After the Sermon: Deuteronomy 12-13
3/30/26 | Will DuVal | DEUTERONOMY: Remembering God's Faithfulness; Responding in Obedience
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Welcome to the After the Sermon podcast where Pastor Will answers follow-up questions and we share your personal applications from the sermon for the benefit of the church. My name is Brian and I'm here with our lead pastor, Will.
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Hey everyone.
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We want to remind you with this podcast that sermons are not just a Sunday thing. Pastor Will, just start with a reminder or recap of the sermon yesterday.
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Yeah. So yesterday we were in Deuteronomy chapters 12 and 13, continuing our series through the book of Deuteronomy and kind of a transition point in the book from the first 11 chapters on Moses reminding them of God's past provisions in the wilderness for them as a nation. Now the biggest chunk of the middle section of Deuteronomy is going to be focused on God's precepts for the present. How do we live as God's people? And then Moses is going to end the last seven or eight chapters with God's promised pledges of protection and provision going forward in the future for his people once they get in the promised land. So that's kind of the outline of the book. So this is a transition point, but chapters 12 and 13 in particular, opening the section on God's precepts, Moses begins with a section on worship and how Israel is supposed to worship.
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And so the title of the sermon was worship God's way and we looked at kind of three main points of where we worship. That was a big emphasis in the text. Moses telling him like, "Out here in the wilderness, here's how we've been worshiping, but once we get in the promised land, here's how we're going to worship. God is going to put his name and his presence in a certain place. And that's where you're going to go to do certain acts of worship, bringing your offerings, et cetera." So relevance for us today and the church and being God's temple today. Where we worship then, how we worship and God's protocol for worship, we ran through 15 sub points of kind of how we worship principles from the text and then closing with who we worship the Lord. And at the very closing why we worship, because of all that he's done for us, freeing us from bondage.
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So that's your less than a minute sermon summary, but yeah, what questions do we have for-
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It's two minutes. That's okay.
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Oh.
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Thanks for that.
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Yeah. Even in my own head, it's quicker than it is. All right. Well, I'll get better at this. We're going to start building in a sermon recap so you have more context, but yeah, I'll get better at getting it under enough. That's really
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Helpful. Thanks. Anonymous congregant wrote in, "Were the people of the Northern Kingdom allowed to go south to the
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Temple?" It's a good question based on the little anecdote I shared about Jeroboam, the first king of the northern kingdom after it split, after Solomon's son Ray Oboam took over and his folly splitting the kingdom and Jeroboam tried to get everybody to stay in the north and not go south. But I would have to do a little bit more digging research, reminding myself of the exact kind of specifics of how that did play out. Like I said, he built the two golden calfs and told Israel, the northern tribes, "Hey, these are your gods who brought you out of Egypt." And again, tried to convince them not to go south. I don't know. Again, I mean, there was basically for hundreds of years on and off civil war between Israel and Judah during that time of the divided monarchy. But I'm trying to remember if in all my reading of first and second Kings, and I guess it's more second kings, in Chronicles, if I can remember hearing much about ... You would think that during time of Civil War, that would have implications for, for instance, Northern tribes, people, their accessibility to get South to Judah, because you would think there would be skepticism about, "Oh, I'm here for the Passover festival or whatever." Well, are you really, or are you just one of Jeroboam spies or something?
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So it's a really great question.
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I don't know if we know, again, just off the top of my head without having to ... I don't know if we can say for sure or if we know what, for instance, attendance at the temple looked like for Northern Israelites as opposed to Southern Judeans for those hundreds of years where the kingdom was divided and things were dicey between them. I suspect some of it kind of waxed and waned based on the status of the relationship between the two kings and kingdoms that there were times when it seems like even with the division and two kings that Israel and Judah teamed up to fight against the other armies together and then the relationship cooled again and they fought each other again. And at times they were going and getting allies to fight against each other. And it was just a whole bad deal. But now I'm kind of curious to know a little bit more about some of the history for, again, the lay people of just Joe Israelite who was commanded, "Hey, you're supposed to go south to the temple to bring your offerings.
