If you were to make a list of words to describe the most God-honoring worship you can imagine, what words would you choose? “Joyful”? “Passionate”? “Truth-oriented”? “Life-changing”?
How far down your list would you have to go before you got to the word, “costly”? Would that word even make your list at all?
In 2 Samuel 24, we find a fascinating story about the way David responded to one of his moral failures. David had committed a sin of pride and self-reliance, and in order to provide atonement, God commanded David to build an altar and offer a sacrifice on a particular piece of land owned by a man named Araunah.
When David showed up at Araunah’s property, Araunah offered to give David the land and all that he needed to obey God’s command, including the oxen and the wood for the offering. David strongly insisted that he must buy the property from Araunah at full price. Listen to the reason David gave: “I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God which cost me nothing” (2 Sam 24:24, italics added).
At this moment of immense historical and theological significance, where David was acquiring the site of what would become the future temple of the presence of Yahweh, David did not want to give a “free” offering to the Lord. David chose to communicate God’s worthiness by sacrificing of himself to provide an offering to the Lord. One of the key descriptions of God-honoring worship is costly.
God’s Honor and His Sacrifices
To prove the point from a negative perspective, consider an example of the polar-opposite attitude towards God’s worship found in Eli’s sons at the beginning of 1 Samuel. The author states that the sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were “worthless men” (1 Sam 2:12). While Hophni and Phinehas were wicked in a variety of ways, including laying with women who were serving in the tabernacle (v. 22), the main charge God brought against Eli’s family was how they treated his offerings. Hophni and Phinehas would regularly take portions of the Israelites’ offerings by force. They made themselves “fat” on the offerings that were meant for God. God rebuked Eli, saying, “Why do you kick at My sacrifice and at My offering which I have commanded in My dwelling, and honor your sons above Me, by making yourselves fat with the choicest of every offering of My people Israel?” (1 Sam 2:29).
God’s words in the very next verse show why God took this matter so seriously: “Those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me will be lightly esteemed” (v. 30). Considering all the depth of wickedness of the sons of Eli, God most hated the way they despised His name by using His offerings for selfish gain. They stole what rightfully belonged to God and grew fat on it.
Contrast that attitude with David’s words to Araunah. David insisted that he must give of himself with his offering to rightly communicate God’s worthiness. Worship that honors God involves giving of myself and sacrificing, rather than selfishly taking for my own self-interest that which belongs to God.
Sacrificing to God in the New Covenant
As recipients of the new covenant after Christ’s death, we no longer sacrifice animals to signify the payment for our sin and God’s worthiness of our lives. But that doesn’t mean we’re done with sacrifices altogether! The apostle Paul says in Rom 12:1–2, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.” We worship God in this present age by offering our very bodies as sacrifices to God.
What does it mean to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to God? It means nothing less than presenting every thought, word, action, and desire to our Savior for Him to use for His purposes, not our own. God is worthy of every word we speak, every second of our day, and every relationship we have. God purchased our lives with the blood of His Son, and now we proclaim the worthiness of our Savior in the way we offer our entire lives to God day by day.
Yes, new covenant worship is certainly meant to be joyful, as we respond to the depth of love God lavished on us by redeeming us into His family and adopting us. But new covenant worship is still costly. Jesus highlights this in Luke 9:24–25, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.”
The point is this: Christ calls His followers to worship Him by daily dying to their own selfish desires and by offering their bodies as living sacrifices for obedience. God-honoring worship is costly.
Implications
The costliness of God-honoring worship has so many implications for followers of Christ. Let me name a few:
- The act of sacrificing communicates God’s worthiness.
By definition, when we worship God, we seek to communicate that He is worthy of something. One of the chief ways we communicate God’s worthiness is by giving up other things that we may find desirable in order to obey God’s commands.
As our good Creator, God gives us so many things to enjoy and delight in. But our sinful hearts so quickly latch onto and worship those created things rather that the Creator. Worshipping God with our lives will regularly require us to turn away from our sinful worship of the things of this world, like the praise of man, or pleasure, or ease, or material possessions. Each moment we choose to walk the path of obedience to God, we are choosing to give up our sinful pursuit of anything else, and that sacrifice communicates the worth and value of God.
Let me give you a few examples:
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- Consider a family choosing how they will plan out their semester and their kids’ commitments. They have the option of choosing a travel sports team that plays games every Sunday morning, but they decide that meeting with God’s people on Sundays is more worthy than a sports league. They sacrificed the opportunity to participate in that team in order to obey God, and that “cost” displayed God’s worthiness.
- Consider a husband in an argument with his wife. His sinful flesh desires to be right and convince his wife of his rightness and just how wrong she is. But God commands, “No, you must humble yourself, listen to your wife, and focus first on how you may be wrong and need to repent. You must trust Me to exalt you in My time and My way as you honor Me.” In that moment, the husband must decide whether he will fight for his own way, or whether he will sacrifice his way, put to death his sinful desires, and believe that God is worthy of his response right then. Worshiping God “cost” the husband the opportunity to fight for his own way, and that cost honored God.
The act of sacrificing communicates God’s worthiness, because we demonstrate that we believe God is better than whatever we are giving up in order to obey.
- Biblical worship is measured by obedience, not feelings.
These days, it can be so easy to measure whether our worship was “real” or “genuine” by how we feel. We deem a corporate worship service to be effective if we could feel the Spirit’s encouragement or fellowship. We believe that we are truly honoring God if we feel close to Him on a particular day.
But if we are truly worshipping God with our lives, then sometimes it’s not going to feel good. Sometimes it’s going to feel like death. Offering our bodies as living sacrifices requires us to daily put our sinful flesh to death so that we might obey God’s Word and demonstrate his worthiness.
By no means does this mean that worshipping God should be drudgery or joyless! But this does mean that we must look further than our immediate experience of a certain kind of feeling to evaluate the genuineness of our worship. We must learn to evaluate whether we are pursuing costly obedience. We must pursue the obedience that results from all that God has done for us in the gospel, and the obedience that leads us to true joy and peace centered on our Savior, not our experiences or our circumstances. The prophet Samuel says, “Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam 15:22). True God-honoring worship is measured by obedience to His Word, even (or especially) when it costs us.
- We must look to Jesus, who worshipped His Father at the highest cost of all – His life.
Recently, our church learned the song, “Your Will Be Done” by CityAlight. I appreciate how the song leads us to proclaim that we will pursue God’s will and not our own, because obedience is at the heart of God-honoring worship.
But what I really love about the song is the 2nd verse, where we sing about the perfect obedience of our Savior. He is the only One who perfectly held “the fearful weight of true obedience,” and He is the only One who could say with authenticity, “not My will, but Yours be done.” Even though obeying His Father would cost Him His life as He bore the sins of the world, Jesus still chose to obey. And His obedience screamed to the watching world that God is worthy of worship, that God is better than anything this world can offer.
It is only as we “[fix] our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith” (Heb 12:2) that we can increasingly honor God with our lives. It is only as we feast on Jesus’s grace and love that we then willingly offer our lives to be used for His purposes. Jesus paid the cost God required for our salvation, the cost that was too high for us to pay. Now we find our joy in offering all we have back to Him. May we all give God the honor He is due by offering him worship that costs us our lives.
Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash
