Jesus Paid It All Series

Why do I worship? Because Jesus paid the whole price of my sin!

Make the Effort!

I have played volleyball for a number of years. When you play “pick up games” that is where people just kind of join your team as they walk in, you never know who you will get or what skill level you will find.

What I have noticed are two kinds of people in sports.

Those who give it their all and those who just wait for the ball to come to them.

The first kind, those who give it their all are ones who seek to get in the game, to play with all of their ability and not hold back.

By playing with all they have they get a lot more out of the game.

They are the ones you can count on to be “in the game.”

The other kind, those who just wait passively, really ruin the game.

They just don’t have their heart in the game.

They just show up. And then they are disappointed when they don’t get any enjoyment out of the game.

They generally don’t come back every week.

Did you know that people come to worship with the same kind of attitudes?

Some folks think that somehow they will experience worship if they just show up.

They don’t necessarily prepare for the morning, they come without a sense of expectation, and seem to think that somehow God is happy to see that they made it to His house.

But by thinking worship will just “happen” to them, they never really experience it.

They never get into it, they never give themselves or put themselves into the service.

As a result, they go away empty and wonder why.

But the others, who give it their all…what do they experience?

They experience God Himself.

They get up on Sunday morning (and just about every morning for that matter) and look for God.

They are hungry for God.

They don’t just want “a little bit of God” but they want all of Him.

And as a consequence, they enter their Sunday experience with a sense of “giving all of themselves” to God.

Which are you? What have you come this morning to do?

Have you come with an aching hunger for God this morning or have you just “shown up” and just hoping that you will experience worship?

Let’s Pray: Lord God, some of us want to confess that we have not come here with the right motives…we came to get rather than to give. We came to receive rather than to give ourselves to You. Some of us have just showed up, wanting You to bless us for making the effort to just be here…yet You want more than that. So we ask Your forgiveness for our mixed motives. Turn our hearts toward You. Help us to hunger for Your Presence the way we hunger for food after a fast. Help us to desire You above anything else this morning. Oh God…You long for us, You Ache for us, may we experience what you feel for us and return that love to you in worship. In Jesus Name. Amen.

This morning, we are going to learn about the supreme motivation for worship.

I want to take you back to the beginning of your bible, to the place where Adam and Eve had sinned and had discovered their alienation from God and found out what kind of debt they had incurred.

Genesis 3:6-8 “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. 8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.”

The bible says that in Genesis 3:7 that after they had sinned that they recognized their “nakedness” and they sought to cover it by sewing fig leaves together.

Their “nakedness” is an analogy that their guilt before God was exposed.

Before their sin, they needed no covering, because they had no sin and therefore, no guilt.

But afterward, they did. Why is this so?

Because sin had done something to them. It had changed them and their relationship to God,

And no longer could God look upon them, because of their sin.

This is because God is perfectly holy and the bible says that “His eyes are too pure to look upon evil.” He cannot dwell with evil.