Pittsburgh New Church » How to Worship the Lord Onl ...

“You shall have no other gods before Me.” (Exodus 20:3)

In our basically monotheistic culture, we often dismiss commandment number one as finished. We never go to satanic rituals, we never bow down to a golden statue, and we don’t burn incense to icons in our homes. Congratulations! This is a success not to be disregarded, but it is obeying the first commandment in only its most natural and external form. This may have been enough for the Children of Israel, but the Lord wants us to be more spiritual. Through the New Testament and the Writings for the New Church, the Lord teaches us about internal and spiritual ways of understanding and obeying His law.

In its spiritual meaning, the Lord is teaching us to worship Him in His Divine Human only—the Lord Jesus Christ. Further, we learn that true worship does not consist solely in standing and kneeling, saying prayers and singing songs. True worship of the Lord is living according to the true ideas that you have learned from the Lord’s Word. It is in life that genuine worship exists. Anything that prevents you from living what you know to be true is also an idol. Evil spirits are skilled at distracting us away from thinking about the place of the Lord in our lives. They want us to pay attention to, and live our lives in dedication to, anything other than the Lord. Drugs, money, and sex are the easy ones to see—partly because they can be so spectacularly destructive. More difficult to identify in our own lives are the subtly destructive things like anger, pride, revenge, control, reputation, and cynicism. These can be idols that we do not wish to abandon as we learn to worship the Lord Jesus Christ with all our hearts, minds, and strength.

This is the first commandment and it is the center of all religion. The acknowledgement of the Lord Jesus Christ as the one God of heaven and earth, Creator and Redeemer, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the essential feature of the life of religion. It is because of this acknowledgement, and only because of this, that the rest of religion contains anything of genuine life.

“Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Revelation 19:10)

To see that this is true, read Exodus 20:1-6, Revelation 19:6-10, and True Christian Religion 294, 295, 296:1.

This is a synopsis of the first sermon in our ten week Journey to Rise Above It, here at Pittsburgh New Church. It was preached by Rev. Amos Glenn. This is just a synopsis. Listen to the full audio here, and you can read the full text version below:

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We start our sermon series on the Ten Commandments with the first commandment which is not to have any other god before the Lord. When we start with this first commandment, lots of people think we are starting with the easy one, then the commandments get harder. Lying, that’s harder; stealing, that’s harder. But worshiping only the Lord, that’s easy. How many people do you know that worship Baal? How many people do you know who have sacrificed a ram to Ashtoreth? We just don’t do that any more. In our basically monotheistic culture, we just worship one god, the Lord. We think, “We don’t participate in satanic rituals, we don’t burn incense to icons in our homes, we don’t bow down to golden idols. Check this one off, we’re done.”

Congratulations! That’s a feat that’s not worth dismissing. Not bowing down to golden idols is important. Not worshiping Baals and Ashtoreths is very important. But it’s really only the most natural and most external way of obeying this first commandment. The Lord, through teaching in His New Testament and through the Writings for the New Church, is pretty clear that He wants us to be more spiritual and more internal than that. This external, natural way of behaving might have been good enough for the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai. It was acceptable for them to behave this way because that was all they understood and so that was all they could do. But that’s not us. The Lord requires us to be more spiritual, to be more internal, to think in ways that aren’t merely natural.

So, no, we don’t worship Baals and Ashtoreths or statues. But do we spiritually and internally worship only The Lord? And that’s the question we take up this morning. How do we worship the Lord only?

Fortunately, the first commandment doesn’t say “only worship the Lord” because that would be very hard for us to do in internal ways. The commandment is, “don’t worship any other gods.” If this were a logic class, we would say, “those are the same things,” but they are, in reality, quite different. Worshiping the Lord only would mean willing ourselves to do certain behaviors and think certain thought, which is almost impossible. NOT worshiping other gods is easier because you just have to NOT behave in a certain way. You don’t have to will yourself into loving the Lord, you just have to not love any other false gods. This is much easier—doable, in fact.

The question, then, that we really need to be asking ourselves is this: “Who is this Lord we are supposed to be worshiping and who are all these false gods we are not supposed to be worshiping.” We can’t obey if we can’t tell the difference. Well, in the Writing for the New Church, the Lord says that when this commandment teaches about the One God that is to be worshiped, that is, the Lord God Jesus Christ, Creator, Savior, Jehovah born into the world, the Divine Human, the God-Man. That’s whom we worship.

