Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 95. This is God's holy and infallible Word. O come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving, Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. For the Lord is the great God, and the great King above all gods. In His hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are His also. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Now our text for this evening. O come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker. For He is our God. And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts. As in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness when your fathers tested me, they tried me, though they saw my work. For forty years I was grieved with that generation and said, it is a people who go astray in their hearts, and they know not my ways. So I swore in my wrath, They shall not enter my rest. Please pray with me. Oh, God, I pray that we would pass. Through the darkness. Into your glorious light this evening. Lord, your people are heavy laden. They carry many burdens. Holy Spirit, I pray the full weight of conviction would fall upon us. That we would see ourselves as we are a profane and idolatrous people. And yet, we are those who you love. The ones whom you've called. The ones you've consecrated in spite of our wickedness and our wretchedness and our forgetfulness. Oh God, you've taken us to be your people. I pray out of the depths of our mourning and our of our sin and our idolatry and our failure to worship you as we ought. We would lay hold again of the gospel of the great victory that is ours in Jesus Christ. It's in his name that I pray. Amen, please be seated. O come, let us worship. The people of God have a long and inglorious history of rebellion, idolatry, and cold-heartedness toward God. I didn't say the pagans had a long history. They obviously do. I said the covenant people of God have a long history of rebellion, idolatry, and cold heartedness. The tendency of the fallen race is to neglect the first commandment. We were created to worship. We were redeemed to worship. But we are easily distracted. We seek our greatest good. From creaturely sources. Beloved, this is an abomination. That the holy ones of God would forget their God. That we would not acknowledge Him as God. That we would not be prostrated on our faces before this holy God. This evening, I'm asking for the impossible. Only the Holy Spirit could do this. My goal is to stir up holy affections in you for our God. Our hearts should be ablaze. We should be filled with zeal and awe and reverence and praise and thanksgiving for the God whom we serve. But let us confess tonight. The words of Jesus resonating in our ears. This people. They draw near to me with their lips. But their hearts are far from me. Tonight we need to repent of our idolatry. It's on the negative side and a prohibition, a command, but on the other side, the side I'm a little more interested in for us this evening, we need to worship the true God with the whole heart, with all of our person. We need to be entirely given over to God. There's a scarcity of worship. In the land. Please turn to Exodus chapter 20. We sometimes forget that the context of the plagues, God's great deliverance culminating in the Passover is that he desired that his people be released from bondage, that they may, as a consecrated people, offer up sacrifices to worship him, Exodus 20 beginning at verse one. And God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. out of the house of bondage. God has already given us some insight, and He's done something to make us His people. He's invested personally. He desires that we be His people, that He would be our God, and He acts and He saves and He delivers. Everybody knows the condition of the fallen human heart. Desire to make idols. To not worship him. To be self-exalting. He gives the first commandment on which all of biblical law hinges and hangs. You shall have no gods before me. You shall have no other gods before me. And I think we misunderstand in the plainest sense what this one powerful verse means, what it means to us. We say, as long as I put God first in my life, then I can order my life accordingly, I can have a number two and a three and a four and a five and a six and a seven and eight and a nine. This commandment is essentially, there can be no other gods before God's face. There is sacred space that only God can occupy, and we try to intrude on that space with creaturely things. The commandment doesn't say put God first, put your wife second, put your family in your church, etc. It's all encompassing. Everything belongs to him. My entire existence, my entire person, all that I am, every passion, every affection, all of my talents, everything belongs to him. And in so doing that, everything else falls into place. We have many other responsibilities. One of the things that you're going to do in the message is say in your mind, what about this? And what about that? Let's narrowly focus here on our duty and our obligation to worship God from the bowels of our inner man. There's a lot of other things we have to do to be obedient. But tonight, let's only think about our duty, our responsibility, our privilege of worshiping the one true God in spirit and in truth. I'm afraid that even among this noble crowd, great heroes to me of the faith here, I think the CPC people, the elders, the churches are the finest people in the land. But we have a first table problem. We want to get on to law keeping as it relates to our fellow man, but we blow through one through four. And tonight I'm going to tell you that we never can get off the first one. We've been deficient. In our worship of God. In 1 Chronicles 29, please don't turn there. I'm going to read some sections of Scripture in the interest of time. Don't turn there, just listen. 