Reformed Baptist Church in O'Fallon, Missouri
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Sacrifice of Praise

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Opening Scripture: A Sacrifice of Praise

Open your Bibles, if you would, to Hebrews. We’re going to continue discussing the topic of worship, and today I’m going to talk about the sacrifice of praise.

And I’m intending to give this message a little bit later in the series, but Deacons wanted to share a little bit later in the service about some financial things, and so it actually fits more appropriately with the flow of the service today, so I’m going to give this message today. Hebrews chapter 13 will start in verse 10.

It says, We have an altar from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside of the gate. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come. For by him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name, but do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.“ If you also look at 1 Peter quickly, 1 R. 2, 1 Peter 2, Peter says verse 4, coming to Him, meaning Christ, as a living stone rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious. You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Therefore it is also contained in the scripture, ”…behold, I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone, elect, precious. He who believes on him will by no means be put to shame. Therefore to you who believe he is precious, but to those who are disobedient or unbelieving, the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. They stumbled being disobedient to the word, to which they were also appointed. you, you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people, that you may proclaim the praises or the virtues and excellencies of him, meaning God, who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light, who once were not a people, but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.“ So we see just these two passages that the people of the God are called a new priesthood and a new spiritual house, and that we are to offer up sacrifices to God, and that’s sacrifice, the sacrifice is the sacrifice of worship and the sacrifice of praise. But the question I want to ask and then answer hopefully today is why is praise called a sacrifice? And I want to give you several reasons in answer to that question. Why is praise called a sacrifice? The first reason is because worship or praise requires the sacrifice of our time. Now it takes time to go to church, right? I don’t know about you, but I would have to sleep in today. Anybody else agree with that? You got to get up early, you got to get ready, it takes time. If you have a family, you got to get the family, it takes a lot. all this time, then you got to come to church, then you sit in the worship service, it takes time. It just takes time. It just takes time. And you have to give that time up. And a lot of people don’t want to give the time up. If you drive through our beautiful town of O’Fallon, you’ll see people out at the golf course, and you’ll see people jogging and people riding their bike, and they’re not taking the time. It just takes time. You have to set aside the time for corporate worship, and you have to set aside the time for private worship. But we also have to sacrifice our time in the sense that to truly learn to worship the Lord is more than just 20 or 30 minutes once a week singing music. That’s easy, right? That’s the easy part.

The Sacrifice of Time

When we talk about the sacrifice of time, we’re talking about what the Bible calls waiting on the Lord, waiting on the Lord. Let’s just look at a couple Psalms quickly. Look at Psalm 62. Psalm 62. You can tell me when you’re there. Look at Psalm 62. We’ll start in verse 1 where David talks about waiting on the Lord. He says, truly my soul silently waits the Here comes my salvation. He only is my rock and my salvation. He is my defense. I shall not be greatly moved. Verse 5, My soul… Now I don’t want to look at Psalm 130. Well, there’s a whole bunch of problems. If we read them all, we just read Scripture all day. Maybe we should do that someday. We just read Scripture all day. Psalm 130. We’ll just start in verse 1. The psalmist says, Out of the depths I have cried to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord. My soul waits. And in His word do I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning. Yes, more than those who watch for the morning. O Israel, hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy and with Him is abundant redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. There are numerous passages that talk about this idea of waiting on the Lord.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m not a very patient person. Anybody have a problem with patience in this room? I don’t like long lines at Walmart. As a matter of fact, I don’t like Walmart. Every time I go to Walmart, there’s a problem with the register. You know what I mean? Then I have to wait. My wife will tell you. Don’t like waiting in lines. Our whole culture, though, is built on speed, right? Everything’s fast. Remember back in the early days when you got one of those first computers? It only took like three minutes for it to load? Now we’re like, what, 10 seconds? What’s the deal? Why has it taken so long? Because our perception and our expectations have changed so much regarding speed and time that everything, is very, very quick, very fast. We have instant everything, right? Instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant dinner, it’s all instant, you microwave it, boom, it’s there, quick, fast. This is the way we live. We are not very good at waiting.

