Psalm 51 Review

We'll turn to Psalm 51 if you want to read along with me. I'm just going to do verses 16 to 19. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. Do good to Zion in your good pleasure. build up the walls of Jerusalem.

Then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings, in whole burnt offerings. Then bulls will be offered on your altar. That's the reading of God's holy word. You may be seated. I think we've spent four weeks now in Psalm 51. And we spent, I don't know, four or five weeks in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 in preparation for it, which I would argue that since Psalm 51 begins, a psalm of David when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba, that it goes together.

It's one chunk of things to look at. And if I remember correctly, we talked about petitions and penitence. And there was another P word. I can't even remember it right now. Was it pride? Is that right?

Okay. and then repentance and reconciliation and restoration. And it was my great pleasure to talk about all those things. And if there's one thing I can tell you that every preacher, well, every faithful preacher feels when he's finished is he's never finished. There was really so much more that could have been said. And there were words that could have been investigated throughout the whole scripture to figure out, you know, what this particular word would mean.

Even the last verse, burnt offerings, whole burnt offerings, and bulls offered on your altar. There's a sermon series just looking at what those things all would mean and understanding those in a deeper way. Certainly if you were an Old Testament Jew, these words would have conjured something in your mind immediately that you may have understood more implicitly than we do. there's certain things that when we read about them in the Bible we have to go look it up and we have to read Exodus and we have to read Leviticus and we have to re-read them and then we have to read a commentary to try to figure out what was going on at the time to describe these words right but if you were somebody who was around the time of David reading this psalm and for hundreds of years after as the Levitical priesthood was still going on with the sacrifices, these words would have immediately meant things to you.

And so something to remember when you're studying the Bible is that it's where they say it's shallow enough for a child to play in, but deep enough for the best theologian to swim in. So you just want to keep digging deeper when you're going through these things. But so what I want to do today, after we've talked about why David was in this position and what were some of the main themes that came out of this psalm is I just want to do a review of it.

So if you're just first coming today, which there's at least four or five people, that's your first time here, but this is not going to, it might just seem like a shallow overview of things, and that's because we've already talked about it for, you know, upwards of 10 weeks if we look back to 2 Samuel 11. And I was thinking about it for a minute that, you know, a lot of us go to different conferences, you know, and we go to like the, you know, the family, what's the family one called now? Church and Family Group, that they have people, and there's G3, and there's all these different places people go to, and they bring in these guys like Steve Lawson, who doesn't preach in the church anymore, and they have, they have, you know, six months to prepare one home run sermon for that conference, and they usually do it.

I mean, and some of these sermons these guys give are just insane, and But that's not how it works in a local church setting. And it's not because the local church preacher doesn't have the same spirit of God leading them or that he's not working hard at it. It's that we're building week to week on the themes that we were building on last week. And we're not trying to make one week the home run of it all.

We're trying to continuously learn about God's Word. So it kind of cracked me up thinking about it for a minute. I've had a couple of times I had more time to prepare, and yeah, it ended up being a little better, right? It's just how it works. But David, okay, David is an example of an Old Testament saint. And I want to look at a few things today.

The first one I want to remind you of is at least one thesis of Psalm 51, something that I thought was extremely poignant, the more I was looking through this, was at the very end of the psalm, tells us what we need to understand about it. Once repentance is authentic, reconciliation is secured, and restoration is in process, the religious duties that are instituted by God and performed by men will be pleasing to Him. Acceptable sacrifices will be fragrant and pleasing aromas to Him when our worship is Spirit-led.

So one of the things I just want you to understand is that we have a way that we can worship God. I think Jason just prayed about it. When we come to worship God, and Elijah talked about it too, when we come to worship God, there is acceptable worship. We are not, it's actually really good news. You're not so far from God that you can't worship him. There is a way.

Now it's a narrow path. We'll get into that. But there is acceptable worship to God. you can know that God is in fact pleased with you and the worship that you offering And the way that that happens is by making that worship proper And what that comes down to what the psalm has told us when God says he would not delight in sacrifice or David would have given it but then later he says the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit is that our sacrifice to God is from our heart and now God's not impressed with your heart but it's your heart that displays whether or not you're truly submitted to Jesus Christ or not as your Savior there's always been a mediator between God and man I think Elijah just read that, it's amazing the providence of the reading, I didn't even remember what was being read today but there's always been a mediator There's only one way to get to God, and that's through a mediator.