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Did they still do that? " You'd like to think that there was a kind of a religious exemption kind of free pass for folks that most of the Southern kings would have allowed those pilgrimages to continue to happen and all of that. But I don't know. I know both kingdoms went so far off the rails that there were periods of centuries at a time when, like for instance, Josiah had to rediscover, refined God's book of the law with dust all over it, buried somewhere in the temple that they just had gone, again, so far off the rails, weren't doing things by the book. So I don't know, that makes me think maybe they weren't, maybe everyone kind of went after Jeroboam and he's the king. And if he's telling you don't go south, maybe they didn't. So yeah, that's a good question.
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Next one is from Matt. He wrote in, Deuteronomy 13: three talks about God's testing with regards to prophets and dreamers. I don't often think of God testing us like that. Could you expand on this idea? A little more context here. He writes, "In the sermon, you mentioned influencers as modern examples. I suppose they can and do point to their successful platforms as a means of establishing supposed authority like the prophets and dreamers did with signs and wonders. In the modern West, we are much more skeptical of the supernatural, so it makes sense that our tests might look different. In what other ways do you think this might be applicable to our age? Have you seen any examples in your own life or the life of the church?"
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Yeah. Great questions. Thanks, Matt. So two questions there. One concerning verse three of chapter 13 in particular and the idea that the Lord was the one. I'll just read that for us real quick. So Deuteronomy 13: three, Moses has warned them against a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, giving you a sign or wonder, and even if it comes true, but if he tells you, "Let's go serve other gods, don't listen to them." And then Moses says, "For the Lord, your God is testing you to know whether you will love him with all your heart and soul or whether you'll walk away after other gods instead." Yeah, I mean, we talk about in the church tests of faith and to me, this is a very explicit one where, again, Moses just makes it really clear that part of the way in which God works in our lives is to, and again, I think you have this corroborated all over the place in scripture, is to allow us to go through and face ... Scripture says that the Lord tempts no one.
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I think it's James one, maybe. Let no one say when he's being tempted that the Lord has tempted me because God doesn't tempt people. However, think about Job, right? Satan goes to God and has to get permission to be the one to test Job, right? And to tempt him, I mean, tempt and test, very related to by testing him, his faith, will you still worship God? Even when I take away all your riches and your family and all that, your land, your health, that testing is a temptation. He is being tempted to fall away and to stop worshiping God because God's not making things work out for him. Similar thing with Jesus and the wilderness, the temptations with Satan and the wilderness, their tests, their temptations to, well, worship Satan, worship me and I'll give you all these kingdoms or eat bread or whatever the temptations are, but they're tests of Jesus faith.
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Jesus of course passes, aces it, no problem.
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But here, once again, God is making it clear in Deuteronomy 13 that part of how God works. And you have, I think of the example of King Ahab was the real bad one, who the scripture says that God sent a lying spirit, I don't want to misquote scripture here, but basically that God doesn't tempt and God of course doesn't lie, but God holds the leash on Satan and sometimes God takes him off the leash and he lets him come and tempt and test and even lie and deceive. And according to God's word, that part of the reason he does that is to see will we allow ourselves to be deceived? Will we follow that prophet or that dreamer of dreams? And so yeah, this is again, one of those like ... I mean, it's clear that's the way it is at the bottom line. At the end of the day, that's the way God works.
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So it doesn't really matter what we think of it. But if you want to be reflective of it theologically and say, "Well, which one is better to have a God who is totally sovereign in that way, but then who, even though he's not the one tempting and testing, or well, God tests, but not tempts, related, but God tempts no one, but he does test." And sometimes the form that that testing takes, like you said, is allowing a prophet or a dreamer or a lying spirit for Ahab or Satan himself for Job to be the one who's implementing or executing the test in a tempting kind of way. So anyway, I'll stop on that. I was going to say, make it a theological point about like, "Well, would you rather have a God who really isn't sovereign over any of that and who Satan kind of does his own thing and God isn't holding the leash." And anyway, like I said, that's not who God is.
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So it's a probably unhelpful hypothetical. So anyway, I'm thinking about it from the standpoint of apologetics and a conversation with an unbeliever who's saying like, "What? Your God does that and he lets Satan do stuff?" And it's like, well, yeah, he does. He's sovereign, but he's also not the one ... His hope and prayer ... God doesn't pray. God's goal in that is to, we know, strengthen our faith, to prove our faith like as was the case with Job.
