Gooding, David: 1 - Introduction

Five very short scriptures will suffice to introduce our topic this morning and our topic in the coming weeks. And the first of those scriptures is found in the book of Genesis and chapter twenty two. Book of Genesis, chapter twenty two and verse five. And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass, and I and the lad will go yonder, and we will worship, and come again unto Unto you. you. The second scripture is found in chapter twenty four of that same book. At verse twenty six. And the man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord. And he said, blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who hath not forsaken his mercy and his truth toward my master. As for me, the Lord hath led me in the way to the house of my master's brethren. Next we go to the New Testament and to the gospel by Matthew and chapter fourteen. Matthew fourteen and verse thirty three. And they that were in the boat worshipped him, saying of a truth, thou art the Son of God. Luke chapter twenty four is our next sentence. Luke twenty four, m Let's read its context from verse fifty. And he led them out until they were over against Bethany. And he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him. And our last for the moment is found in the gospel by John and chapter nine. m John's gospel, chapter nine and verse thirty five. And Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and finding him, he said, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? He answered and said, And who is he, Lord, that I may believe on him? Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and he it is that speaketh with thee. And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him. God used his word to provoke that same attitude of heart within us all. You have invited me today and on five further occasions this term to lead you in thinking about an activity that is in fact the highest activity that the human heart is capable of. The activity of the adoration by the creature of his creator and redeemer. At least that is how I have read the intent of your invitation to me. I have been asked to speak these Sunday mornings on the topic of worship. And you will, I am aware, you will have realized that the words, the Greek and Hebrew words in our Bibles that are translated worship, carry an exceedingly wide range of meaning. I too am aware of that. They can indicate service. For there is a sense in which our worship of God is nothing less than our day-to-day and hourly and moment-by-moment service of the Lord in all its aspects, and particularly in its practical details. To yield our bodies a living sacrifice to God, this is our reasonable service, not to be counted the drudgery of a slave, nor the mere fulfilling of a duty. The yielding of our bodies, our energies, and our minds to the service of God in every particular of life. This too is counted by God, the worship of his name. Such worship will include, says the New Testament, that we are to do good and to share our material goods and benefits with other people. For with such sacrifices, God is well pleased. Indeed, without those sacrifices, our worship otherwise might be a very doubtful quality. Our Lord himself has reminded us, has he not, in his famous parable of the Good Samaritan, how that a worship of God that is content with the singing of hymns and the performance of ritual, and neglects the duty of compassion to our fellow men, such worship is of exceedingly questionable quality. There were, says this parable, a priest and a Levite, and on their way to or from the temple, they came across a man lying by the roadside, victim of a terrorist attack. The man was half dead, and they cast a glance in his direction and passed by on the other side. Let us give those two men the benefit of the doubt. Let us suppose that they said within their hearts that if they dared to stop to assist that half dead man, they ran the risk of ritual defilement and would have been disqualified to engage in the service of God in the temple at Jerusalem. And let us further suppose that they had grasped in their hearts that the service of God in direct thanksgiving and adoration, this is and must be the highest activity that any human is called to, and that by definition the service of God must come first. Let us suppose all that. Yet they were wrong. For God incarnate himself has shown us that God himself would put the need of the human in such desperate circumstance before even his own praise and worship. I am aware of that as I come to lead your thoughts on worship, not in the sense of service, but rather in the sense of adoration. I am aware too that the topic of worship in Holy Scripture includes not merely our service to God and our fellow men, but includes the service, indeed the sacrifice of thanksgiving. It is a lovely thing to give thanks to God for all his benefits received. And should our hearts grow laggard and prefer to receive God's gifts rather than to give thanks for them, then we must remember it is our bound and duty to rally our soul and to call upon it, that deliberately and with