Becoming Worshipers #6: From the Voice of Fear to Bond Slaves of Love

Becoming worshipers means moving from serving God for what He does to loving Him for who He is, until we serve Him freely as bond slaves of love. In this sixth message of the series, the pastor reviews how fear entered through Adam, how perfect love casts it out, and why Moses knew God’s ways while Israel only saw His acts. Then he opens Exodus 21, where a freed servant says “I love my master” and chooses to stay for life. This message continues from Becoming Worshipers #5.

Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a side-by-side look at a slave of fear and a bond slave of love, a timestamped outline, and practical steps you can take this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was preached at NTC Ministries and posted on February 8, 2023. It runs about 61 minutes and closes with an invitation to be born again. The pastor explains that giving your life to Jesus does not mean you have handed Him everything at once. There are parts of our lives we still have to learn to give over, and that happens not by our might or power but by His Spirit.

Because the series had been interrupted, he spends the first half reviewing, saying review is how we learn. God teaches the same way: precept upon precept, here a little, there a little (Isaiah 28:10–11). The second half introduces the bond slave.

Praise and Worship Reviewed

In the church’s praise and worship time, praise is usually faster and more upbeat, because we enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise (Psalm 100:4). The pastor defines praise as recognizing what God has done and is able to do, then expressing gratitude with all your heart.

He points to God’s name Yah, and teaches that it carries the sense of being exuberant, even gloriously foolish, wild and ecstatic. God rides on the heavens by that name (Psalm 68:4), and He sings over His people, excited about them and wild about them.

Worship goes beyond His blessings. It is not about what He does for us but recognizing who He truly is. When Moses asked God’s name at the burning bush, God answered that He is I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3:14). He simply is, from everlasting to everlasting.

The pastor explains that time itself is a creation. God set the sun, moon, stars and galaxies in motion like the cogs of a clock. When Adam sinned, everything in creation was corrupted, so the eternal God invested Himself into time to redeem us and bring us into eternity, where Jesus Himself will be the light.

He pictures the curse as a seed packet with a picture on the front: God showed Adam what would grow from the seeds he had sown. That is why believers are born again not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible, through the Word of God which lives and abides forever (1 Peter 1:23).

He adds a word study. The Greek word for worship, he teaches, means to kiss, like a dog licking the back of its master’s hand, and to lie at someone’s feet. The Hebrew word means to prostrate yourself, bow down or fall flat in homage before royalty. That posture is reverence.

The Voice of Fear and the Love That Casts It Out

In Genesis 3:9–11, after Adam sinned, God called, “Where are you?” Adam, who used to walk with God in the cool of the day, answered, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.” God replied, “Who told you that you were naked?”

“Do you realize that fear has a voice?” the pastor asks. Everyone hears it: the student whose heart is in his throat asking for a first job, or the child tempted to hide something from Dad. Fear makes us hide, do what we should not, and go where we should not.

Jesus, Emmanuel, came into corrupted time as Redeemer and Deliverer. Hebrews 2:14–15 says He shared our humanity so that through death He might destroy the one who had the power of death and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. The devil wants to keep us slaves through fear.

God is love (1 John 4:8), and love has a purpose. A Bible college professor once said God created Adam because He was lonely. The pastor sensed the Lord respond that if He had been lonely, He would always be lonely, because He does not change (Malachi 3:6). Rather, love needs an object to be realized.

He illustrates with meeting his wife when she was only eleven or twelve; this is their fiftieth year of marriage. Something rose up in him he had never felt, because the object of his love had appeared. God needs us to accept His love so He can express it and the world can see it. That, he says, is why religion harms Christianity: we are not a religion but a kingdom with a King who is our Father.

The church reads 1 John 4:18–19 aloud: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.” Worship is accepting God’s love, and as we do, fears and anxieties grow less and less. “The ultimate goal of theology isn’t more knowledge,” he says. “It’s worship.”

Adam never had to ask God for anything; he had dominion over the works of God’s hands. Jesus, the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), took back everything Adam lost. Romans 8:32 asks how He who did not spare His own Son will not freely give us all things. We still ask, but we ask from a Shepherd who lets us lack nothing (Psalm 23:1).

Worship is like a marinade. As we bask in His presence, it tenderizes and changes us, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). Christ said, “It is finished,” and through worship we experience more and more of that finished redemptive work.

Moses Knew His Ways, Israel Knew His Acts

Psalm 103:7 says God made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel. The pastor reads the New Living Translation too: He revealed His character to Moses and His deeds to the people of Israel. Praise knows what God does; worship knows who He is.

