"Trials in True Worship" - 2 Samuel 6:1-23

What can you learn from looking closely at David's trials in discovering true worship?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Oh well, Cedar Street, I love you so, so very much. It's my joy to be with you here this morning. I hope everybody's doing well as we are knee deep in the month of March now. Again, great weather, awful pollen. I wish they were not a package deal, but they are. But we're also knee deep in a sermon series. I know some people have been kind of coming and going. We are in a sermon series as we're looking at the life of King David in 2 Samuel. And as you can see on the screen, our series is entitled Faithful and Flawed. Faithful and Flawed. And we're learning from David a man of great faith who ran after God's own heart, but also a man of great flaws who ran after God's amazing grace. And in this week and in every week of the series, my hope would be that you see the life of King David points us to the need for a better and perfect King Jesus. Every passage should point us in some way to Jesus. Now I want to ask you a question. When I say the word worship, what's the first thing you think about? If I said worship, the first thing that comes to your mind, most people would think singing. Most people would think music, right? In fact, we would call uh Jody has a thousand titles of this church. Of course, he's our minister of music and media, but we call him our worship leader. He brings us into the presence of God for the purpose of worship. So singing is a very, very important part of it. But it's not the whole picture. The whole picture is a life with God. Worship is an experience, it's a relationship that we have with the creator of the universe. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't understand this for a long time, even when I first came to faith, when I would read all these passages about giving God praise and honor and glory and worshiping Him and God commanding us to come into His presence. And I didn't understand that this wasn't an obligation, it was a privilege. And I would say this: here's something to think about, okay? This is a really important sentence I want to share here. If you look at the screen, uh here's here's something to think about. Worship is not an obligation to appease God, it's an invitation to enjoy God. I'll say it again. Worship is not an obligation to appease God, it's an invitation to enjoy God. Here's what I mean by that. When you are in the presence of something that is great, you enjoy it. You go to your favorite sporting event and see great athletes performing, you enjoy it. You go to a concert and hear a musician, you enjoy it. You go to a gallery of an artist and you see an amazing series of paintings, you enjoy it. When you are in the presence of something great, your natural reaction is to enjoy the gift. Well, God, when he created us, he calls us to come into relationship with him so that when we know him and we recognize his greatness and his glory and his majesty, worship is the overflow of that relationship. Worship is an invitation to enjoy God. Why is it so hard? Because you and I are sinful. And we have other things in our hearts a lot of times that we enjoy more than we enjoy Him. We call those idols, false gods, that get all that enjoyment and that praise when God is worthy of the central part of our enjoyment and our praise. And the second thing is sometimes we struggle to know the one true God. We don't recognize who He is and we don't respond accordingly. And so today David's gonna really help us. David's gonna help us to understand what true worship is all about. The title of our message here this morning is Trials in True Worship, as we look at 2 Samuel chapter 6, verses 1 through 23. God does want you to enjoy him. God does want you to have a personal, abiding, vibrant, intimate relationship with him. But you have to come into the presence of God on his terms, not yours. And we find out in the Old Testament here in 2 Samuel what happens when people try to enter into the presence of God on their own terms and why we need a Savior. We're gonna look at that much closer. But what's our big idea in one sentence as we get ready to walk through this chapter together? In one sentence, here it is. David's trials and bringing the ark of God into Jerusalem reveal God's requirements for true kingdom worship. David's trials and bringing the ark of God into Jerusalem reveal God's requirements for true kingdom worship. So if you want to know more about this, please join me by turning to the book of 2 Samuel. Again, if you don't have a Bible, grab the Pew Bible in front of you or beside you. If you're new to the Bible, it's after 1 Samuel, it's before 1 Kings, and it's on page 303 in your Pew Bible. And if you would stand at this time, out of the reverence to the reading of God's holy, infallible, inerrant, and fully sufficient word, we are in 2 Samuel chapter 6. We're going to look at the whole chapter together, and then we're going to just pick apart the most important words and movements in the text to understand true worship. Starting in verse 1, it says, David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, 30,000, and David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Baal Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called the name of the Lord of hosts, who sits enthroned on the cherubim. And they carried the ark of God on a new cart, and brought it out to the house of Abinadab, which was built on the hill. And Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the ark of God, and Ahio went before the ark. And David and all the house of Israel were making merry before the Lord with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And when they came to the threshing floor of Nakan, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah. And God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God. And David was angry because the Lord had burst forth against Uzzah, and that place is called Perez Uzzah to this day. And David was afraid of the Lord that day, and he said, How can the ark