Now We Worship And Serve Him

Amy, thank you. I think I'm good, thanks. Good morning. I have thoroughly enjoyed being here with you. I really enjoyed being, I went to a huddle group yesterday. I didn't realize I could.

I would have gone to one in the afternoon also if I'd have known. So it's been a great joy to be here. And you may have noticed I don't bring notes up here. but if I did, I'd like rip up whatever my notes were for this morning. And that's because I believe that there's something we need to go into a little more detail about this morning that there's been a little bit of questions about.

It seems like there's been some things that I have said that have been very hard for people to hear. And there are things that people have not heard, some of you who've been going to church your entire life. And I want you to turn to Psalms chapter 5. So yesterday we talked about David being a sinner from the time of his conception. David manifesting or exhibiting his sinfulness by becoming a...

David, did I say Jesus or did I say David? Okay, good. I thought I said Jesus. I'm like, no, David's the sinner, not Jesus. And then David manifests his sinfulness in a life where he proceeded to sin. He proceeded to show his nature through his sin.

And then because of the sinfulness of man, God sent Jesus into the world to be the sacrifice for sin. And I made a couple statements, maybe in the Q&A and in here, that people are really struggling with. And that's good. I want you to grapple with things that a preacher says. You're going to hear preachers in your life that lie to you. And you're going to hear preachers that get up and tell you what the Bible says.

And it's really incumbent upon you. It's your responsibility to search the Scriptures yourself to see which ones are saying the right things and which ones aren't. And so I hope that I'm saying the right thing. That's my goal today. But there's other guys that will get up and they'll be deceivers and they'll say the same thing. So you need to study it yourself.

But the statement that I made that people take much exception with, and this is not unexpected for me anymore, is when I said that God hates. And people have a lot of trouble with God hates because we live in a culture where we like to tell everyone that God loves everyone. And there's verses in the Bible, there's at least two I can think of, where it says God is love.

And so in our minds, there's no way to marry the existence of a God who is love with a God who hates. And so I want to develop that a little bit for you so that you have something to study about it. And for some of you, maybe you'll just see the scriptures I show you and you'll just believe it and praise God for that. Some of you, it'll take more time to go and do research and to look at other scriptures and to try to figure out how to harmonize all these things that the Bible tells us about this great God we serve.

But just logically speaking, I want you to think about it. If you love, then you must hate. So God is love. It means he loves righteousness. He loves goodness. So God must hate something.

He hates that which is not good. He hates that which is unrighteous. And so when we look at Psalm chapter 5, I just want to show you some verses. David writes in Psalm chapter 5, in verse 4, he says, For you are not a God who delights in wickedness. Evil may not dwell with you. He says, the boastful shall not stand before your eyes.

You hate all evildoers. just a plain statement there. He follows it up by saying, you destroy those who speak lies. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. So God hates murderers and liars right there. He abhors them. That's a strong word.

And then David contrasts God's hatred for the bloodthirsty, for liars, for evildoers. And he says, but I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you. So there's your contrast that there's there's a group of people. They're called evildoers. There's a group of people that are God's people and the ones that are in the category of evildoers.

God hates. Because they're rebelling against Him. Because they're rejecting the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that He's provided on their behalf. Because they're violating all of His holy commandments all the time. I don't think we understand this sometimes. We think we sin sometimes, and then we don't sin, and then we sin, and then we don't.

Before you know Jesus Christ, everything you do is sin in the eyes of God. It's a doctrine we call total depravity, depravity where everything about you is sinful in the eyes of God. And then God, through his glorious grace, by the power of the Holy Spirit, changes people's hearts and minds to believe the gospel and believe Jesus Christ as their Savior.

And he converts them. That's why we call it conversion. And he makes them into new creatures. And it's because of his love that he sets upon people before they could possibly love him that anyone becomes a Christian. That's why it says in 1 John 4 we love because he first loved us Nobody loves God by nature We think that way in our humanness But the fact of the matter is that we are all evildoers in the sight of God And it is only through His abundant mercy and steadfast love that any of us are brought into the kingdom of heaven And so when we talk about God's wrath, and I told you I'm not going to apologize for what the Bible says.

