Sublime Welcome, Sober Warning
Psalm 95 ·October 1, 2023· Taylor Howsmon
Part of: Psalms
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Good morning everybody. My name is Taylor, as Joel said. I am currently serving as assistant pastor at Meadowview Presbyterian Church in Lexington, North Carolina, and it's great to be with you today. I'm always a little intimidated preaching back in my hometown. Anybody that knew me in middle school knows that I'm a bit of a hypocrite with anything that I have to say. So that's an intimidating thing, without a doubt. But if you have a Bible, turn with me to Psalm 95. Psalm 95. I believe it is written in your bulletin as well. If you do not have a Bible, we will be reading from the ESV translation. If you don't have that, that's perfectly fine, but that's what I'll be reading from this morning. So let's look at Psalm 95. We have a tremendous blessing from God in the Psalms.
The Psalms are an amazing thing that God has given us. The songbook of Israel that He's preserved by His grace in His Word. And Ligon Duncan, a Reformed pastor, said that the Psalms give us the whole range of the Christian experience. They describe to us the whole range of what it means to be a believer and a follower of Christ, and they direct us in how we are to express our Christian experience. I think that's a great description of what the Psalms do. They not only help us to know what it is to be a Christian, but they help tell us what it is to live as a Christian, how it looks to live as a Christian. The whole range, both the joys and the sorrows. And that's why the Psalms are an incredible gift to us. This morning we're going to read from Psalm 95.
This is 11 verses, so I'm going to go ahead and read it. I'll pray, and we will dig into it together. And before I read, this is a reminder that what we are about to read is the holy, inspired, and inerrant Word of the living God. This is a book that is sharper than any two-edged sword. It is living and active and has the power to transform our hearts. Hear this from Psalm 95. Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come into His presence with thanksgiving. Let us make a joyful noise to Him with songs of praise.
For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods. In His hand are the depths of the earth. The heights of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
For 40 years, I loathed that generation and said, They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways. Therefore, I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. The grass withers, and the flowers fade, but the Word of our God shall stand forever. Please pray with me.
Our God and Heavenly Father, we thank You for this great psalm of worship, this great song that You have given us to look at this morning. We pray that by Your Spirit, You will work it into our hearts and our minds. For those walking with who know Christ, I pray that this text would both serve to us as an encouragement, also as one that would come to convict us, Father. Pray that it would teach us not only to be hearers of Your Word, but doers also.
I pray for anybody in the room that does not know Christ, that they, by Your Spirit, would be led, that they would see Him for the perfect, holy, righteous, beautiful Savior that He is this morning. That You would change hearts and minds with the Gospel, the only thing that has the power to do that. We ask this in the name of Your Son, Jesus. So as I said, this psalm is part of the songbook of Israel. This is giving us the whole range of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to live the Christian experience.
And what this psalm is about is worship. This psalm is chiefly about worship. And I would say, I would argue, worship is the most important thing that we have to do. Worship is what God has created His people for. It's what He's created us to do. Many of you are familiar with the Westminster Shorter Catechism first question. What is the chief end? That is, what is the highest purpose of man? It is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. That is our calling.
We are made for worship, both in an individual sense, with the way that we live out our lives day to day, and also in a corporate sense. We gather Lord's day after Lord's day to come into God's presence together to sing His praises. That is what we are here for. And so we read this beautiful and rich text from Psalm 95 about worship. What is it to worship? What is it to be a worshiper? How do we worship? Why do we worship? And that's all here. I've given you two, I believe, two outline points to go through.
It kind of outlines the psalm well. So if you're a note taker, this is the time to give yourself some headings. The first section covers verses 1 through 7a, the first half of verse 7. And we're going to call that the sublime welcome. The sublime welcome. The second half will cover 7b through verse 11, and that will be the sober warning. I get made fun of. We have two other pastors on staff at Meadowview, and they make fun of me all the time for the amount of work that I put in for alliteration in my sermon points.
And I do. I take great pride in my alliteration. So the sublime welcome and the sober warning. Thank you, Joel. I appreciate the affirmative thumbs up.