1 Chronicles 29, O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, our fathers, keep this forever in the intent of the thoughts of the heart of your people, and fix their heart towards you. This is David's prayer for his son Solomon. I want you to listen to this prayer that David utters for his son. This is one of the greatest men who's ever lived, a worshipper, a repenter, a man after God's own heart. Listen to what he prays about his son. Give my son Solomon a loyal heart. to keep your commandments and your testimonies and your statutes, to do all these things, and to build the temple for which I have made provision. He's saying, O Father, keep your covenant promises and make them true in my son Solomon. He's going to build your temple. He's going to set things in order for the corporate worship of God. Oh, God, lay hold of the heart of Solomon. Should all pray. Those kind of prayers for our children. But Solomon has. A different testimony. And less than our pride and arrogance, we think it's removed from us, we can persist in worshiping God half-heartedly or not even at all. 1 Kings 11, heart-wrenching, for it was so. when Solomon was old that his wives turned his heart after other gods. Solomon! The son of David! The man who would build the temple! The man who was most wise in all the earth! He went after other gods. If Solomon can do it, you can do it. You're not as wise as Solomon. You don't have that anointing that Solomon had. If Solomon can take foreign wives. Go after other gods, you can too. The verse continues saying. And his heart was not loyal to the Lord his God as was the heart of his father David. The first commandment is in its essence about loyalty. And tonight you and I have to confess our disloyalty. I know this is uncomfortable. We want to escape this feeling. But it's true for every person here. Our hearts have not been entirely loyal to our God. Deuteronomy 30 says return to the Lord your God and your children and obey His voice and all that I command you today with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And I think what we do is we hop over the first table and start thinking about our duties to God as it relates to our fellow man. Because I think the first table is very uncomfortable, even for the covenant people of God. The Fourth Commandment, the Sabbath day. There's many perspectives within the room. About it. But let's confess tonight, wherever you stand on the Fourth Commandment. that the reason we're not given to corporate worship and the private exercises of devotion, we're not cracking open the Bible and consecrating the whole day to the Lord. Do you know the reason? It's not a theological squabble over Sabbatarianism. We'd rather do something else than worship our God. Anything else but worship Him. Every distraction intrudes on that time. Our hearts are far from God. Joshua 22, only be careful to observe the commandment and the law that Moses, the servant of the Lord, commanded you to love the Lord your God and to walk in all His ways, and to keep His commandments, and to cling to Him and serve Him. And here it is again, with all your heart and with all of your soul. People of God, we're not giving our God that. Finally, Jeremiah 24 says, I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord and they shall be my people and I will be their God for they shall return to me with their whole hearts. You are profane. You are unholy. You are not righteous. You do not love God as you ought. But there's tremendous hope for the people of God. And we have to paint it accurately and it's all its darkness and all of its hardness to understand fully the measure of the love the Father has for us. The grace that is displayed in the gospel of Christ. We have to see it in its fullness. Our hearts are cold. To the God who loves us. Back to our text now in Psalm 95. In spite of all of that sinfulness, in spite of all of those failures, we're called to worship. So today I want to tell you, don't squirm in your seat and say, I really worship the Lord. I don't like what he's saying. You have not worshiped. You've not begun to worship. The way that you're going to be let off the hook. The way you're going to go out of here with joy and dancing and your sorrows going to be turned to rejoicing is when you recognize what Christ has done to make it possible for you, profane, unholy, lawless, cold hearted sinners. To victoriously stand in the presence of God. It's a great gospel opportunity here. Psalm 95, O come, let us worship and bow down. The O come here is an earnest exhortation to come and worship. We are exhorted to approach God, to enter into his presence and to actually engage in worship. I think about this topic, I often think about the John four passage. The father is. Seeking those who would worship him. In spirit and in truth. In this room, we want to hear the truth. We want to hear the propositional truth. Give us something to hang our hats on. We don't want to talk about the Spirit. What the Father is seeking is wholehearted devotion from the people of God. And I can't give you 22 how-tos on that. The Holy Spirit has to rain down upon us. Our hearts have to be quickened. So we shouldn't have a call to worship. We shouldn't be allowed that access, but we're called. We come as individuals, but we do not come individualistically. We come as God's people, the covenant people of God. This exhortation to come and worship and to have fully engaged hearts is given corporately. Let us worship. In our text tonight, we have and I'm going to go quick, try to. We have three distinct postures in six and seven. And these are acts of adoration. Three