 Hi, everyone, welcome back. I hope you had a good break. Got yourself a coffee. Try. We didn't get coffee here. Jeffina's complaining. Yay, water. OK. Well, I hope you are learning something so far. I hope you learned something so far about the tabernacle of David. So we just glanced through from page 23 very briefly about how David erected the tabernacle. We read about it from first chronicles, chapter 16. We see that he raised the tabernacle. He built it. He erected the tabernacle. He distributed loaf of bread, piece of meat, and cake of raisins to everyone. And then he put the roster together. He appointed some of the Levites to minister before the Ark of the Lord to thank and to praise the Lord. That is in first chronicles, chapter 16, verse 4. And we see that he wrote a psalm and then gave it to Asaph to compose the music. And you can read about it in all the scriptures that's mentioned in the notes. And the Levites ministered before the Lord day and night. It was a regular work. So there was administration, a very good administration for the tabernacle of David. And we see that in the book of Acts, it quotes the prophecy from the book of Amos, where it talks about in Amos, chapter 9, verse 11 and 12, about rebuilding the tabernacle of David. OK, rebuilding the tabernacle of David. Now, Acts, chapter 15, verse 13 to 18, it says, and after they had become silent, James answered, saying, men and brethren, listen to me. Simon has declared how God at first visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for his name. With this, the words of the prophets agree just as it is written. After this, I will return and rebuild the tabernacle of David, which was fallen down. I will rebuild its ruins and I will set it up so that the rest of the mankind may seek the Lord. Even all the Gentiles who are called by my name says the Lord who does all these things known to God from eternity are all his works. So rebuilding the tabernacle of David, why not the tabernacle of Moses? Why doesn't it say that? Why doesn't the prophets say that? I will return and rebuild the tabernacle of Moses. So again, I think one of the reasons is the tabernacle of David was a shadow of the New Covenant. Where in the New Covenant, the veil is stoned, there is no separation between the presence of God and his presence of God has been made available to everybody. There's no separation. All are welcome. All are invited. Everyone has a choice to choose him. And so one, the presence is made available just as it was made available to everyone in the tabernacle of David. There was no outer courts, inner courts, et cetera. It was just the tent of meeting, arc of the covenant in the middle, people around it, and everybody could see it. And then secondly, there was order. The tabernacle of David was about praise, and it was about worship and prayer and intercession. It was happening constantly day and night. It was a regular book. Until the tabernacle of David, until then, we don't see that music was treated as a vocation. It is in the tabernacle of David where we see worship, music, and prophecy coming together in the same place for the first time. We don't read about it in anywhere else. And so when God is saying that he will rebuild the tabernacle of David in the days, we see that happening around the globe today, where prayer moments are being raised across the world, where there is nonstop praise and worship and prayer, and intercession is happening day and night, night and day. Houses of prayer are being raised all across the globe. One of the examples are a movement called the IHOP. IHOP is the International House of Prayer. It's in the United States in Kansas City. And it was started, I think, almost 22 years ago in the late 90s. And till today, prayer, worship, and worship and word has been going on for 24 hours, for almost 20 odd years. And that's just one of the examples among the many prayer movements and the tabernacle of David that God is raising up. It symbolizes a moment of true worshipers coming together to make his glory known, who will pursue his presence, his glory, his name, and worship for his fame to be established all across the world. And so that basically is what the tabernacle of David is just is. OK, and let's learn a little bit more about the worship and how worship ministry was organized in the tabernacle of David. We'll learn a little bit about his worship ministry from David's worship team, OK? So if you have your Bibles, you can all turn to the First Chronicles, chapter 25. First Chronicles, chapter 25. Some of the lessons from David's worship team. OK, First Chronicles, chapter 25, verse 1. It says, David and the chiefs of the service also set apart for the service, the sons of Asaph, and of He-Man, and of Jerusalem, who prophesied with liars, with harps, and with symbols. The list of those who did the work, and of the duties, and of their duties. OK, so let's pause there. The very first thing that we see in that verse 1 is the word set apart, OK? David and the chiefs of the service set apart for the service of the sons of Asaph, He-Man, and of Jerusalem. The word set apart is the root meaning, a root word for the word holy. OK, when we say that God is holy, what we are actually saying is that He is set apart, that there is no one like Him. If we are going to learn how to be set apart, or if we are going to understand a little bit about holiness, we