of the Lord come to me? So David was not willing to take the ark of the Lord into the city of David, but David took it aside to the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite, and the ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite three months, and the Lord blessed Obed-Edom and all his household. And it was told King David, The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God. So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the city of David with rejoicing. And when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six steps, he sacrificed an ox and a fattened animal, and David danced before the Lord with all his might. And David was wearing a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the horn. As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michael, the daughter of Saul, looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart. And they brought in the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent, and David had pitched for it. And David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord. And when David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts, and distributed among all the people the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, a cake of bread, a portion of meat, a cake of raisins to each one. Then all the people departed, each to his house. And David returned to bless his household. But Michael, the daughter of Saul, came out to meet David and said, How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servant, female servants, as well as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself. And David said to Michael, It was before the Lord who chose me above your father and above all his house to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the Lord, and I will make merry before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor. And Michael, the daughter of Saul, had no children to the day of her death. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray. We don't fully recognize who you are. And we also let many false gods take up residence in our heart when you are the one that deserves all of our very, very best. Lord, help us as we walk through this passage together to understand what is true kingdom worship for all Christians in all denominations, all tribes, all tongues and all nations. Lord, be with us. Help us to leave here today understanding more than when we first walked in what true worship is all about. Be with us right now, I pray, in Jesus' name. And God's people said. Amen. Thank you for standing for the reading of God's Word. I know that's a long chapter. I'm going to hit some high notes, and I want to be super practical. My goal as your pastor and friend is that you and I together would grow in our relationship with God. And I'm not being helpful if I'm not being practical. So I'm going to try to, with the help of God as we walk through his word together, talk about how this applies to us. But first I want to say if you're new to the Bible, if you're new to church here, if you haven't been here the last few weeks, we've looked in the first five chapters at how David has become king over all of Israel, and he is establishing his reign. And as part of his reign here in chapter six, he's bringing the ark of God into the city of God. Now, if you're new to the Bible, you say, but what's the Ark of God? Okay, another term for it in Scripture is the Ark of the Covenant. And if you've never seen this before, the Ark of God is a wooden storage chest made of acacia wood and covered in solid gold. Inside this storage chest are the most important aspects of the Jewish faith of the Old Covenant. It's the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the budding staff of Aaron, and manna that God showered down from heaven. All right, these are inside the Ark of God, or otherwise known as the Ark of the Covenant. And if you've never read the Old Testament, as the people of God would gather together in the house of God, which was a traveling tabernacle at the time, the ark was put inside the deepest part of the tabernacle, known as the Holy of Holies, and that is where the unfiltered, manifested presence of God was. And it was to represent the holiness of God's presence, that mankind could not just come into the presence of God on their own. They needed to be made holy before they could come into the presence of somebody holy. And so the high priest is the only one that could go into the holy of holies and only to make atonement for the sins of the people of Israel. And you say, well, Bo, then how can we come into the presence of God today? And you know the answer? Jesus. Because of Jesus, who was holy for us, who lived perfectly for us, died sacrificially for us, rose supernaturally for us, ascended heavenly, and sent down his Holy Spirit to live inside of us for us. He makes us holy by his shed blood. And because of that, we can come into the presence of a holy God and have true, genuine worship. And we don't need a high priest to do it for us because Jesus himself is our high priest. Praise God. You and I have an opportunity to worship him. However, even if we are made holy through the finished work of Jesus Christ and we claim that simply by faith, that does not lessen the holiness of God today. And so even though we're invited as children to come into the presence of a Father, we still need to recognize whose presence we're coming into and what is required for true, heartfelt kingdom worship. So let's look at this together. I want to look at three aspects of true worship according to this passage. Here's the first. Number one, true worship requires our total honor. Our total honor. All right, now in verses 1 through 10, we see the first movement of the text here where they're getting ready to bring the ark into the city of David, and something happens. They put this ark, this wood chest, they put it on an ox cart that is not very stable, and it starts to move. Just kind of looking at it and saying, she'll ride. And all of a sudden you start, and the cart's moving all over the place. Now, this is something really