distinct postures. These are acts of adoration, first. Let us worship. The word literally means to bow down. Worshipping is bowing down, let us prostrate ourselves before the Lord. It's not only an act of humility, it's the highest act of adoration and acknowledgement of God's supremacy over all things. We don't get on our faces because we don't fix our gaze on God. If we were to fix our gaze on God, we'd be on our faces. So in our hearts, we'd like to think, well, what does it really mean to prostrate ourselves? What does that exactly mean? Are my knees bent? Does my forehead touch the ground? Am I lying on my belly? That has nothing to do with this. It's the heart directed toward God that drives you down to your face, that crushes your rebellion and beats you on the back and brings you low that you might see him high and exalted and lifted up. To bow down is to cower, to crouch, as inferiors do in the presence of their master. The bowing down is an eagerness to hear our marching orders, to hear His commands, and to walk it out in faith with the whole man. What does it mean to kneel? Let us put our knees on the ground and assume the posture of those who make supplications. This is a visual representation of profound reverence. Tonight, amazingly, we kneeled in prayer. but there might've been little profound reverence. We need to assume the posture, but we need the accompany adoration, these acts of adoration that should drive and influence all of these postures. These three postures of adoration, worship, or a humble recognition that we are in the presence of our creator. I should stop here and say, in the first instance, if God is our creator, which he is. As creatures, we are obligated and duty bound to give him worship. If that's true. How much more should our worship be energized, propelled forward when we realize that God is our Redeemer. That He's taken us from unholiness and made us holy. He's the Lord, our Maker. Let's worship and bow down. Let us kneel before Him. We commonly talk about our sinfulness in terms like this. And it's very helpful, particularly talking with younger Christians, maybe some of the children here tonight. This will be very helpful to you. Our sinful transgressions don't make us sinners. We are sinners, therefore we sin. We have to understand that fundamentally, we are worshippers. It is etched in the DNA in the created order, the imago Dei, created in the image of God. Humanity is created for communion and fellowship with God to be worshippers. But in the fall, that worship tendency didn't go away, became misplaced. And I believe that Satan takes every omission in worship, every worship given to a false idol, false religion, a false God, and he claims it for himself. But Christ the victor has crushed his head. And God is able to take us formerly. Outside the camp. To draw us near. And so I've been thinking about this for a few weeks and it's kept me up at night a couple of times and I'm under the impression this is my opinion that we are like our first parents. In Genesis chapter three, if you'd like to turn there, there's something that's really insightful, I believe, about our condition. Genesis three. This is after the deception, the temptation, the fall, the eating of the forbidden fruit. beginning of verse 7. We're going to understand why we don't obey the first commandment and why we don't heed the call to worship right here, right now. It's going to be explained to us, I believe. The eyes of both of them were opened. And they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. The fall of mankind caused us to be ashamed to stand in the presence of God. When you and I fail to worship, I believe we are fearful about coming into God's presence because of our unholiness. It's all written deep within us. We know that God is holy. We know that we are not. So we hide in the bushes. More on that in just a moment. Our worship flows out of our. Creaturely reverence for our creator. We are to worship because we are in awe of God, his character, his attributes, his works as creator and redeemer, all of these things should serve to us adoring him. Calvin said about this that God supplies us with ample grounds of praise. When he invests us with a spiritual distinction above the rest of mankind, which rests on no merits of our own, the worship of God, which the psalmist here speaks of, is assuredly a matter of such importance as to demand our whole strength. The Geneva Bible, if you have one of those, look this up. It's really amazing how succinctly they described it. Elegant simplicity, these three words, these three postures, let us worship, let us bow down, let us kneel. This is the Geneva Bible. It says by these three words, he signifies one thing. That they must wholly give themselves to serve God. Are you wholly giving yourselves to the inward worship and humble external acts of adoration that are fitting for the redeemed, worshipping people of God? Answer the question in your heart. Are you worshipping Him in this way? And all of us, Have to repent of our apathy. And cold heartedness toward God tonight. Engage your heart. In the pure worship of God. Elders, I'm very worried about you because I'm worried about myself. I see it in myself on Sunday morning. I believe we have a God-glorifying, Christ-centered liturgy that has a start and a finish that all makes sense and comes from biblical sources. Our job as elders is to be worship leaders. And there are many Sundays when we're trying to get through the liturgy. If you're a musician, you're trying to stay on notes, keys, whatever you guys do. I don't know how you do it. And the thought of actually worshiping God doesn't really enter in. There's a danger. And you today, when you sang the Psalms