said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” But the other ten spies swayed the 600,000 men of Israel with their unbelief and led the congregation to begin making plans to stone Moses and to choose for themselves another leader to take them back to Egypt. Never underestimate the power of fear, unbelief, and disobedience!

God spoke to Moses and pronounced the verdict: The whole adult population of Israel, except for Joshua and Caleb, would die in the wilderness. They would wander in the wilderness one year for each of the forty days, forty years in the wilderness. Their children would be the ones who would take possession of the Promised Land. Those who voted “no” would get their will done rather than experience God’s. When they heard the word, they changed their minds and decided to go against what God had said and tried to organize an army without Moses or God’s directive. They failed miserably.

For the next forty years the nation of Israel wandered in the wilderness of Sinai while Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and Caleb dug graves, 600,000 graves. With every death, unbelief grew weaker until it was purged from the nation. They would have been easy to follow because they left behind a trail of graves, each one declaring the truth that the wages of sin is death. With every funeral, Joshua and Caleb must have preached that the flesh will deceive you, defeat you, and fail you. But with God nothing is impossible!

Imagine the graveside service of the final “adult” from that unbelieving generation, when the final shovel of sand was put on the grave. Joshua must have looked at Caleb and shouted “It is finished! Now, let’s go kill some Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites, and take possession of the Promised Land! Which they did!

We, like Israel, are also in a wilderness experience right now. We have the fire and cloud of the Holy Spirit and God’s word to lead us. We have the spiritual bread and water of Life from the Rock of Christ accompanying us. We have the promise of the Father of resurrection before us. And we also are leaving behind us a trail of graves of unbelieving flesh as it dies with every step we take in the Spirit and by the Spirit. And with every grave, faith in Christ grows and pleases the Father more and more.

Your wilderness experience is a worship experience of becoming more and more of a true worshiper as you leave behind you a trail of graves. Today, dig another grave as you walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh.

Spiritual Adrenaline and Worship

Hebrews 3 – 4 are definitive in understanding faith, the finished work of Christ, and the fulfillment of the seventh day rest. One of the principles of hermeneutics (interpretation of Scripture) is that you understand the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament, not the other way around. These two chapters give meaning to the seventh day rest of creation in Genesis 2:2 – 3 and the greater seventh day rest in Christ.

The message of the book of Hebrews is one of encouragement to believers who were discouraged by persecution and considering abandoning their walk with Christ. Some have never had to face that kind of persecution and so it is hard to identify with that temptation. But in the two chapters mentioned above, the writer reminds us of an important story in Israel’s history as it relates to the seventh day rest. He connects entering and the conquest of the Promised Land with entering the seventh day rest of God.

First he states that some of those who came out of Egypt did not enter the land because of unbelief. They died in the wilderness, while their children, led by Joshua and Caleb, entered and conquered the Promised Land (3:16 – 19). Then he says that God’s promise of entering His rest is still in effect with something much greater than what the nation of Israel received when they entered and took possession of the Promised Land under Joshua (4:1 – 10).

He reminds the believers that David prophesied in Psalm 95 about another day of rest that was coming, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” His point is that there is a greater seventh day rest of God for the people of God who will receive His word and believe. Then comes the clincher: “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.” Hebrews 4:9 – 11.

This passage teaches the truth of resting in the Life of Christ, which fully pleased the Father. This defines salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. But in order to rest in peace (RIP) with God through faith in Christ, you must die to the life of trying to please God with your own righteousness and good works (RIP). Entering the seventh day rest of God is to receive the Life of Christ, the only Life fully pleasing to the Father, believing that He is now your life, and that you are accepted and loved by the Father just as the Son is in Him!

What a relief it is to know that your life pleases the Father. This is what it means to worship the Father in spirit and truth. The seventh day of rest in the OT was the day of worship. Resting in the Life of Christ becomes a life of true worship.

The next verse gives some trouble. “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.” 4:11. The word “strive” is the Greek word, speodow, and means to exert intense effort with speed and exhilaration, to be motivated with intense desire. You could call it the Greek concept of adrenaline. We get our English word “speed” from this Greek word.

In the context of Hebrews 3 – 4, this word means that for those who have believed in the finished work of Christ for their salvation and are resting in His Life as theirs to please the Father, there is a new motivation of excitement in living His Life! In Christ there is a spiritual adrenaline for obedience and good works! The Holy Spirit motivates with spiritual truth and sound doctrine for obedience. No longer are you trying to earn God’s favor, but with greater and greater effort you are living in it! The grace of God is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.

Today, meditate on the truth that in Christ your life is His Life and that you are fully pleasing to the Father in Him, and feel the excitement of spiritual adrenaline!

The Seventh Day and Worship

The first thing that was called “holy” in creation was the seventh day, Genesis 2:3. It was also the third thing that God blessed (first blessing was given to the fish and the birds with the command to be fruitful and multiple, 1:22; second blessing given to man with the same command, 1:28).

The seventh day of creation was unique with the third blessing and then set apart with a characteristic exclusive for God, it was called holy. There would be many other places, people, and things called “holy” by God in the Old Testament, but the seventh day, the first one, gave meaning to the designation.

The seventh day of creation was blessed by God and called holy because God saw that what He had said, He had done, completely and perfectly. “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.”

God did not rest because He was tired, He rested because His work was completed. God works by speaking, and all that He had said in creation, was accomplished, and it was finished, and it was good. God is faithful. What He says, He does, perfectly, every time.

The seventh day revealed God’s faithfulness in creation, and it pleased Him. Rest is pleasant. Rest is a slow deep breath. More than that, rest signals completion and a transition to a new beginning. Rest is faithfulness in that what God has said, He will do, and will do again, and again. AMEN and Hallelujah!!!

God used “seven” in the Old Testament to point to the perfection of His work by His word, His faithfulness; seventh day, seventh month, seventh year, seventh cycle of years, all pointed to His work by His word to reveal that God is faithful. When man joined Him in being faithful, he (man) pleased God and was called righteous, holy, faithful. These are all characteristics of God and are good and please Him.

But the Old Testament also reveals the failure of man to be faithful. Man is seen in the OT as sinful, unfaithful and disobedient. But in the midst of man’s unfaithfulness, God promised One who would come and be perfectly faithful; His Servant, His Messiah. The OT closed with the signal that Elijah would announce His arrival (Malachi 4:5 – 6, the last two verses of the OT).

The New Testament is the record of the Life of rest, the Life of faithfulness, the Life that is pleasing to the Father, the Life of Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son. When Jesus was dying on the cross, His last words were “It is finished!” and the six days of the New Creation were completed, salvation was created in Christ!

When you put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the work of salvation that He accomplished by His Life, death, and resurrection from the dead, you enter His seventh day, His rest. Joining Christ in His finished work pleases the Father because He sees Himself in you, He sees the faithfulness of His Son. This is what it means to worship the Father in spirit and truth.

Today, rest from trying to please God and see that Christ Jesus did, fully and perfectly. Rest in that truth and receive His Life as yours today. Meditate on that Life by reading one event from the gospel accounts of His Life and see yourself learning of Him in that event. For example, meditate Luke 19:1 – 10, the story of Zacchaeus.