We love remembering that Jesus overturned tables in the temple—especially when we imagine them belonging to someone else. But in Luke 19:45–48 when Jesus drives out those who sold, and declares, “My house shall be a house of prayer,” His challenge isn’t just to those people who annoy us. What might He overturn when our own convenience, usefulness, and preferences begin to define worship?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Tonight, we conclude that series. And I’ve personally just been incredibly blessed spending this time in here. These are familiar stories for the most part. If you’ve been around the church, if you’ve been in Sunday school and heard sermons and so on and read through your Bible at times, you probably didn’t hear a lot of unfamiliar stories. But what I love about coming to a section like this in the Gospel of Luke, is we come to these stories that we know. And yet we’ve been challenged time and again to really dig deeper with them.
And I know for myself, a lot of times as I come to a passage and I’ve read it before, it’s easy. I do this a lot. I go through a Bible reading plan and my mind kind of goes on autopilot. And it’s often as accurate as autocorrect on my phone, because it starts filling in details, right? And I miss the heart of what God is driving at. And tonight we’re going to come to a passage that we today, I would say love to refer to. We’re going to come to the turning over the tables in the temple.
And it doesn’t seem like I go through a week without hearing someone say, well but remember, Jesus turned over the tables in the temple. Amen, he did. But what does that mean? And this is one of those passages where it’s really easy to go on to autocorrect right? Fill in. We’re just putting all the rest. And are we being like autocorrect on our phones? I think oftentimes, oftentimes we are.
It’s been from the very beginning. We’ve been talking over the last 2 weeks we looked at the triumphal entry. Jesus comes into Jerusalem. This is nearing holy week time. He’s coming into Jerusalem. The people, we have Palm Sunday, right? as we now call it. People are waving palms celebrating him. Last week. We went into the judgment that, As Jesus looks at the city, he knows is coming for them. Now they got foretaste of that, right? He’s going to come into the temple and he’s going to execute a part of that judgment.
But in that, the people aren’t necessarily going to understand what he’s doing. And I’d argue that oftentimes when we reread that passage, We remember it as a very visceral passage. We can feel this passage and we’d kind of like to live this passage at times. Not with Jesus turning over our tables mind you, but turning over other people’s tables, right? Our tables, our tables are nice and neat.
Jesus is challenging us to hear what’s really going on because the problem is, as we don’t spend time really reflecting in what he’s doing there. We lose the point.
We’re halfway through the Summer Olympics right now. Anyone watching the Olympics? excited for team USA, right? Go team USA, or for our southern campus go team Mexico, right? I think Mexico has had several really standout moments in this Olympics as I’ve caught bits. I haven’t gotten to watch a lot of it, but I believe so. So, you know, exciting for our southern neighbors as well. Lots of exciting moments throughout every Olympic games, right?
But, For the most part, we get really excited when wherever we happen to reside whatever country we call home, that country goes and gets a medal. And so naturally, even though we have a huge Olympic team here in the United States, and it maybe isn’t a huge surprise. When we see someone excel in Team USA it’s really, really exciting. Back in 2000, we were in Sydney, and one of those names that rose to the top was Marion Jones. Anyone remember Marion Jones, she was incredibly fast. She was breaking all kinds of records. She came home with 5 gold medals in Sydney.
Well, I don’t care who you are. If you come home with 5 gold medals that’s spectacular, right? It doesn’t matter, if you have a giant Olympic team behind you or a tiny one it’s not easy to come home with 5 gold medals to say in 5 different competitions you were the best in the world.
But then scandal started to bubble up. You see, Marion’s husband slash coach had just before the Olympics, failed a drug test and had been stripped of his privileges to go on the field and coach her. As it turned out, he had been involved in a San Francisco area, lab that had been specializing in trying to create steroids that would not be detected by drug tests ended up leading to Marion divorcing her husband and claiming that she had nothing to do with this. She had not tested for anything she was clean, although then another one of her coaches tested positive for drugs eventually came out, that this whole lab had been operating. The government came in to investigate it. They went and talked to her. She claimed not to have used any steroids. And then ended up serving time in prison when it was shown that she actually had.