and the wonderful hymns that were selected for this evening, your thoughts did not turn in worship and adoration to God. You likely just followed along and tried to keep pace. Every element of the liturgy this week, this booklet, every sermon, every Bible text that's read, every psalm will be an occasion for worship. All of these things are here to tell us how great God is and we should respond to him in worship. We don't want to. We'd rather be doing something else. We properly respond to this call to worship with our entire submission to him. This is what's so tough about this. This topic gave me fits because I wanted to give you some really nice application. I want to tie this thing up in a pretty bow. These postures reflect an inner working. The inner spirit of the man which only the Lord sees. There's a scriptural picture I'm probably going over, brethren, I'm sorry, I preach a long time. There's a scriptural picture. That really illustrates this, if you have the ability to, I'd like you to turn to Revelation chapter four. This is going to provide another helpful. Consideration. So I've got two images I want you to think about. I want you to think about Adam and Eve fleeing the presence of God, and I want to tell you in my pastoral care ministry now approaching almost 20 years. When people say that God is far away, The vast majority of time, I can't personally now think of an instance where the person was drawn away by their own desires that they had left God. God did not go anywhere, the sinner went away, ashamed of their sin, they don't want to be in church, they don't want to read the Bible, they don't want to be on their face praying because they know God's holy and their sin is there. So we're like our first parents. I want that image to stay. Keep thinking about that. But what about some people who are in the throne room of heaven and are in the presence of God? What kind of activity are they engaged in? What is the burning passion zeal of their hearts? They see God as He is. Unencumbered with sin. What do they do? Be reading and begin reading in verse four. Revelation four, four around the throne were twenty four thrones and on the thrones, I saw twenty four elders sitting clothed in white robes and they had crowns of gold on their heads. And from the throne proceeded lightning, stunderings and voices, seven lamps of fire were burning before the throne, which are the seven spirits of God. Before the throne there was a sea of glass like crystal, and in the midst of the throne and around the throne were four living creatures full of eyes in front and in back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second living creature like a calf, the third living creature had a face like a man, and the fourth living creature was like a flying eagle. The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within. And they do not rest day or night saying, holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come. Now, I want you to see the posture of the 24 elders. I want you to see the activity. What do the 24 elders do? Whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the 24 elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things. And by your will, they exist and were created. Doesn't. Our apathy to worship show us just how comprehensive. And radical. The corruption of sin is for us. Well, now a little bit of hope. I want you to squirm. I want it to hurt real bad. Don't flee from that pain. We need to mourn over our sin. We need to bow down, actually, and mourn over our sin. We need to stay here for just a moment. The God is so gracious to us. Psalm 95. Seven. For he is our God. What kind of love is this? You and I, our lives are laid bare, all of our wretched thoughts, our sinful lives, our coldness toward God. It's all bare before him. We're tricking everybody else in the room by looking pious, but there's no fooling him. We're laid bare. We're gutted in his presence. And he says. That he's our God. What a compelling reason to be fully engaged in passionate worship of this God. There's a glorious shift in tone here. Since God is our Creator, our Maker, it follows that His creatures should worship Him. Here we're given an expansion on that call. The God who is worthy of adoration and praise is not a distant, disinterested God. He's a God who makes covenant. He's a God who brings us into his family. He is our God. He's made the declaration. We have no business being here to be his people. He shouldn't be our God. We should be numbered with the reprobate. But he is our God and we are his people. God and his. Infinite love. Has purpose to have an intimate covenantal relationship with you, his people. He has taken you as His own. He has stooped down to enter into covenant with us. He's so committed to taking us as His own that Christ had to come in the flesh to be our mediator. to be Emmanuel, to be God with us. So the horror, the terrors of our rebellion against God are now assuaged. Because of what Christ has done. The penal sanctions that should fall upon us, the banishment from his presence, all of that is taken away in Christ. One of the things that's so striking about the old covenant sacrificial system, I think of that high priest on the day of atonement, entering alone into that sacred space. A chain, a rope tied around his foot in case he does something profane in the presence of God. So I could pull them out and not be struck dead themselves. In the new covenant. It's not just the high priest who gets to go into the holy of holies. In Hebrews 10, I believe the author is saying, in the power of the Spirit, that you and I can stand in the holy presence of God because of our high priest, our mediator, Jesus Christ. All of the impediments to worship have