So let's look at the sublime welcome. Verses 1 to 7a. The first half, the psalmist gives us a sense, not just of what it is that we are to do, which is to worship, but how we ought to worship, why we ought to worship. All of that is here. And he uses very repetitive and very emphatic language to show us what it is to be a worshiper, what it means to be a worshiper. You'll notice if you look at the text of the psalm that the word come appears three times.
In verse 1, in verse 2, and verse 6. In church history, this has been known as the venite. That's the Latin word for come. I grew up in the Episcopal Church. We sang the venite on a weekly basis as part of the Eucharist. And so this has been known as venite, to come. That's what this great psalm is. It's interesting, though, as you get into the language, the Hebrew that it was written in, is that the word come being translated to come is three different words.
It's three different Hebrew words. And they build throughout the psalm in terms of sort of a distance, right? It's a building closer. The first word indicates a coming, as in sort of a, hey, come and listen here. Come here. The second is sort of a come and embrace. Sort of a come in close. And the third, in verse 6, is this very intimate word. It's an invitation. Come almost into the house. Come through the dwelling. Come and gather in my home. And so you see that there's this progression throughout the psalm.
A distance far off to a closeness coming in. And you see that throughout. This is the rhythm that the psalm is meant to have. It's moving the hearer closer. And we can't miss the fact that in the first verse of this psalm, there is a call to worship issued. Joel alluded to this at the beginning of the service. But we do, at the beginning of our services, a call to worship. And it's a very easy thing to sort of think over, look over, right? It's a, you know, sometimes it's the beginning of the service.
You're looking for a mint in your purse. Or you're trying to get kids calmed down. Or whatever it is, you're kind of listening, but sort of not, right? But we cannot miss the significance of the call to worship. And right here in Psalm 95, O come, let us sing to the Lord. Do not let the importance of this wash over your head, Christian. The God who created you, the God who created the heavens and the earth, the God who is transcendent, eternal, holy, righteous, powerful, invites you to come and to worship.
Invites you into His presence. There's no small part about that. There's no small thing for God to invite you in. And remember in Genesis chapter 3, when Adam and Eve fell into sin, God sent them away. God sent them off out of the garden, placed a cherubim to guard the garden so they couldn't come back in. He cast them away from His presence. Here in Psalm 95, we see God saying, Come. Come to Me. Come and worship. He's drawing us back. I would argue that you will never understand worship.
You will never understand what it is to be a worshiper unless you understand the costliness of this invitation. You understand that it cost God, the very blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, to be able to issue you this invitation. To be able to issue you the invitation, Come. Come, guilty, frail, failure sinner. Come in worship. Why? Because the finished work of My Son, Jesus Christ, has brought you in with boldness and confidence to the throne. This is an incredible gospel invitation.
The gospel being extended to you week after week after week in the call to worship. And we have a great example here in Psalm 95. We see this movement, this far off to being brought near throughout the Scriptures. This is an ongoing theme ever since the fall in Genesis 3. We see this invitation, come near. Ephesians 2.13 says, But now, Christ Jesus, now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Hebrews 10 says, Since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way He opened for us, let us draw near with a true heart.
From Genesis to Revelation, we see a constant and consistent invitation from God to come and worship by His very presence. But it's not just a call. Not just a call to worship. This sublime welcome gives us an indication of how we ought to worship. There's a lot of argument and discussion in the church of how we ought to worship. Do we raise our hands? Do we stand up? Do we sit down? Do we run around the sanctuary like crazy people? What does it look like?
What do we worship? How do we do this? What do I do with my hands? Right? You see in the psalm something of a how. How to worship. Look at verses 1 and 2. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come into His presence with thanksgiving. And again, let us make a joyful noise to Him with songs of praise. The mood is passionate, joyful, emotional. And why is this? It's because when you're truly gripped by something, when you are truly, by your heart, taken with something, you cannot help but let that emotion and joy pour out of you.