important that you need to know. All right. Brother Eddie said this may or may not be part of your Bible trivia this week. Why was there a certain way they needed to approach the ark? Well, in the book of Numbers, it says that human hands are not to touch the ark. They had poles that were supposed to be used so that the ark could be moved from place to place. You were not to touch the ark of God because it represented the presence of God, and it represented that he is holy, and we need to be holy to be in his presence, and we are not, so we need a savior. So even what is what is talked about on the book of Numbers points to the need for a savior hundreds of years before Jesus ever came. And so Uzzah puts out his hand to keep the stumbling cart, and what happens the moment he touches the holy ark of God? Exactly what God said in Numbers was going to happen. God took his life. It says, uh, looking at the text here, in verse 6, it says, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, and the oxen stumbled. And in verse 7, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God. That God, who never changes, is as holy today as he was back then. But again, you and I do not have to have the fear of condemnation, the fear of instant death coming into his presence, because you and I have been made holy by the blood of Jesus Christ. The Bible says that you and I can go boldly to the throne of grace to seek help in time of need. What a great offering that God gives us. But we need to understand this. We need to understand this, that we are still coming into the presence of a holy God. All right, now I have found on a scale that most of us we tip too far in one side or the other. All right, on the scale of worship, there is reverence for God on one side, and there's intimacy with God on the other side. Now, I'm not saying this is a one-to-one ratio, but I'm saying, generationally speaking, the older typically naturally have a reverence for God, but they struggle to have intimacy with Him. I've noticed with the younger generations. Everything they write about in their devotions, everything they post on social media is all about intimacy with God. But sometimes they talk about God in a very irreverent way. God is both. He is transcendent and worthy of our honor. But yet he's eminent, which means he's as close to you as the air you breathe, and he loves you and he desires intimacy with you. And so I want to say in this room, before we move on to the second point, where do you fall on that scale? Would you say that you had you fear God and have a reverence for him, but it's hard to think of him as an intimate father and a friend? He does say, you are my friend if you do what I command you. That's what Jesus says in the Gospel of John. He wants intimacy and friendship with you if you meet him on his terms. But maybe you're over here and you say, I got no problem thinking of him as a father and a friend. I love the Lord. And I'd say, Are you honoring him? Are you honoring him with your life? Do you recognize his holiness that even though he forgives you in his grace, he is still a holy father who is not to be trifled with? True worship holds both of those truths in tension at the same time. We come to him with reverence, but we also recognize he offers intimacy through Christ. That's how we honor him. That's how we worship him rightly in spirit and in truth. That's number one. True worship requires our total honor. Number two, as you look at verses 11 through 15, true worship requires our total heart. Now skip down to verse 13 with me, and here's what it says. And when those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six steps, he sacrificed an ox and a fattened animal, and David danced before the Lord with all his might. If you're a note taker, underline it, highlight it, circle it. All his might. With everything I have, with all that I am, and with all that I have, and with all that I do, with all of my love, I give my heart to God. That is worship. Not, hey preacher, I'm just gonna let you know we're gonna be out of church the next four Sundays. We got a lot to do, we got a lot going on. We'll get to it when we get to it. Yeah, you know, Lord, I I may serve or I may not serve. I just don't know if I'm gonna have enough time. Yeah, I know it's been a couple weeks since I prayed. Yeah, I just I need to get around to it. I'm I'm not I'm not playing guilt trip, I'm just saying this is reality. Does God receive our very best or does he receive our leftovers? In your own life right now, your time. Do you come when you have time, or do you make the commitment to be with the Lord and worship him, and everything else has to take second stage to when you make that commitment to be with him? Now, I'm not saying that we're not human, we don't have vacations, those things are part of it, but I know the people that I know on vacation, they're they're seeking to worship God somewhere. And what about what about our resources financially? Now I know we're a mission-driven church, and I'm so grateful for that. We have lots of opportunities. This month alone, we have the Annie Armstrong Easter offering that goes to North American missions. And in this service alone, every penny that's given to the Gideon ministry is going to go directly towards putting Bibles in people's hands. When you sacrificially give to the kingdom, that is an act of worship. Do you give God your first fruits or do you give God your pocket change? You have to think about that. Now it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what I think. A lot of times people act weird around pastors. I have no authority to judge you, and I don't want to judge you. It's not my job, it's not my role. Your relationship with God is between you and the Lord. But David here decided to worship God, and it says, with all of his might. This is why later on we're going to see David living in great sin, and even in the greatness of his sin, it still says he's a man after God's own heart because he gave God everything he had, even though he certainly stumbled and fell. Have you given God your very best, your