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The way the scripture talks about it often is God refining our faith through the furnace of trials, of tests of faith. And it's in that crucible. It's when the head is turned up and the temptation is there to eat the bread or worship Satan or at least not worship God, because what kind of God would take away all my family and my stuff if I'm Job? And in that furnace of affliction, God forges our faith. His desire is to forge our faith stronger. I think of like one Corinthians where Paul talks about, look, yeah, when it goes in the furnace, it's either the real deal or it's chaff and it's going to be burned up and you're going to find out pretty quickly whether your faith is real or whether it's just built on your circumstances because it's easy to worship God when the sun's shining and your belly's full.
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But anyway, I'll stop there. So that's the verse three. The second question that Matt though is expanding and asking about is about this idea of influencers. And I was always thinking about, there's three sections in Deuteronomy chapter 13. There's the prophets and dreamers. If they try and get you to worship other gods, then there's your own family, your son or wife or friend or closest, your father, your parents. If anyone tries to get you to go worship other gods. And then he ends with, if there's a whole other town somewhere and the whole, they all kind of fall away and start worshiping some other God, what do you do? And so I was trying to, again, think about, okay, kind of three points there in chapter 13 and what might the implications, excuse me, tired, be for us and how do we think about the principle there and apply it today and what were prophets and dreamers back then?
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I mean, yeah, we can make the ... I could have made the connection more directly to say Fortune Dellers and Palm Readers and stuff like that today would maybe be a more direct case. And some people obviously still are led astray and believe in those things, astrology and whatever else. And we were just in Branson a week and a half ago with spring break. And I passed right on the main strip of Branson, you're going by the Sight and Sound Theater and all the Jesus saves bookstore and all that, but then two doors down, there's just a number of different, come get your palm read, get your fortune told, the crystal ball thing. So it's still out there. It's crazy to me kind of, but yeah, that people still believe in astrological signs and those kinds of zodiac signs, whatever. But all of it to say there's that.
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But I thought even more widespread for us though, think about what were prophets back then. I mean, the prophets were the folks that other people looked up to and listened to for getting a reading on the signs of the times and what's going on here. They didn't have the 24 hour news cycle. I mean, I could have made that ... I mean, I would argue that newscasters and media, that's their influencers, but yeah, Matt asked about like specifically how have you seen examples of this maybe even in your own life kind of play out or in the life of the church. And yeah, I think about whether it's pastors, other pastors that folks kind of listen to. Or again, I've seen not even pastors, but just folks who are podcasters or whatever, who have a base of listeners. And I, for one, I'm sure we all have seen folks in the church get let astray and basically, well, Joe Rogan said it, so it must be gospel.
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Or fill in the blank of Fox News said it, or Charlie Kirk said it, or Bill Marr said it, both on the left and the right and everything in between, these folks that we might look up to, listen to, and when you're filtering reality through that person's lens that they're wanting you to see it through, as opposed to through God's word, you're going to run into really big problems. And again, that's where you run into the syncretism, I think. And we've seen it a lot, especially to be honest, in the past couple years with the Christian nationalism stuff, I think is one of the biggest ones that has hit the church, the evangelical church, and just how much the so- called evangelical church has gotten in bed with politics and Trumpism and whatever else, and to the detriment of both our politics and especially our church.
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So anyway, that's kind of the lines along which I was thinking is just who are the folks that you might not even know, but who you tend to listen to and be persuaded by. And like, this is a smart person. This is somebody who knows what's going on and being real careful about what the message is. If it's that, I mean, it could be me. It could be, like I said, you're a pastor to the extent that the messaging is pointing you to Christ, then by all means, that's a true prophet and follow and obey to the extent that that person is pointing you to self or to other gods or to whatever else, then beware. So thanks, Matt. Great questions.
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Next, Brad wrote in a list of questions as well.
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Yeah, let's see if we can do quick hitters on some of his here.
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Yeah. Do you want me to go with the first one?
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Yeah, let's go top to bottom.
