Sermon Central
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Covering God With Our Love Series
Contributed by Jeff Strite on Feb 11, 2019 (message contributor)
Summary: I can worship God anywhere... but Psalm 100 talks about "going someplace" to worship. Where should I "go" to worship, and how and why should I worship?
But what’s interesting about Psalm 100 is that it talks about “GOING” someplace to worship. “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!” Psalm 100:4
Jeremiah says pretty much the same thing “Stand in the gate of the LORD’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the LORD, all you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the LORD.” Jeremiah 7:2
Going someplace to worship God - with others - is a common concept in Bible. God asked His Old Testament people to come to the Temple to worship. They could praise God (and pray to God, and sing to God) ANYWHERE. But when push came to shove, the major focus of worship for the people of God was at the temple.
What God was doing here was driving home the fact that worship isn’t about US! God never designed worship to be a “Lone Ranger” kind of thing where we could go off into our own little corner and ignore the rest of God’s people.
ILLUS: I once had a woman call me needing prayer and financial help. As we talked I explained she needed to find a church where she could worship God. “Oh, I worship God just as well at home.” (I doubted that and found later that she spent most of her “worship” time with alcohol). What she meant was, that she would periodically have warm fuzzy feelings about God, and that these warm fuzzy feelings would lead to believe that God approved of how she lived. With a little bit of gentle persuasion, however, she eventually came to worship with us and appreciated what she’d been missing.
God has called His people to “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!
But, how are we gonna do that? There’s no Temple anymore. It was destroyed in 70 A.D.. (pause) Is the church building the new Temple? Oh heaven’s no! We talk about “going to church”, but the building we meet in not the “church.” It’s just a building. Granted, we’ve dedicated this building to worship of God, but this building is NOT THE CHURCH.
Do you know what the church really is? That’s right – we are. We (the people gathered here) are the church! In fact, we are the TEMPLE of God.
Ephesians 2:19-22 says “you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy TEMPLE in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a DWELLING PLACE for God by the Spirit.”
You see, we don’t need a building called a church in order to worship God as a church. Whenever and wherever you come together as a CHURCH, then you are a HOLY TEMPLE in the Lord and then you are a DWELLING PLACE for God. Church is designed to be a time when we gather together to worship.
And when you do it right, people’s lives change. Paul wrote the Corinthians that “(when) an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.” I Corinthians 14:24-25
