In the sermon this week, Pastor Tim preached that there are four things that we do to push back against simply being weighed down by this life and the fleeting pleasures that the world has to offer. Jesus is our great example of what it means, despite everything crushing in on him, to withdraw and to make sure he’s about the mission that the Father gave him. Yesterday, we looked at prayer. Today, we look at worship.

"I’m not preaching to you for one second that sexuality, food, and drink are bad, but God has given these gifts for us to enjoy according to his glory"

We also worship; we worship the Giver, rather than his gifts. The world worships and serves created things without acknowledging the Creator, and we fall into that. Romans 1 says, "They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is supposed to be praised." And so we end up looking to the good gifts that he offers in food, in drink, in sexuality, and we start looking to these things, these good things, as god things, as things that will fulfill us, as things that will remove the weight of the cares of this world that only God can. And I’m not preaching to you for one second that sexuality, food, and drink are bad, but God has given these gifts for us to enjoy according to his glory, and according to rules that he has laid down. So we enjoy wine, beer—but we don’t get drunk. We enjoy sexuality, but we enjoy it in the context of godly marriage. We enjoy food, not to excess and gluttony, but as a foretaste of the wedding supper of the Lamb when we will see Jesus face to face. So we do things that are similar to what everyone else does in the world around us, but we do them very differently because we serve a different King who’s building a different kind of kingdom through us. In Portland, the culture is all about food and drink and sex as an end in itself, and it produces some outstanding coffee and restaurants. But these things are established and refined as if they were the greatest things that the world could ever contain, the best of all possible worlds. They’re worshiped as ends in themselves. And for those of us who know Jesus, that’s never how we’re supposed to treat his gifts. We worship the Giver, we praise him for his gifts, and we enjoy his gifts to his glory. Coming up: the importances of stewardship and anticipation. Tim Smith is the lead pastor of Mars Hill Portland.