Will You Bow?

I don't know How we doing. It's so lame, So light. How are we doing? [cheering]?.

That's good, Bring that to worship night tonight. I'm assuming all of you will be here, . She'll be here. [applause and cheering].

Amen, She's going to be here. Y'all be ready for her, But I'm ready for you. I'd love for you to be here tonight. I joke around and it's not really a joke, but I say it like a joke because it feels weird to say that there's the best night of the year.

Cuz, all of them are good, but this is the best one.

I really enjoy it. It's a little uninhibited. It's not inappropriate. I said uninhibited, and so it's just a place for you to kind of let loose a little bit, relax.

If, if, musical worship is your style, you're going to get plenty of it this evening.

And we've been in 21 days of prayer and fasting And I have alluded to it in my prayer, But I don't know, not every year. We do this every year, but not every year do I feel it as viscerally as I do now. Kind of I don't like to overemphasize the attack of the enemy, because half the time is the stuff in our own brains that we want to call Satan to excuse ourselves for the behavior that God's calling us away from, But, at the same time, I do think the enemy is on the prow, seeking to steal, kill and destroy, And I think he's doing it. I, I've seen people lose jobs.

I, I've seen people get injured, I've seen people get sick.

I've seen some really dysfunctional relational things happen, And I don't even know half of you, right, Like there is something that has happened as we've tried to seek Jesus, And the only thing that I can boil it down to is: the enemy doesn't want us to seek Jesus, . The enemy wants us to bow down and become subservient to him as subtly as he possibly can, because I don't know how he benefits from it. But at the same time, he's doing it, And, and so I, I would just encourage those of you who went through the 21 days of prayer and fasting, whatever negative may have occurred, remember that it's the testing of our faith that produces endurance, . And endurance isn't what we're shooting for.

We're we're shooting for completion, lacking nothing, But let endurance have its perfect effect.

This is, James, That you may be: complete, whole, fulfilled, Tell us right, completed, lacking nothing. I believe that what Paul says in Romans, chapter 12, he says: "Therefore offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship". I believe in some interesting way it is tied to what James says, that the way that God transforms us from the inside out is through trial and difficulty. And now temptation is just one of those trials, And we've been in the series called Wild Wild.

I'm working on my accent.

I grew up in the wild, Wild words. I'm really working on it. There's certain words that just come out like you're from California If you say the 101, it sounds certain way. I'm from Arkansas and so wild sounds wild buckeye, you know.

So I'm really working on it.

But we've been in a series called Wild Words And the idea is that God often brings us into a wilderness in order to shape us, like that trial or temptation can shape us into God, who God has called us to be. And so we've gone through three weeks. At this point, The first week was kind of an introductory, sermon into what a wilderness is. A wilderness is something that God leads you into by the power of his spirit in order to develop you.

Now the spirit can lead in manifold ways.

Sometimes it's your fault, Sometimes it's something that you didn't have anything to do with. Regardless, God leads us into wildernesses, And when we step into wilderness, while God's working for our good, the enemy is working toward our evil and our he. He's, he's trying to hit us at the level of worship. And so Satan comes in while Jesus is in the wilderness, had been fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, and he tries to tempt Jesus, the son of God, which you know.

Someone was asking me after the first service, like: "Hey, tell me how that makes sense", And I'm like: "I don't.

There's a lot of the Bible that makes perfect sense. I don't know what was in the mind of God and how the mind of man melded together in one human called Jesus. I don't know exactly how it worked, but I know that Jesus was both God, meaning he knew the mind of God, the heart of God, embodied all of the physical attributes that God would carry, and he had the full mind of man, which means he could be tempted, disrupted, like guided to a mountain, guided to a temple, mount, guided to a stone. And so the first week, Satan comes to Jesus and he says: "Hey, if you're hungry and you're the son of God, turn these stones to bread".

Now it's, it's as if that the, the mind of God, was perfectly content with his creation and said: "I made stones and I made bread.

I, I made everything. I made you, by the way, Satan". Yeah, Like I made everything. And so it was almost as if, when Satan called Jesus to turn stones to bread, he was like: "Why would I do that?

Already made stones and already made bread.