And if you have that mediator, Jesus Christ, he has the way for you. And so I want you to just be able to think about the fact that you can worship the Lord. And what you need to think through is how. How do I worship him? There's a reason why we don't bring bulls and goats and lambs to a priest right now and have him do something. But there's a reason why there was a time in the history of the world that a true believer had to do that.

Or they were not worshiping God properly. And we need to be able to understand these distinctions. We need to be able to explain them to children. We need to be able to explain them to new Christians. And you should also know because that will help you determine what's acceptable worship. There's things that God had Old Testament Israel do.

That we can see now that those things were only types and shadows of the Christ that was to come. and there's things that Old Testament Israel did that we should be doing the same exact thing as today. Or at least we should be doing the equivalent of them in our day and age, we'll say. So the first verse I wanted to look at was verse 11. This was one of the verses that I thought people would have maybe a question about.

And then after we look at verse 11, I want to look at verse 14 about blood guiltiness. And then I want to look at sacrifices for God to come later. So in case anybody wants to accuse me of being disorganized, I actually have three points. Now I have to get to them because I mentioned them. So I kind of forced myself actually to be organized this way. But in verse 11, David, who's crying out to God.

Now I've told you I think David was a Christian. And we don't use the word Christian all the time when we talk about Old Testament people. Sometimes we say OT saints because David didn't have an incarnate Christ to believe in. He didn't have anyone to believe died and was buried and rose again three days later and then ascended into heaven. David didn't have the book of Jonah to read.

The book of Jonah is what really reveals to us about the resurrection that's going to happen. And David didn't even have that. So although David knew a lot of stuff, and I think David had a lot of special power from God in Revelation. David was a prophet of God. wrote scripture, David didn't have the advantages we have of 66 books written for us. David didn't even have the 39 Old Testament books as we know them today.

So David didn't have a lot of the things that we know for him to know about God. And so it's easy for us to say, well, I know God will never leave me nor forsake me. Jesus Christ said that. Behold, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age, he says. And God says that he gave us his Holy Spirit as a seal of the redemption that we would one day have in Christ Jesus.

God has promised all these things. And so we can say in this room, and I can develop it out for you later if it's not something you understand, but we can say we believe in the perseverance of the saints. In fact, you should believe that if you've become a member of this church. It's in our document, the 1689. that explains what we believe. But what it means is that we believe that because God is the one who has elected the people that he wants to save, that he will certainly finish the good work that he began in them as he's promised in his word.

That if Jesus Christ died for your sins at all, he died for them all. It's that simple. There's nothing that you can do to separate yourself from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That God will hold you in his hands and nobody can snatch you out of them. We believe that. If you don't believe it or if you haven't learned that yet, I'm not going to go into depth about it.

We can talk about it after. But it's a very comforting doctrine unless you absolutely love your autonomy and free will. The only people that call themselves Christians that oppose this doctrine are Christians that insist that they have some degree of sovereignty over their own life that they don't want to relinquish to God as if it was up to them. but David says cast me not away from your presence and then he says and take not your Holy Spirit from me and so this verse can cause us to think well what does David mean by this does David mean that a Christian could lose their salvation well I just told you that can't happen so we'll just we'll just pretend that that can't be it well maybe what David means is that in the Old Testament, you could have the Holy Spirit and then lose them.

Even though I would say in the New Testament, we know you can't do that because we have all these books of the New Testament that say something else. And what I would argue with you is that no. Old Testament saints were saved in the exact same manner that we were saved. They weren't saved with the same amount of knowledge because history hadn't occurred yet. but Old Testament saints were saved by being totally depraved individuals who God the Father sent the Holy Spirit into the world to regenerate their hearts and indwell them and it is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in any person that reveals that they're a Christian and so David could not have meant take your Holy Spirit from me in the sense that he could lose his salvation if if it was God saying that now I have I have a friend of mine who who a Christian who believes the same things and he says he thinks David was just of so much despair that even though David probably trusted that Christ couldn't lose him that he was scared and he just said God don't take your spirit from me.

