True Spiritual Worship 

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit

God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship him in spirit and in truth. – John 4:24

Every form of religion has its ritual. The Quaker, who sits still, and does not say a word, has a ritual so far; and he that has a thousand rites and ceremonies has a ritual so much farther. But if I have gone through the general routine of the worship of my church and then think that I have done something acceptable to God while yet my heart has not communed with Him in humble repentance, or faith, or love, or joy, or consecration, I make a great mistake. You may keep on with your religious performances for seventy years or more; you may never miss what our Scotch friends call “a diet of worship”; you may not neglect a single rubric in the whole ritual; but it is all nothing unless the soul has fellowship with God. Godliness is a spiritual thing; for “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” So far as our forms or worship help us towards this spiritual communion, they are good, but no farther. “Oh, well!” says one, “I never worship beneath a cathedral roof; I am quite content to meet with a few friends in a barn.” Do not suppose, my friend, that the meagerness of your accessories has necessarily secured true worship. If thou hast met God in the barn, it is well; and if thy brother has met God in the right spirit, I care but little for thy barn, and I care even less for his cathedral. What does it signify how thou hast garnished thine offering if it be not a living sacrifice, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ? A dead thing must not be brought to the altar of God. Remember that, under the Jewish law, they never offered fish upon the altar, because they could not bring it there alive. Everything brought to God as a sacrifice must be alive. Its blood must be poured out warm at the altar’s foot. Oh, that you and I might feel that lifting of the soul to God, and that buoyancy of heart, which true spiritual worship alone can bring to us! May our ritual, whether we have much or little, be our guide to God, and not our chain to hold us back from God!

Is God in the Camp? by C. H. Spurgeon

Newer is Not Truer

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit

And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp. And they said, Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a thing heretofore. – 1 Samuel 4:7

“The Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp. And they said, Woe unto us! For there hath not been such a thing heretofore.” The Israelites probably made the same mistake, fixing their hope on this new method of fighting the Philistines, which they hoped would bring them victory. We are all so apt to think that the new plan of going to work will be much more effective than those that have become familiar; but it is not so. It is generally a mistake to exchange old lamps for new. “There hath not been such a thing heretofore.” There is a glamour about the novelty which misleads us and we are liable to think the newer is the truer. If there has not been such a thing heretofore, some people will take to it at once for that very reason. “Oh,” says the man who is given up to change, “that is the thing for me!” But it is probably not the thing for a true-hearted and intelligent Christian, for if, “there hath not been such a thing heretofore,” it is difficult to explain, if the thing be a good one, why the Holy Ghost, who has been with the people of God since Pentecost, and who came to lead us into all truth, has not led the Church of God to this before. If your new discovery is the mind of God, where has the Holy Scriptures been all these centuries? Believing in the infallible Word and the abiding Spirit, I rather suspect your novelty; at least I cannot say that I endorse it until I have tested it by the Word of God. Philistines may like a thing that has not been heretofore; but we like the thing that has been since the days of Pentecost, the things that come from Him who is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever”: the workings of that God who changes not, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” Let Him work His blessed will; and if He chooses to send a new thing on the earth, we will glorify His name; but because there are new things in the world, we will not ascribe them to Him for they may come from quite another quarter. We remember that “Lo, here is Christ, or there!” was the cry against which our Lord warned His disciples. Concerning such a cry the Saviour said, “Believe it not.”

Is God in the Camp? by C. H. Spurgeon

Do Not Confound Enthusiasm with Faith

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, The Holy Spirit

And when the ark of the covenant of the LORD came into the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again. – 1 Samuel 4:5

Anyone who had passed the camp of Israel that day might have said that they had “a bright, cheerful, happy service; just the kind of service the people like, you know, nothing dull about it.” Hark! How the glad sound rises! Surely these people must have great faith! No, they had not a scrap of the real article. They were under a mistake all the time; and shout as they might, they had very little to shout about; for in a short time their carcasses strewed the plain. The Philistines put an end to their shouting. Now, beloved, when you are worshipping God, shout if you are filled with holy gladness. If the ejaculation comes from your heart, I would not ask you to restrain it. God forbid that we should judge any man’s worship! But do not be so foolish as to suppose that because there is loud noise there must also be faith. Faith is a still water, it floweth deep. True faith in God may express itself with leaping and shouting and it is a happy thing when it does: but it also sits still before the Lord, and that perhaps is a happier thing still. Praise can sit silent on the lip and yet be heard in heaven. There is a passion of the heart too deep for words. There are feelings that break the backs of words; the mind staggers and trembles beneath the weight of them. Frost of the mouth often comes with thaw of the soul; and when the heart’s great deeps are breaking up, it sometimes happens that the mouth is not large enough to let the torrents flow, and so it has to be comparatively silent. Do not, therefore, make the mistake of confounding enthusiasm with faith in judging the externals of worship, else you may fall into a thousand blunders. He may worship God who shouts till the earth rings again, and God may accept him; but he may worship God as truly who sits in silence before the Most High and says not even a word. It is the spiritual worship which is most acceptable to God, not the external in any form or shape. It is the heart that has fellowship with the Lord, and it needs little in the way of expressing itself, neither has God tied it down to this way or that. It may find its own methods of utterance so long as it is truly “moved by the Holy Ghost.”

