Our New Testament reading for this morning is from John chapter 4. We'll begin in verse 7 and read to verse 26. Hear now the word of the Lord. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, Give me a drink. For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, asked for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. The woman said to him, Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock. Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty or have have to come here to draw water. Jesus said to her, Go call your husband and come here. The woman answered him, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, You are right in saying, I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true. The woman said to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the father. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth for the father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming. He who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, I who speak to you and he. Now may Jesus Christ, who is the living word, speak to us this morning from this passage which is his written word. You may be seated. Would you bow your heads and pray with me as we ask for the Lord's presence to reveal itself to us in his word. Let us pray. Father in heaven, we cry out to you. We ask that we might see you. That we might worship you and praise you. That we might commune with you. That we might pour out our cares and pour out our love to you. That we might express our trust and faith in you. Meet with us, Lord. Help us to see you in your word. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I have put Genesis aside until I return from my little break here. So I thought rather than just throwing one sermon out there in the middle, unconnected to the others, I'd pick that back up when I returned. So this week we are going to put our attention at, as I've said in my title, at the heart of gospel growth. We spoke on Friday evening at our meeting about gospel growth, about wanting to see people hear the gospel, be converted by the gospel, to grow in the gospel, to be trained up in the gospel. But I want us to be real sure, crystal clear, if you will, what the point of it all is. And that is worship. Worship is at the heart of the gospel. And I want to make it very clear that worship is at the heart of the gospel. Let me ask you a question. First, imagine with me for a moment, if you were one of those disciples in the upper room, hearing rumors of Jesus's resurrection. And then he appeared. There he was. Imagine if that happened here. If Jesus in his resurrected glory appeared here, showed up here. Would that change our worship? Now I'm going to recite to you a very familiar text. where two or three are gathered in my name. There I am among them. Do you know what that means? He has shown up. Now, he walks with us everywhere that should impact our life everywhere. But in this passage, it's emphasizing a unique presence of the living God, Jesus, our Lord, in the gathered people of his people, two or three. Gathered in his name. There he is. When we gather each week, we do so to meet with God, to remind us to walk with God. Because he's with us. I could have cited the Great Commission and. Lo, I am with you to the very end of the age, I am with you go out everywhere, so wherever you go out. There he is! And when you gather, he's here, and in a special way, when we gather in his name, here he is! Have you seen him yet? This is very critical. As we try to... I said on Friday night that I think God's trying to wake us up. I believe that. I think he's trying to wake us up. But be clear here. Not just to a bunch of activity. Now, I want zealous activity. But he wants to see us. He wants to know us. He wants us to know him. God is pleased with worship, not works. Worship, not works. We've got to be very clear on this. On that day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? That sounds like a great gift to have cast out demons in your name. I'd like to have that kind of authority and power to cast out demons. Do many mighty works in your name. I'd like to do many mighty works in the name of the Lord. But that is not the main point, is it? Because he goes on to say, and then I will declare to them what? I never knew you. So depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. Even these great things that were done in the name of the Lord were considered works of lawlessness. Why? Because they didn't know Jesus. Coming to church each week means nothing if you don't know Jesus, if you don't know God. It's meaningless. That's the whole encounter here with the woman at the well. Jesus is bringing that woman's attention to himself, knowing himself and knowing the father. The key verses that we're focusing in on. Today is John 4 23 and 24 the hours coming and is now here when the true worshippers Will worship the father in spirit and truth And then it says, the father is seeking such people to worship it. That's his whole plan of salvation. You see, it's not saying he's looking around hoping he's going to find some. This is what salvation is doing. What is God doing by sending his son? What is God doing by sending him to the cross and bringing him back from the grave and then sending his Holy Spirit to proclaim and his people to proclaim the gospel message? He is seeking worshipers. He's seeking to create worshipers. This is the end result. This is if you're saved from something, sinful rebellion and idolatry, you're saved to something. Worship of the true living God who created all things. And this is what it's about. And if you miss this, you miss everything. Isn't it interesting the connection there that Jesus makes with