The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: In order for worship to meet God's criteria, three musts are needed. We must be born again. The Son of Man must be lifted up, and we must worship in spirit and in truth.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Worship is not about feelings and emotions or simply a time when we gather on a Sunday morning. True worship comes about when our spirit, the divine nature within us, meets with the spirit of God. Let’s join Dr. Boice as he shows us the true meaning of worship from Psalm 95 and what it means to approach the living God in spirit and in truth.

Dr. James Boice: It's time for the evangelical church to discover what it really means to worship God. In one of his books, John Stott, the former rector of All Souls Church in London, writes that true worship is the highest and noblest activity of which man by the grace of God is capable. I think that's right.

But a great deal of what goes on in many of our churches, if not the vast majority of our churches today, is anything but worship. People who really do want to worship God are wondering how you go about it. I've noticed an amazing decline in the traditional forms of worship in the evangelical churches as I travel about and speak in our time.

Everybody, when they think of worship, should think normally of hearing the word of God and praying and having the word of God taught, because it's on the basis of the teaching that we respond appropriately and worship in spirit and in truth. But I find that all of those things are being weeded out of the evangelical churches on the grounds that those things don't appeal to people anymore and what we have to do instead is entertain them.

I notice, for example, that scripture readings are beginning to disappear in many churches. It used to be back in the Puritan age that they read a chapter of the Old Testament and a chapter of the New Testament at every single service. Today, we barely read the scripture that's going to be commented on, and the verses get shorter and shorter if they're read at all. Sometimes one or two verses pass for a scripture reading among us.

As far as the prayers go, prayers are almost disappearing. The service usually begins with a prayer. I don't know quite why. It's always a short little thing. But then, in some churches, the only thing I see in addition to that in the area of prayer is the prayer before the offering. I do know why we pray for that, because it takes a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to get people to part with their money.

But that's all. The great pastoral prayers, in which in times past people would acknowledge the attributes of God and bow low before him and confess sin and humble ourselves and then begin to thank him for all he's done in salvation matters first of all and then intercede for the needs of other people, all of that is going by the boards.

The sermons themselves are getting shorter and shorter. They're supposed to be funny, they're supposed to stay away from anything theological that would actually cause people to think, because, of course, people don't want to think, and if you make them think, they don't want to come to church, and if they don't come to church, you won't have big budgets and all of that sort of thing.

It's not new, of course. A.W. Tozer was a pastor in Chicago years ago. He went to Toronto after that. He actually died in Toronto. He wrote in The Pursuit of God in 1948, think how long ago that was, "Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the word, there are today many millions of people who hold right opinions, probably more than ever before in the history of the church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb."

"To great sections of the church, the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the program. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us." 1948. Today, people don't even hold right opinions. They hardly have any biblical opinions at all. Worship is even more missing.

Now, Psalm 95 tells us how to worship. In fact, it does more than that. It's a call to worship, it's the way it begins. Then it tells us why we should worship, giving us suggestions as to how that might be done along the way. Finally, very significantly, it ends with a warning as to what's going to happen if you don't, how you can fall away and lose your sense of actually belonging to the people of God entirely.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon used a little image when he was referring to it. He says this psalm is like the church bell. Sometimes they ring out merrily, as they do for weddings or coronations or something like that. But at other times, they ring out solemn peals of mourning in the case of a death. He says this psalm begins with the joyful ringing of the bells, but it ends on the solemn notes of reminding us of those who perished in the wilderness and did not enter into the promised land in order that we might be warned by their example.

The first part of it, first seven verses, have been used by the church as a call to worship from the first century. They're called the Venite, which means "to come" from the very first word of the psalm. They have been appropriately used because that's what the psalmist is saying. It begins with this joyful call to worship: "Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let's shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song."

Now, there are many ways to worship, just as there are many different styles of music. But what this opening to the psalm is saying is that many times, and perhaps most of the time, our singing should express joyful worship. Our worship should be expressed with great enthusiasm. I've mentioned before C.S. Lewis's study of the Psalms. He has a section in which he comments on that, probably as a rather reserved Englishman who nevertheless is interacting with what is quite obviously the exuberant joy of the Hebrew psalms. Quite a cultural difference there, of course.

