For An Audience Of One
July 3, 2005 Worship Service
Leading Into Worship:
Why do we come to church? As you planned your long weekend, why did you include “Sunday – go to church” on your list of things to do? Here is a Top Ten:
10. Because praying for a 10 foot putt does NOT constitute an active prayer life.
9. Because saving people from the “heat” is what Christianity is all about!
8. Because this week’s absentee equals next week’s sermon illustration.
7. Because you helped pay for the church’s central air conditioning, you might as well enjoy it!
6. Because your quest to make the immortal words, "Give me wax for my board, keep me surfing for the Lord," a lifestyle choice, just hasn’t been as "gnarly" as you thought it would be!
5. Because the combination of sweaty bare legs and varnished pews makes you feel like you’re suffering for the cause of Christ!
4. Because the youth minister is preaching for the month of August and someone has to keep a record of his inappropriate illustrations and theological blunders!
3. Because all new sermons are a big plus in a season of reruns!
2. Because it makes your day to see the preacher sweat!
And the number one reason to come to church even though it is Summer is:
1. Because when we say that Jesus is the Lord of our lives, we do NOT mean 9/12ths of our lives!
I suspect our answers are a little different. Some of you came because it is habit – going to church is what you do on Sundays, period. That is a good habit! Let’s be really honest, some of you came because someone else made you – maybe a parent or a spouse. Some of you came because you were looking forward to seeing some friends – that is good too, it is called “fellowship”. Some came because you have had a difficult week or month, and you need a safe place to come and sit in the presence of God, pour out your heart to Him, and you expect that God will come and encourage you.
As good, or as bad, as all those reasons may be, there is really one main reason we come to church, and it is summed up in this verse from 1 John 4:19 “We love because he first loved us.” We come to church because of the incredible love of God for us. Most of us come because we know that love, we have experienced the radical, life-transforming power of that love, and we have chosen and pledged to live our lives as Christians because of that love. Some of you are here because you need that love, you are searching for it and longing for it, and you are in the right place… if God so chooses, you can find it here this morning.
So what that means is that we are here to respond to the love of God for us. We are here to worship God – to bring God our offering of worship. A worship service like this is not for us – it is not our primary purpose to “get something out of it”, but rather to give to God. To offer Him our love and our thanks for everything He is and has done.
Each week, we pray, plan, and practice, with the sole goal being to bring an offering of worship. And when we think like that, we quickly come to the realization that we do not want to bring an offering to God that is poor. Or sloppy. Or thrown together, or not carefully crafted and thought through. Instead we want to bring an offering that is good, that we have spent time preparing, that will at least begin to express our gratitude and love for God. It is appropriate to think about it as a concert – as long as we all recognize that God is the only audience member – we are all participants, we are all on stage together, and we are all focused on an audience of one - God alone.
So this morning I want to lead us in worship a little differently than normal. This is going to be a sort of “behind the scenes” look; I intend to walk us through each part of the service with some explanation and teaching and preparation. Let me begin with our opening prayer.
Opening Prayer:
The opening time of prayer is mostly about invitation and focus. While we have no set-in-stone phrase or prayers, the intention is the same. It is where we invite God into our midst, affirm that He is the focus and the reason, and where we turn our hearts and re-orient ourselves out of our messy lives and onto God. So let us do that now.
Worship Through Song:
I firmly believe that every aspect of our service is part of our worship to God. But music has a special place in worship, because it is a good tool for expressing our love for God and for carving out time for us to express that and to listen to hear if God has something He would like to say to us. Eph 5:19 instructs us, “speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord.”
Sadly, our great diversity of personal musical “likes” and “preferences” have often turned music from a tool used to express our love for God into something that we fight about. And since music resonates with us on an emotional level, having someone reject you or judge you for your musical preference causes a lot of hurt. Without getting deep into that, let me just bluntly say this: it is time for that to stop. Let us all rise above the “style” and our “likes”, and put the focus where it belongs – on who God is and what God has done for us. And let us agree to do this: when we hear a type of music that we don’t particularly like, let us take that opportunity to be selfless, to focus on God instead of the music we do not like, and let us take that one step further and actually celebrate that someone else here in our church, whom you know and love, does like that style and finds in it an ability to express their love for God. Laurier has always had a variety of musical styles, sometimes in the same service and sometimes in different services, because we have a variety of people. That is our great strength, when we recognize and respect that in one another. Especially when we talk about music, let us grow very very deep in grace and in love for one another – could we agree to that?