Is God in the Camp? by C. H. Spurgeon

The Jewel of Peace

Sherry sermon

You who are King of kings and Lord of lords, we worship You. Before Jehovah’s awful throne we bow with sacred joy.

Sermon Text

Superstitious Reverence

Sherry Christian Life, prayer, salvation, Sovereignty of God

So the people sent to Shiloh, that they might bring from thence the ark of the covenant of the LORD of hosts, which dwelleth between the cherubims: and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God. – 1 Samuel 4:4

These Israelites…preferred office to character. In their distress, instead of calling upon God, they sent for Hophni and Phinehas. Why did their hearts turn to them? Simply because they were priests, and the people had come to hold the sacred office in such superstitious reverence that they thought that was everything. But these young men were sinners against the Lord exceedingly; they were not even moral men; much less were they spiritual men. They made the house of God to be abhorred and dishonored the Lord before all Israel. Yet, because they happened to hold the office of the priesthood, they were put in the place of God. Dear friends, this is a kind of feeling which many indulge. They think they shall be saved if they have a Levite for their priest. They imagine that the worship of God must be conducted properly, because the man who conducts it is in the apostolic succession, and has been duly ordained. You shall see a man eminent for the holiness of his life, for the disinterestedness of his character, for the fidelity of his preaching, for his power in prayer, for the blessing that rests upon his ministry in the conversion of sinners; but he is counted a mere nobody, because he lacks the superstitious qualification which deluded men think is so necessary.

Now, God forbid that we should say a word against the house of Aaron, or against any who speak the name of the Lord, whom God has truly called unto His work! But, beloved, this work is not a mere matter of pedigree; it is a question of the abiding presence of God with man and in a man. Unless God be with the minister whom you hear, to what purpose do you listen? If the leader of the church be not one who walks with God, where will he lead you? “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” The blind man may wear a badge on his arm to show that he is a certified guide; but will you be saved from the ditch simply because he belongs to the order of guides, and has his certification with him? Be not led away by any such vain notion. Yet this is the error into which many have fallen in all ages of the Church.

Is God in the Camp? by C. H. Spurgeon

Mistaking Emotion for Worship

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, Sovereignty of God

And when the ark of the covenant of the LORD came into the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again…And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp. And they said, Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a thing heretofore. – 1 Samuel 4:5,7

The Israelites, instead of seeing to God Himself, went to Shiloh to fetch the ark of the covenant. The ark was the sacred place where God revealed Himself in the days when His people truly served Him; but it was devoid of power, without the presence of Him who dwelt between the cherubim. The Israelites were mistaken, for they shouted long before they were “out of the woods.” Before they had won any victory, the sight of the ark made them boastful and confident. The Philistines fell into an error of a different kind, for they were frightened without any real cause. They said, “God has come into the camp;” whereas God had not come at all. It was only the ark with the cherubim upon it; God was not there.

It has pleased God, even in our holy faith, to give us some external symbols—water, and bread, and wine. They are so simple, that it does seem, at first sight, as if men could never have made them objects of worship or used them as instruments of a kind of witchcraft…It is sad, indeed, when the symbol takes the place of the Saviour! Man is by nature both an atheist and an idolater. These are two shades of the same thing. We want, if we do worship at all, something that we can see…Anything which we can see, we pine after…we want some symbol, some token, something before our eyes; and if it can be something artistic, so much the better. We lay hold of something beautiful, that will charm the eye, and produce a kind of sensuous feeling, and straightway we mistake our transient emotion for spiritual worship and true reverence. 

Let us each one look after his own life and see that all is right there; then the life of the Church will soon be at flood-tide, and when we go forth to the battle, the Philistines will know of a truth that “God is come into the camp.”

Is God in the Camp? by C. H. Spurgeon

This Must Be Done

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, promises, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Father, The Holy Spirit

The LORD’S voice crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see Thy name: hear ye the rod, and Who hath appointed it. – Micah 6:9

Israel was out of gear with God. The people had forgotten the Most High and had gone aside to the worship of Baal. They had neglected the things of God; therefore, they were given up to their enemies. When Jehovah had brought them out of Egypt, He instructed them how they were to live in the land to which He would bring them, and warned them that if they forsook Him, they would be chastened. His words were very plain: “If ye will not for all this hearken unto Me but walk contrary unto Me, then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury, and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.” In fulfillment of this threatening, the Philistines had been divinely permitted to make great havoc of the idolatrous Israelites, and to hold them in cruel slavery.

The only way for them to get out of their trouble was to return to God, who, by His judgments, seemed to say, “Hear ye the rod, and Who hath appointed it.” The only cure for their hurt was to go back with repentance and renew their faith and their covenant with God. Then all would have been right. But this is the last thing that men will do. Our minds, by nature, love not spiritual things. We will attend to any outward duty, or to any external rite; but to bring our hearts into subjection to the divine will, to bow our minds to the Most High, and to serve the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, the natural man abhors. Yet nothing less than this will suffice to turn our captivity.

Instead of attempting to get right with God, these Israelites set about devising superstitious means of securing the victory over their foes. In this respect most of us have imitated them. We think of a thousand inventions; but we neglect the one thing needful…Get right with God; confess thy sin; believe in Jesus Christ, the appointed Saviour; be reconciled to God by the death of His Son; then all will be right between thee and the Father in heaven. We cannot bring men to this, apart from the Spirit of God.

Is God in the Camp? by C. H. Spurgeon