You can't imagine C.S. Lewis dancing as Jews would in worship and singing out loudly and shouting and all those things. But he has an appreciation for it. He says it's really a remarkable thing. These Jews who write these psalms and sing these psalms don't think that there's any merit coming to them because they sing joyfully. There's no special grace in their case; that's just the way they respond to the wonder of their God.

I suppose he's saying many of us would have a lot to learn there if we really would think about who God is and more or less unburden ourselves of the kind of cultural shackles that keep us from expressing the joy of our salvation. Now, Psalm 95 suggests some of the forms of worship we can enjoy. One of them is singing; it mentions it right off.

Singing expresses human thought emotionally, and it's not to say that that's the only way you would worship. Sometimes you can worship with tears as the truth breaks through to your heart, sometimes the recognition of sin for which you are rightly remorseful, and other times tears simply in wonder at the great grace of our God. But all that aside, singing really is an important way that Christians express their worship of God.

I have sometimes said that Christianity is really the only religion in the world for which singing occupies this place. In some religions of the world, you have chanting, a sort of religious exercise that's intended to put you into a certain mood, to make you susceptible to certain things. But that's not the same thing. Christians sing because that's an emotional and proper way of responding to who God is. We know God is great, and so we sing "Great is our God."

These verses also mention shouting. Most of us have trouble with that unless you belong to the Salvation Army or certain charismatic groups. Probably there are some cultural differences here. I sometimes say when I'm preaching to a white congregation and I'm beginning to get through, it gets quieter and quieter. When I'm preaching to a black congregation and I get through, it gets louder and louder. That's a cultural difference. It doesn't make any difference at all.

When we talk about shouting, maybe most of us aren't going to shout a whole lot. It wouldn't hurt to hear an amen once in a while. We recognize all kinds of cultural differences here at Tenth Church. But it does mention shouting, doesn't it? "Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let's shout aloud to the rock of our salvation." And how about music? Again, there are all kinds of music. Some of the psalms mention these kinds of music explicitly, instruments.

The last psalm in the Psalter, Psalm 150, lists trumpets, harps, lyres, tambourines, strings, flutes, and cymbals. I suppose if the ancients had guitars and electronic keyboards and organs, it would mention that too. It's a way of saying that in our worship of God, it's appropriate to use whatever musical means are available. I think it's true, if we have a whole orchestra, that it's appropriate to use a whole orchestra. We can't afford a whole orchestra all the time, but that would be an appropriate thing to do. So we've got singing and we've got shouting and we've got music, instrumental music as well as the singing.

How about words? Let's not forget words. Words aren't mentioned explicitly in this first stanza because, of course, the first stanza is itself words. You see, words operate in worship in two ways. First, the word of God which we hear. When we hear it and understand it by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we on our part lift up our words and send them back to God, acknowledging what he has told us.

You have both of those here in the psalm. The last phrase of verse seven speaks of hearing God's voice; that has to do with the revelation. The right response to that is obedience; it's what follows. Then the first stanza speaks of thanksgiving, and one way we do that is by vocalizing it. So thanksgiving is one way we worship God.

Let me say, too, that while we're talking about words, one proper use of our words is to tell others about our God and what he has done. That's a kind of worship. Have you ever thought of witnessing as a kind of worship? It's a way of acknowledging the character of our God before others and calling those who don't yet know him to come to know him, to find him in Jesus Christ.

William Carey, the great pioneer missionary to India, got there in 1792. When he arrived, he found that his predecessor in a place called Tranquebar, a man's name was Christian Schwartz, had inscribed the first words of Psalm 95 above the door of the little chapel he had built. "O come, let us worship and fall down and kneel before the Lord our maker." It was an appropriate invitation to those Schwartz was trying to win to Jesus Christ.