forethought, with ingenuity and sincerity, we thank God and bless his name for the benefits that he has given us. Not one of those benefits comes to us by accident. Every single gift and every single giving comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no changeableness. With deliberate design he chooses the gift, and with perfect wisdom he times the giving. And if he so gives to us with such deliberate care and thought, it is an appalling sentiment within us, should we say, but I don't feel like giving thanks. Suppose you don't, my good Christian man. Don't tell anybody. And above all, don't tell him who gave you the gifts, but rally your sluggish soul. Call upon it and summon it to its duty. Bless the Lord and forget not all his benefits. God incarnate taught us, did he not, by his comment on nine lepers? How black the sin of ingratitude appears before God. Ten lepers were cleansed, one only came back to give thanks. Where are the nine? said Christ. Practical duties, I'm sure, had called them. The home that had been so sadly neglected in the absence of its owner these some months or years. The wallpaper coming off the bedroom and the rain coming through the roof and the need to get another job and start up life again, to visit long lost relatives, to meet the wife, of course. All these pressing duties claimed their time and attention when now they felt themselves well again and freed of their leprosy. Even so, let their do- duties be what they will. They ought to have returned, says Christ, deliberately turning their back on all other things and all other duties. They ought to have returned to give thanks. And we who begin to realize in some little way what Christ our Lord has done for us by dying at Calvary, we do well, once a week at least, to turn our backs on every other activity and avocation, and deliberately return and give thanks. For all that, I propose in this series of talks with you not to consider worship in the sense of our service of God and our fellow men, nor indeed simply worship in the sense of thanksgiving to God. I choose rather to talk of worship in the sense of adoration. Worship as it is expressed in both Old and New Testaments as the bowing down before God. Be it the bowing down of our persons in his presence, or even more significantly, the bowing down of heart and mind in ad- adoration and adoring wonder. Not of God's gifts so much. As the wonder of God himself. The wonder of his person and of his character. Be it his majesty or his power, his grace or his faithfulness, or even that dark glory that is his wrath. I propose these days to talk with you about our worship of the divine persons for what they are in themselves. I should like you to understand that in us making these distinctions, I am not proposing to lay down any legalistic rules and regulations. Nor am I keeping in watertight compartments things that, uh, mix among themselves freely. Certainly it is far from my intention to discourage thanksgiving and gratitude, or the expression of gratitude in the meetings of the church. For often it is that gratitude lies at the beginnings of worship. Gratitude is the foothills, so to speak, that presently give place to the higher mountain peaks of adoration of the divine persons. But this I do say, that splendid and proper as gratitude for God's gifts is, sooner or later, gratitude for God's gifts must give way to adoration of God himself. Let gratitude forever concentrate on the gifts that I have received. And never turn her eye to the glory of the giver who gave them. Let gratitude constantly, I say, concentrate simply on the gifts that God has given me, then gratitude herself becomes suspect. Suspect of being selfish. Indeed, were you to listen to my own attempts at worship, you might well conclude that here is a man who, in his highest moments, gives evidence of being incorrigibly self-centered, always thinking about what he has received, with a bare and tiny and poverty-stricken appreciation of the person who gave him what he has received. If If then then it is my duty in response to your invitation, and it was you who asked me. If it is my duty to lead our thinking in these weeks about adoration of the divine persons, then as I pondered it and how I should go about it. It seemed clear to me what I must do. I could not, it seemed to me, suggest to you all sorts of recipes, rules or regulations for the kind of expression that you might adopt in your adoration of the Lord. Nor how you should conduct your meetings arranged for that purpose. I must do something differently. If I may for a m- for a moment descend from sublime and holy things with impossible incongruity to another realm, I could perhaps illustrate what now I wish to say. Suppose I had been asked to come here to help you to laugh. Indeed, had that been the purpose, they would have chosen somebody else, of course. How should I have gone about it? I could have chosen to talk to you about the mechanics of it, how you must use your young lungs and what you must do with your mouth and the kind of noises that are good to hear when people laugh and those impossible laughs