God's King

Good to see the sun shining and all of your faces this morning. It's been an unusual two weeks with the weather. We are going to continue in our study in Deuteronomy. If you need to use a pew Bible, if you don't have a Bible, please take it with you. If you'll be using the pew Bible, this will be found on page 160. We're in Deuteronomy 16. And since we still have ground to cover from last week, we'll say Dune Army 16-ish. You can tell a lot about a culture, a nation, a community by the words they use and how they use them. How often do they use certain words and what context? So, for instance, you can tell a lot about our culture by the way we use the word love. We use it all the time in various contexts, in various ways, and almost to the point where it's almost a meaningless word. When somebody says the word love, I kind of want to know, what do you mean by that word because of how it's used in so different, in so many different contexts, in different ways? Two words we're going to focus on today is justice and righteousness. Two words are justice and righteousness, and really these two words are necessarily related to one another. They're actually almost interchangeable. And if we think about our culture and our nation, we usually hear these words after something terrible has happened. We usually hear about justice and righteousness after a great crime has been committed. It's usually something in response to say, how could they? Maybe it's a murder. Maybe it's theft. Maybe it's an unjust trial, and we cry out, it's injustice. One of the problems is that we don't talk about justice and righteousness enough before a crime takes place. The way to prevent injustice, the way to provide unrighteousness, is to actually talk about what is good and right and just. In no way do I expect our culture and our nation to determine and to know what is good and what is right and what is just. We as a church need to talk about what is good, what is right, and what is just. We as a church have to say, this is the good truth of God. This is the righteousness of God. We as a church should be talking about righteousness and justice. I have a question. How often do we talk about righteousness and justice? As I've asked this question, and I'm wondering how much we actually use these words, which are central to all of scripture. I've kind of wondered, what would keep us from talking about righteousness and justice? One thought that I had, I wonder if we avoid talking about righteousness and justice because, well, if we talk about it a lot, it'll turn folks away. If we talk about righteousness and justice, that won't attract people. But then I thought, dude, I'm gonna be four or five. God says that if you hear my law, you keep my law, you obey it, the nations, they'll come and they'll say, how wise. What a people of understanding and wisdom because they realize God's law is there. What God's word says is that if we actually talk about God's righteousness and God's justice in a world that is full of unrighteousness, people will be attracted to it. And the other reason we're afraid to talk about it is that we don't want to be legalist. It's kind of a dirty word among Christians, isn't it? Legalist. This is one of the more interesting things I see us doing. When somebody talks about the law in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable, which means sin has been exposed, conviction is taking place, one of the ways to avoid that conversation is to pull out the claim legalism. We do this. I'm not prescribing advice. I'm describing what we do as sinners. When somebody comes up and says, I think you're getting this wrong. I think this is not proper. What we do is we pull out that card. Legalism. What that does is it makes us terrified. I don't want to be a legalist. Legalism's bad. It's like a get out of jail free card. Whenever somebody comes and applies the law of Christ and it makes us feel uncomfortable, we do this. Because it just ends the conversation. It makes us run and hide. No, I don't want to be a legalist, so I guess you're right, I'll just back off. See, what this is, it's a very effective way of protecting our sin. When the law of Christ comes up front against our sin and we cry legalist, what we've done is we've tried to turn it against the person. It's a way of protecting our sin by making the person look bad. See, if we don't like the law, If we don't like the law, we cry out, legalism. And then we claim, I love Jesus. I don't like the law, legalism, I love Jesus. Here's the problem with that. I'm describing what we do with sinners. When I say we, I mean me and you. We do this. The problem with saying, no, I don't like the law, legalism, I love Jesus, is this. Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. Love. and keeping the law are intrinsically connected. They're necessarily connected. This is why it's so important. When we accuse of legalism and claim to love Jesus by the law, we're only protecting our own sin. We as a church, we must be about righteousness. Now here's the confusion. We're not about our righteousness. That's where we have to draw the line. We're not about our righteousness. We're about God's righteousness. We're about saying this is what God has said. It is good. It is right. We're not about our righteousness. We don't boast of what good we have. We don't uphold what our righteousness is. We uphold what His righteousness is. Here's what's at stake. Let me make it very clear. Here's what's at stake if we lose righteousness and justice. You can go to Romans 3. We discussed this a couple of weeks ago. If you lose righteousness, you lose the gospel. Right there in Romans 3, it's very clear. There is no one righteous, but the righteousness of God has been revealed. There is no one who is righteous. We are all sinners who deserve wrath, but the righteousness of God is revealed because God himself, the righteous one, came to be punished for our unrighteousness so that we can be saved, so that we can become faithful worshipers. Christians, we have to talk about righteousness, justice, and goodness. Hear Paul in Philippians 4.8. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. By definition, we're going to talk about what we think about. Are we talking about God's righteousness? As we look at our text this morning, there is a clear unifying theme, and it's justice. It's righteousness. It's God exercising His righteous rule. And so here's a one-sentence summary of the entire message of what we're gonna be looking at in Deuteronomy. We must submit to God's righteous rule if we are His people. We must submit to God's righteous rule if we are his people. There's a phrase in the New Testament that is easily confused, and it's the phrase kingdom of God. This is what the kingdom of God is. It's God's people submitting to his righteous rule. It's the king exercising his righteous rule, very important, his righteous rule, and his people submitting to it. Now, I already know I'm talking about words that make us all feel uncomfortable, rule, submit, righteousness. So let us pray so that God's word would convict us, correct us, and make us more faithful worshipers. Father, we thank you that we can come and look at your word. We thank you that you do rule righteously. We thank you that in a world where we can see anger played out in murder, We can see lust throughout our culture. We can see the anger and malice of many events taking place around the world. Or we see the chaos. And we look at Your Word and we know this is not the way it's supposed to be. And so we ask, come Lord Jesus, come quickly. Because we desire to be rightly ruled by You. And we know that our own sin keeps us from submitting fully. Lord, as we look outside, and it's so easy to say, how could they? Lord, I pray that you would bless us with the opportunity and your grace to see that we are sinners, we are unrighteous, and we can come under the righteous rule of Christ by your grace. Help us be more faithful to worship you, our righteous King, God Almighty. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. We're in Deuteronomy, chapter 16-ish. Again, if you weren't here the last week, I took a very ambitious section of scripture, and I did not fulfill that ambition. So we may try to get back to that section, but we're gonna start where we intended, and that is chapter 16, verse 18. Again, page 160. And I wanna remind us where we are. We're in the book of Deuteronomy, which means the second law. Moses has brought the first generation out of Egypt and they died in the wilderness because they refused to obey God. They refused to submit to God's righteous rule. Over and over again, they rebelled against God, so God wiped them out. They said, you're not gonna go in the promised land. You can't go in to the promised land because that's where you will have to worship me. So the second generation, they get the second giving of the law, the same law, but now he's preparing them. Go in and be faithful in worship. Go in and be prepared. Watch, be watchful, be careful. Love the Lord your God. The idols are gonna be so tempting to you. Keep yourselves from idols. And as he gave this message, he gave the 10 commandments, he committed them to love God, he gave them warnings over and over again. In chapter 12, if you just flip over very quickly, you can see a transition. After he kept saying, love the Lord your God by keeping his commandments and statutes, we now see these are the commandments and statutes. Chapter 12 makes a transition in this sermon of Moses. So now we're looking at all the commandments and statutes. We're gonna look at chapter 16, verse 18 to 20 first. Because we're going to see this sets the theme for what's going to play out next. Chapter 16, verses 18 to 20. You shall appoint judges and officers in all your towns of the Lord your God has given you, according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Here's the emphasis here. Justice and only justice you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord your God has given you. Justice and only justice you shall follow, This is a simple verse that's worth memorizing. It stands out in our text because it's the emphasis, justice, and only justice you shall follow. So let's go back to verse 18. In the midst of all these commands, God, through Moses, tells them, you need to appoint judges and officers. Why do they need to appoint judges and officers? Because the nation is made up of a bunch of sinners. That's why they need judges and officers. Because this is what sinners do. Sinners sin and then they lie about it. That is an accurate statement. Sinners sin and they lie about it. This is why they need