Don't take away the salvation you've given me. So that's not to say that because David prayed that, that God says it's possible to lose your salvation. It only means that in that case that David may have been afraid that he could. And I don't know if anybody else has ever felt that way, where you've sinned so egregiously against God that there's some part of you that maybe thinks you're not a Christian.

That happens. But there's also, when you sin so bad against God, you're afraid man if somebody could lose their salvation I'd be the guy right now and in that moment of we'll say sin blinded this and unbelief you may pray something like God don't take away your spirit from me so it doesn't mean that David thought he could lose his salvation or that God was saying through David that you could it just might mean that David was really afraid and if you think about what David did adultery murder hypocrisy you could see why somebody would wonder right? He wasn't offering acceptable sacrifices to God at this point in his life.

His worship to God wasn't being heard in any meaningful sense by God. And so David naturally did not feel the light of his father's countenance and he felt separated from God. He says cast me not away from your presence. David felt the forsakenness that Jesus Christ felt on the cross. David understood what it was like, at least momentarily, to be a person who should know God, but was outside the presence of God because his sin separated them from God.

But praise the Lord, your sin can never fully separate you from God. But we do have experiential separateness from God or separation from God. And I think everybody in here should understand what that means, because everybody in here, I hope, understands what it's like to have one of those mountaintop moments too. I hope if you're a Christian you've had a couple moments where you felt so close to God that you wished that moment would never end, right?

And then you came down from the mountaintop and like Moses you probably got angry at people that weren't worshipping him the way they ought to. That happens to us fathers sometimes. So we all understand I think what it's like to be a sinner who's been saved, who knows the presence of God and then at times feels the lack of God's presence. But David says, take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Another option for interpreting that is you may recall that in the Old Testament especially, there was special dispensations of the Holy Spirit to people at different times, right? There were people who got the Holy Spirit just for the purpose of fashioning the different parts of the temple. Remember? People that were just carving things out of ivory and wood. there were people at different times who had the Holy Spirit most certainly for dictating scripture or being inspired scripture writing and in the New Testament we have a new dispensation of the Holy Spirit where there's more power of the Spirit that has been given to us in the New Testament since Pentecost more people who are Christian now we have more power at our disposal of the Holy Spirit than God gave in the Old Testament.

Jesus describes this occurrence in John 7. He explains that it's going to happen. And he even tells his disciples, this is why it's very good for you that I leave. You need me to leave. And really, if you think about it, it's because when he was there, he was the power. They were all kind of watching him.

And then when he left, he gave them his Holy Spirit, which keep in mind, the Holy Spirit is God. I think sometimes we think of like, God the Father, he's awesome. And then Jesus, well, he's God too. And then we almost forget that there's a third person. And that third person is co-equal in majesty, co-equal in power, co-equal in eternality. And so the Holy Spirit that you have living in your heart right now as a believer is the same powerful Holy Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

And so when you're sitting there and you're failing in your sin and you're suffering temptations of this world and you're giving in to the enticements of sinners and you're just fighting it and then you feel like giving up, you need to remember that the same power that enabled Jesus to do the things he did is in you. And this is a good thing. So what David says, cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

I do not think... Whoops, sorry. Don't want that to happen. Sorry. It's not my computer. even if it was I'd probably want to save it but I'm going to move it a little closer see if that prevents it from tipping what I want you to understand is this is not some obscure verse where God is revealing this amazing truth that oh yeah you could lose your salvation or at least Old Testament saints could don't read the Bible that way if you find what we'll call a problem verse or a difficult verse, what you do is you interpret that verse by reading the rest of Scripture as well.

And you interpret that verse in light of either more clear passages or just the passages that are so predominantly true, like Jesus Christ will never leave you nor forsake you. So the next section that I wanted to go a little deeper into was verse 14. David says, Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation. he says in my tongue will sing a lot of your righteousness so this blood guiltiness David is confessing I'm guilty of murder and in David case he didn put a knife in anyone back directly David didn pull a trigger He didn strangle anyone David actually ordered somebody else to put Uriah on the front line of a bad battle, remember?