And here was someone who arguably had the raw talent without the steroids to have won those gold medals, and that’s the case she’s made over the years since then that she could have done it without those steroids.
And yet in the pursuit of those gold medals, she tried to get an edge. As she was sentenced to prison, the Olympic Committee not only ruled that her records were no longer valid, and that she was no longer this champion, but that she even had to turn over those gold medals. She said, oh, proudly wore around her neck.
I thought about that for a moment. And you think about these athletes who spend all their lives trying to get to that moment to get to the heart of the Olympics. Why do they do that? Why do they? The beer off course? Well, I mean, the problem of when they bear, of course, of course, the point is who can, by their own ability, prove to be the fastest, the strongest, right? The person who can accomplish these great feats? And when you are only that with something added, You’re not accomplishing that. And these people know that if they take these steroids, but they take them anyway why Because they want to get there.
At some point, getting that gold defeats the whole reason why we give out gold medals.
That’s all well and good in sports are not good, we might say. As Christians, we often do the same things. We’re getting performance enhancing drugs for our worship, for our functioning as Christians. And that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. The things that we add, that we think well, they’re just helping me get to that podium. Or the church to get to that podium. So the church of today went to the gold medal that God says, wow, look at how great you did. The problem is that we’re losing something precious to the Lord as we do.
Let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer and then we’ll jump into the text.
Lord, as we look at this final part of Luke chapter 19, and we think about what it is that is the heart of worship, would you help us to hold on to what really matters to you? We can’t do it on our own, Lord. We’re going to constantly find ways to slip away from it. But Father, would you help us to be those who cling to your truth, who cling to your heart, who cling to your heart. We pray in Jesus precious name. Amen.
Well, if you want to turn there with me in your Bibles, it’s Luke 19, verse 45. Where we read the following. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them it is written, my house shall be a house of prayer. But you have made it a den of robbers.
Den of robbers. Can you imagine if Jesus walked into Little Hills tonight? That’d be amazing, wouldn’t it?
Pardon? He did. Yes, he did he’s here, right? Yeah, very good theological point. Absolutely. Amen, Kathy. He is here.
Let’s say he walked in physically. The door opens, right? And you think, oh, do we have a visitor? Someone new here? Wait. Is that Jesus? Yeah, he’s kind of glowing, right? Yeah, he’s chosen to make sure we don’t miss the point. He’s coming in. And, oh, hi, Jesus. Wow, this is amazing. We can praise you directly. You’re here. And he goes over and starts turning things over and says, you’ve made my house a den of thieves.
Imagine how we feel. What did Jesus mean by this? What’s really going on here? Let’s go ahead and just jump briefly over to Matthew 21. Same story, but we get a little bit more detail. And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.
So there’s several different commercial entities happening here. And you might say, well, what’s wrong with them being in the temple area? Well, the 1st problem is where it’s located. Jesus wasn’t against people being able to have what they needed to worship. And one of the things in the Old Testament form of worship is you are going to offer animal sacrifices. So for example, people needed pigeons. Who needed pigeons? Well, pigeons were what you sacrificed if you were poor. You didn’t have a farm. You weren’t raising your own cattle. You weren’t raising your own sheep. You didn’t have the normal sacrifices to offer. So you’d arrive at Jerusalem and you’d need something to offer that you could afford.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem was where they were doing it. You see, these money changers and merchants had set up shop and what we might at 1st glance think, oh, that’s the narthex or more contemporary. That’s the lobby or the foyer or the coffee shop, right? Okay, so we have this place here and we can come into it and we’ll set it up. It’ll be really convenient. But that wasn’t why God had put that place there.