Things are perfectly fine the way that they are And God, the Father, has a plan for me and I'm not going to derail God's plan. This is how Jesus operated in that first temptation. The second temptation, in Matthew specifically, Satan takes Jesus to the temple mount, or the highest place where the temple is right next to the valley of Keedron, and he overlooks it and says: "Throw yourself down". The Bible says that angels will guard you and lift you up.

He's quoting Psalm 91, which is a book in the Old Testament, And Jesus goes back to what we call first principles.

He said: "The Psalms are amazing, God inspired poetry written within the confines of a covenant people group". So let's go back to the covenant itself. Jesus takes them back to Deuteronomy, which refers back to Exodus, chapter 17, . And he says: "You shall not test the Lord, your God".

And then Satan's not done yet.

He takes him to a third location. Now Luke puts the temple mount at the end, And this location is the second temptation. But Matthew actually shows us this right at the end because he's trying to go somewhere, And I told you last week that Matthew is trying to help us understand that Jesus is the new Israel. So he's led into the wilderness, just like Israel and Moses were led into the wilderness, But he a he acts antithetically or the opposite way that Israel did.

He fulfills what's necessary, does not fall into temptation, defeats the lies of the enemies and tries to follow God's pathway rather than his own pathway.

And so, before I dive too much further, I'm going to dive into the passage itself. Matthew 4 will be in verses 8-- 11. If you have your Bible- and I hope that you do- Bibles are good. You got it on your phone- I know the internet's terrible here- You might need to bring a physical Bible once in a while, but if you have your Bible, open up to Matthew, chapter 4.

I'm going to be in the New International Version, NIV, And since I brought this to the first service, I'll bring it here because I thought it was a very helpful Bible oriented point.

The reason I use the NIV, the New International Version, is because it fits right in the middle of what I would call an interpretive or translation spectrum. See, there are two main types of translations. There's one called a functional equivalent, In other words a New American Standard Bible. That's what we would call a functional equivalent or a formal translation.

And the reason we call it a formal translation is because the New Testament is written in Greek, the Old Testament written in Hebrew.

And then there's a Greek version of the Old Testament. When that's translated to what's our language?. English. So slow on that, guys, God.

Our language is English. When it's translated to English, the Greek sentence structure is much different than our sentence structure. So you'll notice when reading a formal equivalent that they essentially copied it and pasted it just in a different language. So sometimes the sentence structure is very difficult.

I love the formal equivalent because it's it's better to study.

But then there's another translation type. We call it thought forthought. It's not a paraphrase, it's a real translation. But what it does is it says: "I know the sentence structure is very difficult to understand".

Right, So what we're going to do is we're going to write it in a way that people would actually understand it, So they translate it and they reorient it such that it's easier to understand.

So the New Living Translation is a great version to listen to on your way to and from work, or something like that, because it's structured in a way that we understand not 2,000-year-old languages, And so what I do is I preach from one right down the middle of that spectrum, because I want you to understand what we're reading. At the same time, I want to be able to draw out some of the things that come from the original languages, And so that's why we chose the NIV. Y'all might not have cared about that at all, but I gave you a little theology and Bible lessons, Starting in verse 8, Matthew, chapter 4, . Here's what it says again: The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.

All this I will give to you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me.

Jesus said to him: "Away from me, Satan, for it is written: worship the Lord, your God, and serve him only". Then the devil left him and angels came and attended him. Don't show my sermon title yet. I want to introduce it with a general concept.

I don't know if you knew this or not, but from the moment that you wake up and the moment that your head hits the pillow is an opportunity for you to make a binary choice.

I know life is complex, but this is a very binary choice. Binary means twosided. You have one very simple binary choice is to move toward God or to not move toward God. You see what I'm saying.

It's not just move away from God.

Neutral is not moving toward God. You have a choice: to worship God or not worship God. Every, every decision is a worship decision. It's not just.

It's not just this, this, what do they call it?

Music thing. It's not just this. We play instruments and it calms us just like music therapy, right before we dive into a text and we're more able to listen to the words. We're primed for that emotional filling of our hearts and the mental outpouring of the spirit into our own minds.

