God Loves Our Worship

In all my years of ministry I haven’t found anything that can make church people as cranky as the music. Seriously. Thom Ranier a church growth and health consultant wrote “The comment ‘someone complained about the music at my church’ is a universal phenomenon of our age.”

If you’ve been with us over the past couple of week’s we’ve been going down a path entitled. Why We Are. . . and we started two weeks ago by looking at why we are focused on the lost. We are by definition what some folks would call a Seeker Sensitive Church.

That is why we do what we can to make the unchurched, the de-churched and the pre-churched comfortable in our service. That’s why we have an one-hour service. It’s why we try to incorporate music that at least sounds like it was written in this century and why we try to explain churchy terms and concepts and preach and teach toward the end of making the message relevant to people today. To answer that all burning question that people ask during sermons: So What?

And the reason we do that is because God loves lost people. God loved lost people enough to be willing to give his Son. And Jesus loved lost people enough that he was willing to give his life. And so we asked the question, if those two statements are true than what are we willing to give to reach the lost?

Last week we looked at the story of the children who were brought to Jesus and how the disciples tried turning the parents away and Jesus got a little cranky and told the disciples, “Let the children come to me, don’t do anything to stop them.”

And we looked at why Cornerstone invests so much time and energy into our children’s ministry. And we do that for the future of the church. The church, this church and the church universal is always one generation away from extinction.

And without children the church will only exist until they close the door after the last funeral.

But more importantly, the reason why we invest so much time and energy into our children’s ministry is because we aren’t just impacting the future of the church we are impacting the eternity of those kids.

If we believe what we say we believe about there being a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned I would think there would be people knocking down the doors to help insure that our children would have an eternity with God.

We aren’t just offering a program to keep the kids occupied while you are in real church, our staff and volunteers are impacting their todays and their forevers.

And that brings us to the scripture that was read earlier.

Jesus was asked by a man what was required for eternal life, and this was his answer: Matthew 22:37-38 Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment.

Jesus said that is the most important commandment, if you can only do one, this is it. This is the one that you don’t want to miss. 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' So we were created to be loved by God and our purpose in our lives is to love him back. He should be the most important thing in our life.

If we have to pick the one item that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do without it should be God.

And there is a word for what we do when we love God that way and that is “Worship”. We worship God. Goes all the way back to the first book in the Bible, Genesis 4:26 When Seth grew up, he had a son and named him Enosh. It was during his lifetime that people first began to worship the Lord.

If we go all the way back to the beginning of the story you realize that Adam and Eve were created to be in fellowship with God. There was a direct connection and they deliberately rebelled and walked away from the relationship. And after they were banished from the Garden of Eden we have no idea what type of relationship they had with their creator.

But it’s not very long into history that we read those words about their grandson Enosh, it was during his lifetime that people said “We need to have that relationship with the one who created us, we need to connect with him again.” And they began to worship God. But what does that mean?

Does it mean that they started having church and part of that was the “Worship” service? Did they have drums and guitars and keyboards and sing songs by Ren Collective and Chris Tomlin, or did they have an organ and piano and sing hymns? Was it contemporary worship or more traditional worship?