This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

So the Bible reading is taken from second book of Samuel. Chapter six, verses one to 17. And that can be found on page 320. Ten. Sorry.

310. In the church Bibles, the Ark is brought to Jerusalem. David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel. Third. And David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Bal Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts, who sits enthroned on the Cherubim.

And they carried the Ark of God on a new cart. And brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. And Uzzah and Ayo, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the Ark of God. And Ayo went before the ark. And David and all the house of Israel were making merry before the Lord with songs and liars and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.

And when they came to the threshing floor of narcon, Uzzar put out his hand to the Ark of God and took hold of it. For the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah. And God struck him down there because of his error. And he died there beside the Ark of God.

And David was angry because the Lord had burst forth against Uzzah. And that place is called Peresuzah to this day. And David was afraid of the Lord that day. And he said, how can the ark of the Lord come to me? So David was not willing to take the ark of the Lord into the city of David.

But David took it aside to the house of Obedidom the jiteite. And the ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obedidom, the jiteite for three months. And the Lord blessed Obedidom and all his household. And it was told King David, the Lord has blessed the household of Obedidom. And all that belongs to him because of the Ark of God.

So David went and brought up the Ark of God from the house of Abeddom to the city of David with rejoicing. And when those who bore the Ark of the Lord had gone six steps, he sacrificed an ox and a fattened animal. And David danced before the Lord with all his might. And David was wearing a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel.

Brought up the Ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the horn. As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal, the daughter of Saul, looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord. And she despised him in her heart. And they brought in the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it. And David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, as we come before this passage, help us to understand it and to apply it into our lives. By the power of your holy spirit. Amen.

Now, I don't know if anybody else in this congregation suffers from an incurable curiosity that's often marked my life and left me looking very foolish. And that is that thing when you get out to perhaps a railway station or a cafe and they have a notice that says, wet paint, don't touch. And yet irresistibly you touch and then you find dabbed white paint on your fingers. You don't follow the instruction not to touch and you end up looking a little foolish. I did that once on the way to school and then had to explain to my tutor group why I was out washing my hands to try and get rid of the paint.

Follow the instructions on the box or near the box.

This passage is quite tricky, to say the least, particularly as we start with this story where the Ark of the covenant is being moved. I think we can make one or two informed guesses about what's going on. If you look at verse chapter five, there's a great deal of war activity going on, various sort of sorting out of the kingdom. David's power is growing. He's reasserting himself, he's getting rid of the enemies around him.

Some commentators then say what he wants to do by bringing the ark to Jerusalem is kind of solidify things a bit more politically, make Jerusalem the centre of everything.

But I would say what David's doing here is essentially political rather than spiritual. There's no mention in the passage of prayer right at the beginning. There's no. It was right with David after talking to the Lord. And in fact, later on, when we look at chapter seven, where Nathan comes to talk to him and outlines a plan for when the temple will be built and all this kind of stuff, I think David is just kind of acting quite quickly and a little irresponsibly and possibly motivated by not the highest of spiritual motives, but motivated by this is the right moment to move this.

We will move this into position in Jerusalem and this will reassert my authority as king and the way that the ark of the covenant is to be brought to Jerusalem is lacking in precision, to say the least. Let's put it on the back of a cart.

This is not what you would expect. This is a holy object. And those of us familiar with raiders of the lost ark know that a holy object needs to be treated with respect. I gave away the ending of the film to the last congregation. I'll save you from that.

But it marks about a holiness. God is a holy God and not to be challenged in that holiness.

Putting the ark of the covenant, the sign of God on the back of a cart, really was a bit disrespectful. It wasn't the way in which it should have been taken up to Jerusalem should have been me by the priests, not just slung on the back of a cart. Isaiah reaches out and puts his hand out and encounters the holy living God. He shouldn't have been anywhere near that. It should only have been the priests who should have been touching and dealing with that because they were allowed to and they were filled with God's spirit.

In order to do that, we confront a holy and frankly, quite terrifying God here.