We’re not very good at waiting. And yet, yet, in scripture, we are repeatedly exhorted to wait on the Lord. Now waiting by its very definition means waiting. If there’s one thing you can’t hurry, it’s waiting. Right? Because it’s a contradiction in terms. You can’t do both. You can’t hurry up and wait. You can hurry up and read the Bible. You can hurry up and say your prayers. But you can’t hurry up and wait. When David says he waited for the Lord, he was expressing two things. One, waiting was an attitude of expectation. The person who’s waiting for the morning, the sentry, really wants the sun to come up because he wants to go home and go to bed. He’s eager for the sunrise, right? So it’s an attitude of expectation. It’s not just waiting like, oh, I’ve got to wait. it’s looking forward to, it’s expecting something to happen. So the sentry who waited for the sun to rise, he expected it to come up. He wasn’t like, well, maybe the sun’s gonna come up. He knew it was going to come up, but it was just a matter of time. So when David says we are to wait on the Lord like that, we are to expect the Lord to come and meet us. Have an attitude of expectation and an attitude of faith. However, it might take a while. And when David said that he waited more than those that wait for the morning, I think he was saying that there were actually times when he waited hours and hours and hours for the Lord. So how do you know that? Well, we know that when he had his sin with Bathsheba, sin with Bathsheba, right? And God said He’s gonna deal with the baby. Remember what David did? What did he do? He fasted and he prayed for days. And he was waiting on the Lord to see if the Lord would speak a word of mercy to him. Days! Some of us, we can’t sit before God for 30 minutes. We’ve got to check our Twitter. Right? Now I’m not saying every time that David sought the Lord, he spent 12 hours waiting. I’m not saying that. But I am saying this, that his attitude was one of expectation and his attitude was one where he was willing to sit before the Lord. Matter of fact, there are scriptures where it talks about David and in Samuel it says, David went and he sat before the Lord. And it’s a picture where he sits down and he’s focused on the Lord and he’s concentrating on the Lord and he’s waiting to meet the Lord. That takes time. Anybody from the book called Margins? No? You guys don’t read books? You do read books? I hope you read books. The book called Margins and it’s about putting margins in your life. whether they’re financial margins or relational margins or time margins. And a lot of times our lives operate in such a way that we can’t, that everything is to the limit. You know what I mean? Your checkbook is to the limit. Your schedule is to everything’s to the limit. There’s no margins in our lives. Well, when it comes to our spiritual life, there has to be big margins. We have to set aside time for the Lord because it takes time to meet with the Lord. It just takes time. If there was a shortcut, I would be a millionaire because I would sell it in a bottle.

