Tag: honor

Published October 5, 2020

God Honors Those Who Honor Him

This morning we are getting back into our story of Samuel. When we last left Samuel, he was about 2-5 years old and his parents, Elkanah and Hannah, had just left him at the tabernacle to live with the priest Eli. And if you missed our previous messages, you might wonder why Samuel’s parents might do such a thing! What would cause a mother leave her 2-5 year old child to live at the tabernacle and be raised by someone else?

Well, just to give you a quick recap, previous to all this, Hannah had been barren – she was unable to have children – which of course, caused her a great deal of heartache and sadness. But she prayed to God and asked Him for son – promising that if God were to give her a son, then she would give her son back to the Lord. She would dedicate him to live and serve the Lord for his entire lifetime.

And graciously, God heard her prayer and gave her exactly what she asked for. Before long, little Samuel was born – and true to her promise, as soon as he was weaned, Hannah brought him to live at the tabernacle. He would be raised by Eli the priest, and would learn to serve the Lord by assisting Eli in his priestly duties.

We read in 1 Samuel 2:11…

11 Then Elkanah returned home to Ramah without Samuel. And the boy served the Lord by assisting Eli the priest. 1 Samuel 2:11

God had answered Hannah’s prayer and so Hannah kept her promise to God and left little Samuel to grow up serving the Lord at the tabernacle.

And so that’s where we are picking up the story today. Today’s passage gives us some snapshots of Samuel’s life growing up at the tabernacle. But it doesn’t revolve solely around the life of Samuel – but it also includes what’s happening with Eli and his two sons – Hophni and Phinehas. And as we are going to see, things are not good with Eli and his sons. Even though they were the priests – representing God at His tabernacle – we quickly see that they were not the Godly representatives that God intended them to be.

In fact, the rest of this chapter is written in a way that contrasts the goodness of Samuel with the wickedness of Eli and his sons. It’s a series of back-and-forth snapshots showing how Samuel grows up honouring the Lord – but Eli and his sons increasingly dishonour the Lord.

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Representing Christ in the Workplace

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about two unpleasant things that everybody does, but nobody really likes doing. And no, it’s not death and taxes – although those may be the end result of these two things that we’ve been talking about. We’ve been talking about suffering and submitting: suffering even when we do what’s right – and submitting to all human authorities that God has placed over us.

Neither of those are things we really enjoy doing – but yet God has called us to do exactly that.

Now if you happen to have missed last week’s message, let me give you a quick recap of some of the main points.

For the last month or so, we’ve been working our way through the book of 1 Peter and one of the big themes of the entire book is that for Christians, this world is no longer home sweet home. As Christians, we have become citizens of a new kingdom – we’ve been transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. And so, as citizens of the Kingdom of God with Jesus as our King, we are now temporary residents and foreigners in this present world. But we’re not just wandering around through this life aimlessly – waiting to go finally home and be with Jesus. While we’re here, we have a job to do. We are ambassadors for our King. Two weeks ago we read from 1 Peter chapter 2 verse 9 which reads:

“… For you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.” 1 Peter 2:9

We were reminded that as God’s people, as His holy nation living in an unbelieving world – our job to show others the goodness of God. We are to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth so that others can come to know and love our heavenly Father just like we do.

But in order to do that – in order to be effective salt and light in this world, Peter tells us in verse 12 of that same chapter…

“Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world.” 1 Peter 2:12

We need to make sure that our lives are so far above reproach that even if we are falsely accused of doing wrong – our honourable behaviour will give evidence to the truth. We want to live such different and upright lives that others can’t help but notice and consider the truth of what we believe and live for.

So having said that, Peter goes on to then give us several examples of what that actually looks like in real life. He started with this passage that we read last week:

13 For the Lord’s sake, submit to all human authority—whether the king as head of state, 14 or the officials he has appointed. For the king has sent them to punish those who do wrong and to honor those who do right.

15 It is God’s will that your honorable lives should silence those ignorant people who make foolish accusations against you. 16 For you are free, yet you are God’s slaves, so don’t use your freedom as an excuse to do evil. 17 Respect everyone, and love the family of believers. Fear God, and respect the king.

1 Peter 2:13-17

And I know for a lot of people, this is a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes we have a real difficult time submitting to our governments the other authorities over us – especially when those in positions of authority are evil and corrupt.