So that Uriah would die. And David was actually then responsible for the deaths of many. And in God's eyes, David was a murderer. we in our day and age we will think to ourselves that well maybe he's not or maybe he wasn't because he didn't directly do it but we need to recognize the way that we can indirectly be murderers so i just want to look at the word blood guilt for a minute turn to genesis 9 blood guilt is a serious thing and I'm sure you've heard the phrase all sin is the same or all sin is the same to God and a lot of times when people say that what they mean is well any sin you commit is enough to damn you and any sin is enough to make you go to hell and that's absolutely true but sometimes when people say it what they're trying to do is they're trying to equivocate that all sins are of somehow the same severity as if walking into your house and confessing to your wife that you've committed adultery on her is no different than telling her that you promised her you'd take the trash out but then you didn't.

I think everybody in here understands that there's different degrees of sin because when they're committed against you, it's very easy to figure out which ones you think are bad and which ones aren't, right? We all understand it. And God finds the murder of human beings to be very, very bad. So bad that even hating your brother makes you guilty of it.

But just look at Genesis real quick. He says, Genesis 9.3, Every moving thing that lives shall be for food for you, and And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything, but you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast, I will require it, and from man. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man.

And he says, Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. for God made man in his own image. So first thing, maybe I'll just always do this and people will say that was off topic, but if you talk to somebody who is pro-abortion, they will say something like, I don't understand how you can be pro-life and pro-death penalty. And they think it's like this really clever little logic puzzle they've just given you where you have to either deny the death penalty or you have to deny being pro-life or you're terribly inconsistent and we should just quit all of our battles.

The death penalty is actually instituted here by God prior to the Mosaic Covenant for the shedding of human blood. So if you shed innocent human blood, you are worthy of death at the hands of another human being. And this is why God gave us government to handle this. we have governments to carry the sword not in vain but to actually bear the sword to take care of this kind of thing so that you can feel safe that a murderous heart person won't murder you or one of your children there's a threat of violence from a higher authority on this earth on that person so the death penalty again and I mentioned instituted by God prior to the Mosaic Covenant this is not something that God gave Israel that was abrogated with when Israel ceased to be a nation.

This is something that God said very early in the history of the world, right after the flood. And we are to love people so much that we value their lives. And so if somebody takes the life of an innocent person, and I'll just toss out there particularly an unborn person who's not possibly done anything to be guilty of a crime in this world, that person is deserving of the death penalty and there is no way around that.

There's no way to say, oh, well, maybe not, or maybe it'd be better if they didn't. We have to understand that this is what God has said is the way that we should behave. And so actually we show that we're pro-life by being pro-death penalty. And so don't fall for their tricks. we should advocate for good laws that punish people for the things that they do that are wrong if you turn to Proverbs 28 we have more blood guiltiness the words also used in Exodus 22 where if a guy breaks in your house at night and you kill him you're not guilty of blood guilt or murder but if he breaks in your house in the day, you can see that he has a weapon or not in the daytime.

So in Proverbs 28, there's a little verse in there that I think we should understand. Verse 17. no, 17, excuse me. If one is burdened with the blood of another, he will be a fugitive until after death. Let no one help him. So I'll just get on a soapbox for just a second here that there is a portion of what I'll call a pro-life community that seems to think that a big important thing that we should be doing is offering help for women after abortion. as if there's somehow this special class of murderer who we should treat utterly differently than the one we love.

God has said we should treat them. This verse says, if one is burdened with the blood of another, rather than give them counseling to make them feel better about the choice that they made, and to let them know they can go on with this life, this verse says he should be a fugitive until death, and no one should help him. Now we know that in the Gospel of Grace, if somebody would repent, just like Paul, who was a murderer, we would be quite pleased with that, and we would want to help them with their life. but there is nothing that you can do to help somebody who's guilty of murder that helps them apart from calling them to repentance.

Everything that, I feel like I'm on a soapbox about it, but all these pro-life centers, everything that they do to try to make abortion, women who've had abortions feel better about themselves and be able to do their life, all they're doing is giving them a little better life before they get sent to hell by God for something that they're being told wasn't even a sin. I'll tell you what, their mouth will be shut on the day of judgment and they'll know instantaneously that they were wrong the whole time. There won't be an argument.

There won't be a debate. You won't be able to say, well, I didn't quite know. Murder is a sin and everybody knows it. And everybody knows that murdering children is a sin. So David ought to be pretty scared though by now. And this is what I wanted to draw your attention to. that when David says, deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, you have to remember that now that David's sin has been confessed, right?