I'm not sorry if it bothers you that God's a God of wrath. I'm not sorry that God's going to take billions of people that he created and burn them for eternity in hell to satisfy his righteous justice against them. I'm grateful that I'm not one of them by his electing grace. and I'm grateful for any ones of you who are not one of them. But God would be right to punish every single human being who ever lived.

So praise God that he sent Jesus to pay the penalty for some of them. And so I know it's a hard thing to hear and it's hard for us to manage in our minds sometimes that God is not just all loving and somehow this all forgiving God that we just make up. But if we want to understand who God is and we want to worship God in spirit and in truth, we need to worship who God really is.

And if you are believing false things about God, there starts to become a danger that you are getting into the point where now you are in heresy. You have to believe in the right God and you have to believe the right things that He's told us to believe. So we have to believe that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, that he was God from all eternity, that he became a man, that he humbled himself to the point of death, even death on a cross, and therefore God has highly exalted him and given him a name above every name, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and he ascended into heaven.

Those are the things we have to believe in that he died for your sins. You have to believe that he died for your sins. Not just some phrase. You have to believe that the Father in heaven and literally was crushing his son because of your sin. That Jesus died the death you deserve, and so that you could have the life that Jesus earned, and the rewards that he earned.

This is a real transaction that occurred. And in God's mind, it all happened before you even existed. Because God's eternal. God doesn't learn things. New things don't occur to God. Everything in God's mind is already there.

He already knows what's going to happen tomorrow. He knows which sinners that today he is righteously indignant or righteously angry with. He knows which ones he's also going to save later. There was a point in all of our lives, if you're a Christian today, that God was righteously angry with you in real time. But also in God's mind, he knew what was going to happen in the future because he planned it out.

It says repeatedly in the Bible that Jesus was delivered up by the predetermined counsel of God's will. Do you know what predetermined means? It's about anybody. It's not a trick question. Yeah. Doctrine of election means it was determined beforehand.

And I'll tell you this, this might sting some people, it was anything but reckless. God's love is predetermined it's specific, it's planned out and it didn't cast away caution or ignore danger God came by the predetermined counsel of his will Jesus Christ in the flesh, the Father sent the Son so let's get back to Psalm 51 so that was a little side note because we've had a lot of questions about that and I realize that that's a hard thing for people even if you're hearing it And if you're going to churches that aren't teaching those things, that's a hard thing to understand and it's hard to swallow. A lot of us think that if we say things like God's angry or God hates that we're actually, we'll say besmirching God.

We think that we're saying something we shouldn't say about God when in fact it's what God says about himself. So we should not only say it, but we should believe it and be proud of it. in psalm 51 in verse in verse 12 we read this yesterday jesus jesus david david who is a picture of jesus for us so if i screw that up that's why he was supposed to remind us of jesus but david says restore to me the joy of your salvation he says uphold me with a willing spirit and this is the verse we skipped yesterday. He says, then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will return to you.

Who knows what evangelism is? Everybody's just tired. You guys all stay up really late talking and there we got somebody. You want to say? I can't hear you. Yeah, like that's an evangelist.

Yeah. So evangelism is opening your mouth to tell people what God has done for sinners. And David says, I will teach transgressors your way. So what David is proclaiming is that if God will forgive him, it's not a conditional thing like God do this for me and I'll do this for you. He's proclaiming the truth that if you will wash me thoroughly from my sin and cleanse me of all my iniquities, if you'll renew a right spirit within me and restore to me the joy of my salvation and let me hear joy and gladness.

David's saying if God does all these things for him, purging him with hyssop and making him clean and washing him whiter than snow, that David going to announce to the world who God is And a lot of you are evangelists A lot of you are happy to open your mouth to tell people about good things that have happened in your life If you had an injury and a therapist helped you you tell other people If you like a TV show, you'll text your friends and say, you've got to watch this show, or you've got to follow this Twitter account. And I'm so old now, I don't even know what all the new little social media things are, because I honestly just don't care anymore. I just do a little bit of Twitter.