They saw an empty spot. Oh, good, we can use it. There’s nothing good that happens here. But what was it? It was the court of the Gentiles. You see, if you hadn’t converted to Judaism fully, if you hadn’t decided to obey the law, if you were a man, you hadn’t been circumcised, you couldn’t go in and offer sacrifices with the Jews, but you could, because God’s purpose, his mission for his people wasn’t only for his people narrowly defined, but to see that people growing, God had, from the very design of the temple, created a spot for Gentiles, for what are known in the Bible is God fears, people who became aware of who the true God But it hadn’t yet gone through a full conversion process. They could come to the temple. And they could pray to the Lord. And they could have a spot where they actually could come into that holy space set apart for the Lord.
What have they done with that space? They made a space for commerce. And not the local bank. didn’t play any part in that. They made a space to sell things.
And probably take advantage of people while they were doing it. It seems clear. They weren’t acting altruistically. It wasn’t a great enterprise, but the big problem was they taken a space for worship and made it a space for commercial activity. They taken a space that was made to expand the mission of God to people who weren’t yet a part of it, and they converted it into a space to advance what the people already in the club were doing.
Something we can easily fall into.
It shows where they were already from the get go losing the heart of what worship is about and what being God’s people is about because they were looking at this space for people to come in and start to learn about the Lord and saying, well that’s not really useful for anything. Let’s make it useful for us.
Friends, we can do this a lot as Christians, where we look at the things of the church that might reach out to other people. And we think, but is it serving me?
Now, it’s not to say that we shouldn’t seek to be served in the ways that we need to be ministered to. God wasn’t saying, you can’t have a place to buy these pigeons if you don’t have the money for something more.
What we’re saying is, don’t sacrifice. the global vision of what I’m setting apart to do here.
What do these merchants see? They saw an empty space, they could put their stands up. And by being right there, I mean, what do we know from real estate, location location, location? If you want to sell the worshipers that are coming into town, where do you want to be? Well, let’s be right there as they come in and they’re going to offer sacrifices. Then they can’t miss your stand. No one else is going to go to the other merchant because you were right there. That’s what they’re thinking about.
And in doing so, then They’re missing what God actually wanted to be the focus.
They were actually missing the gold medal as they were thinking somehow they were making it streamlined to get it.
And as I read the background on what transpired to Jones, I was thinking about her medals and I thought about what it would be like. I never had any illusion. It may outright delusion, to think that I was going to be an Olympian. Never thought it. Unless there’s an Olympics for who can talk the most or something, and then maybe I could try out for the hot air Olympics. But outside of that, I was never going to be there, right?
But I try to imagine, because you know these people, if they, if you get to the Olympics, typically, from the time you were itty bitty, you were training.
So a little montage this weekend about the head of the the final for the male gymnasts and they were showing how these little boys are hopping up on this thing that helps them to get on, what do they call it, the the horse thing? See, I have all these technical terms down. Pommel horse, thank you. Pommel. Pommel horse. How they train without getting hurt initially to do that and then this bucket and so on. Little bitty kids, right? That’s how you get to be good enough that when you’re 15, 16, 17, maybe in your 20s that you’re actually an Olympian.
So you train all your life. And as you’re training all your life, what do you imagine? You’re imagining that day that you walk up on that podium and someone puts that gold medal around your neck and you hear your national anthem and everything’s amazing around that, right? That’s the moment that you’re gunning for.
And I think Jones, if she was training and running and achieving amazing feats of speed, what was she doing? She was imagining that moment. And that moment came, but by the time that moment came, she’d already gotten so far away from what the actual goal was that even the physical symbol that would eventually be taken from her.
And when we lose the heart that the Lord has, even as we worship him, as we worship him, we’re not thinking about well, how do we make sure that we’re declaring God’s kingdom to a hurting world as we worship him? as we’re coming to worship and we’re not thinking, how do I help other people that might be here who we’re hurting? We’re the people who are online who might be hurting and struggling and the things they’re going through and we’re turning it into Can I have a more convenient booth to get the things I need for worship?
Or can I be the person selling those things and it’s benefiting me?
putting in that performance enhancing drug. And whatever we do after that, we’re not coming at it with the heart that the Lord wants, just like if you’re an Olympian who’s taken those steroids, no matter how hard you run on that track, you’re running with those steroids in your body and is not going to count.