We're ready for it, because worship was good through music.

No, worship is more than music. Worship is more than sitting under the words of God. Worship is a posture that expresses itself in every choice that you make: . In other words, when I wake up in the morning, I'm making a choice to worship or not worship.

You see, I have a night nightstand right next to me And on my nightstand I'm trying to avoid some of this pain and temptation.

On that nightstand I've got my phone, I've got a charger, I've got a lamp And if I'm good, I got a. Oh, y'all so good. Y'all are with me on this. And when I wake up, if all of those are there, I can make a choice: to start my morning with the word of God or the word of man, Be it email, Tik Tok news or just the text messages from people who decided they needed to text me at 1:00 in the morning.

Regardless of what it is, I've got a choice.

It's a choice to worship God or to do something else. When I get out of bed, hop in the shower, get dressed, I go downstairs. If I get to go downstairs before Michael wakes up- Mike is my daughter Boy- she wakes up and decides that she wants a- a unnaturally difficult hairstyle that morning And she starts screaming and yelling, cuz we told her to get up 20 minutes before. But now she wants the super complicated hairstyle And I don't do those.

That's Hannah's problem.

But you know, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the dad in the relationship. So when a kid gets a little unruly, I'm like let me come in and talk about this for a second. Y'all heard me say: talk, No CPS in this place. Okay, And I have a choice in that moment.

Am I going to worship God in the way that I respond to this non-abstract thinking?

Amigdalaritten, 5-year-old six- She's six, Okay, Six-year-old, She just turned six. Give me a break, Can't keep up with stuff Sometimes. I have a choice. Am I going to worship God in the way that I parent?

And then when I go downstairs and there's- there's maybe stuff on the in the sink that could have been put in if, if we were all considerate and same thing with the laundry on my side, right, Like I have a choice.

Am I going to worship God or am I going to gripe And then on my way to work? I have a choice. Did you know that worship has to do not just with what you say and what you think, but what you do with your hands? Someone cuts you off.

I got to be care.

It's a worship moment. Every choice in the day can be a worshipful moment where you give your life to God, or it can be a you moment. Or maybe Have you ever considered that each of these choices is similar to the choice that Jesus had while he was in the wilderness, where Satan is leading him? You think it's just some real cosmic thing that you would see on a cartoon, don't you?

Matthew, chapter 4.

Or or could it be? He's out there in the wilderness 40 days and 40 nights and we know in post that it was Satan, because we always know in post whether it was Satan, somebody else or God. You know in post that God worked on something, but in the middle of it you were like "Where is God at". Same thing with Satan, Do we?

I'm sure Jesus knew, cuz he was both man and God in the same body and he's cool like that.

But we're writing about this, We're reading about this in post. In the moment. I have a thought. It's like he's just walking around minding his own business and all of a sudden somebody comes up that we know now is Satan.

But back at the back in the day, maybe it wasn't, Maybe it was just some random dude, or maybe it was a thought that popped in to Jesus's head and he's looking at rocks.

He's like, "I could, I could turn into bread. I could do it. I made him in the first place. No, Satan, It's like, takes him to the temple mount.

It's like that temple is meant to worship me And also I could throw myself off this cliff and show everybody down here in the capital city of Judea, Jerusalem.

I could. I could show them. They'd figure it out real quick. If I jump down and the angels gather me up and then they lift me up, I wouldn't have to have all these conversations with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes and Zealots.

I would have to make all these different trips.

I wouldn't have to cleanse the temple later because I was already st standing on top of it. Jump down, They picked me up. They're all at my beck and call at this point And in this moment, Satan takes him up to the top of a mountain and he sees all the kingdoms of the world. He's looking around.

He's like, "I could, I really could".

And I know it's Satan. Jesus knew it was Satan. We all know it was Satan, but the way that Satan comes to us is not always in this cosmic, cartoonish form, And in each of those moments you have a choice: . Are you going to worship and serve your creator?

Are you going to worship and serve the created?

Jesus obviously made the right choice, but I want to help you understand that that worship is in everything that you do, And I'm going to break that down over the next few moments. I'll try to be swift for you. I've got five little basic ways that I want to do it. But I want to ask you this question because the word for worship is procono- That's the verb form of worship in Greek, And what that literally means to do is bow down.