We're all evangelists. we all tell people the things that are important to us. Very few of us are so shy that we just don't talk at all. But how many of us open our mouth to teach transgressors God's ways? How many of us are so proud of God, not only the things about God that people seem to like, but we're so pleased with who God is that we'll open our mouth to tell people the very hard things for God to hear. that is what david is saying would be the result of a true conversion in his life if david would receive forgiveness for his sins if david would realize how his sins have been paid for by the messiah who is to come david's going to open his mouth and he's going to tell others about it because he's not ashamed of the gospel of jesus christ david is not ashamed to tell people that God's righteously angry with their sin.

He's not afraid to tell people, hey, what you're doing is wrong. David's in fact grateful that Nathan the prophet had the boldness and the courage to come to him and tell him what he was doing was wrong so he could repent and receive forgiveness. So the heart of a person that's actually been forgiven by God is the heart of a person that cannot hold that in anymore.

And I'm wearing my cool t-shirt, and I wore it on purpose today because it says, Fear God and nothing else. Because the Bible tells us we're to fear the Lord, we're to fear God. This is the beginning of all knowledge. And this t-shirt reminds me, when I stand before a group of people, or when I'm evangelizing one-on-one, that my goal is to fear God's chastisement against me rather than what a person will think of me.

So when I'm standing in front of a homosexual person who maybe I don't know or maybe I care deeply about, instead of fearing their anger for me for telling them the truth about their sin and how they can be forgiven of it, I'm to fear God and not them. When I'm standing before a person at work who I know is stealing and I want to tell them stealing is wrong, instead of fearing them being angry with me for it, I should fear God. In fact, when I stand before any sinner, and when I have an opportunity to tell people, this is what sin is, this is how you have offended God, and I know that they're going to react by rejecting me, and they're going to accuse me of sin.

And they're going to say, well, you're not perfect either. And I say, yeah, that's true. That's why I'm telling you about the one who was perfect. so when we evangelize people when we tell transgressors god's ways we're to fear god and we're not to fear man and what we find and this is what i'm going to challenge you with the fruit of the spirit you know this galatians 522 you probably all sang this song the fruit of the spirit is what what's the first love right love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness self-control but love if you love people you're going to tell them about god If your friend had cancer And you had a cure for cancer And you kept it to yourself That would be what?

Hateful or loving? Wake up That would be hateful or loving? That would be hateful, wouldn't it? And yet your friend is sin sick And he's on his way to hell And you keep your mouth shut Because you're afraid he's going to call you a weird Christian Or maybe he won't be your friend anymore Or maybe she won't want to be your girlfriend If you're bold about God because your problem is that you love yourself and you love the way people make you feel when they like you rather than loving the way God should make you feel when you know you're doing what pleases Him.

And so that's why we open our mouth, we teach transgressors His way. That's why I'm willing to stand in front of you right now and I'm willing to say things that I know some of you hate. And I'm risking getting the guy that invited me here mad by saying something about the Reckless Love song. And I love the band. I love these guys. And I don't like that one word in that song.

We talked about it last night. I actually like the whole song except that one word. Because God's love is phenomenally awesome. And it's everything but reckless, but it is awesome. And he went to basically every length to get to us, but all I'm saying is it was predetermined. It wasn't without caution.

It was planned out. Your salvation was planned out before you were created. That's the beauty of it. It was secure in Jesus Christ for all eternity. I want to do a couple more verses of this psalm because I want to talk about one more thing. And then I want to remember the thing Rachel told me to talk about because it was great.

And so I'm going to say it now so if I forget she can rebuke me. Go down to verse 18 of Psalm 51. I want to get through the whole psalm and we're going to do it. He says, Do good design in your good pleasure. build up the walls of Jerusalem. This is David basically telling God, be good to your people and build walls around us. Protect us from our enemies.