When am I so busy analyzing? Is something useful for worship? Is it useful for what, what, what, having a compelling service, a meaningful service, a service, I go home and I’m ready for the week, how often do I get so wrapped up in that?
I realize that my heart hasn’t actually been focused on the real price.
It happened so easily. Oftentimes, we don’t even realize it.
And then we’re way off course. And we only realize that… When we see that the mission isn’t truly being completed. Sometimes we’re too blinded to even realize that. And a lot of the people here, as Jesus overturning the tables in the temple they’re too blind to actually see.
Ah, Jesus is angry. We knew he wasn’t such a good guy.
Sometimes we’re looking at the things of the church and the things that we do and we think, but it’s not pragmatic enough. Can we somehow streamline things because we need to be more practical about this?
Sometimes it just doesn’t fit our preferences, right? One of the things that we’re all being called to stretch at as we are gathered together here at Little Hills, because we haven’t adopted outright, we’re going to be a very, very contemporary church, and we’re going to do all contemporary music and we’re going to have, well, we have some lights. We going to have way more light. We’re going to have way more effects and we’re going to have big screens behind us to do all that. And on the other hand, on the other hand we’re saying to those who would prefer the contemporary, going to sing some hymns.
We’re going to have a time of confession that feels kind of formal.
Well, but I prefer it to be streamlined. Let’s do the 3 songs sermon with the big screen behind the pasture so he can point to stuff on the screen. It’d be really cool. And I’m a geek, yeah, that would be pretty cool. But um, It’d be so cool. And then we’ll do one more song. It’ll be great because that’s how I’m used to it. Or maybe you’re here and you’re used to you can pick up a printed liturgy and it’s always the same and you can count on it and you know exactly what’s going to be said when it’s going to be said. And then you can hear, and now let’s turn to hymn 387. And I’m not sure in our trendy hymnals over there what him 387 is, so don’t read anything into it if you go look.
But you turn, you know the hymnal, right? I remember as a kid, I knew the numbers, a lot of my favorite hymns. And I knew when I saw, I didn’t even have to see the title. I could just see the number. Oh, good, we’re going to sing this.
I was like, well, we’re not going to quite do that either, right? We’re going to be intentioned because we’re not doing quite what anyone probably would pick out on their own.
We’re going to yield our preferences. Well, why do we, why don’t we? Why don’t we just say, well, let’s make some people really, really happy? Well, because we’re trying to minister to the whole body of Christ and trying to figure out how can we be together as the body of Christ, even if it means all of us are somewhat uncomfortable? Even if there isn’t a convenient kiosk when I walk in to buy my sacrifice?
It’s so convenient. I feel so much more comfortable. You know, when I grew up, I could always buy my my doves and my pigeons when I walked in. And now those tables have been overturned. It’s so inconvenient, Jesus, why are you doing that to us?
Saying, care about what I actually care about.
And if you notice? If you look through scripture, it never says, and God despises a contemporary service. Or God hates when a hymnal gets pulled out. It doesn’t. Why? Because God didn’t define our preferences on that. He defines what’s behind them. What he wants us to do is to come to worship and worship him, not because I’m it’s exactly how I would do it, is exactly what I want in this moment, but because it is what is glorifying him.
And here’s the thing that I’ve been challenged because I used to be a real snob on this. And some of you might think I’m still a snob on this in some areas. But I used to be way more of a snob, how about that? I’m a recovering snob. And And I thought, well, how could those people, it’s just so cheesy compared to what would be good.
But you know, the things that we dislike and the things that make us uncomfortable as long as they’re not condemned by scripture, as long as God’s not saying don’t do that. This isn’t pleasing to me. If you see a group of people sing one of your least favorite songs, praise songs or least favorite hymns, and they’re praising their hearts out towards God, or you can have a bunch of people going through the motions, singing something that you love. It’s that 1st group that is actually at the heart of worship.