time, your talent, and your treasures? Or are you giving him your leftovers? Again, that may look different for everybody in this room, but it's something you and I need to think about. And I need to think about it myself as I'm walking through this passage. Pastors are not prone or are not protected from having seasons where we drift from God. And the second thing, it needs to be not just sacrificial, it needs to be authentic. Now, this is important. I want you to hear this, okay? This is another thing I wish that Christians knew. All right, uh years ago, I had a Sunday night study that I thought was so important. I went to several people that typically don't come on Sunday nights, and I asked them to come, and most of them did not. And if they could grasp the truth of this, it would change things. Here, the study was called Sacred Pathways, written by a guy named Gary Thomas. In fact, Brother Joe, I've told you about that book years ago. And basically he said, and he's not the only author to do this, but he said, if you look at Christians, we are wired to experience God through different pathways. All right, and so the ones that he listed, some are charismatic and very worship-driven. And so for them, worship is movement, it's sound, it's loud, it's vibrant. I can't experience God unless I'm moving, shaking, and shouting. On this side over here, you have very intellectual, uh, you have even some that are aesthetic and like to be alone and in solitude, and you have contemplative, those that are deep thinkers, that worship God through thought, that worship God through silence and meditation on the truth. Now that's the scale. There's a lot in between. All right, for those that are wired for worship, where you've got to be moving and shaken, be who you are, but don't look down on other people who are not like you. I've had friends, even people out of state that tune into Cedar Street services sometimes, and I had one person say, Man, I love your church services, but your people don't move at all during worship. And you know why the person said that? That person's very charismatic. We, by and large, at this church mostly are not. That's okay. For me, all right, I'm very contemplative. I'm a deep thinker, so loud movement is distracting for me, but it might not be for the person standing next to me. That's why at church, you and I need to look at each other and recognize we're not wired the same way. Right? And so we need to stop looking at people saying, you need to start moving and shaking and singing, and or on the other side, you need to stop moving or singing or shaking. No, you be who you are. However, God has made you, seek him with all of your might. You know, I remember this years ago, it frustrated me so much. We had a uh community worship service at the Guidos. This was maybe a decade ago. Uh, thankfully, the the last couple services we had that the CLC organized were amazing. And I would encourage you to come a couple Sunday nights from now. Is it next week? Yeah, next Sunday night we'll be at the Guido's, and we've got I don't know how many different churches, including our very own Jody, that's going to be leading us in worship. I'd I would love for you to come. But let me just say this about 10 years ago, we were doing uh community service or community worship. I think it was called Metter Praise. I know, Brother Eddie, you had a leadership role in that. And one of the services we had, it was going great. We had all these churches that were singing and praising. And the last church that came up, I don't even know what church it was, the guy came up behind the microphone, he said, Now we gathered here for worship, but y'all just been warming up. Now we're gonna have worship. And what he was saying was basically, you guys have been playing around because you're not doing it my way. Because loud and moving, that is true worship, and anything else is not giving God your very best. And to that I say, don't go there. Be who you are. Be authentic in how God made you, and however he made you, you give him your very best and stop caring about what other people think. Why is it that the altars are not flooded on Sunday mornings at the end of service when God is dealing with you? Because you're terrified of what everybody else is going to whisper while you're at the altar. What's wrong with him? What did he do last night? Who cares? True worship requires that you abandon what other people think and you approach God with how he's made you, and that's the third and final point. True worship requires not only our total honor, our total heart, it also requires our total humility. In verse 16, it says, As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michael, the daughter of Saul, looked out at the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart. Why did she despise him? She thought, you're a king. You're supposed to have honor and dignity. How dare you dance around as some average person. You're supposed to be the king of the people. And David said, Do you think I really care what you think? What I'm fixing to do is gonna make it even worse. I will be abased in your eyes. This God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has made me king over these people. And for everything he's done for me, I'm gonna worship him with my whole heart. And I do not care what you think. I do not care what you think. I'm telling you, if you truly worship God as God has wired you to worship, you have to get to a point where you don't care what other people think. All right? True worship requires you to be humble and celebrate regardless of what people think publicly, to humble yourself and prioritize your relationship with God over public opinion. Now, again, I do want to say, one caveat that I would say, when we gather corporately, God is a God of order, and I don't think chaos honors dishonor. Chaos is not something that honors God. But within that, there's still room for us to be vibrant and charismatic if you're made that way. And if you're not, that's okay too. Be who you are. Truly who you are. God knows your heart anyway. I'm gonna tell