It can't be helped. I'm astounded often at what gets me choked up and emotional. The things that suddenly just crack my voice a little bit. And I get misty-eyed talking about, you know, any given thing. My daughter's Virginia Tech football. It's mostly sad now than anything exciting. But when I talk about any of these things, I'm amazed at the emotion that comes out. We were made to be emotional beings. You were created for that. Why? Because God is an emotional God.
No, He doesn't get emotional like we do. He's not reactionary the same way we are. But we were made in His image. Part of what that means is that we're emotional people.
And that's a good thing. When you're gripped by something, when you truly feel gripped by something, you can't help but let emotion pour out of you. I think, I have two daughters. My daughter Naomi is three. My daughter Caroline is seven months old. I think one of my truly favorite things about becoming a father that I never anticipated was coming home from work. I think it's like my favorite, one of my favorite things still to this day is one of my favorite things.
Our house in Lexington, if you go through the front door, there's like this narrow hallway. You can't see the family room from the front door, right? You come in and it's kind of around an angle. And so I come in the door and I hear my three-year-old Naomi drop whatever she has, scream daddy, and come running down this hallway, bounding towards me, right? Expecting me to have dropped all my things by the time she gets there so that she can jump up and wrap me in an embrace.
Sometimes I don't get my stuff down fast enough and it's a whole thing. But no, it is just this, it's my favorite thing in the world, right? And I know that there will come one day when she's 12 and, you know, we have tension where, you know, I'm going to have to bottle this and remember that this was a thing when she was three. But as of right now, it's the greatest thing in the world, right? And I'm always very careful with this as an illustration because I don't want anybody thinking that I'm, you know, proclaiming to be God in this picture or Naomi to be a worshiper of me in this picture.
That's not where we're headed. Save your emails for Joel. So, but there is an amazing picture there. There is an amazing picture of this three-year-old running with reckless abandon to her daddy knowing that he will wrap her in an embrace when he sees her just as excited to see her as she is to see him. And that's a daily thing. It's an amazing thing. And this is the picture, I think, that's here in Psalm 95. What is it for us to come to worship?
It's not just this Sunday morning activity that we have to check off our schedule. We are invited into the very presence of God. And it says, come into the presence of God with thanksgiving. Make a joyful noise. Let it go. Let it rip. Right? We're coming to see our Father in heaven who has welcomed us by the blood of Jesus Christ to say you are my child and I love you no matter what your week was like, no matter what struggles you've had, no matter where you failed in the last six days.
Come into my presence with joy and make a joyful noise. And on the flip side of that, God's just as excited to see us as we are Him. Have you thought of that before? Have you thought about the fact that when you come into God's presence with a joyful noise coming in through the name and in the name of Jesus Christ, God rejoices to see you running toward Him, to wrap you in an embrace. That's the picture we have in Psalm 95. Outpouring of joy and emotion.
I think especially a lot of Presbyterians need to think through this a lot because we tend to fall off on this side a good bit. That, you know, we don't raise our hands above our elbows and we, you know, we tend to be solemn, good, reformed theologians, right? With our doctrine. And while I'm not trying to guilt anybody or be legalistic about this, what I will say is that if you've never had an experience in worship where there was a joy and an emotion and an outpouring, it's time to probably ask yourself, why?
Where's it been? Was it ever there in the first place? I confess, and I'm deeply convicted by this, I confess there is something very, very wrong in my heart when my weekend is made or broken by a Virginia Tech football game and I come into worship Sunday morning with a sense of routine and boredom. There's something deeply wrong in my heart. There's something deeply wrong in my heart when a medical diagnosis or something my kid made at school or something, any of these things that none of these are bad things necessarily, but when these things grip your heart more than worshiping the God who created you and welcomed you back into his presence, there's something wrong there.
There's something disordered there. R.C. Sproul, a great reformed theologian, wrote this several years ago. So, if people find worship boring and irrelevant, it can only mean that they have no sense of the presence of God in it. When we study the act of worship in Scripture and in church history, we discover a variety of human responses to the sense of the presence of God. Though the responses differ, one reaction we never find is boredom. It is impossible to be bored in the presence of God.