But it doesn’t exist. Now I know you can go to a bookstore and it’ll say, you know, three minutes with God, and there’s actually a book like that, the two minute leader, you know, if only, but life really doesn’t work that way. So sometimes when I get with the Lord, I have to spend hours in the word, in prayer, in meditation, in private worship, before I’m commuting with him on any deep level. It just takes time. Now fortunately for me, I have to get with God. I have to. I can’t come here and do any good. So Saturday I spend 8, 9, 10, 12 hours reading the Word, meditating, worshiping. That’s awesome. It’s even better than Sunday’s. But it requires that. Do you understand what I’m saying? It requires that. And you see, God established this thing called the Sabbath. Ever heard of it? Well, the Sabbath isn’t 15 minutes a day. He never set up that. He set up a day, a whole day. Now, we fill that day with activities. When God says, that’s a day for worship, it’s a day for prayer, it’s a day for meditation, it’s a day for acts of mercy. It’s a worship day, a whole day! Not only about you, but a lot of times I want to spend time with the Lord, I’ll start feeling guilty. You ever feel guilty? Oh, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that, oh, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to… All these things I’ve got to do, right? But see, God says, on my day, you don’t have to do any of that. So when your husband says, honey, where’s the towels? You the Lord’s day. I don’t have to do that. It’s the Lord’s Day. And if we actually structure our lives in a healthy way, what we would do is we would do in six days what we now do in seven. And then we would have a day of rest, a day of focus, a day of communion with God and with His people. And it would bring the kind of refreshment that communion with the Lord is designed to bring. Now, I’m not a legalist when it comes to the Sabbath. I don’t mind watching a football game or something on the Lord there, all that. But the point is, is there’s a principle there that we have lost. We have lost the idea of resting and waiting in God. And because we’ve lost it, we’ve lost it to our own spiritual impoverishment. We are lesser spiritually because we have lost this in our culture and in our churches today and it’s very unfortunate. [audio unclear] We need to restore this in our lives. It takes time to learn to worship God at a deep level, and there is no substitute for this. If you truly do this, you would be surprised what might happen if you take a day and go somewhere private I know some of you do this once a year, some people do it once a month, where some people even go to a retreat center for one day, they rent a room, and they spend the whole day in prayer, meditation, and worship. And everybody I know that does that says the same thing. You know what it is? God showed up. I met God. I met Him in a real way. But it took time. So, we have to sacrifice time. time if we’re going to the worship the Lord, really worship the Lord. It also takes time in another sense that, you know, it really does take time to learn the art of worship. When I call it an art, I call it a discipline. You could even call it a skill. It dawned on me as I was preparing these messages on worship that I had been sitting in church, I guess say when I was 20 and I didn’t really get behind the pulpit until I was in my early 30s. So for a good 12 years I sat on the other side and I never heard a sermon on worship. Now when I was a new believer, I was taught to read my Bible, I was taught how to read my Bible, I was given a book on how to witness, I was taught how to witness, I was taught how to worship. And it’s interesting because there’s just kind of assumption that, well, I guess you’ll just figure it out on your own. And so what happens is people, excuse me, they get saved and worship is whatever their, their understanding of worship is whatever their environment is. Right? So if you get saved in a Baptist church and they sing two That was a joke, Steve, you’re supposed to laugh. Then you learn that and you say, that’s worship. You can say it’s in a Charismatic church and they’re swinging on the chandeliers. Well, you get on the chandelier and that’s what you do because that’s worship. In other words, you simply look around and you say, oh, well, that’s worship. And that’s how Christians often learn things. When in fact, none of that is the norm. This is the norm. This is how we learn how to worship. God’s worship, or the worship of God, the directions for it are in here. Right? So I had never been taught how to worship. No one ever taught me about things like raising your hands, or bowing down, or kneeling, or anything that the Bible talks about, never taught. And I remember I began to read and study the Word and read other books and things on worship. And through that, my own personal worship was profoundly deepened, but I had to learn it. And that took time, okay, it took time. Worship in a sense is like any other discipline. It takes practice. It really does. You’ve heard of Bill Bradley, the famous basketball player, right? He’s in the Hall of Fame. He was slow, he couldn’t jump, and he had no feel for the game. However, one thing he did when he was young is that he practiced. And he would practice three or four hours every day after school. He would practice on the. The weekends. He would put weights in his shoes. He would tape cardboard under his glasses so he couldn’t see the ball, so he could learn how to dribble. And he practiced, and he practiced, and he practiced. And of course he ended up in the Hall of Fame, because he practiced. Don’t you want to be in the Hall of Fame of worship? Well, it takes practice. You know, I studied music when I was younger, and played the piano, I don’t know how to for you, but then I’m going to blow you away. But when people hear me play and then I tell them I never touched a piano until I was 18 and they’re like, what? How did you do that? Because most people, you learn when you’re younger, right? I said, well, when I went to college and I got serious about music, I practiced the piano four hours a day, Monday through Friday. I would be at school at seven in the morning, and from seven to nine I would practice. Then I would do my classes and then from 3 to 5 or 4 to 6 in the afternoon, I would practice two more hours every school day. And I did that for two years. So in two years’ time of intense practice, I made up for years and I was playing music with my peers with students who had started the piano when they were 5 or 6. But it took intense, dedicated practice. And it applies to worship. The more we worship, the more we learn about worship, the more we focus on worship, [audio unclear]

The Sacrifice of Effort

I think praise is called a sacrifice secondly because it takes effort. You know, the sacrifice of time and the sacrifice of effort really go together, right? But we need to understand that true biblical worship is not as easy as some people think.

Of course, singing songs is easy. At least some of the songs are easy. Worship is not. The 19th century preacher George Morrison said this, he said, he says, it is far easier to give up a coin than it is to give up a quarrel. It is easier to lay down a generous offering than to lay down a long continued grudge. And what Jesus insists upon, he’s talking about Matthew 5 where Jesus is the leaver gift of the altar, is is that we must lay aside our pride, we must humble ourselves as little children. He says that is not easy. Amen.