Now we've seen a few of the ways in which we can worship God. Next question we want to ask, and appropriate one, is why we should do it. Why should we worship God? Well, the psalm gives two important reasons. First of all, verses three to five, because God is such a great God. You can show appreciation to all sorts of people. You can praise those people who are particularly worthy of praise. But worship, worship belongs to God only.

We can't really worship him until we have a proper understanding of who he is. John Stott, whom I quoted earlier, says in one place, "Not until we grasp who the Lord is are we inwardly moved to worship him." Not only do we have to know who he is in order to be moved to do it, we have to know who he is to do it properly. So that's what these verses are talking about.

They say the first reason why we should worship God is because he is the creator of all things, and that means that he has created us. This is the starting place. It's significant, of course, that this is what the apostle Paul mentions in the first chapter of Romans where he's talking about the wrath of God being displayed against the ungodliness of men and women, saying the problem is that although God has revealed himself as the creator, and indeed the all-powerful creator in nature, men and women won't do that; they will not fall down before him and worship him.

But they ought to. They're guilty for having failed to do it. When we talk to people about the gospel, one point at which we can begin is with that: God the creator and what's owed to him as creator. Worship is owed. We should worship him first of all because he's made all things. But secondly, we should worship him because he's our own dear shepherd, if we really are his people. You see, that's what it talks about in verse seven. He's our God, not just the great God of verse three, the King above all gods who made the earth and the heavens. But verse seven: he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.

Now, I suppose there's hardly a Christian who can read that without thinking of the words of Jesus Christ who applied that to himself. He said, "I'm the good shepherd." Then he went on in that great chapter of John's gospel, John 10, to explain some of the things that he does as a great shepherd. The greatest of all is that he, the great shepherd, gives his life for the sheep. He dies in our place that we might be saved.

He also, as the great shepherd, calls his own by name, so they come to him, as he does today through the preaching of the gospel. We hear the voice of Jesus Christ in the preaching of the gospel, and when people respond, they respond not to the preacher but to him. And then as the great shepherd, he cares for us, he protects us, he leads us, he keeps us from harm, and eventually brings us home to his father's house forever.

There is a new idea in this stanza, that is verses six and seven, the third stanza according to the organization of it by the New International Version. This new idea is reverence. I call attention to that because it's important to remember reverence as a way of balancing off the kind of exuberance we were talking about at the beginning. Many of us just fail in that area. We're hardly joyful at all, and the psalm says, "Come and be joyful in your praise to God."

But don't just make noise, it's saying. Noise itself isn't worship, and so it begins to introduce this idea of reverence here. There are three Hebrew verbs here, and each one of them involves the thought of humbling ourselves before God: bowing and kneeling, obviously. That's body language and expresses a humbling of the heart. But also the word worship itself. Often when we talk about worship, we play upon the meaning of the English word, which is to ascribe worth to God, which is entirely true and it's also an idea present in the Hebrew.

Psalm 96:8 invites us to ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name. That's worship. But the Hebrew word for worship itself literally means to prostrate oneself. So in this one verse in the psalm, three times over, that's what we're encouraged to do. These verbs actually follow one another in direct sequence in the Hebrew, so the text literally reads: "Come, let us prostrate ourselves, let us bow down, let us kneel."

You see how that works together with the opening? The opening begins with "come" as well. It says "come let's sing, shout, and make music." Here it says "come let's prostrate ourselves, humble ourselves, and bow down." The two are not opposed; they go together. Reverence is an important part of what we do. Now suddenly, in the midst of this exuberant call to worship, we find a warning.

It begins in the last phrase of verse seven and goes through the end of the psalm. It's such a sudden change in tone that some commentators, liberal commentators often think this way, just suppose that it's a separate psalm entirely that somehow erroneously got tacked on. We've dealt with that kind of problem and thinking before. I point out all that it really shows is that the ancient Hebrews who wrote these things and composed them didn't think like liberal scholars. I'll leave it to you to decide which had the better way of thinking.