Part of this how statement continues down in v. 6. We have the sort of flip side to this because worship that is all about emotion and all about joy and all about emotion and all about all of these things, right? That tends to slip off to a sort of irreverent side. So, we have a balance here in Psalm 95. If you skip down to v. 6, it says, O come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker. Again, I don't try to get too technical with language, but it's profound what happens in the Hebrew here.
Three graphic verbs, right, here in this verse. O come, that I told you about earlier. O come, come intimately into the house, right? Let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, right? These verbs in rapid succession are picturing what it is to come in God's presence in worship, right? Yes, come into the house. But when He says, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel. Three Hebrew words back to back. And if we were to translate it woodenly, it would say, bow down, bow down, bow down.
I'm glad we don't translate it woodenly. But that's what it would say. Bow down, bow down, bow down. The same verb repeated in the Hebrew, right? And the point here, what He's trying to get across to you here is that what it looks like to come into God's presence, yes, joy, yes, thanksgiving, yes, emotion, but it also looks like a reverence, not a polite curtsy, not a, hey, how you doing, God? Not a, you know, not one of these tips of the cap. He is talking about a bow down, face in the dirt prostration before the living God and understanding that you are not Him and He is not you and you do not, you are not worthy to come into the presence of the living God, right?
He is, the psalmist is giving us this picture that what it looks like to come into God's presence involves a reverence. Bow down, bow down, bow down before the Lord, your Maker. And so to summarize this sort of how of worship, we are to come into God's presence with a joy, right, with a thanksgiving, with an emotion, but with a reverence, right? There's a balance there. There's a balance that is being, right, suggested. I'm not here to tell you what that actually kind of looks like practically.
It's not a job of mine to get in a worship war when I'm visiting at, you know, the one time at the church plant in Chester to never be asked back, I'm sure. But the reality is that this is something we all, everybody who comes into worship must kind of contemplate. What does it look like to come in with a joy, a reverence, an awe, an emotion, a thanksgiving? All of those things together.
The final part of the sublime welcome is in verses 3 to 5. And there we get kind of the why of worship. We've gotten the how, now what is the why? Why should we worship? Why do we worship God? He gives four reasons, and I'll go through these quickly in verses 3 to 5. In verse 3, he says that God is sovereign and powerful, for the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods. Psalm 95 calls us to grasp something of God's bigness, God's greatness, God's transcendence.
And the second reason he gives flows from that first. He says God created everything and he rules over it. Great King above all gods. The sea is his, for he made it.
He talks about the way that God made the world. This world that we live in, God made it. Why do we worship God? It's not just because he sovereignly rules and reigns over it. It's because he made it. It's his. Have you ever really contemplated how big the world is? Like, I think we get so zoned into our little, like, the world of our phone and the world of our little community and the world of our, because we are the kings of our own universe. And like, we forget how big the world is.
I remember doing research at one point on the Mariana Trench. It's the deepest point we've found in the ocean. Deepest point we've discovered, I believe, still to date. That might be dated. But hopefully, it's still the deepest we've found in the ocean. It goes down 36,000 feet into the sea. To put that in perspective, if you were to take the highest peak of Mount Everest, flip it upside down, put it into the ocean, you would still have over a mile of water left.
That's insane to me. Right? The earth is a gigantic, large place. And here the psalmist is telling us, basically, it is just putty in the hands of a mighty God. It's a toy. Right? The sea is his. He made it. His hands formed the dry land. It's just, it's a small thing for a mighty God. Grasp the bigness. Grasp the bigness of God. I think part of our worship a lot of the time is that we have a very, very small God in our minds. We have a very small God in our minds as we worship.
The third reason comes at the end of verse 6. Not only did he make the earth sovereignly ruling and reigning, he made you and me. He made us. It's so interesting that he turns in verse 6 to the creation of us. We have something of God's transcendence, something of God's bigness, something of God's eternity. And now we flip to something of God's intimacy, God's eminence, God's closeness. Right? He made us. Every detail, every single thing about you, God made and God knows.