Israel kept saying, in effect, “Do for me, God.” Moses said, “I want to know who You are.” Most of the church, he observes, only knows what God does, and many even blame Him for tragedies. But the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy, and Jesus came to give abundant life (John 10:10). If it is really God, it would not be making His people afraid.

In Exodus 33:7–11, Moses pitched his tent far outside a camp of a couple million people and called it the tabernacle of meeting. He was getting away from the grumblers who complained about water and food. Anyone who sought the Lord could go out, but the people only stood at their own tent doors and watched.

When Moses entered, the pillar of cloud descended, and the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. That is worship, the pastor says: letting God talk with us so we stop hearing the voice of fear and hear the voice of love and grace instead.

Being alone with God makes intimacy possible, just as he is more intimate with his wife at home than at the mall. Many people will not take the time. Martha was busy making lunch while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet, and Jesus said Mary had chosen the good part (Luke 10:38–42).

In Exodus 33:13–15 Moses prays, “Show me now Your way, that I may know You.” God answers, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” Moses replies that if His presence does not go, do not send them up. He would rather stay in the wilderness with God than enter the Promised Land without Him, and so he gets it all.

Getting Into God’s Rhythm

Every heart has a rhythm, the pastor says, and when it falls out of rhythm, you are in trouble. God is not going to get into rhythm with us; we get into rhythm with Him. In quiet time in His presence, He leads like a partner in a dance, rejoicing over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17).

He jokes that a doctor once said his pulse was high at the wrist, so he asked him to take it at his ankle. It is the same pulse. In the same way, we are one body with many members (1 Corinthians 12:27), sharing one life. In His rhythm, whatever we put our hands to prospers (Psalm 1:3), because life is moving through us, not fear.

God always brings good news. The first thing the angel told the shepherds was not to be afraid, followed by the news of a Savior (Luke 2:10–11). But a steady diet of bad news pours fear through our five gates. Lift up your heads, O you gates, and the King of glory will come in (Psalm 24:7). Come out from among them and be separate (2 Corinthians 6:17–18).

Do not be astonished that the world grows worse. In the parable of the wheat and tares, both grow until harvest (Matthew 13:24–30). Believers are the salt of the earth, carrying the manifest presence of God, which comes through worship. It does not have to be hours a day, he says, but the more you do it, the longer you will want to stay, as people find at the church’s Wednesday night prayer.

Cain refused to get into rhythm. God asked him why his countenance had fallen and promised he would be accepted if he did well (Genesis 4:6–7). Pride, the pastor teaches, is driven by fear: fear of not getting what I want, of looking bad, of being criticized. Stop and get into rhythm, and you will have more favor.

Becoming Worshipers as Bond Slaves of Love

The new teaching comes from Exodus 21:2–6, with a parallel in Leviticus 25. In Hebrew culture, someone who fell into ruin through a bad season or bad decisions could sell himself to a wealthy neighbor who paid his debts. He served six years and went free in the seventh.

If he arrived married, his wife went free with him. If his master gave him a wife and they had children, they remained with the master. But the law made a provision. If the servant declared, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,” his master brought him to the judges and pierced his ear with an awl at the doorpost. He then served for life. The pastor adds that the family signet was then placed in the ear.

The pastor notices the order: “I love my master” comes first. Israel in the wilderness and the religious leaders in Jesus’ day only wanted God to do something for them. The wise men traveled a great distance to worship the child, but the leaders who knew He would be born in Bethlehem never went. They only wanted deliverance from Rome.

The servant says: my master fed me, kept a roof over my head and provided every need for me and my family. The pastor applies it to husbands and fathers: if you want your family to know love, serve God. Lead them to church, to the Bible and to talking about Him at home, because God keeps a book of remembrance (Malachi 3:16).

The table below follows his contrast between the two kinds of slavery in this message.

Romans 6:16–18 says you are slaves of whom you obey, whether of sin to death or obedience to righteousness. The pastor teaches that Paul’s word speaks of one born into slavery, not captured in war, and comes from a root meaning to bind. We were born into sin; now, born again, we are born to be love slaves.

Many come to God for a job or a marriage, then drift away once it is fixed. He reads from a word study of the Greek New Testament: before salvation our wills were swallowed up in Satan’s will; now, yielding to the Spirit, they are swallowed up in our Lord’s. “Have Thine own way, Lord,” he says, is the song of our hearts.