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Awesome. He wrote, "What should a healthy biblical fear of the Lord look like in our gathered
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Worship?" Well, I think for one thing, we just ought to be ... The word that my parents always use growing up is reverence. And I think I use it as one of the subpoints for point number two on how we worship is reverentially. And reverence means with a healthy dose of the fear and the awe and the humility and the reminder of who I am and who God is and the kind of Jesus is not your homeboy thing. So I just think that a lot of what happens on Sunday mornings in a lot of churches just has more of the ethos of kind of a pep rally or a rock concert or a ... I don't know.
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Again, and everybody's going to be different about this because some are going to say that this means you should never clap in church or you should ... I don't know, how you actually, practically, what it practically actually looks like to reflect reverence and fear of the Lord in your worship of the Lord, like I said, is ... I want to be real careful about making any kind of blanket statements for us corporately, because I think there's room for lots of different interpretations and applications of that for folks. Like I said, folks that are going to, just based on their own kind of persuasion and conscience are ... Well, yeah, anything like ... I used the example already, clapping feels like less than fearful and reverential, but at the other end of the extreme, we also have God telling us in his word to come into my courts with praise and with the sound of the tambourine and dancing and David's thing to McCalla's wife about, "I'll dance even more.
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I'll debase myself in my worship of the Lord." And yet David was not fearing God in that. He was just so joyful for what God had done and bringing the ark of the covenant back to Jerusalem. So anyway, there's joyful. I mean, both those things are true. Those were both sub points in point number two of how we worship yesterday was joyfully and also reverentially. So holding those two things in tension is tricky. But I do think that, yeah, there are just some things where ... I don't know. There are some churches that don't seem to even have the tension, right? They just really seem to have lost sight of any sense of, "Hey, this is a holy God that you shouldn't even be able to come into his presence that you're worshiping right now and maybe remember that a little bit." I mean, I think some of the things that we do in our service tangible, like a call to confession, for instance, is a way of reflecting like fear of the Lord, reminding ourselves that again, he is holy and we are not, but for Christ, we would all be under his wrath and should rightfully fear him in that regard.
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And yet we don't have to. Yeah. So anyway, I'll leave it there. Good question.
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Which practices such as silence, confession, scripture reading, meditating on God's word, posture, the Lord's supper, et cetera, help a congregation approach God with awe rather than casual familiarity.
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Yeah, that's good. I just mentioned one with called a confession. I mean, we try and think about these things in our kind of liturgy, our typical flow of a worship service for us, but I think our call to worship from the very start should be more than just ... I mean, what's the stereotype, Brian, for worship pastors like who's- How's everybody
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Doing?
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How you doing? Who cares? We're not here to ... What is that? I mean, that's a concert opener like, "How you doing tonight, Detroit?"
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It's rough.
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Yeah. But we are here to worship God. So from the opening words, we want people that to be reflected in our liturgy and in everything that we're saying and doing from the pulpit. And so I think- Remember who
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God is and then respond to that.
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Yes.
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Called a worship who, yes, that reminds us of who God is. And I mean, a God this great, a God this amazing and wonderful is yes to be praised and also to be feared for his greatness, his power is, I mean, all of that. Yeah, mention the confession. I mean, certainly certain texts. I mean, this is another one, right? Is frankly, a lot of the kinds of churches that are opening their services with, "How's everybody doing?" Are probably not also expository preaching churches that are going to be systematically going through God's word, chapter by chapter, book by book, Old Testament and New Testament, right? Probably not a lot of Deuteronomy in a lot of those churches. And so I think that for sure would be another one of like, yeah, what scripture do you read on a Sunday? What scripture do you study? Do you spend 45 minutes unpacking or however long you ... Again, for a lot of churches, that's gotten shorter.
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So I think even that, even as I say that, how long our service is somewhat reflective of, is this like a tight hour with a countdown clock and like turn and burn, get them out? Or is this like, you're here to worship the Lord and he created everything and gave you life and breath. And so where else do you have to be that's more important than ... So if I go a little over my usual 44 minutes or whatever, am I apologizing for that or is it like no, I mean, God's worth paying attention to. God's word is worth sitting in, sitting under, learning from. So all these things I think are helpful
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Probably. Yeah, that's good. What distinguishes a space where God puts his name from any other venue and how should that shape how we prepare, arrive, and participate together?