And it's so interesting to see in the Bible the way that it's talked about. For example, Exodus 4.11, Proverbs 20.12, Psalm 94.9. They all make reference to the fact that God made your eyes and your ears. It's a simplistic thing on the surface. But when you really think about it, I did a project back in school on the human eye. Diagramming the eye, talking about all the pieces of the eye. There's all the rods and the cones and the wiring and everything that goes on back there.
There's a lot of pieces to the eye. It hurts my head to think about all the things that go into vision. Right? There's a lot of pieces back there. And yet God makes all of these intricate details. Right? God makes all of these things so that we might see the beauty of creation. He didn't have to give us eyes. Right? Why do we need eyes? Right? But He gives us this so that we can see, behold, beauty. Right? These intricately beautiful things. Right?
Jesus says in Luke chapter 12 that the hairs on your head are numbered. Every hair on your head, God knows it. God created it. And it matters to Him. It's not just that He created it and sent it out of the factory and made a million more. No, every single hair on your head was made by God and it matters to God.
You're not an acquaintance or a project for God. You are deeply loved. You are deeply welcomed. You are deeply cared for. That's the point here. The fourth reason is in the first half of verse 7. The psalmist says, not only did God make us, but He is our God and we are the people of His pasture. It's not just that God made you. It's that God cares for you. It's that God is close. I think one of the hardest questions for people to wrap their heads around in the Christian life, I think one of the hardest things that we really struggle with is this question of can the God of the universe, can the God who is the sovereign ruler and reigning king over all history and all time and all space, eternal, immense, holy, can that God really know me?
Can He really know and care about my circumstances? Can He really understand my problems and my issues? Can He really be there? And this psalm comes along and says, you bet He does. You bet He does. It's an amazing, amazing thing to hear that the God who formed the dry lands and the God who made and owns the sea, you are a sheep of His pasture. If you're His. If you are in Christ today, you are a sheep in His pasture. God has brought you into covenant relationship with Himself.
And this imagery of the shepherd and the sheep is not an accident. It's present throughout Scripture. It's all over the place. A couple examples. In Psalm 23, He makes the sheep lie down in green pastures. Psalm 119, He seeks the lost sheep. Jeremiah 33, He counts His sheep. Ezekiel 34, He pursues His sheep and brings them back. Matthew 18, He leaves the 99 to bring back the one lost sheep. This covenant relationship He's entered into. I will be your God and you will be my people.
No matter how far you stray, I will always seek you out and I will always bring you back because you're mine. You're mine. There's an incredible, incredible closeness to this. We've been going through the children's catechism with Naomi and, before too long, Caroline, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to go through it with her again. And I love the kids' catechism because it's very simple, but it's very profound, right? It has all this beautifully deep theology, but it's written in a way that is close and understandable and easy to digest.
One of my favorite things, and you want to talk about something that kind of gets me choked up a lot, is children's catechism question number five. And it's based on Psalm 95. Why should you glorify God? Why should you glorify God? And the answer in its beautifully rich simplicity, because He made me and He takes care of me. It's profound. It's beautiful. Because He made me and He takes care of me. We have a sublime welcome from a holy God, and I would love to end the sermon there.
I would love it if this psalm just ended, because it's a very beautiful and happy tone, but it doesn't. It takes a dark turn in verse 7. So let's get to the dark turn. That's the sublime welcome, the sober warning. Everybody's smiling and happy. Let me try to ruin that for you. Sublime welcome, sober warning. We have a very interesting psalm here. It starts off with this joyful description. What worship is? Who do we worship? How we worship? Why we worship?
All of this. And then we have this sobering ending. The psalmist changes his tone completely. You'll notice, if you look from the second half of verse 7 down to 11, you'll notice that through the first six and a half verses, we have used language. Let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come into his presence. Let us make a joyful noise. Right? It's us. Us and we. Verse 7. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.