I’ve shared the story before and I don’t want to belabor it because I know many of you have heard it, but I think that’s so remarkable actually, and that’s why we did that song today. The whole story of that, that song, The Heart of Worship, is about a church. They had gotten so busy wrapped up in all the bells and whistles of the time and they realized they were missing the heart of what God actually wanted them to focus on and they got rid of it all for a time. That song’s about that.
But a song that’s worth coming back to not to say, hey, I’m so good at this but… But Lord, I do make it something that isn’t what you want it to be over and over again. And I know that you want me to come back to the heart of worship over and over and over again, not analyze everything by well, do I like it? Not to analyze everything by, does it seem to fit my particular grid of what’s useful and what’s not, but to analyze as God being glorified in it. Is it fulfilling the mission that God wants his church to fulfill? And these merchants and these money changers, they weren’t.
It wasn’t because the things that they were doing were unuseful. It was in how they were being done. And a lot of times that’s really where we need to dwell on and ask the questions. Maybe there’s something really useful we need to do, but can we do it in a way that’s going to glorify God? Was it useful to serve the people that were traveling a long distance that were impoverished? They didn’t have a way to transport their sacrifice. They didn’t have a farm back home with the sacrifice they could bring. Was it useful to serve them? Absolutely. Just not in the court, the Gentiles. We were supposed to be reaching people that haven’t heard about the Lord yet.
The money changers even. Maybe we don’t have as much sympathy for them, but we need to understand what they were doing. The Roman coinage. Had the inscription, Caesar is Lord.
And by that, they didn’t just mean Caesar is really important. I meant Caesar is a god. And they had a carving of Caesar on those coins. And the Jews said, we’ve been prohibited from dealing with idols. And so when we bring money into tithe when we bring money in to buy a sacrifice we can’t bring in idolatrous money. And so the Romans had made a concession they had special coins for that region. They said, well, you can change them out and use these only here. And so people would come in with their idolatrous coins and they’d change them out for the coins that were permitted for worship.
What was that, a bad thing? I appreciate their scruple on that. There’s a lot of times we don’t have the scruples to say, these things that we just take for granted, okay, we’ll just live with them. They actually were analyzing, wait, does this fit the grid of what God has permitted? And there’s something good about that. What’s bad about it is they said, let’s then take up the area that’s for the Gentiles. Well, we hold the line against those pagan Gentiles. Let’s make sure none of those Gentiles let’s not even bother with trying to help some of those Gentiles become non-pagan.
Jesus said, You’ve missed the point. As he quotes from Isaiah, and he refers to a house of prayer. It’s a house of prayer, but it’s not a house of prayer in that context, 1st and foremost for the Jews, But for the Gentiles. At the beginning, when we looked at that passage and it talks about the foreigner.
Foreigners weren’t well looked upon. They were different. There were other. They didn’t talk the same. They didn’t act the same.
We’re not sure we want any of those foreigners. They might bring diseases. They might be corrupt. They might make worship sound different than we would like it to.
They’re looking at all the external preferences. What did God say he was going to do with his temple? He was going to make it a place where those people could come and they could encounter him, because he didn’t care what tongue they spoke. He didn’t care how they dressed. He cared they came to know him.
And yet we come and have that same heart a lot of times that the people of Jesus day did. And we say, but they might change the way we worship. Might not sound the same. It might not look the same. It might not be exactly how I like it, and God says, that’s not what it’s about.
You see, a lot of times when we do that too, we not only start to turn it into, we start to say, well, but it’s so much more useful, it’s so much smoother if we just leave it alone because we know that the music will sound great. The liturgy will go smoothly. So I say, now it’s my job. I’m going to protect that. Let me see that in the 2nd half of this passage. Take a look at verse 47.
Because and he was teaching, that’s Jesus once again. He was teaching daily in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the principle of men, and the people were seeking, to destroy him. But they did not find anything they could do. Why? Well, for all the people were hanging on his words.