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Well, it should mention, again, the connection between the temple in the Old Testament, Old Covenant, and now the church under the New Covenant being God's designated place where he's put his spirit, his presence, and how should that impact how we prepare, show up, all of it. I mean, the one that I, of course, mentioned yesterday was attendance. Being with the church is not an optional thing for real Christians. So that's step one. But I mean, I think Brad does a good job here of highlighting that's only step one. I mean, that should impact Saturday night for us. It's hard for me because it's totally unique for me. I mean, my Saturday nights and my preparation for Sundays is different from everyone else's in the church.
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But I'm trying to put myself in others' shoes and think about, okay, if I was my wife or if I was just name any member of West Hills, what would a typical Saturday night routine look like for me to make sure that I am ... I mean, Saturday night is probably a really good time to, if you haven't already, read the sermon text that we're going to be studying the next morning. Spend some time meditating on that, reflecting on that. If you were going to preach this sermon, what would be your three points? Really working it over in your own mind actively, not just passively, but imagine Will got sick and you were going to preach this text the next morning. How would you preach? What do you expect him to say? What are the verses that stand out to you as being noteworthy and why?
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What's the main point of the text here? Why did Will put chapters 12 and 13 together, but not 14 or not 11? Why not do one of them? Why not just chapter 12? Why not? I mean, asking all the ... I think that would all be great stuff for everyone in our church to do. You would all grow so much more by doing that every Saturday night, thinking about the Sunday morning routine and what that looks like to make sure that you're able to be there on Sunday with the most fully engaged, open, spongy mind and heart, removing distractions, trying to remove obstacles and reduce possibilities for fights or tension between the kids in the car. And I mean, all these kinds of things are worth spending time because of how important what we do together on Sunday morning is. I've said it before, we'll continue saying it.
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It can feel ... I think the first time I said it, it felt sort of self ... Was it self-aggrandizing or whatever, like self-promoting or self-important to say, but it's not because it's not about me at all. But Sunday morning from either 9:00 to 10:15 or 10:45 to 12:00, those are the most important 75 minutes of your week every week. I mean, maybe if you're getting married or divorced or you lost a child. Maybe I can't categorically say that for every single person every single week, but certainly on a weekend and week out basis, those 75 minutes of the worship service, the corporate worship service, when we, as God's people, are gathered in his name, in his spirit, under his word, to hear from his appointed messenger, mouthpiece, the pastor from his word. I mean, if you had a 75 minute Zoom counseling meeting every week with God, I do online counseling and I pay a lot of money to my therapist for this 50 minute appointment.
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I don't miss the appointment. I'm going to be there on time. If it was with God, if the Zoom was with God and he's talking to me and telling me this is how you live, I'm going to be there and I'm going to be fully present, engaged, and all that. So yeah, I'll stop there. I think that's probably enough said, but yeah.
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Yeah. How can we teach the difference between everyday meals at home and sacrificial, set apart moments before the Lord without creating legalism or neglecting hospitality?
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Another great question, because in one sense, part of what Jesus does when he dies and rips the curtain from top to bottom, God rips the curtain is there is, like I said,
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This breakdown of the barrier between the secular and the sacred, this idea of, okay, this is the place and only these people can come and only on these days and whatever. So we got to really feel that. Jesus is John 4:20 to 24 thing about you don't have to go to this or that mountain, doesn't have to just be the priest on this day. God wants worshipers who worship and spirit and truth, and that's you, Samaritan woman. That's everyone. The reason he's talking to the Samaritan woman is like, imagine Jews hearing this story or Jesus disciples, who's the person who we'd least peg as being qualified to worship God and to be in God's presence. And so anyway, I think we want to feel that. And again, I referenced the one Corinthians 10:31 where Paul says, "Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all for God's glory." And so again, the way I'm defining worship and was defining worship is just assigning God worth, bringing God glory.