In this text, Satan offers Jesus the opportunity to have all the splendor of the kingdoms of the world if he would first proune bow down to him. That's the word we get worship from. So Satan is asking him bow down, But Jesus hears it and knows what that means. He knows that bowing down is simply an embodied form of your own belief and worship system.

He's saying that who I bow to is who I worship, And so let me ask you this question.

You've got a choice: Will you bow to the enemy or will you bow to the creator. That's my sermon title. I don't know if they're ready for it back there. There we go, I'm gonna call them out.

Man, We got to stay in, We got to stay in charge of this.

All right, Will you bow? I almost taught it, titled it: You will bow, because you will, You are. The question is: will you bow to your creator rather than the created, to the enemy, to your own thoughts, to the cares of the world, to the lies that people would tell you, to your busyness, to your boss, to your spouse, to your kids, to the people that you've fallen for, to the people that you interact with, to all the things in your own mind that you want to pursue and engage, to the neglect of your walk with God? You will bow, but will you do it in the right direction?

The Scriptures say: "Worship and serve the Lord, your God only", And I want to give you five things that come literally from the etmology or the word origin of procaneo, or to, to bow.

And these are my points. The way I'm going to form it is: this is who you worship, So the being or the entity or the thing that we worship. This is what I'm talking about today. The first one.

This is who you worship.

You worship who you fall for, Who you fall for or what you fall for. Let's start with who you worship, who you fall for, Because bowing down is literally falling forward. Pro means toward. You're worshiping toward.

You're falling toward, You're bowing toward.

So who you fall for is ultimately who you're worshiping. Now, I know what your mind comes to at first, but I want to be very clear with you. This is not just about relationships. This could be about your employer.

This could be about your career.

This could be about the things in your life that have formed habits over time that actually aren't that important to you. But the one you fall for is who you are worshiping. In other words, some people are pursuing their career. They're infatuated with their career.

Now, there's nothing wrong with enjoying your career.

I don't know about you, Hannah. I kind of enjoy mine. I like my career. My career gets me in front of you guys.

I love it.

But if I put my career before my creator, then I'm I'm worshiping the wrong thing, And it's so easy for pastors to worship and serve created things. Now, I'm called to worship and serve my creator and serve you in the process, but I'm not called to worship you. I love you. You're all beautiful and pretty and kind and handsome.

If you're a dude- because you didn't like the term pretty, You're all of these amazing things, Apple of God's eye, peaches in mine, I don't know Like I'm just, I love you to bits but you're not worthy of my worship.

It's going to be a fun day. Get out of here. Little gremlins in the lighting board today, Oh, I love it. Hey, I'm going to be honest with you.

I don't like to give too much credit to Satan. It could be just tech issues in general, but if it is Satan, get out of here. You know I'm not cool with it. It's cool, Hey, I'm going to move forward with that.

I don't care what kind of lighting issues happen.

The reality is Satan wants to get at you by getting you to leap forward or to fall forward in a direction that is not toward God. Satan will use whatever he can. He'll use the people you fall for. You know I'm talking about early on in your relationship, Melody and Chad.

Y'all been married for for so many years.

I'm not going to tell them how long because I can't remember mostly, but you've been married a long. How many? 30. 30 years.

Look at that [cheering], .

Now I hope I'm right. When you start out in the relationship like that first 6 months, it's like that's better dude. Your heart's beating fast, Like you got all the vibes in the feels and you're looking at them like "Oh, my gosh, I can't get enough. It's so good", Like I'm appreciative of everything that they do.

They're appreciative of everything I do.

They're not seeing any of the flaws or problems or griping at me about being connected and all these other things. None of that's happening at this point. Where I'm at right now is: I'm all vibes, all emotions, all feels. I'm falling head over, .

That's, that's many good relationships.

Now, if you ever had that, that's okay. If you're married, you're married. You better figure that one out right, Like but. But the problem in many marriages- and I want to say this first- is that there's all feels, all vibes, but then you get married and there's no real deep or solid connection.

