Well, hello and welcome to another broadcast. We're trying to figure out what the subject of worship is all about. It's an interesting subject. First time we see the word worship. Genesis chapter 22 verse 5. We'll be looking at it. Have your Bible ready if you can. We're reading in Genesis chapter 22 verse number one, and it came to pass after these things that God did tempt or test Abraham and said unto him, Abraham. And he said, behold, here I am. And he said, take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah. and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains, which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and claimed the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass, and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again unto you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son, and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father, and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. So they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of. And Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son, and laid him upon the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son." Now let's go back to verse 5. It says there that Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass, and I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you. He went up on that mountain to worship. Well, way back in the 1950s, A. W. Tozer, who was a highly respected man of God, said, quote, 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. The 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." He said that back in the fifties. I wonder what he would say today. Well, what is worship? Worship to the unsaved people is a visit to a shrine or some special religious place. And to a professed Christian, and I say professed Christian because not everybody who professes to be a Christian is one, But today we see a whole lot of this CCM worship leaders where they're getting together and getting all bent out of shape on rock music and calling it worship. And then in our fundamental independent Baptist church, worship to us, many of us, is to visit a church three times a week and then get that over with and get on with what is important to me. Well, we certainly don't find anything like that here in chapter 22 of the book of Genesis, where the first time we read that Abraham took his son and they went to worship. In our previous broadcast, we have seen that Abraham was in constant communication with God, and that's what worship really is. In Genesis 12-7, 12-8, Genesis 13-4, Genesis 13-18, we see that he built an altar and he was in communication with God. And it's because of that previous communications that he had with God that he came to the place, it says here, in chapter 22 and verse number 9, he came to the place which God had told him. We read that in Genesis 22 verse 9. Now, the place, chapter 22, verse 4, was a far off, it was a distance, and that was not good enough for Abraham. He had to get close to God. He had gotten used to being close to God. He was now living in the faith instead of living in the flesh, and so he was able to handle a situation like this one that confronted him here in Genesis chapter 22. So it says in verse number 9, they came to the place which God had told them. Now you notice that both in verse number 3 and in verse number 9, the reference is to past communications. He went to the place where God had told him. He was simply following instructions from his time that he had spent worshipping the Lord and in communication with the Lord. And so they came to the place and he built an altar there and he laid his son on that altar to sacrifice him. Now, his worship began long before that, as we have seen back in Genesis 12 and 13, where he is building altars and communicating with God. Worship for Abraham began with a sacrifice of his own reasoning. We read back here in verse number one, God said, I want you to take thy son, verse two, and I want you to take him up to the mountain there in Moriah, and I want you to offer him therefore a burnt offering. Now maybe in another broadcast we'll focus in on the burnt offering aspect of this. It's very interesting. It's mentioned six times in this chapter. that they were going to do, a burnt offering. There's three specific types of offerings in the Old Testament of which the burnt offering was one of them. But we see back here in verse number one that Abraham sacrificed his own reasoning, his own logic, his own... what would seem sensible to him. I mean, it's not sensible to take this son that you have promised me is going to have more descendants than the stars of the sky or the sands of the sea. It's not sensible for me to take him and to put him to death. He doesn't argue with him at all. He sacrifices his own reasoning. There is no argument. He simply trusts God. That is a major, major part in our worshipping the Lord. Not only that, we see that Abraham sacrificed his personal plans. He said, I want you to take him, and I want you to go for three days to this Mount Moriah, and then, of course, it's going to take another three days to get back. Well, you know, Abraham could have said, well, can we not do this in the backyard? I have a pretty busy schedule. No, he didn't think about his own plans at all. And when it comes to communicating with God, which is basically what worship is, Abraham sacrificed his own reasoning, and he sacrificed his own plans. Abraham also sacrificed his reputation. What are people going to think? What is Sarah going to think? What is the average person going to think? They're going to think he's an idiot. That didn't matter. He's just simply going to do what God says to do. And not only that, Abraham sacrificed his natural affection. He said, I want you to take that son, the son whom thou lovest, and we're going to offer him for a burnt offering. Then he said in verse number five, I and the lad are going yonder to worship. Well, all of this is quite a bit different from what we call a worship service where we can get together for an hour and then get it out of the way so we can get on with what's important to us. You see, because Abraham was in such close communication with God, he absolutely knew this was going to turn out okay. He said in verse number five, I am the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you. Now, it tells us in the New Testament that Abraham knew that Christ would raise his son from the dead again. And nobody had ever been risen from the dead prior to this. It's not like some of the things that were going on in the New Testament. No, he knew that God would take care of this. He just simply trusted God. I and the lad will come again after I've offered him for a burnt offering. We will come again. And so in verse number six, Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac, his son, and he took the fire in his hand and the knife, and they went both of them together. Now here we have father and son, both of them together. Isaac's carrying the wood, as we mentioned in a previous broadcast, as Christ carries the cross. Both of them together, the father and the son, were totally involved in this, as it was with our plan of salvation when Jesus Christ went to the cross. We have an interesting question now in verse number 7. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father? And he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? Now we've got a picture from our little art pictures of Abraham laying a boy on the altar that's maybe 7 or 8 years old, that's just not the way it is. If you do your homework here and study the timeline here in the Old Testament, you will find that Isaac at this point is 33 years of age. the same age, by the way, that Jesus was when he was crucified. And he's talking to his father, and he's saying, where is the lamb for the burnt offering? And again, the burnt offering. And Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering. God will provide himself a lamb, and he did this several thousand years later at the cross when he provided himself a lamb for the burnt offering. So they went, both of them, together, and they came to the place which God had told them of. So important. They came to the place which God had told them of, and what did they do there? They built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son." In verse 11 we read, "...the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham! And he said, Here am I." That's what Abraham's saying these days. He's walking in faith, not in the flesh. And he said, "...lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him. For now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only..." And the word son is in italics again, remember. "...thine only, thy unique Isaac from me." That's what he's talking about. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of the place Jehovah-Jireh, as it is said to this day in the Mount of the Lord, it shall be seen. And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time, and said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son thine only, that in blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies, and it goes on to say the great blessings that will follow as a result of Abraham worshipping with God. Now, we have a really interesting word here, and we kind of slip over it. It says in verse number 12, that God said, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him, for now I know that thou fearest God. Isn't that interesting? That thou fearest God. This kind of gets overlooked here in this thing. It doesn't say you trusted God. It doesn't say you believed me. It doesn't say you had faith. It says, I know that thou fearest God. Well, I think we've lost something here, too. We've lost something in this area of worship in the first place, and what it really is. We're living in an age when there is no fear of God before their eyes, and I'm not sure we really understand what this means, either. But we're going to have a look at it. We can't do it now because we're all out of time again. So, tune in again for our next broadcast. We're going to try and figure out what it means to fear God. We'll try to make it plain, and we will try to make it simple. you