are to look at the holiness of God. OK? OK, now, would you try and tell me what comes to your mind when you hear the word holy? You can type it in the chat section. Please feel free to unmute your mic and speak also, OK? Holy, gone, OK? Purity, God, no sin, OK? Blameless, all right? Come on, everybody, come on. Holiness, OK? Separate from sin, OK? You can think consecrated, OK? Yeah, perfect without sin. I'm making a surprise. Right, so the very first thing that comes to our mind when we talk about the holy, or we use this slang to kind of make fun of someone is, we call them holy Joe. He's a holy Joe. OK, why don't you come to party with us? Why don't you come and have a smoke with us? Oh, no, don't call him. He's a holy Joe. You know, why wouldn't you do that with us? Why wouldn't you drink with us? Are you a holy Joe? Have you heard that? Have you been? Right? So one of the first things that comes to our mind when we talk about holy or holiness in general and everything what we explain is true, is right, and even more, what do I mean by that? Holiness is not just moral purity, OK? Because of who we are in this physical state for us, the only thing that we can fathom about the word holy is that moral purity. Moral purity is not living a sexually moral life, living a godly life, as you mentioned, a righteous life. We don't cheat. We don't lie. We follow the Ten Commandments to the most part of it. You know, we don't covet. We are not jealous. We don't gossip, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's either moral purity or sinlessness, as you mentioned, or our understanding or some of the explanation or definitions of the word holiness from us is righteousness, actually, right? It's actually righteousness. But when we say that God is holy, we are not just saying that He is morally pure, right? We are not just saying that He cannot sin. We're not just saying that. We're not just saying that God is sinless. The point is that He cannot sin. It is not in His nature to even fathom. He doesn't understand what sin is. When we say that God is holy, He is set apart. In other words, another meaning for the word set apart is there is no one like Him. There is no one like Him. Now, I'm just stressing on this, you know, the word set apart because it says in the first verse that David and his chief set apart. If we need to understand what it really means, we need to look at God because He's the one who is set apart. And only then can we understand what it actually means to be set apart, right? So Exodus 15, verse 11, it says, who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working in wonders? It's a rhetorical question. Basically, who among the gods are like you? There is no one like Him. Who is like you in majestic in holiness? There is no one like Him. Who is majestic in holiness? Let's say an alien came to Earth. Someone, an alien from planet Mars. I'm just saying, OK, a Martian comes to planet Earth and he asks me, is like, who are you? I can point my finger and say, you know, I'm like that person. I'm like Lyndon. I'm like Subashish. I'm a human being. There is someone like me. They are like me. I am like them. They are like me. But there is not a single creature or a creation that God can point his finger to and say, you know, that they are as holy as me. He is holy all by Himself. Let's go to very quickly go to Psalm 89. OK, just come with me to Psalm 89, verse 6 onwards. Psalm 89, Psalm 89 verse 6 onwards. I hope you're there. It says, for who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? OK, again, rhetorical question. No one. Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord? Let's stop. When you think of the heavenly beings, what are some of the heavenly beings that comes to your mind? Angels. Yeah, OK. You think about angels and the different classes of angels. There are, you know, I'm not sure if you're learning about angels and demonology and all of that. But there are different classes of angels. There are the archangels. There are the messenger angels, right? And there are the seraphim. You read about it in Isaiah chapter 6. You read about the cherubim in Ezekiel chapter 1 and Ezekiel chapter 10. And you read about the living creatures in Revelation 4. OK, think about the seraphim. It's a seraphim. Seraphim means plural, right? The singular for seraphim is seraph, or seraphah. So the meaning of that word, seraphah, is burning ones, OK? So these angels are on fire. These angels, everything, oh, so cool. So look at the beautiful feathers, oh, the arrows, you know. These angels, seraphim, seraphah, means the burning ones. They are on fire. These angels are burning, with six wings, with two, they fly, with two, they cover the face, two, they cover the feet, and crying out to one another, holy, holy, holy. And then you read about the cherubim in Ezekiel 1 and how crazy they are. And then you read about the living creatures in Revelation 4, covered with eyes inside and out. And so one would read, you know, and think that, OK, hey, these angels are the closest to the presence of God. And so they must be like God. They must be as holy as Him. If I were to ask, which creation or creature can be compared to God's holiness, either the seraphim or the tiniest molecule particle, which among these two creatures comes close to the holiness of God, the answer is neither of them. Psalm 89 clearly says, verse 