Nathan calls him out. David pretty much acknowledges it. And a whole bunch of people know. Now, thankfully for David, he had a bunch of dastardly guys working for him, like Joab, so he could ask these guys to do bad things. You know, we all know that guy who if we wanted something bad done, we could ask and he'd probably do it for us. You know, we all have an old friend like that.

Or hopefully none of you are that guy. But, you know, I remembered a couple guys in high school who if I wanted something stolen, I could just ask them, hey man, would you steal this for me? You know, there's people like that. David had a whole crew of these bad guys that were willing to let Uriah die, right? But David says, deliver me from blood guiltiness.

If you're David, you have to have a healthy fear right now that you actually are deserving of the death penalty at this point. that if Israel was going to carry out God's law the way they ought to have at this moment David deserved to die and it would take the abundant grace and mercy of God as David prayed for at the beginning for David to even persist at all at this point and of course he was going to preserve his godly line for Christ Jesus who had come through Solomon and David's other son Nathan right and so God preserved David and had mercy on him and delivered him from this blood guiltiness and I like to believe that David didn't murder anybody ever again that's repentance so David is saying that if he's delivered he's going to sing about of God's righteousness which God certainly deserves anyway but turn to 1 Corinthians 11 I want to look at another way we can murder though. I'm hopeful that most of the people in this room aren't really interested in murder at all. And that even those of you that have fits of rage or anger issues, that you recognize those as smaller degrees of murder in your heart and that you're working on those, hopefully confessing them to another and if need be you can talk to me about those things.

But in 1 Corinthians 11 talking about worship and talking about religious rituals we perform that were instituted by God as Holy Communion Paul says in verse 27 whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord and I find it kind of interesting that he says guilty concerning the body and blood and David's talking about blood guilt blood guilt's always associated with murder and here's Jesus Christ and it's said that if you take the cup unworthily you'll be guilty concerning his body and blood and it's actually amazing what having a we'll call it a Christian country can do for people. When you read about people from the 1700s, the 18th and 19th century especially, you read about some of these guys that we can read about now that founded our country. One of the things I noticed, I don't remember which guy it was, it said this guy started to feel the conviction of sin.

I don't remember the guy's name. He's a Christian guy who read a biography of and it said that he was so afraid to take communion because he wasn't sure that he was a Christian and he already knew this verse. And he was afraid. He said, I don't know if I've been born again. I don't remember who the guy was and this was in his pre-conversion story. And I remember thinking that it was good that this country was so well catechized and taught that even the non-believers knew what it meant to be a Christian enough that he had started to be afraid to be guilty of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Now, Lord be praised, you could be forgiven. If you took communion prior to your salvation and maybe you didn think much of it or maybe you thought you were being serious the Lord can forgive that And the Lord will forgive it if he saves you But this is why we examine ourselves to see if we of the faith And this is why we want to be serious about the religious worship that we offer God. So that moves us into the final thing I want to talk about, which is the sacrifices of God.

So in Psalm 51 we have what was one of the most confusing sections for me which is David says you will not delight in sacrifice or I would give it in verse 16 and then in verse 19 he says then you will delight in right sacrifices and so you have to be able to explain how can David say you will not delight in sacrifice and then say you will delight and right sacrifices. And in verse 16 he says, you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. And in verse 19 he says, in burnt offering.

So it's not like David is explaining a different sacrifice in 19 from 16. Now the answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. And the answer is in verse 17 where he says, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. David is confessing the truth that we understand, I think, a little easier today in the New Testament, which is that when the Messiah would come, when the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, who could actually do all the things that the lambs that have been sacrificed for centuries in the Jewish sacrificial system could never do, when someone would come whose blood was actually able to be a substitute for the blood that you deserve to shed for your sin, then and only then will we be able to offer God proper worship.

And in the Old Testament time, the proper worship was to bring your sacrifices. When these Old Testament guys brought their little lamb to the tent, and the priest took the lamb, and they did all the different things to the lamb. You can talk about all the details and they all have neat applications in our Lord's life. But ultimately what we see is a person going through a religious ritual.