judges and officers so that they can have people who are just and wise and discerning to determine the sin and the lie. This is why they needed men appointed to determine judgment. Verse 19. And notice it doesn't just focus in on the judges and the officers. He's still speaking to everybody. Y'all shall. Sorry, that's my southern translation of Moses' word. Y'all shall not pervert justice. The nation. It's not just judges who are supposed to be just. It's all the people. It's the nation, it's the community that upholds justice. So the nation, you cannot pervert justice. You cannot let injustice take place. There's no partiality, there's no bribe. You must be for the cause of righteousness. In there, verse 20. to emphasize it, to bring it all home, to make sure it's very clear, justice, only justice. Now, the word righteousness and justice, these are interchangeable. You can see how they're even connected in verse 20 and verse 19. What we see is that God's people must be marked by justice and righteousness, that they're to follow it alone. Sin must be called sin, sin must not be overlooked, sin must not be acceptable, sin must be removed. Now, is this just old covenant? Because the new covenant, we replaced the words righteousness with grace oftentimes. The scripture doesn't do that, but we often do that. Well, what about grace? What part does grace have in this? Friends, grace is built on the doctrine of righteousness. God is righteous. He should give us all what we deserve, which is wrath. But He's gracious. He sent His own Son to receive His wrath so that now He can give us forgiveness. We water down grace, we remove it from righteousness. The new life we have in Christ is a free gift we do not deserve because God is righteous in giving us His wrath. He would be righteous in giving us his wrath. The new life in Christ is a free gift we don't deserve, but receive because God poured out his wrath on Christ. The new life in Christ now means, now means we pursue righteousness. We can actually see this in Lord Willing in the Fall, we'll see this through Romans, that the first step is to recognize I'm not righteous. The next is to see Christ was righteous, but yet he died. as if unrighteous. And this is the exchange that Lord willing we'll hear on our Good Friday service that he took on our unrighteousness so that he could give us his righteousness and therefore we're declared righteous. If we go on to Romans, we'll see we're now supposed to be a living sacrifice. We're not declared righteous so that we can keep on sinning, no. We're declared righteous so we can submit ourselves to the righteousness of God. Well, the main point I want us to see, if nothing else, justice, only justice you shall follow. Now, I want you to see how the rest of what we're gonna see in chapter 17 follows from this. There are three instances now that you're going to see justice. Verses 21 and 22 of chapter 16, justice demands that we do not set up pillars to worship God. If we follow justice, we will not accept a foreign practice to worship the one true God. That make sense? Justice says God deserves to be worshiped as he told us to worship him. Do not set up a pillar as if he's an idol. Chapter 17, verse one, justice demands that we do not bring a sacrifice with a blemish. There is no half-hearted worship. Justice means God deserves the best. Chapter 17, verses two to seven. The particular instance, justice demands that if someone has done what is evil and has worshiped other gods, you should put that man to death. The evil must be purged from your midst. Justice demands that if someone has broken the Ten Commandments, they have gone after other gods, they have served idols, they have taken the Lord's name in vain, they have not worshiped Him who was worthy of worship. Justice demands he is put to death. Chapter 17, verse 8 through 13. Justice demands that if someone is brought before a judge or a priest and he acts presumptuously against God's appointed man, he must be put to death. Now what's interesting, if we put the order together, justice only justice, justice means we don't have foreign worship, justice means we don't bring unholy worship, justice means we don't worship foreign gods, and then we see in verses 18 to 13, this is if somebody will not submit to the judges and the officers that God appointed. And then finally, justice demands that we should desire a king that God has established. That's chapter 17, verses 14 to 20. I wanna start there because the king is very important for what we're gonna be looking at and what we've been singing about. So here, God's word, chapter 17, verses 14 to 20, and I wanna go ahead and let you see there's two parts to this. Verse 14 to 17, who the king should be, okay? 14 to 17, what kind of king you're looking for. And then 18 to 20, that's what that king will do. All right, two parts to the instruction for a king. The first is choosing a king and then instructions for that king. When you come to the land of the Lord, your God is giving you and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me. You may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose, one from among you, your brothers, you shall set his king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you who is not your brother, only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses, since the Lord has said to you, you shall never return that way again. And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold. And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priest. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life. And he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of his law and the statutes and doing them. that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children in Israel." The most basic point we need to see here is that God intends for Israel to have a king. God is Israel's king. The most fundamental point that we need to understand as we get into this particular story is that God is their king. But he's saying, whenever you get into the land and you wanna look around, you wanna say, ah, it'd be nice to have a man as a king. When you do that, this is the kind of king you're looking for, and this is what he needs to do. The king needs to be God's chosen king, As the priests were chosen to represent the people to God, right, so the priests take sacrifices from the people to God to make atonement for sin. As the priests represent the people to God, the king is supposed to represent God to the people. Right, that's why there's two different offices here. The priests represent the people to God, God represents the people, himself to the people. The problem The main problem and what the people are going to ask is seen in verse 14. I will set a king over me like all the nations. They want the wrong kind of king. They don't want the king that God chooses. They don't want one who will lead them in worship. They want one that'll make them mighty and powerful with security like all the other nations. Now this is one of the saddest declarations in scripture. When Israel says, I want a king like the nations, this is why it's extremely sad. They used to be like the nations. And God said, I'm going to take you out from being like all the nations that are raging against me, and I'm going to bring you to myself. I'm going to say, you're no longer like the nations, you're my. You're my treasured possession. You're my beloved son. I'm drawing you out from being like the nations. I want to be your king. I want to show you how to live in my righteousness according to my laws. And now they're saying, I want to be like the nations. The nations rage. This is what a king like the nations will lead God's people to do. Even worse, as a parent knows a child and their sinful tendencies, God's warning them of what they're actually going to do. This is exactly what Israel does. Don't look for a tall king who's mighty. Look for a king who I choose, who will follow my law to bring you into the law. Let's look over to page 230, 1 Samuel 8. 1 Samuel 8. We need to look and see this is what happened. 1 Samuel 8, page 230, if you're using a pew bottle. Then all the elders, I'm sorry, chapter eight, I'm gonna start at verse four. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations. The people asked for a king, they asked for the wrong kind of king. Drop down to verse seven. And the Lord said to Samuel, obey the voice of the people and all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. This is crushing. We want to be like the nations. God is going to give them over to be like the nation. One of the worst things God can grant us is the desires of our heart. When the desires of our heart are opposed to him and rejecting him, he's giving them over to their sin. Look at verses 10 to 18. In 10 to 18, he's warning them of all the things the king will do, and he declares to them, the king, he's going to abuse you. Just look at verse 17 and 18. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves. The Lord will not answer you in that day. He lists out all the abuses the king will do to the people. And then when he says you'll cry out, I've given you what you asked for. Look over to verse 22. And the Lord said to Samuel, obey their voice and make them a king. This is God giving them over to their sin. Flip over to chapter 10, beginning of verse 17. Now Samuel called the people together to the Lord at Mizpah, and he said to the people of Israel, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I brought you up out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you. I've delivered you. I've brought you to myself. I've loved you. I've cared for you. But you have rejected your God who saves you from all your calamities and all your distresses. And have you have said to him, set a king over us. Now, therefore, present yourself before the Lord by your tribes and by your thousands." Friends, this is a frightening warning. We can keep asking God for the wrong thing and he will eventually give it to us. This is frightening. If we persist in our sin, he gives us over to that sin. That's the worst judgment God could possibly give us. To remove his grace that restrains us. Let us go wholeheartedly in our self-righteousness, in our licentiousness, in our claiming, no legalism for me. God gives us over to our sin. Now this is the beauty of salvation. This is the beauty of all of scripture. This is the big picture of what scripture's about. God's plan was for Israel to have a king. It needed to be him. And what God is doing here, He's renewing everything that's wrong with the world. God created this world to be king over it. If you go back to Genesis, man's an ambassador. God's