Are you ready? Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, and as on the day at Masa in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof. You see how the language changes. Right? This invitation to come far off to near. Right? We, us, language, turns to you, language. Turns to that's you. Right? Derek Kidner, who's a commentator on this passage, said that it's almost as if God busts through the door, breaks into the middle of the psalm, and interrupts the worship.
The message of this final part of the psalm is clear, and it's very simple. A heart that is disconnected from the Lord cannot worship. A heart that is disconnected from the Lord cannot worship. This is the point. Romans 8-7 says, For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot. Not only can we not worship God, but the words indicate that we ought to tremble because there's great danger in unbelief.
There's great danger in unbelief. If you see, He gives the example of the Israelites in the wilderness. Harden your hearts as at Meribah, on the day at Massah, in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test. That's all Old Testament language. It's an illustration of the story of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. To put it plainly, to boil it down, essentially the Israelites who had seen God split the Red Sea, who had seen water come from the rock, who had seen God do all of these great things to provide, grumbled and complained, and eventually said, we want to go back to Egypt.
We want to return to slavery because our life was much easier then. There's a distrust of God. There's a doubt of God. There's a hatred of God. There's a hard-heartedness towards God. And what did God do? God said, you're going to stay in the wilderness, and none of you are going to see the promised land. Every single person in this generation of Israelites is going to enjoy a sandy grave because of the way that you have turned your hearts from me.
Because of the grumbling in the wilderness. God says that because of their unbelief, He loathed that generation. There's very few things in the Bible, and I'm saying this to people that are believers, that are in the church, there are very few things in the Bible that get God more riled up than the false worship of His people. This is a theme throughout the Minor Prophets, I think is where it's most vividly displayed, is that God hates false worship.
And when it's coming from His own people, He hates it even more. God loathed that generation of His chosen people. Very important question for us. What's the biggest threat to the church in 2023? What's the biggest threat to the church? We could answer that question a number of ways. Here are some of the possibilities. Is it theological liberalism? Perhaps. Is it the rise of post-modern sexual and gender politics? Is it a government who is more and more willing to suppress religious freedom if one doesn't fall in line with the cultural narrative?
What's the biggest threat to the church? This passage would have us understand, and we'll look at Hebrews 3 and 4 in a second. These passages would have us understand none of those things are the problem. None of those things are the issue. All of those things are symptoms of a far worse disease. And that disease is hard-heartedness. It's the fact that God's people do not trust Him and they've turned from Him. And the church that's slipping further and further into hard-heartedness will become increasingly more and more irrelevant in the wake of all of these very difficult cultural issues.
But they're symptoms of a much larger disease. Hard-heartedness is the problem. If you'd turn with me, let's go to Hebrews 3. We read this earlier in the service. Or part of this earlier in the service. Hebrews 3 and 4 is helpful because it sort of acts as a commentary on Psalm 95. It helps to open up and expound the message of Psalm 95. But it also transports the message of Psalm 95 from the ancient Israelites to the New Testament church. The same issues are the same issues for the people of God in the New Testament church.
And so Hebrews 3 and 4 is important for us to look at if we are to understand what Psalm 95 has to say. You'll see in verse 12-14 of Hebrews 3. Take care, brothers, lest there be any of you with an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
We have here the issue plainly spoken. What is the problem? What is the danger? What is the issue? It is an evil, unbelieving heart that leads you to fall away from the Lord.
The most catastrophic thing for the health of the church, the destroyer of worship, the most dangerous thing facing any of us now is hard-heartedness. We need to be very aware and very careful.
But He gives us two solutions as well. Thankfully, He gives us two solutions. It doesn't leave us in the lurch as far as how we can avoid this. There's two things He gives us and we'll kind of close here. Two exhortations, right? Two solutions here. In verse 13, exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. What is the biggest enemy to hard-heartedness? It's community. It's the church.
This is what the church is. In all its failures, in all of its shortcomings, in all of the ways in which the church has massively failed to do what it was called to do, the church is still a community living under the submission of Christ, submitting to His authority, obeying Him, and loving one another with the Gospel. That's what the church is called to be. And as we are in this community together, I talked with the men at the retreat about friendship, right?