Couple of things that we can see here. First, the scribes, the Pharisees, and now we have a new group here, the principal men. In other words, other important civic leaders. They’ve all put their heads together and said, we have a problem here. Jesus is messing up our commerce. You know, our foyer doesn’t look like it used to. It was so nice and neat with all the merchants and everything. It worked really well. And now he’s trying to make it a court of the Gentiles again. And you know what happens when we have a court of the Gentiles again? All those dirty, stinky Gentiles are going to be in here again. They’re going to be talking in all their different languages and they’re going to they don’t know really how to worship the Lord and they’re going to be there and they’re going to be in our way.
And worse than that, he’s made us look like fools. He’s trying to upend everything we’ve worked for.
What would work out really well? Maybe we could kill him. And he wouldn’t do that any longer.
Now, They don’t at this point. Why? Are they suddenly racked by their conscience, they say, you know, I don’t really like when worship sounds like this or when those sorts of people come to worship. But I know the heart of God is different than my heart. Forgive me God for feeling that way.
That’s not why they do it. They look at Jesus, and they see, here’s a man who knows the word of the Lord, is teaching the word of the Lord, and what else? He’s teaching it in such a way, I love the way that Luke describes this. They’re hanging on his every word. They’re just hanging on to it. They can’t wait to hear the next thing that Jesus is going to say about what about God’s word.
And these people who are supposed to be defending The teaching of God’s word and the worship of God, they say, and we hate him. And we kill him except for the fact that too many people would notice because they’re busy listening to God’s word when he’s here. And they noticed that we killed them. We have to work on this some more.
I don’t regret the idea of killing him. We know within the week they’re going to go through with killing him. What they regret is that too many people are learning God’s word from him.
And we do this. friends, we do this.
I thought a discussion this week on social media. And it was debating the eternal status of Tim Keller. If you know Tim Keller, he established a church and then a church planting network in New York City. He went into Manhattan, not exactly known for its great fervent passion for churches. Yes, they have churches. They like them as museums, essentially. But he went, unless it’s actually a church that would reach people that don’t already go to church, and let’s actually see what we can do to this city. Let’s see what God will do through us in this city.
And it grew spectacularly. They’ve planted 100s of churches now. And 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people come every week and worship the Lord in those churches. And people were discussing his eternal status this week. He passed last year.
Why? Because it wasn’t political enough.
And he cautioned against overpoliticizing the church.
He didn’t talk the way they wanted him to where he’d go and fight the wars they wanted him to fight. He was too busy actually going onto the streets of New York and trying to get people that didn’t know Jesus to know Jesus.
And I have to think that what you see that conversation around them. I’m not saying he was perfect. No one’s perfect. Not saying that at all. But we can go a long way away from someone teaching 100% pure truth. And if you look closely enough, no one is. Unless you’re just reading God’s word and not adding any commentary to it, right? And then we’re going to misunderstand parts of it because we’re still fallen human, fallen humans.
There’s a long way from that to saying, I wonder if he’s really saved. I wonder if she’s really saved.
And yet that conversation goes on. That wasn’t that wasn’t a one off conversation. It wasn’t the only time I’d seen it. It struck me, but it didn’t strike me that much because I’ve seen it before.
And where do we fall into those traps? We have our things that we’re looking for and they’re about our preferences. They’re about what we think is useful.
And we use those to determine if someone is saved or not. They’re worthy of being called a follower of Jesus rather than actually looking at what Jesus wants us to do.
Now here’s the irony that I referred to at the beginning about when we speak of turning over the tables. I see it used a lot and I’ve seen it used a lot right now in the context of politics. And as I see people using turning over tables in the context of politics, what they mean is Christians need to not be so nice. We need to get out there and we need to overturn the tables of our culture and say, here is how it really is, people.
I see that a lot. Anyone else heard that? I hear that kind of language a lot. And let’s be clear, that’s not what Jesus is doing here at all.
Period. Jesus is overturning the tables of the religious people, not the people outside that don’t know him yet. Jesus wasn’t going to the Roman governor’s mansion turning over his tables. Jesus wasn’t traveling to the city of Rome and protesting in front of the Coliseum. Jesus was protesting the people that were too busy, too busy. trying to make worship the way they wanted it, to make worship work, how they thought it should to actually care about what God says worship should do.