But we need to reflect on holiness. For many of us, our God has become a little too comfortable, a little too much like the cushions on our sofa or a toy that we value from childhood that gives us great comfort. The idea of the God who disturbs the God who is holy and beyond human understanding and challenging to humans is often very, very difficult for us to get on board with. We live in an age where we tend to stress God incarnate, Jesus, or we stress the idea of God as love. Previous generations of christians rightly would stress the idea of God's holiness, God's otherness from human beings.

It's only when we take that seriously can we take seriously the grace of God that saved us.

If we don't take God's holiness and otherness from us, then we're not really getting the point. So this passage perhaps offends us because we have an image of God that is a bit too maty, a bit too intimate, but in a wrong and inappropriate way.

It should be characterised by respect and understanding. In the age of grace, Yusar may not have died, but this was the age when people were learning about the holiness of God and grace was a developing idea, as God was revealing himself.

God is holy and God has to take sin seriously and we should take God's holiness seriously. I'm grateful to David, who's in my home group, for telling me this week about Charles Finney. Charles Finney was a great evangelist and great teacher. And towards the end of his life, he was reflecting on what his failures were. Very few people would have done that with Finney.

Finney was enormously successful in bringing people to Christ. He had a great preaching ministry. But the one thing that Finney said as he came towards the end of his life was, I wish I had spent more time teaching people holiness. Making sure that the followers of God were distinctive in their lifestyle, showed the holiness of God. And I failed the people.

And I see people who are Christians in name, but not in the power of God. That's quite a challenge, isn't it? Christians in name but not in the power of God. We need the Holy Spirit working in our lives to understand the holiness of God, how vast he is in comparison to us, and in our great need as sinners facing a holy God.

It's interesting that perhaps this passage may well suggest to us David is just kind of thinking on his feet a bit, let's get the ark into Jerusalem. Everything will be great, but it's not thought through, and there's a consequence for somebody else. David gets angry with God about this. But David might actually have been one of the reasons why this thing happened, because he hadn't stopped, thought and prayed about what was the appropriate moment to do this. And then you have an unexpected consequence that they have to lay the ark down in the house of Obed.

And Obed, who isn't a jew, who isn't part of the people of God, is blessed by having God's presence in there with him and his family. What a sign of grace that is for us, that the people at that point had a very exclusive view of how God would bless. And yet now God can bless even obed, because Obed, ironically, is behaving slightly more with respect than the very people of God were in the presence of the holy God.

So a difficult passage about holiness, a challenging passage also about worship. How do we worship? Do we worship like David, wholeheartedly? Towards the end of this passage, we got some good things to see about David. He worships God wholeheartedly.

Now, I've never been able to do the holy look in worship. Some people are really gifted with this, that they can look really, really holy while worshipping. I've never been able to do that.

But what I do know is that whether you put your arms in the air or you like a good dose of the book of common prayer, externals don't matter in worship. What matters is your heart.

And I have sat in the most charismatic of services and felt very little of God. And I have sat in the most liturgical of services and felt a great deal of God, and sometimes vice versa.

What matters here is your heart. David here is keen to celebrate. He dances. I'm not suggesting that for the 1115, I alone might do myself damage. And indeed.

Anyway, let's stop there. He offers burnt sacrifices, he blesses people with blessing. He does the equivalent of putting vestments on. Neither am I suggesting we get the vestments down and share them around. He is wholehearted in his worship of God.

Now, one of my side hustles, as they like to call them these days, is that our market exam papers. And this year, as many year in the re paper, they set this question, which is better, liturgical or non liturgical worship? Right, so you're 1115, so you're going to probably have a view on this, I guess, for some of you. Anyway, this one young gentleman, and I'm guessing he's the gentleman because his handwriting wasn't great. Anyway, this one young gentleman had this question, and I don't know who his re teacher is, because you never know when these things come to you via the computer.