But he says, then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar. So I went to Great Links yesterday to tell you that all these sacrifices were effectively meaningless for your salvation. And now David comes right back and says, now we're going to do burnt offerings, whole burnt offerings, and bulls are going to be sacrificed on your altar.

And so there's like a contradiction here. The preacher said, that stuff doesn't matter, it's all Jesus. And then David saying we going to do these sacrifices once I receive the forgiveness of sins that I need And so I going to try to reconcile that for you by saying that once we become Christians we start to live a life of true worship to God So before you were a Christian you knew who God was Everybody knows who God was If you disagree with that I explain it to you later But God has put in every one of us an understanding that he exists and that he's righteous and that we actually, his wrath is revealed from heaven against us, it says in Romans 1.

And so every person is without excuse before a holy God. But everything you do before you know God, before you've come to God through Jesus Christ, is sin. And so even if you have worshipped Him at a church, even if you've sang good songs to Him, it wasn't really worship because you didn't come to God the way He prescribed through His Son, Jesus Christ.

The only way that any person can be made holy in order to enter His presence in the first place. but now once you've been born again once you've been made holy by the blood of the cross once christ's blood has been applied to you and you've been redeemed and you believe that he resurrected from the dead which is essential and it's absolutely important once you've done those things now you can give god right worship so now when you take your sacrifices okay you have your broken spirit it says in verse i remember i don't forget the verse and i remember the verse but i remember the number, so I'll tell you. In 17, yeah, he says the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Once you've come to God with that broken spirit and that broken and contrite heart, and you've received his forgiveness, now you do good works as the result of what God has done for you.

So there's two types of religions in the world, basically. One of them says you do good things, then God will forgive you, and God will love you, and God will be pleased with you. The other religion, the religion I'm preaching to you, and the one that I hope every one of you is in or joins, is the one that says, Jesus does all the work on your behalf, then you do good works in response to what Jesus has done.

So it's a difference between what we say, to make it rhyme, root and fruit. Your good works are either the root of your forgiveness and your standing with God, meaning that your good works are how you receive God's love, or your good works are the fruit of what God has already done on your behalf. So I'm preaching the fruit one. Ephesians 2, 8-10 says, You've been saved by grace through faith, and this is not your own doing, lest any man should boast.

It's the gift of God, right? And it says, It's not your own works, lest any man should boast. And then what does it say in 10? For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which he prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. God didn't save you just to take you to heaven. If he did that, you'd already be there if you were a Christian.

God saved us so we'd stay here and we would produce good works as the result of the heart change that he's already worked inside of us. As the result of the Holy Spirit indwelling in your body. You're the temple of the Holy Spirit if you're a Christian. As a result of that, the fruit of that spirit is your love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Basically, the fruit of that is you follow God's law. You look at God's law. You love your neighbor as yourself. And how do you love your neighbor as yourself? Well, you don't steal from him. You don't commit adultery with his wife.

You don't murder him. You don't hate him. You don't take his stuff. You don't lie to him. Tell him about Jesus Christ. I just listed six of the ten commandments for you.

That's how you love your neighbor. But let's not be confused. We don't do the works of the law in order to gain God's pleasure or in order to gain his favor. We do the works of the law because God has given us his favor. And so when David says, I will sacrifice, he says, then bulls will be sacrificed on your altar. And I just want to comment on that, that bulls are like the most expensive thing at the time.

And what David's saying is, then, let's turn this into like a 21st century context here. What David's saying is, once you get saved, there will be no sacrifice in your life that's too large for the one who came and sacrificed his life for you. So you have to ask yourself, what am I holding back? I don't know, half of you probably have jobs. Do you give any money to church or to missions?

Do you sacrifice your time for others? Do you sacrifice your time for Jesus Christ? Those are things we want to consider. Are we doing right sacrifices for God? And it's not bulls and goats and all these things that they did in ancient Israel. Our sacrifices are different now.

Our body is a living sacrifice. Romans 12.1 Is your body a living sacrifice to God? Do you use your body in ways that honor God all the time? Or do you presume upon the forgiveness of sins and then go ahead and jump headlong into sin, thinking, oh, well, God will forgive me anyway? That's not the attitude that David said that a person would have who had been forgiven by God.