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I think we want to take that really seriously. Our calling in all of life, whatever we do, I mentioned before that great little book, Every Moment Holy, that has daily liturgies for while you're folding laundry, while you're changing a dirty diaper, while you're cooking breakfast or whatever, just making coffee, like taking a shower, I mean, brushing your teeth. These are just an idea of some sample different prayers just to get you thinking and reflecting on every moment is holy. Every moment holds the potential for worship, for bringing God glory in doing that. And also, like I said, and like Moses said yesterday, like God says, is there are these set apart moments and these set apart times and these set apart ... Of course, we're recording this six days before Easter and four days before a Good Friday. And you're thinking about, okay, set apart even in the church calendar and things like that as distinctively, not necessarily holy in a different way, in the same way that the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies was holy and unapproachable and that kind of a holy ... But that are special and that there's still room for that for us as God's new covenant people.
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And again, what we do and how we do it, when we do it, all of that on Sunday mornings, that's special and Easter is special. And so even within the, like I said, even within the regular Sundays, there are special Sundays. So I think how we teach the difference between these things without creating legalism or neglecting hospitality. I mean, one thing with legalism is, I think the thing there is you want to be careful about overspeaking, overstepping, imposing your own kind of ... That's because that's what the Pharisees did, right? They're the prototypical legalists. And what they did was they had effectively buried God's law under their own oral traditions and laws. So you had God say a law like, "Don't work on the Sabbath." But then the Pharisees came along and said, "Well, gosh, we probably need a thousand laws just to explain and apply very, very tangibly and dogmatically what constitutes work, lighting a candle.
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Does that work? Cooking a meal, does that work?" Walking to the synagogue to worship. Does that work? Well, depends on how long you got to walk versus writing an ox versus ... So all these things. And so they just started heaping on laws. So I think we definitely want to be careful about doing that. Like I said, I tried even in yesterdays about like, get your butt to church to give some caveats like, okay, yeah, but we don't want to be so legalistic like, yeah, you're sick, you're a homebound widow, you've got to travel and you're flying out for ... I mean, I take vacations or you've got a cousin's wedding and they're not a Christian and they're getting married on a Sunday. Do you skip the wedding? I mean, there's things where it's like, there's going to be room for personal conscience and so you don't want to overstep and overspeak, but yeah, you want to convey to the same extent and degree, certainly that the Lord does, what he deems special and why, and in what ways?
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So when God says gathering with the church is special, do it. Don't forsake it. Then we want to really be serious about that. So I'll leave that there.
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How can West Hills leaders discern when cultural forms help us communicate the gospel and when they adulterate our worship with rival loves-
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That's another really good question. And I'd be curious to ask Brad even more follow up on what he means specifically by cultural forms. When cultural forms, what does that mean? Help us communicate the gospel and when they adulterate our worship with rival love. So yeah, is he talking about something like the, I don't know, pro- life movement or the pro- country movement or ... Yeah, I just would want, and I don't know if I can really venture to ... Do you have an idea? The word forms is kind of tripping me up. I mean, I can think of things culturally that are sort of culturally normalized for us in our culture in 21st century, upper middle class America, Midwest, whatever, however specifically you want to define our culture of West Hills and podcast listeners. But yeah, is he talking about like ... I don't know.
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I don't know. I'm going to wait and see if ... Yeah, I can get more context from him before trying to answer that.
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Last one that he wrote, what practices could help West Hills defer to God's will rather than doing what is right in our own eyes, especially in planning liturgy, music, or preaching series.
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Well, for starters, you just got to listen to what he's made clear in his word. I think it starts with a lot of churches, I would say ... And again, it kind of depends on how you read and implement and interpret and cross reference God's word because there are times when, again, God's word, it doesn't contradict itself, but times when ... I mean, like something like a first Corinthians 14 and women being silent in church, how do you put that up against like, "Yeah, but the Psalms tell me to make a joyful noise to the Lord at all times, and especially when I'm with his people. " And so anyway, it's going to look good, but this idea of the regulative principle, if you're not familiar with the regulative principles, the idea that anything that we do in worship, especially corporate worship, together as a church, should be regulated directly by God's word.