the king. This is what it means to be made in His image. It is to reflect Him. We were supposed to represent to all of creation what God's right rule is. But instead of submitting to God and His right rule, we led the rebellion. That's what we're doing. And all of scripture is God's plan to reunite us to himself, to reconcile us to himself, to reestablish his rule. This is something fundamental about us as human beings. We are ruled by something. You're not free. You're ruled by something. Jesus says in John 8, if you choose sin, it's your master. When we choose sin, we're submitting to it so it can be our master. And what God sees is that it's abusing us, so he came down to become a curse for us so that he could free us from that abuse. So that he could exercise his right rule over us. In scripture, the king who is set against Saul is David. You can turn to 2 Samuel 7 later and you can see that God, he promises David, you'll have a son, he'll be a king. His kingdom will be forever. And it's interesting, David is said to be a man after God's own heart. I believe this mainly emphasizes that he's God's chosen king at that particular time. And we see that David does demonstrate a good heart. He's gracious to Mephibosheth. But also think about what he's done. He takes another man's wife. He then tries to cover that up and ends up murdering that man. He's a sinful man. He is not yet the king we're waiting on. And I want to pause here for a second. I want you to see a lesson from David's life. Sin is never a simple one act. It's never a simple one-time action. Because as I said before, what we do as sinners is we sin and we lie about it. Sin compounds. When we sin and we seek to cover it up, it leads to more sin and more cover up. And the scary thing about this, young people, listen to this, do not set your pattern to sinning and covering up, because this is what happens. We eventually forget where the line between the truth and the lie is. We're not just deceiving, we're self-deceiving. Young people, tell the truth. We are a people of the truth. Tell the truth, because if you continue in a lie, you will eventually become self-deceived. Now David, he was deceived. He was deceptive. God showed him grace and gave him grace to repent. You can look at Psalm 51. If you're convicted, go to Psalm 51 because it will lead you into proper repentance. What we see here with the King David and then his son Solomon in 2 Samuel 7 is two scarlet threads. Scripture is united in one main purpose. It shows us Jesus Christ. And we see two scarlet threads actually come together. In Genesis 3.15, God says, I'm going to bring a son who will reverse the curse, who's going to crush them to death. In 2 Samuel 7, we see there's going to be a son who will be a king. It's the same son. When we get it more narrowed in and focused, it's not just a son of Abraham and a son of Judah and a son of David. He's going to be the son of God eventually, who comes to reign over God's people with righteousness. Well, Solomon, who was the next born king of David, he was clearly not the king. If you look throughout scripture, you see the declaration, a king was born and he did evil on the side of the Lord. A king was born and he did evil on the side of the Lord. A king was born and he did evil on the side of the Lord. Every now and then, there's a king, hey, he was a good guy. He died. Then we get to Jesus, born not just any man, not just chosen by God, God Himself who took on flesh, God Himself who came, and He's not just going to write the Word of God, He is the Word of God. He reveals God's truth perfectly, right into the darkness. Secondly, He's that Son promised in Genesis 3.15. He destroys the work of the devil. He destroys death. He destroys a curse. How? With His own death. Friends, this is the gospel. Every human being is a sinner and every human being will die and face the righteous wrath of God unless they have believed in Jesus Christ. Because in his death as a righteous man, God's wrath is satisfied. He died without sin, but yet suffered as if a sinner so that everybody believes in Him. The wrath we deserve was put upon Him so that we are now forgiven. We have to be forgiven. God's righteous wrath will be against us if we do not believe in Jesus Christ. He's the King who transfers us into a new citizenship and a new identity. He has won the victory. The king God is ultimately pointing to in Deuteronomy 17 is Jesus. Now let's look to verses 18 to 20. What will that king do? There's a couple things that are really interesting in this particular passage. One, the king doesn't get to write his own law. The king's on a legislature. The king receives a law that he must uphold, and the law he receives is from God, And notice here, he has to submit that to the priest. In no way was God's king ever meant to be autonomous. The priest was going to check his work so that he had a copy of the law. The first thing a king must do is he must submit himself to writing down God's law. He's not going to exercise his own law. He's not going to exercise what he thinks is right. He's supposed to submit to God's law. And the priest is there to make sure it's right. Now, paper and pen and ink are something we just take for granted. This was expensive and time consuming. This was a great expense and took a great amount of time, but it was the only