 I turn back to the book of Revelation and the fourth chapter, we're going to read from chapter 4 verse 2 through all of chapter 5. Now sometimes it's a preacher's ploy if he doesn't have anything to say, he just reads a long passage in Scripture. That's not the case here. Immediately, John says, I was in the spirit, and behold, a throne set in heaven and one who sat on the throne. And he who sat there was like a jasper and a sardius stone in appearance. And there was a rainbow around the throne in appearance like an emerald. 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 lightnings, thunderings, 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 and 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. Whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four 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. And I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll written inside and on the back sealed with seven seals. Then I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals. And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look at it. So I went much because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll or to look at it. But one of the elders said to me, Do not weep, behold the lion of the tribe of Judah the Roof David has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals. And I looked and behold in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures and in the midst of the elders stood a lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. Then he came and took the scroll out of the right hand of him who sat on the throne. Now when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the lamb, each having a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song saying, You are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals, for you were slain and have redeemed us to God by your blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation and have made us kings and priests to our God and we shall reign on the earth. Then I looked and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne. The living creatures and the elders and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands saying with a loud voice worthy as the lamb who was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing and every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea and all that are in them. I heard saying blessing and honor and glory and power to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb forever and ever. And the four living creatures said amen. And the 24 elders fell down and worshiped him who lives forever and ever. Wow, I've tried to show so far that worship is the ultimate priority. It was the primary concern of God. It was the primary concern of Christ. It is the first response of the regenerate heart. It's the essence of the gospel message. It's the chief inhabitants of the inhabitants, no chief work of the inhabitants of heaven. It's the reason for God's anger, the absence of it. And it's the essence of man's relationship to God. But then the question naturally arises, why should we worship God? Well, I think the scripture gives us three reasons. First of all, did you catch the word that permeated the entire passage we just read? Did one word stick out? Worthy. He's worth it. He's worthy of it. So first, we worship God because of who he is. In scripture, God is always and only the reason for everything that God does. It is simply enough that he is who he is. That's all the reason he gives. In Exodus 20, when God lays down his moral law, he begins in verse one, I am the Lord your God. And then he gives a command. And while the word itself is not there, I believe it strongly implied the word therefore. I am the Lord your God. Therefore, you shall not do this. From Exodus 20, verses two through chapter 29, verse 46. All the reason given for each of the laws that are laid down is found in these words. For I am the Lord your God. In Leviticus chapter one, verse one, God starts with laws. But there's no reason given for any of them until chapter 11, when he says, for I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore. There it is again. That's all the reason we give, because he is the Lord our God. God is always the reason for everything that God asks. Leviticus 18, one, I am the Lord your God. You shall not do what was done in Egypt. Keep my statutes. I am the Lord your God. Leviticus chapter 19, verse one, you shall be holy. How come? For I the Lord your God am holy. And that's repeated many times throughout that chapter. In nearly every single verse, at the end of each command, God gives himself as the reason for what he commands of us. So I conclude that we're to worship God because he is the Lord our God. When I was young, I'm one of five boys. When I was young, my mother took ill. You can imagine after having five boys that would do it. And she had to spend a fair amount of time in the hospital. Well my dad was already working two jobs. One is a state policeman and then he'd come home, clean up, and go drive trucks for the gravel yard. So he was working 16 hours a day. So he obviously didn't have time to run a household. So my older brother Dan and I were the only ones old enough to do anything. The other three were kids. So my dad calls us over. He says, all right, this is the only way this is going to work. Now we lived on a small dairy farm. Dan, you're in charge of the outside of the house. Now this is in the late 1950s. You get the cows milk. You get the milk out to the street for the dairy to pick up. You change the irrigation pipes. You feed the chickens and the hogs. You feed the cows. Make sure the hay's out there. If it's out, you mow the lawn. If it's outside the house, Dan, you do it. He looked at me and says, everything inside the house is you. You get up. You make breakfast for everybody. You get your brothers ready for school. Get them on the bus. You wash the dishes. You cook all the meals. You vacuum. You mop. You do the laundry. Pull the clothes. Put them away. Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! How come I got to do all the woman's stuff? Remember, this was the 50s. And my dad, Dirty Harry hadn't been admitted yet, but my dad was Dirty Harry. And he was a cop. And he was a German. And he was 6'2", 190-pound German cop. And he leans over to me like this. He grits his teeth because I said so. Boy, Pop, I can't argue with logic like that. You have convinced me by evidence and sound reasoning of what I should do. I have to tell you this story. One of my dad's favorite things was Friday night to come home to a chocolate layer cake. That was back in the days when they had round pans with that thing that would go around and undo it from the bottom. And then you put it in. Well, he comes home one day after work on Friday, says, you got my cake? And I said, yeah. I put it out there. It was the height of two pancakes. Both layers took up about a quarter inch. He says, what in the world is that? I said, it's the chocolate layer cake. Well, it certainly didn't like the kind your mother makes. What did you do wrong? I followed the directions on the box. Well, you did something wrong. Don't do it again. Well, the next week he came back and there it was again. In the third week he came back early and saw me eating the batter. He got all that was left. I knew I needed to get married. So we are to worship God simply because he is the Lord our God. Secondly, we worship God because he deserves it. We saw in Revelation 4, they will worship him and will cast their crowns before him saying worthy art thou, O Lord. In Revelation 5, verses 2 and 3, it's obvious Christ alone is worthy. In verse 9, they sang a new song saying, you are worthy. In verse 12, worthy is the Lamb. All of heaven declares the worthiness of Christ in God to receive worship. And do you notice that they worship him based on his worthiness to receive it? But again, God's great controversy with man is that they will not honor him as God. Instead, they insist on worshiping themselves. The entire book of Malachi in the Old Testament, or as the Italians like to say, Malachi, the Italian theologian. The entire book of Malachi is about worship, but God is not pleased with what they offer him. In Malachi 1.14, I am a great king. Where is my honor? Where is my respect? And then he says, go offer this to your governor and see if he'll take it from you. In other words, we treat God in ways we'd never treat anybody we really respected. Now the word for worship is a combination of two old English words, worth, sip. Literally reverence tendered based on the worthiness of the person to whom it is given. Jonathan Edwards once wrote this, our obligation to love, honor, and obey any being is in proportion to his loveliness, honorableness, and authority. What other conclusion can we draw then, but that we are under infinite obligation to love, honor, and obey God, since he is infinitely lovely, infinite has infinite honor and has infinite authority. We are infinitely obliged to worship God. We are under greater or lesser obligations to anyone based on their position and the respect or reverence their position demands and deserves. Even if you can't respect the person, we are to respect their position. Even in our own culture, a judge walks into a courtroom, all rise, or they do that at Yankee Stadium when Aaron Judge comes up to bat. And to not do so in a courtroom is considered as contempt. When the president walks into the press room for a news conference, the reporters stand up out of respect or deference for the office of president, even if not for the man himself. It's interesting to me that in Scripture, whenever the word of God is read, the people stand out of respect for the Bible. With that in mind, you can see why God asks the question in Malachi, if I am a king, where is my honor? Now, since worship is based on God's worthiness to receive it, we have to ask this question, how worthy is God? How much is he worth? According to Nehemiah 9.5, God is above all blessing and praise. According to Isaiah 57, God is the high and exalted one who lives forever. So if God is high and exalted and our worship of him is not, we refute the very Scripture we've come here to have teaches. Some churches are called high church, and they have a very formal liturgy. Every church has a liturgy. It's just whether it's high church or low church. And the reason for the formal liturgy is not because they have a love for formality, but a love and respect for the high and lofty one who inhabits heaven. How then could we ever treat the worship of the King of heaven and earth as something