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And so whether that's the specific things we're going to do ... Now, again, I think for me, some churches can go legalistic with that and they're going to say, "Well, we're not doing announcements from the pulpit." There's nothing about in scripture that when you get together, make sure everybody knows what time the potluck supper is like, no, no. So no announcements or this or that. Whereas I would say, well, I mean, he doesn't also say specifically, well, for instance, how often we do the Lord's Supper or I mean, if you want to be real regulative and look at, for instance, the way the early church was doing in Acts two and Acts four, I mean, they were in one another's houses breaking bread. And so maybe that's where real legalistic house churches are like, "Well, you're supposed to be in houses or whatever." But I think you're trying to find what are the, again, the differentiating the practices from the principles, right?
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That's what we did with Deuteronomy 12 and 13, practice, kill this animal offering, but principle is bring your offerings to God. Well, maybe that's today it's our worship or instead of an animal, maybe that's our tithes and our money or our volunteering and sacrificing in that way, because Jesus is the one for all time animals. So again, even with that, with the regulative principle, what parts of scripture are regulating? Because if you want to do Old Testament worship, that's going to be a problem, bring your dead pets to church. So anyway, I think how we defer to God's will is by rightly reading and trying to understand, interpret, and apply his word for starters and then his spirit. I mean, that's always the two big things, his word and spirit. And this is why we are some of our practices today ... And again, there's other churches that are going to say that this is wrong and that we need to restore first century worship, that if we're not doing it the first century way in houses maybe, that we're not doing it by the book and whatever, we would say, no, there is a role for God's ongoing work of his Holy Spirit in leading his church into all truth and how their worship looked at that time might be different from ours because the church is bigger and we can't fit in anyone's house.
(46:51):
And so it's okay to buy a building or to rent a building or whatever. So yeah, even that, the decision to be out of our building and renovate it so we could go and rent this other building for a year, I mean, that's affecting the physical place and also how we are able to worship as a church, but those decisions were not entered into lightly. So I think that's part of it is taking it seriously and feeling the weight of, and not just I think checking certainly your motives. I mean, what are our motives here? Is it just to get more people, to build the church, to get more kind of money in the offering box or like what are we really trying to do here or are we trying to best facilitate people's assigning of worth to God on Sunday mornings by how and what we do?
(47:52):
So I'll leave that at that. Good questions. Thank you for all those, Brad.
(47:56):
Yeah. And Will, you had mentioned you had a few that you wanted to mention as well.
(48:00):
I'm going to real quick, just again, if I was ... You can tie me on this one too, Brian, this will be less than five minutes for a lot of questions, but I'm just going to read. I'm not going to answer them. If I was Joe Congregant listening to Will's sermon yesterday on Deuteronomy 12 and 13, these are some, just some of, I probably have more, some of the questions that I might ask depending, what's an Asheram? That was in the first three verses. Chop down their Asheram pole. What's that all about? I imagine some of our congregants know the answer to that, but I imagine some don't. And if they don't, they should have asked. Did Moses know the place would be Jerusalem? That was a question I kind of thought. And a lot of times when David's making a prophecy in the Psalms and stuff, it's like a common question.
(48:47):
It's like, "Do you think David knew? Do you think he knew that this was a Missionic Psalm?" In this case, do you think Moses knew, like he referenced three or four times like, "Don't worship just anywhere, worship in these ways, specifically at the place that God would choose." And he keeps saying it that. Do you think he knew or had any sense that it might be Jurius? I don't think so. I don't see why he would. He'd never been there, right?
(49:17):
So anyway, and I don't see any reason why God would have needed to give him that supernatural knowledge. Anyway, what about the 500 years between Joshua and Solomon? So I said Jerusalem is the place where God was going to make his habitation, but that was for 500 years later. What about those interim 500 years from roughly 1400 to roughly 900 BC? Where were they supposed to go? They were already spread out in the land, but Moses had told them to go to the place where God would make his habitation. I imagine that was still then the Ark of the Covenant, right? That's where God had made his presence to dwell in the Ark of the Covenant. Eventually it would set up permanent shot in Jerusalem, but we know their stories of, I mean, the Philistines come and raid and take the Ark of the Covenant for a while and then when they try and transport it back, remember it goes in all these different cities and everyone's scared because God's presence is causing, because of the sin that's there and God's presence being there, there's boils on people's skin.