And let’s be 100% clear on this.
If we as Christians are thinking we’re going to go out into society, this year or any year, and overturn the table so that We’ll make society shape up.
We’re not following the heart of Jesus. Period. I know that sounds harsh.
But you know why it’s so wrong because we’re chasing after the wrong prize. I don’t care if we get every single person in this country to look like a good Christian. What we need to care about is that the people around us actually are Christians.
And there have been plenty of times in history where Christianity has enough power that we can make a lot of people that look like good Christians. And we’re paving the way to hell for them. That’s not what God wants.
He wants us to actually care about people’s hearts. Why does Jesus overturn the tables where he does? Because as he looks to people who are already his people, people who are already teaching his word, he wants to say, actually understand what the heart of this is and follow it.
What he’s not interested in is just making other people scared of him. Or other people flee him. Or other people say, I need to put on the appearance of being like Jesus so people don’t come and be angry towards me.
Jesus wants us to actually follow him.
All depends what we’re trying to do in something. And that’s where when we’re thinking about what’s useful and what’s practical and what’s even preferential, we need to be thinking in terms of what’s needed in this context.
Do they need all those services around the temple? Yeah, but not in the context it was being placed.
Last night, I was trying to find something on the Olympics. Went on to Peacock. I don’t even remember how I got Peacock. I don’t pay for it, but somehow I signed up for a promotion. I got a free peacock. Turn on Peacock and you can watch anything, right? So I turn on equestrian. I see something called dressage. I’m eating that, right? I’ve never watched it before in my life. And apparently it’s this thing where the jockey is on the horse and you’re basically going around in this large rectangle and the horse is prancing in different ways. And, you know, I guess I’m a horse here jockeys doesn’t look like he or she’s doing anything. Apparently, somehow they train to just do the slightest movements and the horse can prance this way and prance that way and prance with this foot or prance with that foot. And they’re doing all these sorts of things. Really remarkable when you think about it.
As I was watching it, I thought, well that is really, really remarkable and really, really interesting and probably would be utterly useless if the reason I wanted to have a horse around was that someone was attacking me and I needed to hop on that horse and get away.
Because they’re talking about the one horse as the competition was going on, the one horse got a little off the pattern. I got a little confused. And the jockey just very calmly was calming down the horse because they said the horse can’t take feeling failure. If the horse feels like he or she has missed it here, I’ll just throw the whole thing off. You have to be able to be that calming presence to the horse. Well, if you’re trying to use a horse to escape, you’re not trying to be a common present here. Giddy up, let’s get out of here. We have to go, right? Don’t calm down here. We’re going to die, right? It depends what you want the horse to do.
And a lot of times we don’t ask, what is it that we’re trying to do when we come before God and worship. What are we trying to do?
And we get it so we can prance really well and it feels really good. And in the right context, maybe that is even good, right? If you’re at a dressage competition, your horse can do this, that is really good.
It depends on the context. And we forget about the context. The people then forgot about the context. And we forget about the context.
John 421, Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. And he 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 and spirit and truth for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.
Let us not be doing the wrong thing. Isn’t it amazing? And it would have been inconceivable at this time. The people have been worshiping in their designated spots for centuries. It’s not like us where, oh, this church isn’t quite what I want. I’ go to a different church. No, God said you worship in Jerusalem. And for the Samaritans, is they had been separated and different cultures had conquered them and they’d been corrupted in their worship. What had they done? Well, they just made their own spot that they were going to worship. And that was the spot you did it.
But they had their spot too. Jesus said, it’s not ultimately going to be about the spots. It’s not about your preferences. going to be about what? that you’re coming to God with the Holy Spirit with you and you’re going to do it in truth. You’re going to actually be concerned with what God cares about. That’s what’s going to matter. What are we trying to do?
This was so, so, so important. Back in the 1960s is the nuclear race was going on in the United States and Soviet Union, we’re rushing to build greater and greater weapons so that we could annihilate each other if we needed to. At some point, the Kennedy administration became concerned. What if a rogue general decided he just wanted to go ahead and launch World War III? And now we had these nuclear warheads that could be launched. We couldn’t stop them once they were launched. And once they were launched, the next thing that would happen is the other side would launch weapons towards us and it’d all be over. What would happen if that would happen?