That gets you through the first 3 to 5 years and then divorce or like murder comes into your vocabulary because it was all vibes and emotions.

I want to say that at first. But there is truth that who you fall for is who you worship. That's why Paul's right when he says in 1 Corinthians, chapter 7- and it's your fault that I'm not honoring Paul in 1 Corinthians, chapter 7. - He says it's better that you remain- as I he's talking about- single, because the moment you step into, the moment you fall for somebody else, there is an attention divided between you and God.

Now what Paul's not saying is: never get married, never love somebody, never step into a relationship. But he is right when he says it.

There is a divide And when you fall for somebody, there's an easy step- or like there's there's an easy pathway- if you're not careful- into worshiping that person. I found myself in that place. Like young people are the worst at it- And that that was me. Young people are the worst at it.

It's like they like somebody and they miss all the things that they shouldn't miss in this relationship.

They forget all the things about God and every single thing they do is related to that relationship. Who you fall for is who you worship, But it's also like what you fall for. Like I'm convinced there's a bunch of people who have fallen for science. I'll be careful with this, cuz I like science.

I'm not one of them preachers- who's going to be up here and say science is always wrong?

I'm not. No, I love science. Science told me about gravity. Without gravity you don't get our church name.

Actually, now that I think about it, it's funny.

Yeah, Like science got us here. I love science. I like studied up on Isaac Newton for a day and didn't still didn't learn anything, But I love science. I like reading about scientific experiments.

I like watching stuff about like space.

I had to watch Interstellar like four times before I even lightly understood half of the theoretical physics. You're not going to hear me talking mess about the Big Bang. Why? Because I didn't study theoretical physics.

I don't know nothing about black holes, E=, MC², the speed of light.

I don't know nothing about that And I appreciate it very much. But a lot of us have fallen for that. Like it's a lie from the enemy that you have fallen for. You have been looking to science not as a, as a what could possibly have happened.

You're looking to science for the reason that you exist.

You're looking for the big bang as an origin of why or how things came completely to be, And I need you to know. Science doesn't tell you all of those things. Science is not worthy of your worship. It's worthy of reading a couple of books, utilizing it as you walk through your day.

You won't jump off a cliff when you understand a little bit about gravity, will you?

You know it's helpful for you to walk through life, but it WILL NEVER GET YOU INTO ETERNITY. That's right. It's only God who enables you to step into the eternal plane, And so what you have to do is you have to look at these things, this information that Satan's trying to use to trip you up and say: "Not today.

Away from me Satan. I'm going to worship and serve my creator. Amen, And [clears throat]. One thing you'll get to is you.

You'll eventually get to this place where you recognize science is trying to ask a different question than Christianity is, And so you, you'll move forward and able to, like, use them to complement one another.

But it's who you fall for, It's what you fall for, It's the lies that you believed. Number two: it's not just who you fall for, who you lower your level for. I'll be really swift with this one, because I'm not talking about the type of lowering level that Jesus did when he came from heaven to earth, step down into our stuff in order to save us from our own sin. Right, That's humility and that's submitting to God's overall plan, And there's a level where God's calling each of us to take it down a level in order to serve one another.

This is not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about in this moment is the people or the things in your life that ultimately become excuses preventing you from following God the way he's called you to. I'm talking about the people you say: "Well, I would come more frequently to church, except so and so don't want to come", Or "I would read my Bible more, except I don't understand it". What's happening in both of those moments is you're lowering the level of God's calling to something you're comfortable with, rather than leaning into it, regardless of how difficult it is. Now, when it comes to reading the Bible and prayer, I know it's intimidating sometimes, And so what we do is we say "I don't know, so I just won't", And I need you to know the calling God has placed on each of you.

It's accessible.

It's accessible whether you're knowledgeable of the Scriptures. It's accessible whether you have a different level of understanding and comprehension than another person down your row. It is accessible. The Bible says: "Seek him where he can be found, and he will be found by you".

And if you seek ye first, the kingdom of God and his righteousness, he says, everything will be added.

What does that mean? It means there is nothing I could want for if I continue to pursue him. It doesn't say: have all my knowledge together, have all my stuff together, wait for all these people to get their stuff together so that we can all go together. That's not what it's saying.