the woman? Is that a well? Give me something to drink and then I would give you living water. Now living water could be an expression just referring to like a spring or a stream that's moving in motion that's clear and more drinkable than some well. I mean a well still could be decent water but you'd think a nice clear mountain stream. That's the kind of living water picture here. And he said, I'd give you living water. And he means even more than that, doesn't he? As the conversation makes clear. He'll drink this kind of water and you'll get thirsty again, but the kind of water I give you will well up and do eternal life. Isn't it interesting right there that Jesus then tells her to go get her husband, knowing full well she isn't living with a man, but it's not her husband. And she's had five husbands, so this is certainly an area that's been a struggle with sin for this woman. It's safe to assume. So in giving her living water, what does he first do? He draws her attention to her need to have her sin dealt with. Because if you want the life-giving water of being in the presence of the living God in true worship, you have to have your sin dealt with. That's what's such good news about being justified, having a sentence declared upon us, not guilty. Sins cast aside, placed on another. That's the goodness of the gospel message, is that our sin has been dealt with so that we can worship, drink deeply of the living God and have this now spiritual living waters welling up within us into eternal life, as Jesus put it to the woman. The Father is seeking true worshipers. That's his plan. That's his plan for us. In that sense, we could summarize that evangelism is a call to worship. A call to worship the true God and a call to leave the worship of false gods. Idolatry. The call from idolatry to the worship of the true God. This is evangelism. Evangelism is a call to worship. And as I said already, true worship is the very heart of the gospel. The very heart of the gospel. So, what is true worship? Now, I wrestled a lot. I had this burden to say these sorts of things today to you, and I had a hard time pulling it all together. I think largely because when you talk about worship of the Living God, well, the Living God is so immense, and therefore our worship of Him is so immense. It's a huge topic. So what I'm saying is not definitive in any way. It's not exhaustive. It's not that. There's any number of ways we could go in this discussion. I've chosen this one. I got some help. I'll be right up front with you. I have begun auditing an online course by the Founders Ministry. They're connected with the Southern Baptists and they have a Founders Study Center online. And this course was offered to be able, I could audit it for free, about worship. And so God's kind grace to me, the first couple sessions in that have bailed out my wandering thoughts in worship. So his outline, particularly in session two, I'd say his, Dr. Bruce Leifblad, I believe that's how you pronounce it, is largely guiding this section in my notes, Roman numeral 2, what is worship. I'm going to use his outline, I tweaked it, I changed some of the words and moved things around, but I am going to be quoting from his notes in that session because I thought they were helpful to me and I thought they would also be helpful to you. And I wanted to give credit to the Lord's servants who took the time and energy to organize these things and thank the Lord before you, that was a very much of help and blessing to me in preparing what I'm about to say. That being said, listen to his definition, and he in the study was saying, this is not an exhaustive definition, but it's a handy one. Worship is communion with God in which believers, by grace, center their mind's attention and their heart's affection on the Lord. humbly glorifying God and response to his greatness and his word. The rest of the outline here is really playing out that little definition in various sections. Let's say it one more time. Worship is communion with God in which believers by grace center their mind's attention and their heart's affection on the Lord. Humbly glorifying God in response to his greatness and his word. So, piece by piece, true worship is communion with God. True worship is a relationship. It's communion with God. There's three intimacy models. There are more than that in the scriptures, but these are prominent. Father, child, he is our father. This is an intimate relationship. Husband, wife, he is our husband. There's an intimacy there. There's that communication. There's that relationship. Husband, wife, and one perhaps less known, best friend to best friend. And for that, we get the relationship with Moses. Listen to what it says in Exodus 33, 11. Thus, the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend. And we've been through some of the other Old Testament figures that have had a similar relationship. Abraham walked with God. Noah walked with God. Enoch walked with God. There was this relationship of intimacy. So true worship is communion with God. Secondly, true worship requires faith. As it says in Hebrews 11, six and without faith, faith, it is impossible to please him. If we're going to worship God in a way that pleases him, we must do it trusting him. It says right here without faith, it's impossible to please him. Listen to this for whoever would draw near to God. That's what we'd like to do, right? Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists. and that he rewards those who seek him. So there's two aspects to our faith. We believe two things, that he exists, who he is, who he's revealed himself to be. He is the creator God. He's made all things. He sustains all things. He's the one that sent our Savior to die in our place, to exchange places with us, bearing our sins so that we could wear his righteousness. This is things to believe. We must believe these things. We must believe in the truth. Isn't that what our key passage this morning is speaking to us? We worship God in spirit and truth. I think that speaks of spirit and truth in sort of two dimensions there. There's, there's a, it needs to be sincere. It needs to be wholehearted, but it also needs to be true. You can sincerely and wholeheartedly worship the wrong thing. Can you not? So we have to worship the true God the way he's revealed himself in his word. And make no mistake about that. That's this takes hard work. That's what he says in the notes. Worship is hard work. It requires effort. Amen. And by that, I don't mean it's it's it's tedious. I mean, it's the same sort of hard work you have in a marriage. You work hard at that, but it's not like, oh, man, I have to work at being a husband today. And if it is that you're already in trouble. You're already in trouble, so it's that kind of work. You don't just sit there and let it sort of happen to you. Don't misunderstand you. You need to get your mind in gear and understand who God is. He says, again going back to the worship class notes, what a person believes about God is the most important thing he believes. I agree. What a person believes about God, about God, is the most important thing he believes. And then, related to that, God is only worshipped as he is, not as he is not. And then secondly, What we believe about God's presence will affect how we worship. That was my opening illustration, was it not? We know that verse where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. And that was my opening challenge. Do you believe it? Really? So, this is our challenge. Again, you walk in, you may have had a tough morning, maybe nothing went right, and you've got all these other distractions, and then you have what's going to happen this afternoon, and then what's going to happen this week, and all things are assailing and distracting you. So, it's easy, without the visual, to forget that Jesus is here! He's here! We're listening to His Word being proclaimed because we want to hear from Him. But He's here. Right now. He knows exactly not only what you're doing, where you're looking, but also what you're thinking. He knows your heart. So, I mean, you can be looking up at me and you can fool the pastor. You can go every time at the right time. And I say, amen. You can go, amen. You can do that. But inside, you can be all sorts of distracted. But faith is not just belief about God. It's a trust in God. That's the other side of it that we have from Hebrews 11, 6, that He rewards those who seek Him. That we are seeking Him because of who He is. Because we know that true life comes from there. He is the waters, the living waters, is He not? This is what we believe. This is what we are putting our trust in. This is what we're banking on. And again, this is something that we cultivate, that we exercise. Faith is an action. It's not, it's a verb. Sure, you can use the word as a noun, but let's think of it in its verb form. We need to exercise faith. We need to remind ourselves as we walk in, the living God, our Lord and Savior is present in this place because we all are. Not this building, not because we walked through the doors somehow. No, but because His people have gathered in His name. Jesus is here. Let's remember that. Let's cultivate that mindset. Let's seek his favor. Let's seek his faith. Let's seek his pleasure. True worship requires faith. When he returns, it won't be faith anymore, it will be sight. That's the difference in my illustration. If he walked in here visibly, and he was shining and glowing, probably the one clear distinctive difference would be the first thing we do is probably fall on our face in awe and wonder. But then we might get back up and say, hey, we're going to sing to you, Lord. I want to do it as well as I can do it. Because we're not singing for our own pleasure. Jesus is here. True worship involves centering our minds on God. There is no such thing as mindless worship. And it's really just overlapping with what I've already said. I mean, consider this deliberate looking to that we're called to in second Corinthians four for this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison as we look not to the things that are seen. See, there's this instruction here that instead of looking at the things that you can see right in front of you that are so difficult and hard. Don't look at these seen things. No, what you're to do, you're to look to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient. That means they're temporary. They're here for a moment. They're passing. But the things that are unseen are eternal. So this is a deliberate switching of focus of our minds. We are centering our minds in true worship. We are centering our minds off what is coming at us through our senses and putting it on the things that's not coming to us through our senses, the unseen. The things that are eternal, the living God, our salvation in Christ, the love that he has displayed to us, that he's now building into us, the character that he's building, the faith, the trust, the hope. These are the things that we are to deliberately and continually turn away from the one and toward the other. So, you see, our discussion just immediately right there has gone beyond what we do on Sunday morning, as well it should. As I said in the opening, we gather together here to meet with God so that we remember to walk with God. out there, live a life of worship. I won't get there. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but it is it all hangs together. We have to work at this. We have to prayerfully work at this. We need to cry out to God. Oh, wretched man that I am. Who will save me from this body of death? Focus my attention, Lord. I am so prone to wander, so prone to distraction. The enemy knows how to get our eyes off the Lord. And sometimes the enemy doesn't need much help. Because in our own hearts, we have the remaining indwelling sin and we've got distraction inside, outside, all around. This is a deliberate focusing of attention, centering our attention on the Lord. Point F in my outline, the true worship is expressing love to God. This is, of course, obvious, but let's dwell on it for a moment. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your might. Wholehearted devotion and love. This is what we do in worship. We give our affections to God. Worship is loving God first of all, most of all, and best of all. Isn't that good? Worship is loving God first of all, most of all, and best of all. I want to say this well. I want to say this carefully. When we gather with one another, in the name of Jesus, knowing that He's going to be here. Isn't that enough? Isn't the fact that Jesus is here, isn't that enough? Isn't that why we want others to come? See, my fear, my fear for the church broadly, let me start there, my fear for the church in America broadly that I'm more familiar with, is that we have gotten our eyes off our Savior and on to all the business and things that we're doing for Him. That we are more compelled. Let me give you an illustration this way. When I was in college, I went to a U2 concert. You know, rock band, you know. The whole stadium filled with people. You ever been to a concert at a stadium? It's compelling. Everybody got their little lighter going up, going like this, you know? I got a little creeped out, I gotta be honest. Because it's like worship! There's something compelling. You walk into a Red Sox game that's packed out, it feels electric in there. Why? Because it is a whole study on fear of man, is it not? We walk in there, there's so many people, they're all excited, they're all jazzed about the game, then you're caught up in that, because we're so oriented to one another. We're so oriented to what we are doing, that this is what becomes amazing to us. This is what seems like amazing activity and something of worth and value. But Jesus is here. This is why we're here. This is why we don't need people out there that don't know the Lord to come in to help us. We need to come in because we have real riches. Because we see Jesus. Why? Because of His grace. because of his death, because of his resurrection, because of sending his Holy Spirit out to convince us and convict us of our sins, because of repentance and a changed orientation of life. We see that. We see that. And so we gather in Jesus name and we gather here to remind ourselves of what we already see. To see it afresh, to see it anew, and he meets with us and he promises to. He promises to meet with us. We gather to meet with Jesus, not primarily to meet with one another. That is another blessing. This is the confusion. I think we confuse the focus of real worship on the real God, on a real Savior, Jesus, our Lord. And we focus on all the attendant blessings that come with that. There's a lot of blessings about being in a family of God. There are a lot of blessings of one another and all these other things that are attendant blessings to the central thing of worship that I'm speaking of this morning. But they are not the main thing. Jesus is the main thing. God the Father is the main thing. We have come here to be with him. Do you see him? Do you see him? If you leave these doors and you haven't met with him, you have missed out on worship and you are going to die of starvation. Your spiritual life will be famished. You will have nothing to live on. Even our love for one another needs to be God-centered, needs to be about worship, shouldn't it? That's the next point. True worship is servant ministry to God. Servant ministry to God. Romans 12, 1 is a familiar passage. I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. That's the language of worship, isn't it? Holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. So your life, doing what is pleasing to God in your life, is worship. Again, we gather here to meet with God so we can go out there to walk with God. We need to walk with God. Everything needs to be for God. When you go about your business in your profession, do that work for the Lord. Isn't that? I don't have it printed out, but Ephesians 6, 5-7 says as much. Even servants will always be serving as to the Lord. They're not serving their particular human master. They are serving God. And they're to offer that service to God. So are you. Whatever you do out here this week, do it for God. Not for you. Not for your living. Not for your family. Do it for God. This is offering up as a sacrifice to God. You do your life for God. If you have a trial, you endure patiently for God's glory. If you have a blessing, you say, thank you, God, for his glory. Whether you eat or drink, you do it all for the glory of God. Everything is for God, for the Christian. Everything becomes an opportunity for worship. There is not a bit of life that comes at you that is not an opportunity for worship. And he is trying to get us to be like Enoch, to walk with God, till he takes us home. We get little bits of heaven here as we learn to walk with God. If we know God, we are getting taste of heaven. Because that's what heaven's like. That's the best part. By definition, heaven is where God is. Hell is where you're cut off from God's presence. By