At any rate, we have these ideas together, and often it is extremely effective because you see here at the end of a psalm which calls upon us to worship God, suddenly we're brought up short. The psalmist says, "Look, here's a warning. Make sure you really do worship with your heart and with your soul and with your mind, and not merely externally with words." Jesus said the same thing, you know. At one point, he quoted from Psalm 29:13 and he said of the people of his day, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; they worship me in vain."

Now, what do these verses teach us? Well, one thing they teach us is that worship begins with listening rather than speaking. You see how verse seven works? It says, "Today, if you hear his voice." It's another way of saying that worship has to be based on the preaching of the word of God. If worship is a response to what we hear God say, we ask where do we hear God say anything? The answer is in the scriptures. That's where God speaks. And so in a worship service, you always have to have the exposition of the scriptures because that is the thing to which we respond.

The actual order is this: first, we must hear God's word; secondly, we must obey God's word, which means hear it with our hearts; and then thirdly, we praise God joyfully for what we have heard. Now, obedience is the starting point, of course, and that's what these last verses are talking about. They go back to an incident from Israel's history that would have been known to everybody in the ancient world who was singing this hymn.

When the Jewish people had come out of Egypt and were led into the wilderness, they came to a place called Rephidim where there was no water. That was a serious matter for a large company of people. It would be serious for even an individual, but here they had more than a million people and all their flocks and herds and there was no water. So they began to complain about it. They complained to Moses. As a matter of fact, they were going to stone Moses, which would not have helped provide the water, of course, but would have given vent to their frustration.

Moses went to God and asked God what he should do, and God told him that he should take the same staff that he had used to strike the Nile and turn the Nile into blood and use it to strike a great rock there that was called the Rock of Horeb. When he did that, a stream of water burst forth, which was sufficient to provide water for this vast host of people. It must have been a great river that came forth out of that rock.

Now, a name was given to the place. Actually, a double name. It was called Massah because Massah means "testing", and the people had tested God by their unbelief. Secondly, it was called Meribah, which means "quarreling" because they quarreled with Moses about the lack of water. Years later, a similar thing happened at Kadesh. That's where Moses got into trouble because on that occasion, God told him to speak to the rock, and he didn't; he hit it with the stick and he was angry and he got into trouble and was unable to enter the promised land as a result.

But the same names were carried over to the second place as well. They said, "This happened all over again." So they called it Meribah and Massah. Those two words occur together also in the 33rd chapter of Deuteronomy at the very end as Moses is giving a challenge to the people. Now, this is what God brings forward in this psalm as an illustration of the disobedience of the people.

He points out that it was as a result of this attitude that characterized the entire years of wandering that they were unable, that generation, to enter the promised land. Now, in the unfolding of the story in those first books of the Bible, the critical point was when they refused the testimony of Joshua and Caleb after they had investigated the land, that it was possible to go in and take it. The other spies had said, "Well, no, there are great giants here and you can't take it because of the giants," and they believed the ten rather than the two.

That was the critical point. But the attitude was this attitude that had been seen way back at the beginning. So that's what the psalm refers to here. This is the warning: if you want to worship God, make sure you do not harden your heart against God's word or quarrel with him or test him as the ancients did. In other words, do exactly what I said a moment ago: hear the word of God, obey the word of God, and thirdly, praise God for it.

Now, there's one more thing before we close. We've looked at that psalm, but I want to point out that it occurs again, the last portion, in the New Testament. It occurs in the book of Hebrews, beginning in the third chapter, verse seven, and it occupies the rest of that chapter and the fourth chapter to verse thirteen. These two chapters of Hebrews quote Psalm 95 no less than four times, beginning with an extensive citation of this last stanza, that is Psalm 95 beginning with verse seven through eleven. You find it in the third chapter of Hebrews.

In other words, Psalm 95:7-11 is introduced in Hebrews as a passage to be expounded. It's sort of the way I write my sermons when they appear finally in book form. I put the text at the beginning of the sermon, and then the sermon follows. That's exactly what you have in Hebrews. Now, Hebrews makes several very important points based upon the psalm. Here they are.