It's saying you seek him first, Don't lower your level to somebody or something.

It's not a good excuse, but people utilize it all the time. I'll give you an example: Spouse, we're in different, We're in different places, And so I'm compromising with my spouse because they don't want to come to church right now And I just want to love on them and submit to them the way that first Peter says. And I want to tell you from the spouse perspective of somebody who's seen my wife follow Jesus better than me for our entire marriage- I look at her and what I'm asking: is this, This faith that she holds to be true? Again, I believe it, obviously.

But this faith she holds to be true.

How legitimate is it? The moment you scale back from your calling, thinking you're lowering yourself to my level or somebody else's level, is the moment that very person you're trying to connect with stops listening to you about your faith. Anyways, Like I see it all the time They're like "I wish my spouse would come to church" And I'm like: "Do you", . Are you opening your Bible?

Are you reading God's word?

Are you allowing it to change you from the inside out? Romans, chapter 12, is so clear: DON'T BE CONFORMED to the world, Don't lower to the world's level. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, And what that's going to produce is something so life-changing, so life-giving, so different. What does he say in second Corinthians?

It's a fragrant aroma of Christ Jesus that Paul's always like walking around with, And maybe he's a little cocky, but also he's super called, And so I would imagine when he walks into a room people are looking at Paul like "Yo, what, what's that smell, man"?

And you thinking that you're able to help somebody by neglecting your calling with Christ is the craziest thing ever. No, what you need to do is seek him first, And when you seek him first, your life will be so radically shifted that when you go to people and serve them rather than sitting at their level because it's comfortable or because you don't want to confront something like sin in your marriage and in your family, you're going to go to them the way God called you to go to them, and they're going to look at you and they may be resistant at first, but the longer you serve and worship your creator, the more it looks legitimate to the person that you're trying to reach anyways. Don't lower yourself to their level level, up to where God's called you to be. Oh, I got to go, I gotta go.

All right, It's first who you fall for You worship, who you lower your level for You worship who you submit to. I'm talking to the people in the room who would never say this: Like, how many of you love your love, your job? Exactly, You get what I'm saying. We all got our job, And so what we've decided do to do when we get our job is we say, "I've got to have a job, I've got to in order to make money, Just making sure you're with me, I, I got to have a job in order to make money.

And when I get a job in order to make money.

I always have a boss or an employer, And we have secretly- you don't even say it out loud- We have told ourselves: "My boss has more authority over me than God has over me". You say: "I, I, I, man, I don't have time to read the Bible right now. I don't have time to spend time with God's people. I don't have time to go to church.

I don't have time to lead my kids in the way that God's called me to.

I. I don't have time to think long enough to encourage my, my spouse with something she's dealing with in the Lord. I don't have time. I don't have time to do all that.

Why?

Because I'm so busy? Why Because my boss told me what to do? Or because I'm my own boss and I tell myself what to do, and I've chosen to worship and serve a creature rather than my creator. In that moment, I've chosen to worship my career and submit to it, rather than submit every aspect of my life to God as a living sacrifice.

You're not your boss of sacrifice.

Don't be one Now, granted, so that people don't come to me next week and say, " hey, I got fired". I, I, I want to be clear. It might not even be your boss. You're subordinate to.

It might be a mindset that keeps you from being as excellent as God's called you to be, which makes you blame your boss, because you refuse to blame yourself for the laziness in which you, with which you, operate at work.

Whatever it is for you, don't be subservient to anything created. Worship and serve your creator. He's worth it. He's worthy.

The next one is who you honor. It's who you give honor to. You might be thinking right now: when's the last time I praised God? When's the last time I spoke positively about what God did in my life?

It's more than that Like.

Honor is living your life in such a way that when people look at me, they see the one I'm honoring or the one that I'm living for. [snorts]. So when I go through my life, what do they see? Do they see a guy who's on TikTok a lot?

Yeah, unfortunately.

Do they see a guy who's not a perfect parent? Yeah, unfortunately. Do they see a guy who utilizes his wife in illustrations sometimes-, that I got to buy her shoes later because it wasn't the best illustration to utilize her in- Yeah, Un. Do they see a guy who sometimes stands up here and messes up Absolutely.

