We All Worship Always

Who Will You Worship?

When I get to preach on whatever I want, it is hard to choose, because the Bible is a long book and all of it is good. This time I took us to Exodus 20 and the first five of the Ten Commandments. God calls them words, and they are really a covenant between two parties. And the whole passage is about worship, though not always the way we think of it. There is formal worship, the times we set apart to gather. But worship goes far beyond that. It is a mindset and a heart attitude, because worship is valuing God. “When we value God above all else we live for God above all else.”

What Worship Is

Think of a sports card. A kid says his rare card is worth $200, and I, being a squasher of joy, ask who will actually pay him $200. A magazine can say whatever it wants, but “whatever value you put on it whatever you’re willing to give or sacrifice that for that is truly the value and that is what worship is.” Worship is simply showing God the worth we give him. When we gather, we show we value God enough to give him time in our schedule.

That is why I put the main question at the very start: who will you worship? Not only this morning. Tomorrow, when something in your family goes haywire, will your response show that you worship yourself, your comfort, or God? On Sunday I am motivated to live for God, but “Monday seems like it feels different doesn’t it.” And “how we value God here should be the same as how we value him out there.”

The Parties to the Covenant

In verse 2 God introduces himself: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” He is Yahweh, the one with no limitations who needs nothing. We are the ones he rescued. We do not take the place of Israel, but through Jesus we are grafted into its promises. The best part is that we will fail these requirements, and “Jesus met all these requirements for us.” I also learned that the two tablets were probably identical copies, one for God and one for his people, as in an ancient covenant. The Hebrew word chesed means “loyalty required in response to loyalty shown.”

No Other Gods

Verse 3 says you shall have no other gods before me, which could also be translated beside me. Everything else falls behind God. When your child is scared by a storm, you hold their face and say look at me. It centers them on what matters most, and that is what God does for us. By nature we look for other things to serve, and every sin is a choice to devalue God and value something else.

The next three commands go through what we can do, say, and think, the same three ways we sin and the same three ways we please God.

What We Do: No Carved Images

Why idols? We struggle to hold things we cannot see in our minds, and we do better with visible things. That is why Jesus coming as a man was such a blessing. But “nothing you could make could ever truly represent who God truly is.” I was engaged for 13 months to a wife who lived far from me, and I had her picture. But if after we were married she asked me to go for a walk and I said no, I’m good, I’ll just stare at her picture, that would be ridiculous. “You have the real person in front of you but you’re like I kind of got used to the picture.” God is jealous in a good way. If your spouse were unfaithful, you would hope to feel jealous. God says, “I so deeply want to have a relationship with you that I am jealous when it’s not going well and when you’re unfaithful to me.” How we value God affects our children and our children’s children, but his steadfast love reaches to thousands who love him.

What We Say: God’s Name

Do not take the Lord’s name in vain. It is not only cursing. Using God’s name as a filler “devalues him in your own thinking,” in the people you influence, and in our culture. Be careful even in how we joke about him.

What We Think: Remember the Sabbath

God does not get tired. He rested as an example, to show us we need to stop and focus back on him. It is like an anniversary: the other 364 days you can forget the value of that covenant, so you set one day apart to remember. The Sabbath is a day to let distractions go and give God that day.

What Worship Looks Like

The fifth command, honor your father and mother, says a child’s obedience to parents is a way of valuing God, because parents represent God’s authority in a child’s life. “When you honor your parents you’re showing how much you value this God who created you.”

And when life goes wrong, we see worship in Job. He lost everything, including his children, and tore his robe and shaved his head. He was not a robot. Then he worshiped. “His worship was simply saying God I value you and what you’re doing above what I want and what I could ever hope for.”