(50:20):
Anyways, there were multiple different town cities that the ark bounced around for a while. So were people constantly having to try and track in an age before there was really news and like, wait, where's the ark now? Did it move? Where do we go? That's an interesting question. Here's another one. You called out livestream. I said Jeroboam facetiously named his two calves livestream and youth sports. I was trying to think, what keeps people from being with the church on Sundays? You called out the livestream, but don't we use a livestream as a church? We have a livestream. So what's with you hating on the livestream? That's a good question. You said, if you baptize yourself, it's not a real baptism. I said that yesterday. What about other non-church baptisms? What about if I got baptized at a youth camp? What if I went on a trip to the Holy Land to Jerusalem and got baptized in the Jordan River by someone who wasn't my pastor or I wasn't with the church or whatever?
(51:16):
Are those not real baptisms? What constitutes a real baptism? I don't know. Just a comment I made in passing that I was like, huh, somebody could ... Many of my principles for worship from the sermon were pulled from sections of texts discussing this whole long section in the middle of chapter 12 on slaughtering and eating your meat in your towns. Why is that worship? So I read that as all part of Moses' instructions about worship here, but really you could read that as just this whole kind of non-sequitur kind of an aside. He has this whole aside about, "Oh, by the way though, let's talk about eating meat for a little bit. If you want to eat meat once you get in the promised land, you can do that as long as you do it this way and this type of meat. And here's when you need to take it to the temple, here's what you don't." Why are you still connecting that to worship?
(52:08):
That's a valid question. What are some examples of the kinds of holy things that should be reserved for God alone? So verse 26 said, "But the holy things you got to go to God's place for. " And I said, "There are certain things we got to go to church for, Lord supper, corporate worship, whatever." But I also said there are certain parts of us of our heart that we should only give to God, like the blood. I've used the example of for them, it was blood. God said, "That belongs to me. Give that to me only." What is that for us? What are some examples of ... I said there are certain parts of my heart that shouldn't go to my kids, even my wife, those closest to me, but only to God. What is that? What does that look like practically for you as a husband to love Jesus more than you love your wife and to reserve certain things that you don't even share with your wife that you share only with Jesus and that you give only to him?
(53:05):
That's a great question. What are examples of abominable ways that the church has adopted in our worship from the surrounding godless culture? That was verse 31 of the end of chapter 12 where he said, "Your worship has to be distinctive. Don't inquire about how the other nations that used to live here used to worship their gods and do their practices." So if you want to draw that parallel to the surrounding sort of pagan godless people in our culture today in 21st century America and how they quote unquote worship and assign worth, what are some practices and some principles and some things that we should be especially cautious of, not letting it creep into our worship and where have we maybe seen that in the 21st century evangelical church? Are there practices that we could, hopefully not our own at West Hills, but I could go to another church and say, "This church just did that.
(54:05):
" I mean, one of the examples that I heard a pastor mention was secular music, playing secular music to build a bridge, but yeah, does that have no place in our worship on Sundays? But what are some other things that might creep into the church? And then lastly, I made my very kind of final point about verses 12 through 18 of chapter 13 about comfort. I said, "Be aware of influencers, be aware of loving your family more than the Lord and be aware of loving comfort more than the Lord." Why comfort? That was an interesting ... It was so quick. I was like two minutes at the end of the sermon, so I didn't really have time to unpack why I made it about that and interpret it in that way. But I did kind of expect a close listener to be like, "This was a passage about going and slaughtering an entire town that had fallen away to apostate worship, but you made it about like, do we love our own comfort more?" What was that connection for you to comfort?
(55:13):
So anyway, I'm not going to say more. I'm not going to answer any of those questions, but I'm just going to try and continue to get in the habit of naming for people the kinds of questions that we want to have when we're really fully engaging in the message.
(55:29):
Thanks, Pastor Will. Amen. Well, we hope that this has been beneficial and edifying for you as you seek to be changed and to love God more as you apply God's word after the sermon. So go apply the sermon, continue to make disciples and Lord willing, we'll catch you right back here sometime next week.
(55:47):
Happy Easter. See you Sunday and Good Friday and the Easter egg hunt Saturday. See you this weekend. A lot. I hope.
(55:53):
Lots of
(55:54):
Opportunities. We hope and pray.