But I hope and I pray that when you know me at a deeper level, they see a guy who, who like, worships and serves him alone.

And when the rubber meets the road, like, I'm going to follow him, regardless of where culture is trying to take me. And this isn't about me, This is about you, Like. When people look at you, what are they going to see? Are they going to see someone who makes excuses all the time?

Because there's no excuse, according to Paul in Romans, He says: "Therefore, we are without excuse, because the evidence of God has been the, the, the works, the mighty power of God have been evident from the beginning.

They are evident in nature and all the things that we see. We have no excuse to worship and serve a creature rather than the creator. Yet we did it anyways". And so the call of a person who's going to follow God is to worship and serve him.

It's not to fall for anything else, It's not to be led by anything else, It's not to live our lives for anyone else.

And one of the things we honor more than anybody- and this is where this text is so evident in our own lives- Satan takes us to the pinnacle of success and self-worth. He says: "You can have all of this at your foottool". Now Jesus is like, "I already got all this at my foottool". But for us we're like, "Oh my gosh, clout people, adoration, accolades, success, and we're like I'll take some of that".

And then what we do is we honor ourselves with our living as opposed to honoring God.

First We'll say "Glory to God, after we do something really special", But the way that we live our lives does it. Does it, Or are you just saying it? I, I've learned that worship, again, is the embodiment, the activity that accompanies your own belief, And people are so good at expressing their beliefs, but they really struggle with embodying that belief in worship. And the final one is who you worship, who moves you?

You worship the one that moves you.

And- and I am as I was prepping this message, I was trying to think about what moves me, Not like a liar who reads the Bible and wants to be so good that that I'm moved by God. Like worship moved me that one time, and the word moved me that one time, and when that person, came to me and invited me to consider something, I was moved that one time. No, I'm thinking about my normal everyday life, What moves me? And so when I wake up in the morning, what moves me is obviously an alarm.

But then I look at the phone and it moves me.

If it's news, it makes me think, filled like think away, filled with anxiety I. If it's something else, it's just me. Lolly gagging and wasting time before I jump into the other thing that moves me, which is my career, or my kids, or my spouse and the to-do list I get once a week or a day, And then I have an office next to my house, so I'm kind of at home all day. So then what moves me is the fact that I have to pick up my kids from school, And then I go there and I, if I'm good, then maybe, maybe I'm going to spend some time thinking about the Lord.

But then I pick up my kids and they're they're yelling, So it's their screams and arguing that moves me.

And then it's dinner time that moves me. And then it's trying to get time with my wife and kids before we go to bed. That moves me. And then it's the next big thing that moves me, And I'm not saying that those aren't in any way in my life integrated to my worship of my creator.

But I want you to ask yourself a question: is what moves you, God or something different?

Because if it's something different, it's not worthy of your adoration. A and one of the best ways that you're going to understand this component is when someone comes to you and they share with you that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. When they come to you about a way that you're living that is in contrast to the Scriptures, calling you to righteousness, are you going to respond like Pharaoh in the Old Testament, who it says his heart was hardened and in another variation, it says he hardened his heart? Is your heart hardened so thick with selfishness, with pride, with just being inundated with temptation week after week, year after year, that it's become hardened to the will of God that when, when your sin is brought to your face, You look at it, you're like Paul says in Romans 1, that the epitome of sin is not only that we worship and serve the creature rather than the creator, is that we thought our own way was better than his.

But I'm not even call.

I'm not called to worship me. Gosh, that's a really bad idol Me? I'm not. I don't even like myself half the time.

You know what I'm saying.

So why would I worship me and why would you do that? But sin is one of those things people's scared to talk about these days. I mean so, I mean honestly, I- I even get scared to talk about it. There's a couple, like key speakers and preachers out in the country who I feel like have a an automatic pass to talk about certain things, but maybe it's just that they're bold enough to do it, And so I want to be bold today.

One of the greatest ways that you're going to experience God and one of the greatest ways you are going to begin this process of worshiping him rather than created things, is when the moment comes for you to be confronted by your own sin.