And so a rule was made that these missiles were going to be required to have a complex launch system. It wasn’t just like a mechanical key, but you actually had to have the right combination to enter into it in order to start it up. And it was supposed to be, you were supposed to be unable to hotwire. It was sort of like our anti-theft systems on a car today where you can’t just go in and easily hot wire car anymore. So I’m told I never tried. But you have to have all the right pieces right? The chip that’s in your key that makes the key so expensive. You have to have all that stuff in order to start it up.
Well, the military didn’t like this. Didn’t like that the civilian government didn’t trust them enough. And they also didn’t like that if an actual need occurred and the Russians sent over missiles towards us that it might take a while for the president to get the information or what if someone blew up the White House? And now the military is supposed to defend the United States, but they don’t have the codes. And so they said, well, okay, you’re going to make us do this? Fine, we’ll put in that system and we’ll require an 8 digit code. We’re just gonna make it all zeros.
And so for decades, Unbeknownst to the president, the military had an 8 digit code. It was just zero. 8 times. And not only was it 0, 8 times. It wasn’t even one, two, three, four, five six, seven, 8 or something, right? It was just zeros. Just in case someone forgot, they had a nice printed sheet on how to launch it. And it included the code.
Well, they had a point. If the goal was to launch the missile as quickly as possible, that was a more efficient way to do it. If the goal was to prevent it from being launched erroneously. It was a terrible way to do it. Depending on what the real goal was.
If the goal was to make it easy for people to come into the temple and get the things they needed to worship the Lord because they already knew who the Lord was and they wanted to worship him and you wanted to make it efficient, you didn’t want the lions to be long and you wanted to be comfortable, you didn’t want to stand there too long, get back to whatever else you were doing. Was it more efficient to have the money changers and the merchants in the temple? Yes.
But that wasn’t the purpose that God had. He wanted the complex launch code. Because why? He didn’t want to annihilate the people around that were outside of his covenant. He wanted to bring them into his covenant.
Yet the people thought, well, we can we know God said some things about that about how we’re supposed to represent God to the rest of the world, but it’s so much more efficient for us if we just go ahead and prepare to annihilate them instead. We only care about them. So much more comfortable for us. And That’s not something that we should look back on them and say those stupid backward people because the church today goes to the same place over and over again.
How often are we talking about the annihilation of those people. Maybe not physically.
But the humiliation, the removal. of those people that don’t have our preferences, don’t do things our way. And what we’re not talking about is helping them to actually come to know the Lord. Because the uncomfortable truth is if they come to know the Lord, they still might not do things our way.
And when our way is what we’re holding on to in valuing. The fact that they know the Lord doesn’t feel like the gold medal.
But it is the gold panel. This is what God wants us to be focused on. Whatever things seem pragmatic, whatever things seem preferential, whatever things seem politically expedient, whatever seems whatever that makes us want it, if it’s not about glorifying God, if it’s not about loving him and helping more people love him.
It’s not about what worship is about because worship is about one thing, it’s about Jesus. If it’s about everything else, we’ve missed it. It’s about anything else. We’re not going to earn that medal. We might see that metal being taken away.
May we be a people who are chasing after the heart of worship. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, as we come before you, We know that worship isn’t the thing that we’ve made it so often. Something much richer, much better because the amazing thing about us coming before you and worshiping you in spirit and in truth is that, yes, it means other people are going to come in and it may not always be exactly what’s comfortable for us.
But it means that the things that we get wrong too. Lord, you’re correcting us and you’re drawing us in. You want us there, even though whatever we find detestable about others, there’s a 1000 more reasons that we should be rejected.
Lord, as we hear about this, what we’ll remind is that your heart is for us and for every person who calls on the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus. May it always be that is our focus, that heat is our focus. We ask this in his precious.
Start the Conversation