And if we could have a peek back in Old Testament Israel, we could watch two guys approach the tent with their lamb. And they could both hand over a beautiful spotless lamb. And they could both stand there and go through all the motions and then they could both walk away. And you have no way of knowing which one of those people was actually doing it from a heart of worship.

And there were certainly Israelites who were not. And there were certainly Israelites who were. Israelites that understood that this lamb is not my salvation. But I'm doing this because I believe in the God of salvation. And this lamb is a picture of what he's going to do for me. And they didn't understand it yet.

Not in the detail we can. but we can do the same thing today I can look around this room right now and I can see about 15 or 20 people that are all apparently looking attentively and they're getting ready to drink some wine and some bread and you're going to stand and you're going to sing another song you listen to Jason pray and some of you closed your eyes and put your head down maybe you folded your hands you look really holy I've been places where guys got on their knees I don't do that on the hard floor so much but maybe I should but we don't know what's going on in your heart and that's one of the reasons why we preach it's one of the reasons why we open God's word but if you have a broken spirit and a contrite heart God will not despise that this is the principle Jesus taught us in the sermon on the mount blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven He's not saying you're supposed to be sad all the time. He's saying you're supposed to be sad about your sin when you mourn and are comforted. Jesus is saying it's those who come to him with humility.

Those are the ones that have the kingdom of heaven. And so the key is this, that when you have authentic repentance, and you've been reconciled to God through his son Jesus Christ, you're being restored, having a life that's showing these things are true, you will do the religious duties instituted by God, and they will be acceptable to Him. And so in our day and age, we have different religious duties.

And so I want you to inspect your heart, but turn to Romans 12. I want you to inspect your own heart. And this is why I said earlier that we have to warn you not to just follow the order of service. In fact, I think we mixed it up a couple times on purpose, just to make people think about that. But you have to watch your heart. Why are you worshiping?

Whom are you worshiping? And how are you worshiping? You're worshiping God because He's worthy, or is it because it's what you've got to do today? or is it because you think if you worship him maybe he'll forgive you for the bad thing you did yesterday or this morning are you coming to God like a judge in a courtroom and you're going to bribe him to look away from the things that you've done is that why you worship him is it so that somebody in your life will think highly of you I remember when I was a non I hated Christians so much I thought it was the stupidest idea that a person would pretend to be a Christian But now that I'm a Christian, I see it happen all the time, because there's some weird prestige and pride in the whole thing.

It was solely foreign to me as a non-Christian, I thought even the fake Christians were losers, I didn't understand why anybody would do that. but why do you do what you do? Is it because you have to? Or is it because you love the Lord and you want to? That's a question you have to ask yourself. And whom are you worshipping? Are you worshipping the God of the Bible?

Are you worshipping an image you're making in your mind? Elijah just read we don't worship any images. It takes a lot of work on my part to actually try to cast out the images of Jesus Christ that I have seen in my life that people have made that aren't even actually images of him, but that I saw my whole life, and I never thought anything of it. And I have to treat that stuff like I have to treat pornography.

I have to beg God, just remove that from my mind altogether. I don't even want the memory of it. So who are you worshipping? Are you worshipping the God of the Bible? Are you worshipping Him through Jesus Christ? And then how are you worshipping Him?

Through the regular principle of worship. And so we talk about worship in the Bible and in the church. But in Romans 12, Paul, I think, is using a different concept of worship. He says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

So Paul's talking about worship. We always have to remember the context because we're going to read the rest of this chapter and none of it's going to sound like what we described as worship. So he says, tell me about your worship service. You know they mean one of two things. They either mean how big and loud is your band or they might mean what's the whole thing like, right? nobody's asking you about how your body is a living sacrifice every single day for the living God and I think too often and I think it's great to be a Sabbatarian, I'm one, I think we all should be and it's in our confession so you have to be if you remember I think that's wonderful that we set aside time for corporate gathering and worship but in order to worship God the way he has taught us we worship him every single day of the week and you do it from a heart of devotion to Him and your living sacrifice.

So listen to what He says. This is how you worship Him. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. He wants you to try different things and gain wisdom. For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function. Now here we go. So we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. So now, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. Part of how you worship God is by exercising your spiritual gifts. You exercise your spiritual gifts by bestowing the gifts upon other believers.

Your body's a living sacrifice. If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness. So we'll look at the gifts, Lord willing, when we get to Romans 12.