But praise be to God that he's the one that is able to do the work in people. So I don't want you to feel bad if you're a Christian today. and think, oh, God's mad at me. I certainly wouldn't want you to think God hates me. If you're a Christian today, God cannot love you more than he loves you right now. That's the neat thing about God. His love is unchanging.

God's immutable. He cannot change. So if God has chosen to set his love upon you, that cannot change. He can't start loving you more because you start doing better. And God cannot start loving you less because you start doing poorly. God will always love you the same, and it's with an infinite amount of love.

It's inexplainable. You can't even fathom it. It's unfathomable. You can't get to the depths of it. That's what unfathomable would mean, right? And so I want you to realize, if you're a Christian today, that God has already, before you even came into this world, before every single sin that you ever were going to commit, and still will commit in this life, God chose to save your soul, to set His love upon you, and to punish His Son in your place.

And then you're expected to walk in that newness of life, and to believe that love that He has for you, and to enjoy it, and then to go around and tell other people about God's love. And that's what we call evangelism. So we open our mouth, and we tell people the truth that Jesus saved sinners. You know what evangelism is not? Evangelism is not a cool t-shirt.

Evangelism is not living a really good life so that other people will see you live a good life and then maybe they will believe in Jesus too. Nobody gets saved by seeing you. Trust me. Nobody will. The very best day you'll ever have, you're going to fall short of what anybody could ever need for the forgiveness of their sins. People get saved when they hear the word of God proclaimed to them, when they read something that says Jesus died so that sinners could be forgiven.

That's how people get saved. It's faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. And so do not fall deceived to the teaching we have today that says if you just live a good enough life, your neighbors will walk over and ask you, hey, tell me about this God you serve. But it doesn't happen. No one seeks after God. There's no such thing as a seeker.

You must go to people and you must open your mouth and you must tell them Jesus Christ paid for the sins of people. And if you will repent and believe, you can be forgiven. That's what we tell people. And then we know in Psalm 51, David says, then I will teach transgressors your ways. He says, and sinners will return to you. It's a promise.

And it's a promise because it was all pre-planned by God. So you can go to people who you know are oppositional to Jesus Christ. You can go to people who you know are enjoying their sin and loving their sin at that time. They don have to appear to be open to Jesus You go to everyone you encounter and you tell them about Jesus Christ what he did for sinners and what you trust is that sinners will return to God as David just said That God has a plan, that some sinners are going to hear the gospel, and that gospel seed is going to get planted, the Holy Spirit is going to use it to grant someone faith, and they're going to believe.

Because I'll tell you what, I don't like getting personal testimonies, but I'm going to do it. When I was in high school, I was a wicked man. And the Christians in my high school avoided me because I was so wicked. And in some cases, they probably should have stayed away from me. And then when I was 30 years old, God saved my soul. And I emailed some of those people and we started to make friendships.

Because now that I was a Christian, they were happy to know me, right? I mean, that's part of the fellowship. And I had to rebuke some of them and say, why did you never tell me? And they said, well, we didn't think you'd listen. So I spent 12 more years in sin and despair because you couldn't just open your mouth to someone that you were afraid was going to make fun of you.

Because people wouldn't just open their mouth and love me enough to tell me what they knew. And they accepted that and they asked me to forgive them for that. And of course I did. But you don't know who God's going to save. So open your mouth to everybody. Love people more than you love yourself. and God's a God who who restores things okay so this I got to give credit to Rachel this was Rachel's idea where's Rachel so she probably doesn't want the credit so anyway but but but somebody really inspired me to talk about this part and so I want you to turn to Matthew chapter one so some of you have come from uh we'll say really bad backgrounds some of you this is like the one time a year that you can like open your mouth and enjoy yourself and uh I don't know maybe you have an abusive father, an overbearing mother, a drunken father, a family member that's abused you or hurt you.