that split your eardrums. You wouldn't have laughed, except at my absurdity. No, had my desire been to cause you to laugh, I shouldn't have told you how to laugh. I should have told you funny stories, and you would have laughed. For trying to laugh is a very difficult thing to do, and it's a well-nigh impossible thing to do with sincerity. And trying to worship, oh, what a sad and sorry thing it is. What would I feel like if presently God spoke out of heaven and said, Gooding, what are you trying to do? And I said, Lord, I was trying to worship you. I found it a difficult job, Lord. If my worship is going to be anything, then it must be my almost instinctive response, channeled by my intelligence, but my instinctive response to some glory of God that I have perceived. Or if I might come a bit higher, suppose I had been asked, and I never would be, to come and help you make a proper response to good music. I could, I suppose, uh, suggest to you that if you would save your face when the concert is finished, that you should say something like, how superb! Wasn't the flautist very grateful- graceful? That's one of his best compositions, I think. Or if you really wanted to pose as a cognoscente, you would say, I don't think that's up to his normal standards. What use would it be? I could teach a parrot to say that. And alas, once I had taught the parrot to say it, the trouble is he'd go on saying it and saying it and saying it, and keep on using the same expressions every week, every week, every week, the same expression. Till it became evident to all who heard that my parrot was merely speaking empty phrases, and worse still, he didn't even know what they meant. And I must be careful in my worship, must I not? Of not becoming a parrot. It seemed to me, therefore, that if I would lead you in thinking of worship as adoration of God, what I must do is to talk to you about God himself. And pray that as I do so, God by his spirit will show you something of him. It will instinctively call out your response of adoration. If you will help me to worship God in this sense, my brother. Tell me, yes, how he has brought me, delivered me out of darkness. Tell me about that darkness until I feel it in my very bones. Gratitude fills my heart when I think of what I have been rescued from. Tell me too about that marvelous light into which God has brought me, and tell me of those ten thousand blessings that God has given me and shall yet provide. But when you've done that, go further, pray, go further. Tell me not about the darkness merely, nor about the light, but tell me of the virtues of him that called me. Tell me that if God had been a different kind of God from what he is, I must have perished forever. Tell me about the virtues of him that called me out of darkness into his light. Until the greater wonder is not the blessing he has given, but the wonder that he is the kind of God he is. For this, it is evident we shall need to know God. And you will see a difference between gratitude for gifts and adoration. Sometimes they come tumbling through our letter boxes, a packet or so. Inside the packet, perhaps, is a book. Some enterprising advertising firm has sent it along with their compliments and other ulterior motives. And as you open the package, you say, well, I don't know these people who sent me this book, but this is a jolly fine book. I don't know the man who wrote the address, but whoever he is, I- I mean, I- I feel very grateful for the book. It's a lovely book. You can feel gratitude without knowing the giver. You'll scarcely adore God without knowing God. But example is better than precept, isn't it? And if perchance this morning in our initial study we find it a little bit difficult to see the difference between gratitude for a gift and adoration of the person who gave it, then let us, by their permission, intrude upon the worship of some of our ancient brethren and sisters. And I start with Abraham's obscure servanthood. Part of that delightful tale, how Abram in his old age sought a bride and wife for his son Isaac, and sent his servant down to his kindred, to that far off country, to find a suitable girl. And the servant went, burdened with his responsibility. A difficult task, you might think yourself, in any circumstance to do any such thing. Choosing a wife for oneself is difficult enough, choosing her for somebody else must be extraordinarily difficult. It wasn't merely that. Abraham was a sheikh of great riches. He might be choosy on those grounds, just who married his only son. Way beyond that too went the fact that Abraham was God's friend, chosen of God to play a unique role in history, and the seed of Abraham, privileged of God indeed to carry the divine purpose down the centuries. This was no small task, to find a wife for Isaac. And he went and came at length to a place and used his common sense and judgment, good man that he was. For meeting these girls, he proposed to one of them that she should give him to drink, and the dear woman not only gave him to drink, but volunteered to give his camels drink to well, a good augury of what she might do for Isaac