Number one: it applies these verses to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Now, in their Old Testament context, they don't refer to that. They have to do with entering the promised land. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't have any warrant for taking those verses and somehow applying them to Jesus and salvation and believing on him and all of that. We might want to do it by way of an illustration; we want to say it's like this and make an analogy. But here in the book of Hebrews, the author says that's really what they're about.

The way he proves it is this: he says this psalm, Psalm 95, was written years later than the events that are being described when the people disobeyed and didn't enter the land. This is after they had already gotten into the land, and yet here the psalmist is putting forward the words again as a warning. So he says, obviously, the meaning of the text goes beyond what you had there in the original setting. He says the real meaning has to do with Jesus Christ.

Hebrews 4:8-10: "There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work." Derek Kidner comments on that and said that the handling of this in Hebrews keeps us from confining the psalm's thrust to Israel. The "today" of which it speaks is this moment, the "you" is none other than ourselves, and the promised rest is not Canaan but salvation. So that's the way Hebrews handles it.

Second point: this warning that is given here but used again in Hebrews is for those who have heard the gospel and who seem to have responded to it. The whole book of Hebrews is like that. It's written to Jews who had heard the gospel and begin to sort of embrace elements of Christianity but had not quite or were unwilling or perhaps we weren't certain whether they had actually gone on to the fullness of faith in Jesus Christ. So it's warning them: don't pull back, but go on, go on to the fullness of faith in him.

Hebrews 3:12-13: "See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God," like these people did in the wilderness, "but encourage one another daily as long as it's called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness." You see how personal that gets when you come to the end? Because it's talking about us.

It's not talking about the world out there that doesn't have any knowledge of God, doesn't care about him. It's talking about people who sit in the pews of a church and who go through the motions and think they're worshipping God. It says be sure you really are. You say to yourself, "Well, how do I know whether I am or not?" The answer is whether you hear the word of God and obey it.

You can't come to church and just sing a hymn, you can't come to church and just recite a creed, you can't come to church and sort of give a nodding acquaintance to what you hear the preacher say. You come to church, you are here to hear the voice of God in scripture and obey it and respond in praise to what you've come to understand. The author says for people like that, that the psalm gives the warning.

You see, it reminds us of Jesus' story about the ten women, five of whom were wise and five were foolish. They were all invited to the banquet, they had all responded, they all confessed the master as Lord, and they were all waiting for his return. But five were lost, and only half of them were saved. So it's a way of saying, "Make your calling and election sure." Be sure that you really are a Christian. Be sure that you really are worshipping God, that you really do know him, because the issues are the issues of life and death.

Third point, last one: it's important to believe on Jesus Christ now while it is today. That's the word the psalm uses. The psalm says, "Today, if you hear his voice." Hebrews, which quotes this, repeats "today" no less than five times. Once each in Hebrews 3:7, 13, and 15, and twice in chapter 4, verse 7. See, the point is that today, this today is the day of the gospel invitation.

It's when Jesus Christ is proclaimed as savior, and you and I have an opportunity to turn from sin and come to faith in him. This day is not going to last forever. So this is the time to turn from sin and come to Jesus Christ. Have you done that? Have you trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior? Is he the one who has rescued you from your sin? If you haven't done that, if you haven't come to him, the psalm is saying and Hebrews is saying, "Don't put it off." Others have put it off and have perished. The challenge is to commit yourself to Jesus Christ today.

Our Father, we thank you for this psalm and the privilege that we have had to study it here in this hour. We thank you for all it tells us about worship and also the way it impresses upon us the need to do that rightly and also to do it genuinely, so that by our worship we actually are responding to your word and showing our faith in Jesus Christ.

We pray that you would work in the hearts of each one here, teaching us what we need to know and above all, in the lives of those who perhaps have been going through the motions of religion but for whom it is not yet real. By your grace, bring them to a genuine faith right now today while there's still an opportunity. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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