But don’t we say Jehovah is God? Is worshiping Jehovah equal to worshiping the Lord only? The Writings for the New Church would say, no, they’re not equal. Thinking of the Lord as Jehovah makes the Lord invisible and unknowable, He becomes a cloud with lightning and thunder on top of the mountain. That sort of God is hard to obey, as the Children of Israel discovered. In the moment, of course, they were terrified and perfectly willing to say, “Anything you tell us Lord, we’re going to do it!” But only because they were terrified. And that worked for a week before they forgot their pledge and started worshiping other gods. Then the Lord would send some terrible plague and they would say, “Oh, yeah! We’re worshiping the Lord only,” and that would last another month before they would start worshiping other gods. Most of the stories of the Old Testament are just that happening over and over again until they finally just can’t do it any more at all and Jerusalem is destroyed.

So it can’t be Jehovah that we worship. It has to be Jehovah in Human form. It has to be Jesus Christ who is Jehovah, born on earth to show us the Human form that the Lord is, to demonstrate to us that He and we are the same. We are human because He is human; we love because He loves; we have life because He has life. That’s the sort of worship that we can do. That’s the sort of worship that isn’t worship out of fear but worship out of free and rational choice. That is only possible with Lord God Jesus Christ, who is Jehovah as the soul is in the body.

So that is the one God of Heaven and Earth that this commandment is teaching us to worship. No other gods. We’ve already said that those other gods are not necessarily Baals and Ashtoreths. They’re not necessarily weird, cult-like things either. Worshiping is more than just standing up and kneeling, and saying prayers and singing songs on Sunday morning. Community church is an important part of worship, but it’s not the definition of worship. Worship exists in your life and it exists there only. It exists here this morning because this is part of your life. But if you leave here this morning and you don’t think about the Lord, or His place or your life, or the true ideas taught in His Word until next Sunday morning, you’re not truly, genuinely worshiping. Worship means behaving all the time in a way that agrees with the ideas that you believe to be true. So you read the Lord’s Word and you find some things in it that you recognize as true because they’re in the Lord’s Word and then on Monday you go and you do them and then on Tuesday you do the same thing. That’s what the Lord wants; He wants us to live our lives according to His Word. What good are ten thousand rams or ten thousand rivers of oil or ten thousand Sundays in church if you’re not obeying the Lord’s law?

Obedience to the Lord’s law, from a free rational choice because you acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ to be the One God of Heaven and Earth is what this commandment is teaching. Anything else is an idol. Anything else is not worshiping the Lord. Anything that prevents you from doing what you know to be true is what this commandment is talking about. The evil spirits love to distract us from thinking about the Lord, thinking about his place in our lives, thinking about our actions in comparison to what we know is true. Distractions are all around us. It’s easy to pick out some of the more spectacularly destructive false gods like sex and drugs and money. Those are easy to spot when they go wrong. But what’s not so easy to see are the ones that are more subtly destructive. Things like anger and fear. Things like control. Things like reputation. These dangerous things are not false gods in an of themselves. All of these examples can be examples of good things, too. They become idols when, for example, your reputation becomes more important than your life according to the Lord’s Word. When you have a choice of doing what you know to be true but being thrown out of proper society, then you can really know if you are following the Baals and the Ashtoreths or you are worshiping the One God. That’s the challenge. That’s the subtle destructiveness of worshiping other gods.

In the book of Revelation, we read about John seeing his visions in the spiritual world. An angel was showing him all the things he was to see. Near the end the wonders were overwhelming to him and he falls down at the angel’s feet and begins to worship the angel. But the angel says, “See that you do not do that.” The angel compares himself to John’s brother rather than John’s Lord. They are brothers because they both have the testimony of Jesus. Then the angel says, “worship God for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophesy.” The Writings for the New Church reveal the really beautiful meaning of these words. The “testimony of Jesus” is the true acknowledgment of the Lord Jesus Christ, not just with the mind but with the heart and the life. That “testimony of Jesus” is the “spirit of prophesy.” The “prophesy” here represents all of the Lord’s Word and the “spirit” represents it’s life. The angel tells John to worship the Lord because the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophesy. We might use correspondences to translate this phrase into “Worship the Lord because when you acknowledge the Lord to be the one God of Heaven and Earth, all those truths that you have learned from the Word are filled with life.” When truths are filled with life from the Lord they become part of our lives and we leave behind spiritual struggles—your life becomes filled with Life.

This is the first commandment and it is the central commandment. We read the two great Commandments and this is one of them. On this commandment hangs all the law and the prophets. On this commandment hang all the teachings of the Lord’s Word. If you are doing all the other things that the Lord says but not worshiping the Lord only, it really doesn’t matter what else you’re doing. Living your lifeaccording to the Lord’s commandments because you acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as the Divine Human is the essence of the life of religion and the guide on the path to heaven