been conquered by Christ. So all of the weight of conviction that you should have felt All of the grieving that you should have helped with, how you've dishonored God, all of that is laid upon Christ in a perfect sacrifice. And now, not just the high priest, but the rank and file sinners like you and I, we stand in His presence. Oh, this is what we do. We think it's cool theologically. But we don't enter into that presence and worship him. We like the idea that we can have that access, but we don't take full advantage of it. We have a standing at the throne of grace because of the merits of Christ. We've been united to him. We belong there. As the people of God. He's our God. What a wondrous thought. We are the people of his pasture. We have fashioned idols. We have emulated our first parents by seeking something outside of the blessings of God. We have not learned from the transgressions of worship of our spiritual forefathers in Israel. It is utterly shocking to me in this moment. But this the people of God, you and I have a blessed assurance. God has united himself to us. God calls out to us, inviting us into His presence to worship Him. And we saw in Revelation 4, if you really see Him, you're going to be on your face. So we need to be making much of all the means of grace, everything that shows me our triune God. I need to be looking, I need to be sitting on the edge of my seat, even in my devotions, my prayer, I need to be getting more and more and more fodder that I might have reason to worship God. And tonight, you have to believe me, I really think that you don't go in because of your sinfulness, because, you know, he's holy and you know, you're not. And tonight, I'm telling you, you look to Christ. Adam failed, don't look to Adam in this regard, look to Christ. You can come unencumbered with your sin into the presence of God because of the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice. You belong there. Isn't it crazy that we don't want to worship him? It's nuts. It's the insanity of sin. How could we not want to worship him? I was going to. I did an informal one recently, and I talked to people in my congregation and other Christians, and I wanted to find out what really gets them going, what gets them excited. And there are a hundred things that get you excited, that cause you to smile in a way that your lips touch your ears. And your eyes glimmer. And you're filled with so much excitement. But when I talked about God and I talked about being a holy person. The joyful countenance fell. Found it astounding. God doesn't satisfy us. God doesn't cause our hearts to jump in our chest. We need to repent. We're doing something bad to ourselves, trying to conclude now. When we neglect this gracious call to worship. We're robbing him of the glory that's due his name. And we're robbing ourselves of the blessings of being in the presence of God. I'd like to give you a couple of words of application. Brethren, I'm sorry, the schedule's probably off a bit. First, you have to know the true God, the God of scripture. You have to be a diligent student of God's word. If you neglect this duty, you're going to be a first commandment violator par excellence. You have to know the true God study, meditate, apply the truths of scripture. Tonight, I hope you've already done it, but. If you are wanting to make excuses for how wrong I was earlier about it, repent now of your idolatries. Calvin said we are master craftsmen at making idols. Look deep into your heart, you will find some there. Repent to them, smash them tonight. Believe the gospel again. Brethren, we never have to hide from the presence of God again. We're accepted in the beloved. Consider the patience, the long suffering of God. He bears with us. He knows our frame. He knows our tendency toward idolatry. He knows we're unholy. And he loves us anyway. He persists in keeping covenant, though we fail. Finally, I was trying to tell you how to do this. And The best way to do a thing is to do it. If your affections are cold and you're unmoved, confess and repent and keep doing that until they're not anymore. The best way to do a thing is to do it. Saints of Covenant Presbytery We have many distinctives which I love, many things that we're passionate about. But wouldn't it be something if our churches and our families and the husbands and the wives and the older children, the younger children, that the overarching distinctive of the covenant presbytery would be that they were the worshiping people of God. Wouldn't that be something? We talk about denominational growth, little church planning, little mission work. Let us be the worshiping people of God. Let us have that privilege and honor to give God the glory that's due his holy name. Let's pray together. Oh, Christ, you are so wonderful, so beautiful in our sight tonight. Oh, God, we confess that we've hidden from your presence, I think it's. Then unconscious, subconscious in some way that we've we know that we're unholy and we don't want to intrude there, we know that we shouldn't be there. O Lord, I pray that moment by moment in our failures and our forgetting, we would remember the glorious gospel of Christ. In our glorious standing in your holy presence, you have promised to be our God, and O Lord, we cling to those promises. We hang on to them. We clutch them with clenched fists. that we would be the sheep of Your pasture, Your people. Father, I pray that the full weight of conviction would fall, but in due time, at the proper moment, the sweetness of Christ would reverberate in the hearts of Your people. Lord, I pray that We wouldn't skip over the first table. I pray that we'd worship you in spirit and in truth with our whole hearts. We ask these things in Jesus name. Amen.