But clearly his re teacher had been trying to sort of impress and make them think, and had obviously referred to this passage. And the teenager's answer was quite unusual. Most teenagers don't like liturgical worship. They immediately go, oh, bad, terrible idea. But this teenager had read this passage and, like Michael in the passage, was appalled with David dancing about.

And so came to the conclusion that that sort of thing should be stopped and that you should do liturgy. Definitely do liturgy all the time. No, what matters is wholehearted worship. It may be liturgical and formal, it may be non liturgical, it may be happy and indeed clappy, it may be reverential silence. What matters is, is your heart wholeheartedly with God.

And by the end of this passage, David's heart is, he knows he has a holy God, he knows he has a God who can't be treated lightly, and he worships that God. But we also have David's wife, who is really negative about his way of worship.

Let's just think we can all be quite negative about worship. Here are just a few. There's one I've actually made up that I've never heard. See if you can spot which one this is. So I've heard people complain about worship the following.

It's too loud, it's irrelevant. It's too much centred on young people, it's too much centred on old people, it's too much centred on families, I don't like the music. I don't like the way the prayers are led. I don't like the way the Bible was read. The sermons are too long, the sermons are too short.

I bet you guess which one I made up at the end.

Now, there are all kinds of negative things that we can say to each other to undermine worship. I think some of the most important moments in church are after the last prayer has been said, after the music has died away, and we just start having a chat to each other. For some of us, that might be the green light to say something quite negative about what's gone on. Didn't he go on too much? Didn't he miss that point in that passage, et cetera?

Wasn't the music, et cetera? And we can end up being incredibly negative about what's gone on. And I've made that mistake. I will probably still make that mistake. But I'm going to challenge myself and you to think quite clearly about that.

Because there have been moments when I have sat in church, both here and in other churches, and it hasn't particularly powerfully spoken to me that day.

But that may be for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps I wasn't being receptive. Perhaps I felt I was, well, lacking humility, perhaps that day, being prepared to listen. But then I've sometimes, when I've done this thing right, sat on that, and then just started talking to somebody else. And somebody else said, that really helped me today.

That really challenged me. Today I'm in this dark place. And that hymn or that sermon brought me to the light.

Now, whatever you say to each other at the end of the service, be very careful, because you may be undermining the work of God in somebody's heart today. Because something I've said or something that we've sung or we've prayed might be having a really, really significant moment in the heart of somebody else today. So it might not have worked for you. But think about the person next to you, or the persons you speak to as you go out of church. And forget the externals about how the service was structured and when him one came in, or when the Bible reading was read, or whatever.

Forget the externals. What was your heart like today? Was it ready to worship?

And if you weren't ready for worship, can you at least appreciate that other people might well have been, and that you should respect that as a follower of Christ and encourage them in understanding it? We need to, in the words of Matt Redmond, go back to the heart of worship when everything else is stripped away. We come back to our mighty, loving, powerful and yes, holy God, who can sometimes be quite frightening and quite challenging, but loves us. We take sin seriously. We take holiness seriously that need to be different to serve our God.

We take his Holiness seriously and that will transform the way we think and feel. And when we take this holiness seriously, we can then ask for his Holy Spirit to work within us. Many of us have had experiences when worship hasn't gone right, when our perhaps long time when things have been damaged and we need to bring them to God to be dealt with. A few years ago I was talking with somebody about this and I realised that I often found worship difficult because in my head I was still that four year old who was dragged to church and made to be quiet while other people sang. And I needed to put that four year old to bed and be an adult and know that I was encountering the living God.

Whatever baggage you carry from school, from another church, from another period of your life, that may make worship difficult for you in some sense, bring that baggage before the Lord, give it to him and he will enable you to worship him as you should in your way, to his glory. Let's pray.

Father, help us to take your holiness seriously. Help us to realise the depth of your holiness and the depth therefore of your grace to us. Help us to worship you with all of our heart and to avoid negativity that ruins other people's relationships with you by careless words. Help us to know that you are a God who is powerful and loving and true, and let us this week worship you with all of our life. Amen.