It’s not easy. It never can be easy. That is far from natural to man. That is hard to do and very bitter and quite opposed to natural inclination and a cause for patience and interior sacrifice and prayerful if secret self-denial.

He goes on to say, this is what I want to impress upon you, and I want to teach you that worship is not easy. I want to teach you that it is very hard. It is not a comfortable hour on Sunday with beautiful music and a fluent preacher. It is an attitude of heart and soul that it is impossible without self-denial. Now singing the songs is easy, but the true spirit, the worship and the spirit and truth, is not easy. Now, this morning while we were worshipping, I was fighting because thoughts were coming into my mind about other things. I had to do a battle. It wasn’t easy. Let me read that again. It is a attitude of heart and soul that is impossible without self-denial. I thank God that in the purest worship there is but little demand upon the intellect. The humblest saint who cannot write a letter may experience all the blessings of the sanctuary, but there is a demand upon the soul. There is a call to sacrifice and cross bearing, for the road to church is just like the road to heaven. It lies past the shadow of the cross. What we need to understand is that in true worship, if we worship in spirit and truth, It requires the effort of the entire inner man. It requires the effort of the mind, of the will, and of the affections. The mind must focus on God and fight off all worldly or demonic distractions.

Anybody distracted this morning during worship? Yes, indeed you were. And very often you will be. Because the world, we don’t appreciate how much as we walk through the world, the stuff for the world gets stuck on us as much as we don’t want it to. And we also don’t appreciate how often we’re worshipping the Lord, how the enemy doesn’t want us to worship God. Let me tell you something. I don I don’t think the devil cares about Christianity. I think he cares about a group of people that are truly full of the Holy Ghost. That’s what he cares about. People that are in touch with the living God. having vital holy communion with the risen Savior. That’s what he cares about. Because that’s where resurrection power is and that’s the power that defeats him. He doesn’t care about church. So he doesn’t want you in vital communion with God. He will resist your efforts and you have to do battle in your heart and your soul. And you have to fight him because he will try to distract you from true worship. So the mind must focus on God and fight off all distractions. The will must submit to God’s Spirit. And like David, it must determine to worship God. And David says repeatedly in the Psalms, I will praise the Lord. In other words, I will choose to do this by an act of my will, even though I might be distracted, even though I may feel downcast at the moment, I will do this. So our wills must submit to the call, God’s call to worship. And our affections have to be cleansed by repentance. They have to be inflamed by love. They have to be intentionally set on things above, not on things of the earth.

To quote Morrison again, he says, the approach to God is with the whole heart and it demands real effort. And I love this paragraph. Can I read a little bit more of him? It was such a great sermon. He says, of course, you can come in church, you can be in church and never know the reality of worship. You hear that? You may come to church, be in church, never know the reality of worship.

For you may think your thoughts and dream your dreams and be in the spirit a thousand miles away. But quietly to reject intruding thoughts and give oneself to prayer, praise and reading, That is a task that never can be easy, and for some it is incredibly hard. If there were anything to rivet your attention, that would make all the difference in the world. In a theater you can forget yourself absorbed in the excitement of the play, or we might say the movie. But the Church of the Living God is not a theater. And in the day when it becomes theatrical, in that day its worship will be gone with all its blessings. If you want to wander, you can always wander. Not wonder, wander. There’s nothing here to river the attention. There’s only hymns and prayer and the simple reading of Scripture. And you to make the needed effort. And to shut the gates and to withdraw yourself. And through that very effort comes the blessedness of the public worship of God in Jesus Christ. the effort that the blessing comes. You see? It is thus, meaning through the effort, that worship becomes a heavenly feast when we bring our will to it and take it nobly. It is thus, meaning through effort, that worship becomes a means of grace. Make it as attractive as you please, but remember, if it is to be blessed to you, you must deny yourself, you must take up your cross, the cross, you must bring an offering and come into the courts of the Lord. Isn’t that good? It’s so true. The real problem with worship is not usually the worship, it’s the [audio unclear] It’s us not making the appropriate effort of mind, will, and affection to enter into a true spirit of worship and to enter into communion with God. And then we say, well, how was the worship? It was okay. An indictment more of ourselves than anything else. So, we speak of the sacrifice of praise because we sacrifice our time and we sacrifice our effort.