way this king was going to rule with righteousness. I want you to look at the actions. Here are the actions the king is supposed to do. And I shall be with him. He will read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord. First you have to read so that you fear the Lord and his law. By keeping them, all the words of the law and these statutes, he will do them. The king is not just an exercise. It's so that he will have the law. He will meditate upon it day and night. It will rule his thoughts and therefore change his heart. And therefore he will be a good king. Look at verse 20. That his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers. He's king. but he's there to serve the people according to God's righteousness. Friends, Christ is this king for us. Christ is the one who came according to the word. I realize we're getting into Easter season, but you can go back and celebrate a little Christmas right now. When you go home, I know I'm giving you lots of homework. The Levitical priests will come and check it later. Go back to Matthew. And look at what Matthew says over and over again, according to the scriptures, according to the scriptures, according to the scriptures, according to the scriptures. Jesus came as a fulfillment of every promise of God. He came according to the word so that he could be the child born to declare God's word perfectly. He is the king, the good shepherd, who not only submitted to God's word, but he taught it. It's amazing, he submitted to God's word to the point of death, even death on the cross. This is the king. who leads us, who doesn't set his heart above us. No, he considered us above himself, our interests greater than his own. That's why he died for us. There's an application here for us. As disciples of Christ, we must follow Christ and his word. The law is for us. The law of Christ, it isn't legalism, it's discipleship. We're called to submit to the commands of Christ if we love him. We're called to submit to one another in obedience to the king. This is the great beauty of what a church is supposed to be. A body united of all kinds of different individuals, submissive together to the one king and his law. Which means we're also submitting to one another. That's where it gets difficult, isn't it? Submitting to one another under his law. God's word must bind us, restrain us, and unite us. The word of God must direct us. If we want to be about the kingdom work, we must be submissive to his word. Again, the kingdom is God's people submitting to his rule. Let's go back and look at chapter 16, beginning at verse 21 now. The king reigns, he has called us to worship, and now we're gonna look at what righteous worship looks like. We're called to follow God and His righteous rule in worship. Last week, we saw something very similar to these passages, and that in chapter 17, we saw the phrase, purge the evil from your midst. We saw that Paul actually quotes this in 1 Corinthians 5, that we're supposed to remove those who are not going to submit to God's Word. They're not going to submit to the other brothers and sisters according to God's Word. We saw that if a pattern of sinful rebellion persisted, according to Paul, the church is supposed to remove them because the purity of the body matters. The pure worship matters. Christ purchased those people to be unit, his body. So we look at command in chapter 17. There's a few things that tell us simply not to do. One, don't take a foreign practice and put Jesus' name on it. This is what chapter 16 verses 21 and 22 tell us. If you go to Israel and you wanna visit Jerusalem, you're gonna see a lot of pillars with Yahweh inscribed on it. The big fancy word for that is syncretism. It's taking two things that shouldn't be together and putting them together. You don't take a pillar and put Yahweh on it and pretend it's worship of Yahweh. Because Yahweh said, don't put a pillar up. Don't bring in foreign ways of worship. The second thing, chapter 17, verse 1, don't bring half-hearted worship. Don't bring worship with a blemish. Bring a pure sacrifice to worship. Now, this one, we really need to put our finger a little more because worship is about reverence. Worship is about trusting God's Word that it tells us how to worship Him. We don't have to come up with foreign practices. Worship is according to God's Word and that we don't have to guess what it is. That's not a creative act. It's a faithful act. Worship with reverence is bringing God worship without a blemish. As Romans 12 tells us, to be a living sacrifice. Two warnings in Scripture. First is Cain and Abel. God did not accept Abel's sacrifice because it was a blood sacrifice and Cain's because it was a grain sacrifice. That's not the difference. Abel brought the first fruits. He brought the best sacrifice. Cain brought some of his grain. God did not accept Cain's sacrifice because it wasn't his best. Another example a little closer to home is Ananias and Sapphira. They came and they said they sold all their land and here's all the proceeds, but they lied. God killed them. God doesn't deserve our seconds. He deserves our best. He deserves unblemished worship. We cannot withhold our best from God. He deserves our best. So I ask you, well, think about today. How do you approach corporate worship? This is corporate worship, we're a body. Are you rested? Did