casual or something commonplace? How could we ever treat God as someone on the same level as ourselves? Psalm 113, verse 4, God is high above all nations. His glory is above the heavens. So we should also ask how great is God? Because the greater he is, the greater must be our worship. The more worthy he is, the more our worship should reflect his word. Listen to 1 Kings chapter 8, verses 10 and 11. And it came about when the priest came from the holy place that the cloud filled the house of the Lord so that the priest could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of the Lord. How is that for a worship service? Wouldn't you just love to be part of that kind of worship? Where the priest couldn't even stand to minister because there was no need because the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. You say, ah, that's Old Testament. Yeah, we only believe in the 27 books of the new. We just do away with the old, right? Wrong. It's not unique, just Old Testament worship. Listen to Revelation 15.8. And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of the Lord and from his power. And again, you know the imagery of Isaiah 6. I saw the Lord sitting on the throne lofty and exalted with the train of his robe filling the temple. When Isaiah saw the Lord, when Isaiah worshipped in the presence of God, he saw the Lord. He didn't see his own problems. He didn't see his physical infirmities. He didn't focus on his so-called needs. He saw the Lord. We need Isaiah's vision of God's glory in our worship. You can see why the Puritans would say we need to be forgiven, not just for our sins, but for our worship. Jonathan Edwards once closed the sermon this way. Can you think of a single reason why, since you got here this morning, God has not opened the gates of hell and dropped you in simply for your worship? You may be the last man alive who could get away with saying that anymore. Or I can, because I can play hit and run. But nobody else can get away with it. Jeremiah Burrow said the reason we worship God in a slight way is because we do not see God in his glory. 2 Samuel 22.4, I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised. Psalm 29.2, give unto the Lord the glory that is due under his name. Now, if it is due under his name, what does that mean? Here we have interactive class. If it's due unto him, what does that tell you? You owe it to him. It means he has a right to it. And if he has a right to something, we have an obligation to give it to him. So if God deserves our worship, how much of our attention does he deserve in his worship? How much of our concentration does he deserve? Well, these are questions you don't have to answer because the Bible does. Psalm 103, verse 1, bless the Lord, oh my soul, and let what? All that is within me, bless his holy name. 4, Matthew 22, verse 37, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. When was the last time you left the worship service exhausted? Both mentally and physically because you gave God everything you had to give in worship. The story told of Martin Luther when he was in seminary studying for the priesthood. He engaged in what so many seminarians do. Today we call it a bull session. Basically it's where a bunch of folks sit around and give their opinions about something. Sounds to me like most modern Bible studies. What do you think the verse means, Fred? I don't give a rip what Fred thinks the verse means. What does God think it means? Well, this particular session was about what was the greatest sin. So the question was asked, what's the greatest sin? And they're sitting in a semi-circle and one young student suggested that murder was the greatest sin since man is created in the image and likeness of God. And to take a life was to mar God's image. And another seminarian said, well, adultery would have to be the greatest sin since it's a breaking of a covenant between man and God. And so each individual, as they went around the table, gave his opinion about what's constituted the greatest sin. And then they got to Luther. Do any of you know what Luther was going to be before he went into the ministry? He was going to be a lawyer. There's strikes one, two, and three. Like we need another obnoxious guy in the ministry. Luther thought like a lawyer. So when the question was posed to him is what was the greatest sin he answered in this way? Now, if the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, then it stands to reason the greatest transgression of that commandment would be to love him with anything less than all. If that's a reasonable criteria, how guilty are all of us for committing the greatest of all sins in our so-called worship? Stephen Charnock said, the first ground to the worship we render to God is the infinite excellency of his nature. Worship ought to be suitable to the nature of God. Now think about that for a moment. Worship ought to be suitable to the object of our worship, not the worshiver, the worshipee. I want us to see something else about the nature of worship. The verse in Psalm 29, 2, given to the Lord the glory that's due unto his name. Many times in that verse the essence of worship is said to be giving something to the Lord, not getting something from the Lord. Give unto the Lord, give unto the Lord glory and strength, give to the Lord the