Paul introduced himself in Romans 1:1 first as a bondservant of Jesus Christ. In Galatians 1:10 he says that if he still pleased men, he would not be a bondservant of Christ. Children see only by their own understanding, as in the Christmas song about Mommy kissing Santa Claus, so we must trust in the Lord and not lean on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5–6).

People who only picture a gentle Jesus holding a lamb forget the whip in the temple and His rebuke of hypocrites. As a school principal, the pastor has been told he is “not really a pastor” for enforcing rules, and a parent once accused him of saying words he never spoke. Unless we are worshipers, we only hear by our own understanding; God gave Daniel wisdom beyond his peers.

He ends with Jeremiah 3:19, where God promises a pleasant land and says, “You shall call Me, ‘My Father,’ and not turn away from Me.” Chaos may grow, but like watching a movie, it will not be part of your life. He then invites listeners to be born again.

Becoming Worshipers This Week

Here are the practical steps drawn from this message on becoming worshipers:

• Pitch your own tent of meeting. Set aside a daily time, even a short one, to be alone with God and let Him speak, as Moses did outside the camp.
• Ask to know His ways. Pray Moses’ prayer, “Show me now Your way, that I may know You,” rather than only asking Him to act.
• Answer the voice of fear. When fear speaks, read 1 John 4:18 aloud and receive His love.
• Guard your gates. Limit the bad news you take in and lift your gates to the King of glory.
• Say “I love my Master.” Choose to serve God after the prayer is answered, not only before.
• Lead your household in worship. Talk about the Lord at home, read the Bible together and bring your family to church.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:01 Becoming worshipers is a process
• 1:05 Review: praise and worship defined
• 3:12 I AM WHO I AM, and time as creation
• 5:26 The seed packet and Genesis 3
• 6:33 Fear has a voice
• 7:34 Hebrews 2: freed from the slavery of fear
• 8:45 Love needs an object
• 11:19 Perfect love casts out fear
• 13:41 Romans 5:5 and the meaning of worship
• 16:20 The last Adam and Romans 8:32
• 18:37 Psalm 103:7: His ways and His acts
• 20:59 Moses’ tent of meeting
• 24:25 Face to face, and Mary and Martha
• 25:30 Exodus 33: My presence will go with you
• 27:46 Getting into God’s rhythm
• 30:18 Good news and the five gates
• 33:56 Cain, pride and fear
• 35:09 Exodus 21: the bond slave
• 37:34 I love my master
• 39:42 The wise men came to worship
• 43:37 Romans 6: slaves of righteousness
• 49:01 Our wills swallowed up in His
• 52:34 Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ
• 58:01 Jeremiah 3:19 and salvation prayer

Becoming Worshipers Series

This message completes a six-part teaching series at NTC Ministries. Start from the beginning or go back one message:

• First message: Becoming Worshipers, Part 1: From Praise to True Worship
• Previous: Becoming Worshipers
• You are here: Becoming Worshipers #6: From the Voice of Fear to Bond Slaves of Love

Frequently Asked Questions

Does being a bond slave mean God forces us to serve Him?

No. The pastor stresses that God does not put handcuffs on us. Jesus died, rose and ascended, so the believer is already free, like the servant at the seventh year. The bond slave stays by choice, because he loves his master. Each believer has to decide to obey, keep working at the relationship and keep seeking to know God’s ways.

Is it wrong to ask God for things if worship is about who He is?

No. The pastor says he still needs God’s intervention regularly, because we live in a corrupted world. The difference is that we ask from relationship, not from fear. God is not withholding good from us; if He did not spare His own Son, He will freely give us all things. Worship keeps the relationship first.

How much time should I spend alone with God?

He says it does not have to be an hour or two. Start with time every day where you are simply with Him, without worrying about what is in the oven. He has found that the more you do it, the longer you want to stay, and he describes the church’s Wednesday night prayer as a time people do not want to leave.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Exodus 21:2–6 — the servant who loves his master
• Romans 6:16–18 — slaves of righteousness
• Genesis 3:9–11 — who told you that you were naked?
• Hebrews 2:14–15 — freed from the fear of death
• 1 John 4:18–19 — perfect love casts out fear
• Psalm 103:7 — His ways and His acts
• Exodus 33:13–15 — My presence will go with you
• Romans 1:1 — Paul, a bondservant

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

Watch More Messages

If this message drew you closer to God, there are many more teachings from NTC Ministries waiting for you. Browse the full sermon archive and keep growing as a worshiper in spirit and in truth.