you a story as we close out. Over the years, as I've gone to visit family and friends, I typically hide my devotional life. I don't, and I don't want to be forceful. I know that I can be aggressive in my faith and it can be overbearing for people that are not on the same path that I am. That's okay. I recognize my personality. All right. But I remember a time not too long ago when I went to visit some family, and for the first time I said, you know what? I really don't care how stupid I look. Now, for me, that the the truest part of devotion and worship for me is probably different than most of you. Um you're good. You're good. Uh Alexa, what's true worship? Uh um, so I have attention deficit issues. This has been well documented. So whenever I pray and read scripture, I need to have background music. So I carry with me everywhere this sound machine that plays soft piano music. And the second thing I do most days is I set my chair to the window so that when I'm reading scripture and praying, I can look at nature and I can cast my focus on something, typically trees or something that can keep me from going like a ping pong ball. It takes a lot of effort for somebody with attention issues to really pray and study scripture. Well, I went I went to go uh visit my sister last summer, and I said, I don't care how dumb I look. I set it up in the corner of her dining room. I put the chair around and put the piano music in, and I prayed and read, and yeah, a couple days in I realized that the chair was facing the driveway, so my nieces were coming up the driveway looking at me and like, what's wrong with Uncle Bobo? I became the weird uncle at that point. But I wasn't staring at them, I was staring over them, trying to pray, trying to read. And I realized it was probably weird for them. I'm in their house playing piano music, staring out the window. But you know, I've gotten to a point where I really don't care. I don't want to offend anybody, but I gotta be who I am. And why should I be that devoted to him privately and then publicly act like I don't know him? God cares about this, he knows. You can't be two-faced, you've got to be genuine in how God has made you. That's what worship is all about. Somebody lay on the plane here. How do I sum this up? Of course, this always points to Jesus. David's worship as Israel's king points to Jesus, our eternal king, whose sacrificial life fulfilled all requirements of true worship. I'll say it again. David's worship as Israel's king points to Jesus, our eternal king, whose sacrificial life fulfilled all requirements of true worship. Now I get this from Philippians 2, verses 5 through 8. Think about the humility of Jesus in coming to live for us from the direction of the Father. It says, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man, and being found in human form. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Now I know that John and Bubba's class has been studying Philippians, right? Some of you know this passage well. In that passage, it doesn't say that Jesus ever stopped being God. He always was God, was God in that moment, and always will be God. When he became fully human, he set aside some of the privileges of being God so he could enter into our humanity and live our life for us to earn our righteousness. He humbled himself. The highest act of worship is obedience. And he obeyed down to the letter everything the Father gave him to do. And he didn't care what others thought. When people said, Boy, the crowd's getting big over there, you need to go over there. He said, No, I need to be alone with the Father. He constantly sought to offer true worship to the Father, and in that he makes it possible for us to have true worship. He makes us holy in his blood. He gives us his Holy Spirit to help us. And he shows us if we walk with him, he shows us who we are and who we're not. Part of the Christian journey is you get to discover your true self. I've learned so much about the gifts God's given me and the limitations that He's placed on my life so that I can stop envying people who are not like me. I do wish that I was more charismatic. I wish I had the gift of music like Jody does. I can't carry a note in a bucket. But that's not my role. I can appreciate the ones that have that gift. So as we draw to a close, here's the invitation. Think of your life with God right now. Would you say in your life right now that not perfectly but consistently you model true worship? That you give God the honor that he deserves, you give him your total heart, and you also are humble that you don't care what people think when it is that you do what you do for God. Maybe you are a faithful follower, and maybe you've just drifted a little bit. Gosh, I've been in that category so many times. Other things have distracted you, other things have taken precedent. You would not say that your time and your money are given to God as a priority, but maybe as leftovers in this season, and maybe God wants you to make that priority today. And maybe you have been worshiping Him, but you're still worried about what other people think. Maybe today's the day to dance like David and say, I really don't care. As we pray, that's the invitation. However, you choose to respond, respond in true worship. Let's pray. Father, I recognize the challenges in truly worshiping you. We don't get a clear view of who you are all the time. We dishonor you with our thoughts, words, and actions and attitudes sometimes. We give you our leftovers sometimes. We are scared of what other people think sometimes. Lord, I pray right now, in the name of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit, that you would help us in your grace to not play games with you, but to be genuine. All warts, wrinkles, and all to come to you just as we are, to love you as we are, to give you our very best as we are, and to recognize that you're not any less holy than you were when Uzzah touched the ark. But we are made holy to come into your presence because the blood of Jesus makes us holy. Be with us right now, I pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.