How will you respond to it? Does it move you, Like if I talk to you about how you're living your life, or if someone brings sin that you're performing or interacting with into your life? How does it make you feel angry, frustrated, obstinate or- and this is something I've noticed in my walk with God- When you're worshiping and serving God, when you become aware of sin? It breaks you, Not breaks you down.

It breaks you because you want to know God more and live a life that's pleasing to him.

And there's this: there's a person- and I know they love God like deeply, and there was something like in their life that I think it's that they weren't aware of it, but it had come to me a few times that that people thought this about this person, or they were receiving this person in a particular way. And when you don't know somebody you're like, I mean maybe they intend to do it like they're older than me, so maybe they just intend to live their life in this way [sighs]. And at some point I just felt led by God to just go approach that person. I don't know, I don't know if you knew this was part of a pastor's job sometimes, but to approach people about some like social or spiritual stuff that they may or may not be aware of, you're always scared that when you go to them, they're going to respond with hardness of heart and not trust you and go their own way, which is the way that we responded to God when he sent Jesus.

And so I went to this person, scared to death, and I walk up to him and I say, "Hey, I, I've, I've noticed this, I've seen this.

Were you aware of this" And there was just like a I do that and like tears started coming down their cheeks and like I, I'm feeling miserable at this. Oh my gosh, I made him cry. This is terrible, This is not good. But then they, they like they.

They had to sit down and ponder it, because I knew they love Jesus.

And for anyone who loves Jesus, what moves them is not the stuff of the world, It's God himself. And when he brings something to their doorstep, there's an openness, a receptivity that comes. And this person heard it. And just because you hear about your sin, just because you hear about your struggle, doesn't mean it's fixed the next day.

No, there's a process called sanctification, where God starts to redeem us from the inside out, And he's going to do it.

But it takes time and it can be frustrating. But, but what God wants from us isn't an obstinency that comes from, like Pharaoh in the Old Testament or even Israel when they were in the wilderness. He wants an understanding, a receptivity that says "No, no, no, no, I will never be moved. You can bring me to a mountain, but I'm going to remember that through Christ Jesus, I can move a mountain.

I can do whatever I'm called to in Christ Jesus".

A and so Satan brings Jesus to this tall mountain and he tells him to worship and serve him. And he's like: "I will not be moved. I will not be moved from my creator And some of you in the room. I want to encourage you: get to that place in your walk with God, because Satan offered the world to Jesus and he offers the world to you, expecting that you would bow to him and stop worshiping your creator.

But the beauty of the Gospel is that Jesus, you know, like Satan, wants you to bow to him, He wants you to lay low, He wants you to fall forward.

But Jesus actually, like he sacrificed himself, like he offered himself so that we would ultimately believe in him and spend our lives following him. So I don't know who needs that word in here today, but all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And the only way that we can come into connection with God and honor him with our lives is by believing, not just saying something, not just thinking something. But the Bible says: anyone who confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in their heart that God raised him from the dead will be saved.

Is not just this belief.

It's a belief that expresses itself in the way that you live your life, And so, for anyone in here, you're still separated and disconnected from God because of your sin. I want to encourage you: confess, believe, begin to worship him, Allow him to be the one that moves you in this moment. Don't be stubborn, Don't be obstinate. Be like Jesus, who was not moved by the enemy, only moved by his father.

And we're going to have moments tonight and I'm expecting all of you to show back up at 6 pm for worship night.

But I want to pray for those of you who are ready, ready to turn your lives around, seek repentance from God, forgiveness of sin, and step into a life that worships him. Father God, I thank you for the people in this room. My prayer right now is that you would- you would speak to everyone in this room, chip away at the walls that have been built and draw them nearer and nearer to you. I pray so selfishly in this room that the people who came to sit under this teaching today.

I pray that they would be convicted of their sin and compelled to follow you and worship and serve their creator rather than other creatures.

It never got them where they wanted to be anyways. But, God, you give peace, You show us love, You fulfill the desires of our heart as we seek you. So, God, be with them right now. And if that was one of you, you're ready to receive Jesus.

Check the box on the card that enables you to do so, to let us know about it.

We want.