you prioritize what was gonna take place Saturday to make sure you were ready to worship on Sunday? I realize it's unfair to do this on Daylight Savings Time, but it makes the point all the more clear. I'm serious, do you plan your Saturday in preparation for Sunday or does Sunday get what's left over? is worship the most serious thing you're going to do about your week, the first day of the week? Are you coming here with just whatever energy is left over? Are you coming rested? Did you go to bed on time to wake up and pray? Did you come to bed ready to pursue God and expect God to speak? Have you come ready to listen? Have you read the passage, God, will you speak to me today? I think it's very important for us because Americans are said to play at their work and work at their play. I think it can be said about our worship as well. Do we worship when we play, and do we play when we worship? Do we worship what we love to do on Saturday when we're playing, and do we play it when we come to God's throne to worship him together as his body? We must gather with a purpose. It's to worship, to intentionally engage God, to intentionally engage one another. Now this great declaration that is repeated over and over again in verse seven of chapter 17, purge the evil one from your midst. This seems harsh, but this is a picture of what God wants. He wants a people who is wholly committed to himself. It's not about our individual religion. It's about a people gathered, a nation, and then a body, the church. You have to realize this, each individual person's sin affects everybody else in God's community. Your private sin affects our church body. Don't pretend your sin is some individual, isolated event. Because your sin keeps you from engaging the body, it keeps you from being involved, it keeps you from being effective. The other thing that's interesting, I'm not going to read it because of time, but if you look at chapter 17, both sections there, there's something amazing about what happens in Israel that if they hear somebody's worshiping other gods, they need to go diligently search. So first you're going to have a diligent inquiry, and then you're going to publicly expose. Sin always leads to exposure. Sin always leads to public recognition. The church is called to remove the sinner, because that sinner will affect the whole body. Now, this is uncomfortable. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about God's discipline, and then he calls us to be responsible for the discipline within the church. We are focused upon discipline because Christ's disciples should be about discipleship. We need disciples. There's three different kinds of discipleship. One is formative. This is where the church comes and we're built up. We're told about the righteousness of God. We're told about the commands of God. We're told what to do. We're told about the grace of Christ that will empower us to do it. It's the formative building up. The second kind is corrective. This is the more uncomfortable discipleship. That scripture clearly prescribes. It's pointing out sin and calling to repentance. This is necessary because we're sinners, and we're sinners who lie and cover up our sin. The third kind is punitive. It's excommunication. It's whenever somebody will not repent. They persist in sin. They need to be removed so they don't affect the rest of the body. So the body will learn to be warned from sin. I realize these aren't the most popular topics to talk about as a church. Here's my advice to you and my encouragement to you. If you do not like the idea of a church excommunicating somebody, my exhortation to you is to be a faithful, active discipler. building up and correcting the body. That is the one way God has told us that we can keep from excommunicating those who are persisting and following a pattern of sin is to be forming and correcting with our actions and our words to one another. Friends, it's not legalism to follow the law of Christ. It's love. It's love that He gives us His law. It's love that He lets us know how we can love Him. It's love that we go and we tell each other, these are the commands of Christ. It's love that we go and tell each other, this is a correction. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is correct somebody. We are called to love Christ, which means we submit to His law. We're called to love one another, which means we're submitting to one another in His law. This is the vision that God has set for his nation, Israel. This is the vision God has set for us as a church. Will you pray with me? God, give us the grace to submit to your word and to submit to one another. We're sinners and we like to submit to sin. We like to lie about our sin. I praise you, God, that you do not let sin go unexposed. You do not let sin of your believers to go undisciplined. God, I praise you that you don't let us continue in sin without being miserable. What a grace it is to be a miserable Christian because of sin, because it allows us to not go after that sin. Lord, protect us. from our sinfulness, do not give us over to our sin. I praise you, God, that your word says where our sin abounds, your grace abounds. Help us to repent of our individual sin. Help us repent of our corporal sins. Help us to be a body that glorifies you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.