What Do We Give to God?

00:00:04.000 | Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday.

00:00:06.000 | Last time we were together, you told us, Pastor John, that God enlists us in His service,

00:00:13.000 | which means He calls us to have a part in accomplishing His purposes, not in meeting His needs.

00:00:20.000 | Yeah, that's really key. He uses us, and in using us, we meet no need in God.

00:00:28.000 | If that's true, then comes the question, what do we do with all the texts that talk about what we give to God?

00:00:36.000 | That's the dilemma in the mind of a listener named Jeff, thinking about Sunday mornings.

00:00:40.000 | Pastor John, thank you for this podcast.

00:00:42.000 | Jeff writes, "You have taught that we are to come to corporate worship gatherings hungry,

00:00:48.000 | to receive, not to give to God as if He needed anything." That's Acts 17.25.

00:00:52.000 | Yet there are other passages related to corporate worship that clearly use the language of giving.

00:00:58.000 | Like, "Let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name."

00:01:04.000 | That's Hebrews 13.15.

00:01:06.000 | Or, "Bring an offering to Him." That's Psalm 96.8.

00:01:11.000 | Or, "Give thanks to Him, bless His name." That's Psalm 100, verse 4.

00:01:15.000 | How do you harmonize these two seemingly opposite perspectives on our role in corporate worship?

00:01:20.000 | What do we give to God?

00:01:24.000 | It's true that I have said very often that I think pastors make a mistake if they scold their people

00:01:36.000 | for coming to worship to get rather than to give.

00:01:41.000 | That's a mistake. They shouldn't do that.

00:01:44.000 | If I hear a pastor say, "If you people would just come to give to God rather than get from God,

00:01:51.000 | we would have meaningful worship services," I think that's a serious mistake.

00:01:57.000 | Yeah.

00:01:58.000 | In fact, I don't hear that so much anymore, which makes me happy.

00:02:02.000 | Now, I do suspect that such a pastoral rebuke is really on to something true.

00:02:12.000 | People can come to worship to get the wrong thing.

00:02:18.000 | They can come to get seen for their new outfit.

00:02:23.000 | It used to happen on Easter at the church I grew up in.

00:02:26.000 | They can come to appear moral in the community as an upstanding churchgoer.

00:02:33.000 | They can come to merely see their friends.

00:02:36.000 | They can come to merely take their children to get some moral instruction.

00:02:41.000 | They can come in the hopes that their marriage will get better.

00:02:45.000 | And pastors sense this wrong coming to get, and they know it's not healthy.

00:02:54.000 | My people are coming to get all the wrong things.

00:02:58.000 | But when the pastor diagnoses this problem as a disease of wanting to receive

00:03:07.000 | instead of wanting to give, that's the mistake.

00:03:11.000 | It's not a disease to want to receive in worship.

00:03:15.000 | I have argued that the very essence of worship,

00:03:20.000 | not just the outward acts of worship, but the inward essence of worship,

00:03:25.000 | is being satisfied in all that God is for us in Jesus.

00:03:32.000 | Therefore, the way people should come to worship, if I'm right,

00:03:37.000 | is to come hungry to be satisfied in God,

00:03:43.000 | to see God more clearly, to taste God more sweetly,

00:03:47.000 | to be amazed at the way God is,

00:03:50.000 | and to feel the admiration and the wonder of His greatness,

00:03:54.000 | and to feel the hopefulness and thankfulness and confidence of heart welling up

00:04:00.000 | because of the bounty of His grace.

00:04:03.000 | All that is a way of getting, not giving.

00:04:09.000 | And the right posture of that kind of getting is a sense of hunger and neediness

00:04:16.000 | and desperation and longing and praying for more of God, more of Christ,

00:04:22.000 | more of grace, more power.

00:04:24.000 | That's the kind of getting I'm talking about.

00:04:28.000 | And my point is that when we assume that kind of needy, expectant, Godward posture,

00:04:37.000 | God gets glory, not us.

00:04:42.000 | And that's the essence of worship.

00:04:44.000 | And worship services and preaching should aim to awaken and satisfy

00:04:51.000 | that kind of God hunger, that kind of God getting.

00:04:58.000 | But Jeff is right to ask if I am contradicting the biblical language

00:05:06.000 | of giving to God in worship.

00:05:10.000 | Of course, I don't want to do that.

00:05:12.000 | I don't want to contradict the Bible.

00:05:14.000 | I love the Bible.

00:05:15.000 | I believe the Bible.

00:05:16.000 | I'm getting all this from the Bible.

00:05:19.000 | If we read our English Bibles, we will see give praise to God, Joshua 7:19.

00:05:26.000 | Give thanks to God, Psalm 75, 1.

00:05:30.000 | Bless God, Psalm 103.

00:05:33.000 | Give glory to God, Romans 4, 20.

00:05:36.000 | Give power to God, Psalm 68, 34.

00:05:40.000 | Offer sacrifices to God, Hebrews 13, 15.

00:05:45.000 | I know these texts are in the Bible.

00:05:47.000 | I love them.

00:05:49.000 | I aim to obey them.

00:05:52.000 | And I don't think they contradict what I just said about the essence of worship

00:05:59.000 | being satisfied in all that God is for us and coming to worship services

00:06:04.000 | hungry to get more of God.

00:06:07.000 | So here are five quick observations to support this claim that that's

00:06:14.000 | not a contradiction.

00:06:15.000 | Number one, now this is just a pointer.

00:06:18.000 | It's not a kind of absolute statement about the use of giving language in worship.

00:06:22.000 | If you look up all the uses of the word give, which I did to get ready for this,

00:06:28.000 | the Hebrew word natan, super common word for give in a hundred contexts.