definition. on the outside with his weeping and gnashing of teeth. So if we don't begin to enter into heaven, what on earth are we offering to people out there? We don't know what heaven's like. What hope on earth do we have? We can know what heaven is like because we can know God and we need to offer our lives to God and we need to walk with God in this manner. to worship is servant ministry. So we serve each other. We serve our neighbor like the Good Samaritan. Whoever we happen to bump into, we serve. Why do we serve them? Because every bit of our service is a service to God. Every bit of it. Oh, the Lord would help this get into my thick skull. Oh, I'm so prone to wander. How about you? Oh, would we cry out to God even now? Would he make his presence obvious to us? Would he open the eyes of our hearts that we could see? And might we cling to that? Might we crave that? Might we hunger and thirst after that? Turn to me and be saved, says God, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other. There is no other God. There's no one else to turn to. This illustration we have in Jeremiah is powerful, isn't it? I'm the living waters. I'm the living waters. You get the picture in your mind of this fresh mountain stream, cool, clear, clean, and this cistern that can't even hold water, so it's muddy. If you're lucky, you've got any moisture in it at all. And yet you're busy digging your cistern, digging your cistern, getting something, like we're talking about in Sunday school, getting something out of somebody else. You've got to give me this. I need this from you. I need that from you. You've got to give this to me. My career has got to give me this. My husband or wife has got to give this to me. My kids got to give me this. My profession, my whatever. You fill in the blank. They are broken cisterns, friends. We are craving the wrong thing. We gather to have our eyes unveiled once again so that we could see true living water. This is what evangelism is about. We're not trying to say, you know, hang out with us and take a step down. No, because it's not about us. It's about Jesus. And Jesus is here. He's in this place. He's in us. He's with us. We offer, not ourselves, we offer Jesus. We always offer Jesus. Oh, that we would see it. True worship exalts God's glory. I think this would probably be obvious by now, but Psalm 115.1 says it plainly. Not to us, O Lord. Not to us. He wants to make sure you really get that. Not to us. Not to us. Not to us. Not to us. But to your name give glory. We need to have that pounded into us, don't we? I mean, I'm always trying to get credit for things. You know, if I remember to pick something up on the way home that I was supposed to, that I told my wife I was going to, you know, I pick that thing up because I better get credit for it. I'm a good husband, you know. Always after glory. No, not to us, not to us, not to us, but to your name, give glory for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness. And the testimonies about what God has done for us and in us is fine and good, but oftentimes they devolve into, this is what I'm doing, this is, you know, I've changed so much, you know, and it ends up sometimes coming across as, aren't I wonderful? Instead of, isn't he glorious? Not to us, not to us, but to him be glory. Not to us, but to him be glory. True worship is a response to God, is a response to God. You know, you can look up 1 John 4, 19. We love him because he first loved us. Right? That's it. He pursued. At every point, God gets the glory. He initiated. We respond. One of the reasons, and of course this doesn't mean this as a dogmatic rule, you have to start a worship service this way, but I have intentionally always started our worship service with a call to worship, which is some scripture. Why? Because I want to set that pattern. God speaks, we respond. God speaks, we respond. And if you'll look carefully through the service, it's set up in that type of responsive manner. God says something, we respond. God says something, we respond. After the sermon, we're going to sing, we're going to respond. Well, there are other things we could say, but let me conclude with a few closing thoughts. True worship is at the heart of the gospel, has been my core premise here. True worship is at the core, at the heart of the gospel. And three things I want to say about that. First, true worshippers worship more than once a week. Now I've already made this, kind of been in the warp and woof of what I've said already. But if If this is the only time that you think about God, if this is the only thing you do to pursue God, I dare say you're probably not seeing Him. Because once you've tasted that the Lord is good, nothing else will satisfy. Now, ask the Lord to open the eyes of your heart. Cry out to Him. Weep more until you see His face. Cry out to God until you're seeing God himself, because once you see God, nothing else will satisfy. And once you see God, everything else dims. God in reality becomes, and it's true to reality, becomes big and then becomes small instead of the other way around. We need to worship all week long. We worship together today. that we might meet with God so that we'd be refueled to walk with God out there. That's worship. Life is worship. We need to be in the word out there. We need to be routinely telling ourselves the gospel message, whether that whether we just rehearse it and read it, whether we get some worship hymns together that that clearly say it in the words so that we can sing it. But whatever we do, we need to walk around with God all week. And it's not just moments of worship. Those moments of worship, formal worship, where we're singing something or we're reading