6, who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord? Answer, no one. Verse 7, Psalm 89, a God greatly to be feared in the counsel of the holy ones and awesome above all who are around Him. O Lord, God of hosts, who is mighty as you, O Lord, with your faithfulness all around you? You rule the raging sea when its waves rise, you still them. OK, it's just a wonderful Psalm on the holiness of God who says, you know, who He is. If you take a big diamond, right, I'm trying to use the tangible to explain the intangible, which is impossible. But just for our understanding, you take a big diamond and you lift it up to the light. And you can imagine all the possible reflections of lights that it can emit, right? And talking about the holiness of God is something like that. It's like you can't explain enough of it. And the Hebrew word for holiness, like I mentioned, is kadosh, which means set apart, OK? And someone mentioned the word consecration, right? Consecrated. Another meaning of that is sanctuary, right? Like the holy of holies, sanctuary comes from an old Latin word called sanctus, OK? Put it in the chapter. Sanctus. It's Latin for consecrated or holy. We get the word consecration, the Greek word consecration from the word sanctus. And it is when we don't understand the holiness of God, we ask questions like, how can a good God create the world with evil, sorrow, pain? How can a good God order the slaughter of women and children? How can a good God kill Uzair for stopping the ark from falling, right? The central recurring theme throughout the scriptures is that God is holy. God is holy. It is in his holiness, he is gracious. In his holiness, he is merciful. In his holiness, he is loving. In his holiness, he is kind. In his holiness, he is compassionate. In his holiness, he is omnipresent. In his holiness, he is the great I am. And time and time again in the scriptures, we see that he says that his name is holy, right? It is who he is. They can look. Chapter 1 verse 49 says that my name, holy is his name. And Psalm 103 verse 1 says, bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name, right? So the scriptures, time and time again just emphasizes to us that he is holy, he is set apart. There is no one like him. And if we as worshipers and worship ministry and worship team, if we don't have a revelation of his holiness, we will never understand what it means to be set apart. And or why the scriptures are telling us to be set apart. It will just be another rule for us. It will just be another principle, another guideline. Okay, I'm a Christian, so I shouldn't be doing all this. No. When we understand the holiness of God, it draws us to become more like him. It's not just about doing or following some few things, just to be immoral, just to be morally pure. Being holy or being set apart is more than just being morally pure, right? And so let's go back to the first chronicles, chapter 25 verse 1. David set apart, right? The sons of Asaph, Heman and Juditin for the ministry, right, we'll get to that. And it's a very important commandment. It is when we don't understand we have to be set apart. We compromise with the word. There's a Hindi word for it says chhalta hai. It's okay attitude, parwal, you know? It's like, oh, it's okay. You know, it's just one drag of smoke or it's just one nude scene in the series. But the series is amazing. It has great reviews. You know, it has only 10 murder scenes in it. It's okay, it's all right. Israelites compromised. They compromised and they began to follow the ways of the Canaanites. And that was the beginning of the downfall. Compromise will fill a fire for the Lord. Compromising with the ways of the world will destroy our zeal, our love for the Lord. It's compromise is pouring water on the fire that you have for God. But God is very clear, right? Don't compromise with the ways of the world. You know, don't flirt with the ways of the world and with mine. You choose. So set apart. And the second thing is ministry in what we learned from the David's worship team is ministry. Is they were set apart for the ministry of prophesying and to serve and worship. Again, the root meaning for what ministry is to be a cup bearer. That's the literal meaning is to serve. Is to serve without expectation. How many of us would like to do that? We all love to serve but do we serve without expectation? Right? That's a very good important question for us to have. We see the greatest example of that in John chapter 13 where love plus service equals to ministry. That Jesus takes a bowl of water, ties a towel around him and begins to wash the feet of his disciples. That is ministry. Okay? So set apart. Serve. Serve without expectation. Right? And then the next thing that we learn about on the David's worship team in 1st Chronicles 25 is, so it says, you know, they were set apart for the ministry of prophesying and we come down to verse six. Okay? Verse six it says, they were all under the direction, another translation NIV or NLT will say, under the supervision, right? They were all under the supervision of their father in the music in the house of the Lord with symbols and harps and liars. And Asaph and Jirithin and He-Man were under the order of the King. In other words, under the supervision of the King. In other words, they were submitted to the King. Okay? Submission of being, choosing to be under someone's supervision is an expression of