glory that is due unto his name. Worship is therefore not what you get out of a service, but what you give to God in the service. And that happens when you give the Lord what he's due, what he is worthy to receive from you. So here's a radical idea. Worship isn't what you get, it's what you give. I told you that story about the young student, I didn't get anything out of it. The only consideration we need to have after a worship service is this one. Did I give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name today? Was what I offered worthy of him? Was he pleased with my offering of praise? Was my worship suitable to his majesty? Did I adore him as a king ought to be adored? I get to do a fair amount of traveling, most of it out of the country. My dad says, yeah, people will ask you to preach if you promise to leave the country. You wonder why I have a tick. So that positive affirmation. When I go to other countries, I'll be going to Medellin, Colombia in four weeks. And I preach there to Reform Baptist Church in the city. There's about 600 people that attend there. I love the music. Now I know the tunes, I don't know the Spanish words. But these people sing as if they're afraid that everybody in the city of Medellin, which is three million people, might not hear them. And again, they go this way. It says, make a joyful noise. I'm doing that. And so then I come back to America. And people in churches here sing like they're afraid the guy next to them might hear them. Are we singing for him? Are we singing for him? What difference does it make if he doesn't like it? So what? Who's he? Others often like to say, we preach to an audience of one, him. You and congregations need to sing to an audience of one, him. It does make a joyful noise. It doesn't say you got to be on tune. I can't carry a tune in a bucket. There aren't any buckets here. Shut up and sing. Now if Charnuk is right, and I believe he is, and worship is to be suitable to the nature of God and His excellencies. There are those excellencies that are the grounds of our adoration of Him. These are all from Revelation 4 and 5. He is eternal. Next He is the creator of all things, the preserver of all things, the reason for all things, and the final cause of all things. He has overcome. He was slain and has purchased us with His blood. Another one is He is sovereign, and those are just a few. Again to quote Charnuk, the more we grow in the sense of God's holiness, the more we shall advance in the true performance of all our duties. Our reverence to God in all our dresses to Him will increase if every act of duty is ushered in and seasoned with thoughts of God sitting on a throne of holiness. We shall have a more becoming sense of our own vileness. A greater ardor to His service, a deeper respect in His presence if our understanding is possessed with notions of this. So that's the first reason. Why do we worship God? Because He's worthy of it. He deserves it. The third reason is that we're to worship God because He demands it. He deserves it. He demands it, and He's God. Again Revelation 14, 6, and 7, fear God, give Him glory and worship Him. Matthew 4, 10, you shall worship the Lord. Deuteronomy 6, 13, you shall worship Him. And all of those are in the command mode. William Beverage, if I know anything of God and of that service and honor that is due unto Him, we who live and move and have our being in Him ought to be possessed with such a fear and awe and dread, such a fear and reverence of Him is not to dare to carry ourselves irreverently or inseamly in His presence. If any of you desire to manifest yourselves to be truly Godly indeed, you must be sure to lay aside all carelessness and indifference in the presence and worship of God and to perform all your acts of devotion to Him with all the modesty and humility, with all the reverence and solemnity that you possibly can, as becomes those who believe themselves to be engaged in the highest acts that they are or can be capable of performing. That word modesty is not spoken of often enough and it applies to men and women. The address to reflect God's honor or how well you're built. So what's the response of heaven to God? Revelation 5, 14, and the four living creatures kept saying amen and the elders fall down and worship. So the only response to true worship is more worship and we should always strive to make it better worship. So why do we meet on Sundays? The worship service is your opportunity on a weekly basis to show God how much you think He's worth. That's a rhetorical question here. If you were God, how much would you think you're worth based on how you worshiped Him last Sunday? There is a choral anthem that is my favorite. I love choir music and particularly choral anthems. You all should have a sheet of paper with the words to this one on it. Is that correct? This was written by a young girl when she was 19 years old. She's still alive. She lives in Dallas, Texas. The kind of stuff you were doing when you were 19? We worship God because He's our God. That's the answer to all the questions now. Why should I submit to my husband? Because God is your God and your eternal King. Why should I obey my parents? Because God is your God and your eternal King. Why should I come to church twice on Sunday? Because He's your God and He deserves it.