some scripture or we're discussing it with one another. These formal times, they help us to remember through the rest of the day to walk around with God so that all of life becomes worship. Worship is not once a week. Secondly, the priority of worship is not an option. It's not an option. I like what What's the name again? Bruce. Well, Bruce has to say about this. He says the priority of God is not an option in scripture, nor can it be anything but the very centerpiece of Christian belief and practice in the in the contemporary church. If the church expects to be all that is intended to be. God must be first. If the church is to accomplish its great mission in the world, God must be its first priority. If the church is once again to become salt and light in an increasingly darkened and decadent culture, it must recover the priority of God for itself. And this is an article related that the same gentleman wrote. He wrote this little article, Worship 101, that I quoted here. I have another quote here, it's from the same author. Now, it seems to me, as we reflect on the recent history of our particular culture, that what has happened was we lost true worship and remained Christianized for a season. And we enjoyed that. We enjoyed having people say, this is a Christian nation. We're governed by Christian principles. And people actually believe that, even whether they were the Christians or not. We like that. There's a romance there. It's like, oh, if we could just go back to that. But you know why that didn't last? It's because we lost true worship. That's my opinion. I'm putting out an opinion. But there is clear evidence in history that suggests this. The liberal denominations went to good works and left behind the gospel. They left behind Christ. They thought they could be good apart from God. And now they're dying. And our culture is struggling. And for those who kept the gospel, there's been a real retreat from culture and it's shown, hasn't it? It's shown. So if we want to recover this idea of being salt and light, we've got to recover the priority of God for itself. And this is what I was trying to say a little bit earlier, don't confuse the gifts to the gift giver. You know, on a birthday with one of our kids, Rebecca just had one, We give her something we think she would really like and we want her to enjoy that gift because she liked that gift. There's a sense in which we want to pick things that would be enjoyable for her. But of course we give her gifts not just so that she'll like the gift because we want to say something to her about our love for her. Right? And that's why when you're training kids you try to say, oh make sure you go thank so and so before you go enjoy the gift. You've got to thank the person because you've got to value the relationship more than the gift. You've got to value the relationship. You've got to put that first and remember that or the gift then becomes a liability. If you don't train in this way, then you become, oh, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, and you're selfish. And it becomes so obvious that it becomes no joy to give gifts anymore. Because it's not accomplishing its end. What was the end? I want to extend love to you because of our relationship. And that relationship clearly doesn't exist. This is what we do with God. We fall in love with the gifts. As a culture, you could say we fell in love with the gifts that God gave us as a culture. The sort of morality, people being honest all the time. That's a good thing. At one point, everybody recognizes it's a good thing. Today, not so much. And we pay the price. But that's still focusing on the gift of being with God and becoming like God, instead of focusing on true worship, which is God Himself. I love this quote. When worship renewal comes, the congregation pursues God himself as its ultimate objective. God himself is treasured above any experience, any feeling, or any result of worship. You know, you can get so caught up in just creating an emotional atmosphere. And this God! Love to God will be the dominant affection expressed through the various forms of worship. Did you hear that? Love to God will be the dominant affection expressed through the various forms of worship. Fresh commitment to God is the common response of the entire worshiping community. Worship becomes an end in itself rather than a means to some other end. That's good. Hey, Jesus is here. Giving Him our adoration, praising Him, depending on Him, casting our cares upon Him, relying upon Him, believing in the truth about Him, learning more and more about who He is. We're doing this for Him. And that's an end in itself. I'll pray the prayer with the Apostle Paul from Ephesians three. For this reason, I bow my knees before the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory. He may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." Oh, that God would help us see with the eyes of our hearts this reality. That we would see His love poured out to us through Christ. We know God is good to his word. So, for a fact, Jesus did show up this morning. Now, are you meeting with him right now? Or are you still stumbling around in spiritual blindness? Meet with the Lord. And be renewed by the meeting. Let's pray. Father in heaven, would you forgive us for being distracted by so many lesser things that we chase after and crave after? And even in our religious practices, we go after other things, are more concerned about what one another thinks than what you think. We so often please ourselves, Lord, and we have paid so little attention to pleasing you. Father in heaven send your spirit Jesus our Savior meet with us refresh us open our eyes. I Pray in Jesus name. Amen