The Sacrifice of Treasure

But I want to mention a third thing that we need to sacrifice. That is, we need to sacrifice also our treasure. Morrison said again, no Jew went to the temple empty handed. And that sums it up. When you think about the Old Testament economy, it’s striking the way God structured it. We know that they had the annual tithes and some people say there were two a year, some people say three a year depending on how you read the text. They had free will offerings. They had special collections, for example, a big collection for the temple. They had laws regarding gleaning and other things. When you look at the scripture in the Old Testament, it’s amazing how much attention is given to not just worship but the physical aspect of worship. I mean the whole system, the sacrificial system, the temple system, all the regulations regarding giving. And so the picture you get in the Old Testament is that when a worshipper came, he came with an offering. He had something in his hand. As a matter of fact, it even says in the Psalm, it says, bring your offering and come into the courts of the Lord. it just assumed that when you go to worship Jehovah, you bring him a gift. It’s a very interesting attitude, okay, because the idea is, the idea is I’m going to go meet with God, and because of who God is, I’m going to give him a gift. Do you ever go out to lunch with somebody really important? You know what your natural inclination is? To buy their lunch. You want to give them a gift, right? You want to honor them. And this is the spirit that permeates the Old Testament, is that we’re going to meet the great King, we’re going to meet Jehovah, we’re going to worship God, the true and living God. Let’s give him a gift, because that’s what he deserves. And so, it was just assumed, and Jesus even assumes it. In Matthew 5, when he’s talking about being reconciled to your brother, he says, “…and when you come to the altar with your gift…” Right? “…with your gift…” If you remember, you have a quarrel, blah, blah, blah, go take care of it. The assumption is, when you come with your gift, because they just assume that’s how you worship. You worship with your gifts. I got saved in church, it was very counter-cultural. That’s not the right word. It was counter, in some ways counter-evangelical. Because they wanted, they were very, sensitive to the fact that a lot, there’s kind of a stereotype out there that, you know, the church just wants your money, preachers just want your money, and there are some preachers like that, right? As a matter of fact, I know one, by the way. I won’t mention his name. And so in reaction to that, I said, you know, we’re not going to pass the plate at our church because we don’t want people to think we want their money. And I, like, that’s cool. I like that. That’s a good idea. Remove that as a possible offense. That way if someone comes in that doesn’t know Christ, they won’t be offended by passing the plate. And so good. The problem with that approach is that it takes giving and makes giving something separate from worship. You see? And as I began to study worship over the years, and over the years as I studied giving, I saw that they were intimately connected. And that although I understand why in certain situations you might not want to pass the plate is, it’s called taking offering in church in certain contexts. I think as a general rule, it’s actually the right thing to do. And it’s the right thing to do because our giving is, is, or should be a act of worship. You understand? That when we’re giving God our tithes and our offerings, we are worshiping Him. That’s what we’re doing. We’re not just, we don’t worship and then give, we worship as we give. Now in the Old Testament, there was a problem, or should I say, there wasn’t a problem with the Old Testament. The problem was, what we saw happening in Israel is they began to substitute the physical for the spiritual. They began to say, okay, well, I brought my goat, I brought my lamb, so I’m good. Me and God are good. They began to rest in the ritual, okay? And so it became a formalism and an externalism. And that’s why you find these scriptures where David and others say, you know, God doesn’t want your sacrifice. God wants the sacrifice of a broken heart, right? wants a sacrifice of humility because people were falling into the snare of ritualism, and they were substituting the external for the internal. Now in the New Testament, we can go to the opposite extreme though. What we do is we end up, we divorce the physical from the spiritual. So in the Old Testament, worship became materialized, if you will, to the neglect of the spiritual But in the New Testament, we must be careful, lest we spiritualize worship to the neglect of the material. And we tend to do that. How do I know we do this? Because we can sing a song, like, I surrender all, and yet not surrender ten percent.

You see, we have divorced the spiritual. We can say, God, I give you my life. God, I give you my heart. But I won’t give you 5%. You see? Anybody been guilty of that? I have. So see, true worship, meaning worship in spirit and truth, is the blending of both.