But now, this is just, look at this section. This is a list of commands. So anybody tells you the New Testament's not about commands, it's a relationship or not a religion or all those things people like to say this is a list of commands for you as a Christian to carry out now praise the Lord that Jesus Christ carried them out perfectly for you and where you fail you're forgiven but this is a list of things that you should be striving to do it is a living sacrifice to God let your love be genuine abhor what is evil hold fast to what is good love one another with brotherly affection outdo one another in showing honor do not be slothful and zeal serve the Lord and be fervent in spirit he says to rejoice in hope be patient in tribulation be constant in prayer that was enough right there but we'll keep going contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality it doesn't say wait for your phone to ring and then if somebody asks you they can say over give them a bed Seek to show hospitality.

Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. So important in a local church. Live in harmony with one another.

Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Sometimes I think you're all fulfilling that verse by just talking to me. So thank you. Never be wise in your own sight. That's from Proverbs 3. repay no one evil for evil but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all it is amazing how trying to do right to people in the sight of everyone will have a good effect I think I've seen Christians who did evil to other Christians and they were right about the other Christian being wrong about something And the evil that they did in response wasn it didn look good I never agreed with it.

Then if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. It's a nice verse for those of us that suffer from having some non-believers in our lives we have to deal with. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. for it's written vengeance is mine I will repay take care of your enemy turn to Hebrews 13 so you want to be doing what David talked about interpret what he says properly David says that burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings will be a delight to God and bowls will be offered on his altar the best offerings will be given to God he says because of what you've done to me God I'm going to do what's best he's not going to make the mistake that so many people would make after him and give faulty sacrifices to God or bloodless sacrifices to God or all these different things Jesus Christ would come and David then was going to offer the best and that's what God wants you to do but you don't have a lamb to kill okay the lamb has been slain alright we're living post cross post resurrection.

The lamb has been slain. The blood sacrifices are done. The ceremonial system is abrogated. The Jewish religion is basically gone. We have Jesus Christ in our presence in your heart every day and you should live a life that shows that you really believe that right now you belong in hell and you're not there. And not only does that mean you should try to stop sinning so much and repent of sin and you should try to let the Holy Spirit sanctify you and work with people on on growing in that way.

But it means doing more than just the bare minimum. So we look to our Lord Jesus Christ in Hebrews 6, 13. We'll start in verse 12. Now we'll do, sorry, 10. We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. like this whole thing is about how we have a better religion now the whole book jesus is better than everything that came before even the stuff instituted by god okay the religious sacrifices the tent the altar the priest even if the priest went in and did everything verbatim to the word of god we have something better you understand that we have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.

For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Because of that, so therefore, remember what is the therefore therefore? Because Jesus did this, let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.

This is saying the same thing as Romans 12. Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. When you're not conformed to this world, you're bearing the reproach outside the camp. And he says in 14, For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God.

What did David say? Oh Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise, right? Saying the same thing. That is the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. And then he says, do not neglect to do good and to share what you have for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. And I dare say that if you have the right heart towards God, That there will be sacrifices that you make in your life for others.

That if somebody mentioned them to you, you would be shocked and say, that was no sacrifice. That was just what I ought to have done. Because Jesus Christ already gave more than any of us could ever give. And so there's nothing you can give that will feel like a sacrifice if you keep your focus on what he already gave for you. so let me pray Father in heaven we thank you that Jesus Christ is perfect we thank you that we have a holy and righteous Savior who can never fail and we are grateful today that there is hope in him and him alone I pray Lord that you would use the preaching of your word to pierce the hearts of the people that each one of us would repent of known sin and that you would even reveal to us the sin that as deep inside our hearts that we may loathe what is evil and hold fast to what is good.

Help us, Lord, not to be so destroyed by a knowledge of our sinfulness, but rather to let that be our motivation to cling tighter to the Christ who does love us and died for us and really does want to indwell us and have fellowship with us. We can preach about sin and we can talk about repentance and all these things, Lord, but we're thankful that you love us. That it was your love that sent your Son and it was His love that died for us.

And so we thank you for your love and the love of Christ and the love of the Holy Spirit. We pray that it would fill our souls with joy today as we try to be conformed to His image. In Christ's name I pray. Amen.