humility. If you don't have that, the first question would be, why should I be under him? Why should I be under his order? Who's he to tell me what I should be doing? I will do whatever I want to do, however I want to do it. Whenever I want to do it, I will do it. You understand? So that is the opposite of being submissive is pride. Opposite of humility is pride. And God, the first worship leader in the Bible had serious issues with submission. You read about it in Isaiah 14, is equal to 28. He said to himself, I will ascend above the throne of the most high. I will make myself like the most high. And he just had to think, you know? And so that was his downfall. And God resists the proud. We read about it in James chapter four, verse six. As a worship leader, I'm going before him with song. And the last thing I want God doing is, no Roshan, I don't want you. I don't want your worship. Thank you very much. And keep it aside, walk away. Pretty much like what he did to Cain, right? So humility in this day and age, it's portrayed as weakness. Humility is portrayed as weakness. It's weakness to say, I'm sorry first. It's weakness to say, I forgive you first, right? It's weakness to extend your hand of help to someone else. But you have to be strong, to be humble, isn't it? Right? If you want someone to, let's say there's a huge wall in front of you and you want to jump across the wall, you have to be strong enough to bend down and give your back to someone to climb over your back and jump over the wall, isn't it? And humility is picking up someone who cannot up with your strength. And that's the beauty of submission and that's the beauty of humility. And there is something about humility and brokenness that God cannot ignore. He is attracted like the law of gravity in this realm. In God's kingdom, the law is if there's humility and desperation and hunger, the law is the kingdom has to respond. It has to respond to the cry of the humble. It has to respond to the cry of the desperate. And so something about the brokenness and the humility that God loves in us. And so that's the third point that we learn from the David's worship team is that they were all under the supervision of the leader of the king. And then a couple more points and we'll stop. And let's go to verse seven in 1 Chronicles 25. It says, the number of them among their brothers who were trained in singing to the Lord, all who were skillful was 288. Now, forget the number. Okay, 288, 4,000 later you'll see that it's all crazy. But then it says that they were all skillful. It doesn't necessarily say they were the best because how do you define best? But what we can learn is to have skillful. Let your music, let whatever you do for God have skill. Okay, raise the standard. Keep raising the standard. Don't compromise at where we are. Okay, this is where we are. This is how much I know. So I'm gonna continue doing this forever. There is no scope of getting better. There is no aim. There is no goal saying, okay, this year we are at this level in our musicianship and next year we're gonna take it up a notch. And these are the mission. This is the goal. These are the steps that we're gonna take to get to that place. If we don't have that as a worship ministry your worship ministry will fail. It's gonna get stagnant and you know what stagnant means. There is no growth and it's going to attract all kinds of unnecessary things. And finally we see that in verse eight, it was Chronicles chapter 25 verse eight, it says, and they cast lots for their duties. That means they were roster, small and great, teacher and pupil alike. That means there were all kinds of ages of people who were serving in David's worship team. It was not just the old, it was not just the young, it was the young and the old. Student with the teachers were serving in the David's worship team together. One of the things that we will learn in the chapters to come is the difference between the band and a church worship team. We'll learn about it in the next chapter sometime. And so you'll understand this better about the difference between a worship team and a band. So these are the points that we learned from the tabernacle of David and how worship was organized in his temple and his tabernacle that they were set apart for ministry. They were all under the supervision. They were submissive. They were all trained and skilled and they all seek to learn and teach. Again, even in this last point, that there is an expression of humility, right? Only if you're humble, you will go to someone and say, teach me. You know something I don't know, so teach me. And again, only if you're humble enough, you will teach someone. A lot of proud people will not teach. Why should I teach you? Why should I share my secret with you? This secret has been with my generations for hundreds of years. Why should I share it with you? Now, in teaching, there's an expression of humility as well, okay? So there's so many beautiful things to learn from the worship team of David. And I hope you have taken something from today's class and today's session, okay? Does anybody have any questions, any thoughts you wanna share? Okay, I guess not. So we'll actually stop here for this session because there's been quite a download of information. So we'll resume again next week. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for joining in, guys. Take care, God bless you.