Confessions of a Church:Guard Your Steps

The Psalm writer wrote:  Open my eyes, that I may behold Wonderful things from Your law. As we come before a Holy God and hear his word, may we have eyes open to the wonderful and fearful things from his law. May it move us to repent and seek forgiveness, fear disobedience, and live in light of the grace we have received.   This is the word of God.  It is eternally true and applicable for all of life.  

Ecclesiastes 5:1-7  Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know they are doing evil. Do not be hasty in word or impulsive in thought to bring up a matter in the presence of God. For God is in heaven and you are on the earth; therefore let your words be few. For the dream comes through much effort and the voice of a fool through many words. When you make a vow to God, do not be late in paying it; for He takes no delight in fools. Pay what you vow! It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. Do not let your speech cause you to sin and do not say in the presence of the messenger of God that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry on account of your voice and destroy the work of your hands? For in many dreams and in many words there is emptiness. Rather, fear God.

This is the Word of the Lord.

For many of you here today, that moment when you became a Christian may seem like a long ago point in the distant past.

You've been a Christian so long, you cannot remember a time when you were not.

I remember a gentleman in a former Church telling me one time that he had been a Christian for as long as he could remember, and thank God, because he had been spared a life of profanity, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and the like. He had what you might call a boring testimony. Yet in reality, isn't this type of testimony just as miraculous as one in which God plucks someone out of some depraved, debauched lifestyle?

Isn't it equally magnificent that God would call some at such an early age, that those people are shielded from the devastation and scars which a lifetime of sin can inflict upon a person's life?

This is the testimony many of you have, and it is one which puts you in a position to stumble in ways that one who was recently converted, or who has had a dramatic testimony, may not be tempted to.

If I could narrow the focus a bit, no one here may be more susceptible to this sin which I am about to expose, than the young people sitting here today.

You children who have grown up in the church. You've loved Jesus since you could color pictures of Noah's ark in Sunday School class. You've memorized Scripture. You've sung all the good old hymns hundreds, if not thousands of times. You have heard God's Word preached to you countless times by Pastors, Sunday school teachers, parents, and others within the church. You've been catechized, trained up in the way you should go by imperfect parents praying to God that He might spare you from a life of depravity and wickedness. You've been baptized and partaken in the Lord's supper, these two sacraments which in part serve to mark you off as His. You've tasted and seen that He is good.

Many of you here today will sit in your seat, stand when you are told, make noises with your mouth when everyone else does, sit seemingly alert and attentive as the Pastor preaches, then walk up here at the end, put the bread and wine in your mouth, and not give a second thought to the weighty, heavy, serious nature of everything which has transpired this morning.

Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know they are doing evil.

Having an indifferent, apathetic, cold, uncaring heart is a danger for you young people who have grown up within the Church since your youth.

Children, to be indifferent means that you lack care or concern for something. To put it another way, if a tree had fallen across the road this morning and prevented your family from getting to Church, the only regret you might have is in not getting to see your friends. Never mind missing out on the Preaching of God's Word. Not to mention the hymns you won't be able to lift up to God in praise. You've done these things hundreds of times, so what if you miss them this once! So what indeed. It may be your last.

 That would be indifference or apathy toward the things of God, and it is a great danger for you and others who have a long walk with Christ.

Lukewarmness. It is vile in the sight of God, and leads us to a flippant, careless, thoughtless approach to worship. It leads us to take God's grace for granted. A lukewarm heart is one which forgets that our God is Holy, Holy, Holy, and so, we come near without a thought. We come near with no examination of the heart, yet are commanded to do so children:

But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

— 1 Corinthians 11:28

Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you⁠—unless indeed you fail the test?

— 2 Corinthians 13:5

Uzzah was a man who learned this lesson the hard way. Thinking he was doing something good, he reached out his hand to steady the Ark without regard to God's command to not touch, and God smote him. Struck him down.

We read of a story like this and are unmoved because of our familiarity with the things of God. What ought to be viewed as Holy, time and a flippant attitude turns into the common and we stumble into a grave danger.

Guard yourselves the text warns us. Guard yourselves lest you offer a sacrifice of fools. What is this sacrifice of fools?

Feigned worship.

Going through the motions with your body, while your heart is far from Christ.

The sacrifice of fools is that which is offered to God which is not the best. It is giving him the lame goat. It is offering him the diseased sheep. It is believing that you can put on a show for everyone around you, fool the Pastor, fool your parents, and fool your friends. In doing so, because you think lowly of God, as if He is like you or your friends, you bring vain worship and foolish sacrifices into the Lord's house and try to pass it off as genuine worship.

God will vomit you out because of your lukewarmness (Rev 3:16).

Repent little children, for today is the day of salvation.

Repent, and put your hope and trust in the perfect, spotless lamb of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

If you are able, at this time please kneel as we confess our sins to God Almighty.

Heavenly Father,

We are oftentimes a stubborn and stiff necked people.

We have tasted and seen that You are good, yet grow to despise it.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and we find ourselves hating you and your grace because of all people we are the most familiar with You. Rather than viewing the ordinary means of grace with thanksgiving, we grow to despise it.

Father, so often we take our eyes off of Your Son and are subsequently charmed by the shiny things offered by the world. We pursue after things that temporarily satisfy our flesh, to the neglect of the good things you have provided for us: Your Son, Your Word, Your Church, and all the means of grace.

Father, forgive us where we  like sheep have gone astray.

Forgive us for appetites which lead us onto the broad path of destruction.

Please turn our hearts back to you. Quicken those who are dead. Soften hard hearts. Grant clear thoughts to the distracted. Strengthen those who are weak. Heal those who have been wounded by the effects of sin. Please be merciful toward us sinners.

In Jesus's Name we pray, Amen and Amen.

Please stand and listen to the comforting assurance of the grace of God, promised in the gospel to his church: 

2 Peter 2:4-9a For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly lives thereafter; and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation.

To all those who thus repent and seek Jesus Christ for their salvation, your sins are forgiven in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lift up your hearts!