Maybe somebody's living in abuse right now and you're enduring it with affliction. I don't know what the situation is. Maybe you feel there's some generational curse on your family or whatever. And then you know yourself that you've committed some sin. You've done some horrible things, maybe not as bad as David, or maybe in your mind it is as bad as David.

And you don't think God can forgive you, or maybe you believe God can forgive you, but you don't think God could use someone like you. I'll tell you, I know how you feel if that's the case. But in the book of Matthew, I just want to point this out, and we just back up a step From the beginning God promised that he was going to send a Messiah through the line of Abraham Okay this is what we read about in the book of Genesis He was going to send someone in whom all nations would be blessed and that was Jesus Christ And it would come from the line of Abraham, and it would come through Isaac, not through Ishmael.

We kind of know this story. And then it would come through Jacob, not through Esau. And all of a sudden, it was going to come through Judah. And Jesus was going to be this great high priest, and he wasn't going to come through the line of Levi, which is an interesting thing to understand but david does this egregious sins and it's still through david that the davidic covenant was given the one where god said he's going to send the messiah from his line and in in the genealogy of matthew the part of the bible we all skip like the you know this guy then this guy then this guy it's like the boring part right that's what i'll admit it i think so too sometimes it's horrible to think that i'm wrong for thinking it But I think it too.

But in the genealogy, it says in verse two, Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac, the father of Jacob, Jacob, the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah, the father of all these guys. Right. So then we'll just get down to verse six, though. Jesse, the father of David, the king. And then it says what? And David was the father of Solomon.

And he could have stopped right there. And then we know that Solomon had kids and then eventually Jesus comes and we have a Messiah that was promised. but God chose to include Solomon by the wife of Uriah. And so even David's sin is magnified in such a way as to show us the goodness of God and how God will even use sin for his own good purposes. And that David, although he had sinned and although he had taken another man's wife and he was punished for it, that David's life was still used of God to bring about the Messiah that would save his own soul and everybody else's that he came to save.

And so God can use each and every one of us too. Because it's God who has the power. It's not about us. It's not about our ability. It's not about David's ability. It's about Jesus' power.

It's about God's power. And when you start to get that, God will use you more and he will start to use you in ways that he could have never used you while you were just sitting there thinking about your own strength or your own weaknesses even. So submit to God today. I feel like I just want to talk to you guys forever. God's so big and he's so great. And there's so much about him that I wish I could tell you.

And I only had about 90 minutes and I was told I had 60. So thank you for letting me go 10 minutes over on each of my talks here But I here for you guys I not the weird distant speaker guy You can just come and ask me questions You can challenge me. I have a sophomore and a junior, and they challenge me all the time on stuff, trust me. And I've got a 19-year-old, and I'm used to people asking me questions where they just don't believe what I said.

And I have to go in deeper with them, so that's okay with me. If I didn't say it already, I love you all. I'm really glad I got to be here and I'm really thankful that people would ask me and I hope I can come back even. We'll see. I just want to pray God's blessing on you and then I'll be done. Father in heaven, you are blessed forever.

Amen. You are the creator and you sent Jesus to pay the penalty that we deserve God demonstrated his love toward us and that while we were still sinners Christ died for us and so we thank you that you came for the weak you came for the lowly you came for those who lived in darkness and Father we pray for widespread revival as we sit here and contemplate your gospel we think about all the people we know that are headed to hell Lord and we know we deserve to be on the same path and so we pray your forgiveness on our nation on our state, on our cities on our classmates, my co-workers, our families some of us have parents and grandparents that we just wish would just come to Christ so we ask for your power Lord and we ask that you would use us in mighty ways that only you could do so that you would get all the glory for what you accomplish in this world thank you for these I don't want to call them kids thank you for these young people Lord I pray that you would work in their hearts to make them holy and make them blameless and to grow them into the image of Jesus Christ in whose name I pray Amen U.S. and resides in central Ohio with his wife Erin and their kids. You can contact Michael at thingsabove.us or visit his ministry website michaelcoglin.net.

That's C-O-U-G-H-L-I-N. Thank you for listening to this episode of Be a Berean. We hope you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.