in the home on Monday afternoons, when the wedding was long since passed. Then presently he inquired who the girl might be, and found that the girl was none other than a distant relative of the very same family of Abraham. And in that moment, it was as though for an instance a veil had been drawn aside. And the servant saw something of God. And the wonder of God. Blessed be God, said he, that has not abandoned his truth and faithfulness towards my master Abraham. You notice what the man is saying, don't you? He's not saying, oh God, how marvelously kind for you to have picked a girl so gloriously looking. Oh, Isaac will be pleased with her. He was indeed when he got her, that was true. And gratitude might well have expressed itself in those terms, at least from Isaac. But at this moment, it wasn't at the girl's beauty that the man was looking. He was looking up into heaven. And had now caught vivid sight of the faithfulness of God, the wonder of his providences that behind the scenes control our lives. When the going is easy and when the going is difficult, and when on times for months on end we see no evidence of the divine hand, and our duties almost overwhelm us. But yet, now he saw, and all that while, God had been planning for his good, and left to himself. God had been faithful, and God had been merciful. All the wonder that the God of heaven should descend to such a small detail and guide that man so precisely. You think of the places he could have gone, to the girls that would have been all too willing to say yes. And the sense that God is so big, that his providences concern themselves so precisely, and that he is faithful and true. In that moment, it was as though a veil had been drawn aside, and he saw into the very heart of God. And before the veil came back again, he bowed his head and worshipped God. I know not what thousand and one blessings have come your way this week. I know you are grateful for them. From time to time, has it not so been with you? That it was not so much the gift given. It was the insight it gave you into the wonder of God's providence and the precision of his timings and the sense of his faithfulness. Thus was it with that great, uh, example of worship that we read of in chapter twenty two, where Abram with his only son climbed Mount Moriah to offer him upon the altar. Pray, Abram, what is it you intend as you climb this mountain to lay your only son upon an altar? What is it you intend? Says Abram, we go to worship. Worship? Abram. Are you going to have a a meeting of thanksgiving up on the mountain and and rehearse in the ears of God all the wonders of the benefits that he has given you. No, not today. That Abram had done a thousand times and more in the days that were past. He had gifts of sheep and oxen, of servants and menservants and maidservants, and wealth beyond computation. And doubtless he had many times thanked God for his gifts. But today wasn't to be a Thanksgiving meeting for gifts. This day, God had asked him to take the sublimest gift. The gift that made sense of all the other gifts. The thing without which life was empty and nothing apart from God. God had asked Abram to give it back to God. I say, Abram, what kind of a God is that? That would give you a gift one day and take it away the next. Go you, Abram, to offer your son because you are afraid of his lightning, lest he strike you dead if you don't surrender your son. Nonsense, says Abram. I go to give my all to God. I go to worship him. What were all his gifts had I not God? Let me tell God what I think of God. Though I had all heaven and ten thousand galaxies beside, and had not God himself, how immeasurably poverty stricken should I be. Let God take all so long as God be mine. I go to tell him that. I go to tell him more. God has said that in Isaac shall my seed be called. I cannot tell you how he will do it. Will he raise him from the dead, or what will he do? I cannot tell you. I go to tell him what I think of him. I will offer my son as he tells me to, and I will tell him that I believe that he's not a God of the yes and no, a God who says yes today and no tomorrow. I shall tell him I believe he is a God of utter consistency, true to his word, though heaven and hell fall apart. If he has said he will bless me and Isaac, he will bless me, though now I put him on this altar. I go to tell God what I think of God, and I shall not wait till the sun shines. I shall not wait till he gives me Isaac back and the warmth of the summer sun begins to unfreeze my heart. Now, in the dark moment, in the flood of the trial, I want to tell God now that God is my all, my magnificent God, and I want to tell him I trust him now. Yes, I shall tell him that in the sunshine of heaven, when it's all come right in the end. That'll be easy to do. I should be ashamed to turn up there and join the choir at that late stage, says Abram. I'll do it now. And he took his all and put it on the altar, and together Abram and his son, they worshipped God. God induced in our hearts such appreciation of himself that we too might be found in this vale of tears as those who thus think well.