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Published March 10, 2020

Honour the King

Today, as we continue our journey through the book of 1 Peter, we come to a passage that probably wasn’t a favourite memory verse for any of Peter’s original readers and it probably isn’t a favourite verse of anyone today – because it’s a passage that talks about how we are to submit to our governments – how we are to honour and respect those in authority over us.

And I don’t think it matters what country you live in, where in history you find yourself, what parties you support or any of that – I think for most people, it is a real challenge to submit to our governments.

I read an article this week that talked about how the United States official seal came into being.

I’m sure you’ve seen this seal before – it was designed back when the original 13 colonies of the United States were declaring their independence from Britain. And on the front side of the seal there is an eagle holding an olive branch in one claw and 13 arrows in the other – signifying how they were seeking peace, but they were willing to go to war to defend their liberty.

Then on the flip side of that seal, they have the pyramid with 13 layers and the all-seeing Eye above that – signifying that God was watching over them as they built this new nation.

Well, when they were coming up with these designs, Benjamin Franklin had a different proposal for the reverse side. And I think it perhaps reflects some of our negative views of submitting to government. This is what he wanted to see – imagine this:

Pharaoh sitting in an open chariot, a crown on his head and a sword in his hand, passing through the divided waters of the Red Sea in pursuit of the Israelites. Rays from a pillar of fire in the cloud, expressive of the Divine presence and command, beaming on Moses, who stands on the shore and, extending his hand over the sea, causes it to overflow Pharaoh. And the motto: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

That’s the seal and the motto that Benjamin Franklin would have liked to see. The article went on to say how Americans live in a country that was founded on a revolution and in which defiance of government authority is viewed as a basic constitutional right.

And based on what I see in politics today, I think many Americans and many Canadians and many Albertans would quickly adopt that same proposed motto. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God!”

But you know, as you read through 1 Peter, I’m not sure that Peter would agree with that statement. But I’ll let you be the judge of that yourself as we go through this passage together this morning.

And of course, my purpose today is certainly not to speak into politics, but rather, my purpose is to share with you an accurate understanding of God’s Word and how He wants us to live as strangers and foreigners in this world. And I think we’ll see that the application for this passage has a far greater reach than just politics – so I’ll leave the specific applications up to you and you can come to your own conclusions.

Our passage today begins in 1 Peter chapter 2, starting at verse 13. It goes like this:

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Changing Diapers for the Glory of God

It was an unusual service last week. We played “The Price Is Right” right in the middle of the message and we had a quick round of “Balderdash” – but it was all to help us understand what it means to worship.

Worship is the fifth spiritual discipline that we’ve looked at since we began this series on Healthy Habits, but its a little bit different from the other spiritual disciplines in that, while most spiritual disciplines are specific activities that Christians do in order to help us grow in our understanding and in our faith in God, worship is not necessarily a particular activity. We can worship in almost everything we do.

We learned that while you might envision worship as singing or bowing down or bringing an offering or sacrifice, worship is really much more than all those kinds of activities.

To help us define worship, we looked at the old English word “Weorthscipe” – which is where we get our modern word “Worship.” And weorthscipe means to declare the value or the worth of something. It’s worth-ship.

So when we worship God, we can certainly declare God’s worth through singing for example – but really, we worship God (that is, we declare His worth through our actions) anytime we choose to honour and please Him above everything else. When knowing and pleasing God is more important to us than anything else, then we are worshiping God. And on the flip side of that, anytime anything else is more important to us than knowing and pleasing God – that becomes an idol to us and we worship that other thing rather than God.

So that, in a nutshell, was what we talked about last week. All of us worship something – the real question is “What do we worship? What do we value more than anything? Do we worship God or do we worship something else?” And I hope that’s a question that you’ve wrestled with over this past week.

Now this week, I want to build on our definition of worship. What we’ve looked at so far is what I’d call our “unintentional worship”. It’s not necessarily specific activities that we do, it’s more of an attitude. It’s simply what we value. Because like we said… What we value the most is what we worship. We don’t even have to put thought into it. If we worship money, for example, that just becomes evident in how we live our lives. We just automatically arrange our priorities so that money is given the greatest consideration in any circumstance.

It’s not like we go physically go and bow before our piggy banks or pray to our wallets. Not literally anyway… So that’s why I would classify this kind of worship as “unintentional worship”. We just kinda do it automatically.

But when it comes to worshipping God, in addition to our unintentional worship, there should also be an element of intentional worship as well. There are things that we intentionally do to express our worship. And the Bible is full of statements and commands and examples of intentional acts of worship.

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