This idea of each individual Christian experiencing a vertical communion with God and that vertical communion bleeding out into a horizontal community. Right? It's not relationships based in shared interest or convenience or similar age or family state or whatever. It's not based in that. It's based in a reliable, true foundation of the Gospel that cannot be changed or cannot be taken away. It's rooted in the fact that, as Peter writes, you've been given an inheritance that is undefiled and imperishable and can never be taken.
If you have relationships that are rooted in that, you are exhorting one another as long as it's called today to be weary of your hardness of heart and to turn to the Lord. That is what we are called to be. The church needs you and you need the church. Quite simply. It's not an accident or a coincidence that Paul uses the illustration of a body to describe the church. Without any one of you, this church is not what it, without any one of you, this church is not the same.
Right? Without its index finger, the hand does not work the way that it is supposed to work. Right? It's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a cheap metaphor. It's a true illustration of what the church is. We need you. And you need us. As broken and as faulty and as failing as we are. We need each other. Exhort one another. One theologian said that the best friend of apostasy is isolation. The best friend of apostasy is isolation. And I am not one to come and talk about COVID and politics and all of this, but it was a, it was a huge threat to the church to have everybody staying at home watching services online.
That is not what we're called to be. It's not what we're called to know and experience. Great harm was done in that. Exhort each other. Care for one another. But then the ultimate solution to this problem is given to us in verse 14. And we'll close here. For we have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. What is it that keeps the church from hard-heartedness? What is it that keeps our worship of God? It's the gospel.
It's the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The original confidence that we had is held firm to the end. It's not just exhort each other to keep your chin up or to pick yourself up or to just be happy. Right? It's more than that. It's deeper than that. It's that you, by faith, have come to know the living God. You have come into His presence as a follower of Jesus and you are known and accepted and loved more than you could ever believe or imagine.
There is not one thing you could do to be taken from His hand. There's an astounding reality in the gospel. Right? This thought, and we sing that, I don't know if y'all sing it here, one of my favorite hymns that's ever been written is that hymn, O Love That Will Not Let Me Go. Right? This picture of God holding me on by the neck of my shirt. Right? As I'm trying to run away from Him, I'm trying to do everything, I'm trying to go after every idol, everything that's in the world, everything that seems more attractive, and yet God is just, He's holding on to me.
He's not going to let me go. He's not going to let me out of His grasp. He's not going to let me out because I have been secured. I have been given a foundation. I've been given a sure and steady anchor in Christ that cannot be taken away. What is the greatest enemy of hard-heartedness and of flat worship that God hates? It's the gospel of Jesus Christ. Do you know, Christian, that you have been welcomed and accepted and loved more than you could ever imagine or believe?
Do you know that this morning? And if you don't know Christ, do you know that that's possible for you? Do you know that there is forgiveness? Do you know that there is welcoming? That there is acceptance? There is great transformation that can take place in your life if you know Jesus Christ. Sit at His feet and know what it is to be loved and accepted not as a servant but as a child and as a friend. That's astounding.
And so, new creation, I would close by saying as does the psalmist in Psalm 95 as does the writer of Hebrews here quoting Psalm 95 says today as long as it's called today if you hear His voice do not turn. Do not turn from Him. And let's strive together to enter His rest. Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, I ask that You would help us guard us from hard-heartedness. Guard us from a grumbling faith that turns us away from You. Father, help us to worship in spirit and in truth. Help us to be the worshipers that You desire, that You want. Worshipers that are coming into Your presence making a joyful noise of thanksgiving. But also worshipers that come into Your presence with reverence, with an acknowledgement that we are not You and You are not us.
We pray that we would know You. We thank You that You have sought to get us. We thank You that You have come to get us that we might be known and that we might know You. Father, as we go to the table of the Lord's Supper, we pray that these things would be fresh on our minds, that we would see and understand and know what has been done for us in Christ and what has been promised to us when He returns. May I help us, Father. It's in Christ's name that we pray.