00:06:34.000 | If you look up all the uses for the word natan or give in the Psalms,

00:06:40.000 | there are 95 uses of the word give.

00:06:43.000 | Only three refer to giving to God.

00:06:49.000 | Two deny that we should.

00:06:54.000 | Two of those three.

00:06:56.000 | No one can give the price of his life, Psalm 49, 8.

00:07:00.000 | You will not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I'd give it, Psalm 51, 18.

00:07:06.000 | The single one other text says, "Give power to God, whose majesty is over Israel."

00:07:15.000 | Virtually all other places in the Psalms where we read in English

00:07:21.000 | that we should give to God praise or give to God thanks,

00:07:25.000 | the Hebrew has no word for give.

00:07:28.000 | It's just the word praise and the word thank.

00:07:33.000 | We use the word give and so create the problem for ourselves.

00:07:38.000 | None of that says we should not use the language of giving to God.

00:07:45.000 | I don't want to go that far at all, but it should be a caution

00:07:50.000 | that maybe the Psalm writers were jealous not to put God in the position

00:07:57.000 | of being the main receiver in worship rather than the main giver in worship,

00:08:04.000 | since the giver gets the glory.

00:08:07.000 | That's number one.

00:08:08.000 | Number two, that text, by the way, back in Psalm 68, 34, that says,

00:08:15.000 | "Give God power, give power to God," is translated in the ESV,

00:08:21.000 | "Ascribe power to God."

00:08:25.000 | And surely that is right.

00:08:28.000 | So I think what we ought to mean when we speak of giving God glory

00:08:34.000 | or giving honor or giving strength or giving wisdom or giving power

00:08:40.000 | is that we are ascribing those things to God, not adding anything to God.

00:08:47.000 | We are, in essence, receiving those things as gifts for us to enjoy

00:08:54.000 | and echoing back to God our admiration and enjoyment

00:08:59.000 | that we call "give God glory."

00:09:03.000 | Number three, the Bible teaches that all our gifts to God,

00:09:08.000 | whether ourselves or our resources, our praises or our thanks,

00:09:12.000 | are already God's, and He Himself is giving us the willingness

00:09:19.000 | and the ability to give Him what is His.

00:09:22.000 | 1 Chronicles 29, 14, "When the people of Israel gave generously,"

00:09:27.000 | David says--I remember I used to use this over and over

00:09:31.000 | when I was a pastor to try to encourage the right kind of giving to the church.

00:09:35.000 | Here's what he says, "But who am I and what is my people

00:09:40.000 | that we should be able thus to offer willingly?"

00:09:45.000 | In other words, the willingness was a gift.

00:09:47.000 | "For all things come from you, and of your own we have given you."

00:09:55.000 | Now, that means that both the thing given and the act of giving

00:10:02.000 | are gifts to us.

00:10:05.000 | Number four, Paul says in Romans 11, 35,

00:10:10.000 | "Who has given a gift to God that he should be repaid?"

00:10:14.000 | Of course, the answer is nobody.

00:10:17.000 | And then he gives the reason, verse 36,

00:10:20.000 | "For from him and through him and to him are all things;

00:10:23.000 | to him be glory forever and ever."

00:10:28.000 | In other words, the Bible really wants to discourage us

00:10:33.000 | from thinking of ourselves as originating any gift to God.

00:10:40.000 | We are always receivers, even in our giving,

00:10:45.000 | and we should love to have it so.

00:10:48.000 | Finally, number five, C.S. Lewis expresses why it is

00:10:54.000 | that our giving in worship is really a getting.

00:10:59.000 | Our giving praise to God is really getting joy in God.

00:11:06.000 | Here's this famous quote that I've quoted,

00:11:09.000 | I don't know how many times, I love it.

00:11:11.000 | "The psalmists," Lewis says, "in telling everyone to praise God

00:11:17.000 | are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

00:11:22.000 | My whole more general difficulty about the praise of God

00:11:26.000 | depended on my absurdly denying to us,

00:11:30.000 | as regards to the supremely valuable, what we delight to do,

00:11:34.000 | what indeed we can't help doing about everything else we value.

00:11:40.000 | I think we delight to praise what we enjoy

00:11:44.000 | because the praise not merely expresses

00:11:49.000 | but completes the enjoyment."

00:11:52.000 | That's the key right there, John Piper talking.

00:11:54.000 | That's the key. Okay, here's Lewis again.

00:11:56.000 | "It is, it's appointed," so the praise is

00:12:00.000 | the joy's appointed consummation.

00:12:05.000 | It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another

00:12:09.000 | how beautiful they are.

00:12:11.000 | The delight is incomplete till it is expressed."

00:12:17.000 | So I end where we started.

00:12:19.000 | Yes, we come to worship to give praise to God,

00:12:24.000 | but the essence of that praise is being satisfied

00:12:29.000 | in all that God is for us in worship,

00:12:34.000 | and the overflow in outward acts is the completion of the joy,

00:12:41.000 | joy in God, which is a gift from God to us.

00:12:47.000 | Yeah, our giving praise to God is really getting joy in God.

00:12:52.000 | That's a remarkably profound point about praising him

00:12:56.000 | and how his glory and our joy are bound together,

00:12:59.000 | profoundly bound together,

00:13:01.000 | which is what we're all about as Christian hedonists.

00:13:04.000 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:13:06.000 | And speaking of praise, how do we authentically praise others?

00:13:11.000 | That's up next time. I'm your host Tony Reinke.

00:13:13.000 | We'll see you back here on Thursday. See you then.

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What Do We Give to God?

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