Now it’s easy to go through the ritual. It was easy in the Old Testament to offer up, I shouldn’t say it was easy because it did cost them something. They could offer up a lamb and give God a lamb, but not give God their heart. Well, you know, we can give God songs and not give him our heart. We can even give God money and not give him our heart. God wants our heart. But you see, here’s the thing we have to understand. When you hear statements like, God wants your heart, and you hear statements like, God doesn’t need your money, people are like, good, I don’t have to give. That’s nice. That’s missing the point. The point is, is if God has our heart, He has our money. If, if God has your heart, He has your house, He has your car, He has your kids, He has your life, He has your job, He has everything about you. And the reason I believe that it’s important b that we see giving and worship connected is because our giving is a reality check. Shout me down now, folks. Don’t shout me down. It’s a reality check. Because we Christians can become Gnostics. It’s all real spiritual, and it’s all etherial in our head. And what we’re calling worship has no connection with how we’re living. That’s not true worship. I don’t know what you want to call it. You call it sentimentalism. You call it religious fervor. You call it ecstasy. You call it whatever you want. It’s not true worship because true worship transforms.

And if I truly worship, it changes how I live. If I truly worship, it changes how I give. So there’s a sacrifice involved in a worship, which is not just theoretical, it’s very practical. We come into the Lord’s courts and we come and we should be bringing gifts to him. We should be. We should be bringing offerings to Him. Because we love Him. Not because it’s a duty, not because it’s a law, but it’s because of who we recognize that He is. Amen? We give to God because we love Him. We honor Him. We understand that worship without giving is not true worship, because worship is a sacrifice of praise. with one scripture from 2 Samuel 24, if you want to turn there with me. 2 Samuel 24. There had been a plague on Israel because of David’s numbering of the people. And in 2 Samuel 24 verse 18, it says, And Gad came that day to David and said to him, Go up, erect an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. So David, according to the word of Gad, went up, as the Lord commanded. Now Araunah looked and saw the king and his servants coming toward him. Now notice this guy’s response to the king, because this is important. So he went out, and he bowed before the king with his face to the ground. Then Ere-una said, Why has my Lord the king come to his servant. And David said, to buy the threshing floor from you, to build an altar to the Lord, that the plague may be withdrawn from the people. Now Eruinus said to David, let my Lord the King take and offer up whatever seems good to him. Look here, oxen for burnt sacrifices and threshing implements and the yokes of the oxen for wood. In other words, Eruinus, understanding who the king was, what did he want to do? What did he want to do He wanted to give it to him, because that’s what you do. You give kings gifts. The perfect spirit of worship right there. The right response to royalty. All these, O king, Eruuna has given to the king, all these I will give to you. And he said to the king, R.A. may the Lord your God accept you. Then the king said to Eruuna, no. I will surely buy it from you for a price. Now listen to David, nor will I offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God, which cost me nothing. There’s the same spirit, the same understanding of worship. I will not worship God on the cheap. He deserves better than that. I don’t want my worship to be easy. I want it to be costly, costly, because then it’ll be precious in your eyes. We think about when Jesus was in the temple, right? And all the rich people were throwing their offerings in one of the freewill boxes. And then this widow comes in, she throws in her two mites. It says in Jesus watching them, watching their giving, says to his disciples, she gave more than all of the others because she gave up. out of her poverty. In other words, it wasn’t the amount, it was the cost. You hearing me? It was the cost. Because that offering was a sacrifice of praise to God. So God wants us to give him the sacrifice of praise, the fruit of our lips, but to do good and to share or to give. These sacrifices are well pleasing to him. And Paul refers to the giving that he received from the Philippians as a sweet aroma to God, a direct reference to the Old Testament burnt offering or thanksgiving offering. And when God smelled the smoke, it pleased him. So when we give, it pleases him because it is a sweet smelling aroma to him. It’s a sacrifice of praise. Amen.

Closing Exhortation

So my exhortation today is to truly take the time, make the effort, make the sacrifices appropriately, financially, and otherwise so that our worship would truly be worship in spirit and worship in truth. Now, Jake’s going to come up and share a little bit, and then we’re going to have some worship at the end. And we’re going to take our offering at the end of the service, because then we’re going to have a chance to apply the sermon right away. Just apply it right away. Because I want us to understand, because I think we’ve gotten into a routine where, oh, we’ve just the plate that we’re worshiping God with our gifts and our offerings. Amen. All right, Jake, you want to come up?