As we prayed and planned, one song stuck out to Pastor Sue more than others. It is called “O Worship The King”. In keeping with the idea that worship is for an audience of One, we are going to learn it and practice it, and then offer it to God. Our hymnal (it is #10) includes 4 of 6 verses written by Robert Grant in 1833, and he was reworking lyrics from a man named William Kethe published in 1561. The music was written by Johann Haydn, brother of famous composer Franz Haydn. The original 6th verse is really good, but we are used to bringing the song to the climax at the end of verse 4 so we will do that today.
For me, my expression of love to God is much more significant if I understand and agree with the words I am singing. So let’s take a quick look:
The first two verses are sung to one another. We are inviting each other to worship – especially focused on God as our King. Much of the imagery in those verses is royal imagery – “all glorious”, and incredibly loving, and then it becomes strong and mighty, “our shield and defender” (which is from Psalm 91:4), “Ancient of Days” another strong title for God, and He is surrounded and exalted with splendor and praise (a pavilion is a special place set aside to highlight something beautiful and important, girded just means surrounded). The second verse accomplishes the same thing, inviting us to “tell” and “sing” of who God is, and it introduces some more images of the fierceness and powerfulness of God, again using Biblical imagery of God’s chariot of “wrath” (which is from Ezekiel).
Verses 3-4 switch. Now we no longer sing to one another about who God is, we sing together directly to God. “Thy bountiful care…” the entire verse meditates on God’s goodness and care for us, climaxing with us experiencing that care in the midst of both good times, “the dew”, and during the storms, “the rain”. This gentle image comes right after the images of power and wrath. God is both. And if God is so powerful and yet cares so bountifully and gently, where does that leave us? Verse 4: as frail, feeble, yet trusting in God and experiencing and affirming His mercy. Our hymnal version climaxes with 4 titles for God: “Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.”
So know we are going to do as a whole congregation what we do as worship leaders each week. We are going to practice. If you read music and like to harmonize, please do. This first time through, you can concentrate on the music and on trying to get it right, and on making the way we sing (volume, tempo, etc…) correspond to the lyrics.
(practice two verses).
Alright, now the preparation is done, we are practiced, now we stop and return our focus towards God. (As leaders, we do this each week 30 minutes before the service begins, and anyone is always welcome to join us for prayer in my office 30 minutes before the service begins.) Each week my prayer is this – that God would re-focus me on Him, that He would now take care of the little details and keep us from being distracted by anything, and enable us to bring an offering of worship that would be pleasing to Him. So now we are all ready to do the same thing.
O Worship The King - #10
How Deep The Father’s Love for Us
other?
DISMISS KIDS – SUE
OFFERING
Giving financially is also an act of worship. It is our way of demonstrating our dependence on God and not on money, and it is our way of supporting the practical workings of God’s Kingdom. The practice of giving God 10% of all our income is rooted in the Old Testament, and including it in Christian worship dates all the way back to the New Testament – 1 Cor 16:1-2 “Now about the collection for God’s people: Do what I told the Galatian churches to do. On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made.”
Sue has picked an incredibly appropriate song for this time, bringing us back again to what God has done for us as we respond by worshiping through giving.
CORPORATE PRAYER
In Ephesians 6:18-20, Paul writes: “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.
Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.”
In keeping with Paul’s command, we take time in our service to pray for one another. And so that we can pray more intelligently and effectively, we take time to share the needs and requests and praises in our hearts.
MESSAGE
The Importance of Preaching:
Preaching had a very significant place in the life of the Early Church. Jesus was constantly preaching and teaching. The church as we know it began with Peter’s sermon in Acts 2. Paul went all over the place preaching the good news of the resurrection of Jesus. In keeping with that tradition, preaching continues to hold an important place in our times of worship.
Part of our Baptist Heritage is the centrality of the Word of God – the Word recorded in Scripture and the Word brought to life, through a sermon. It has a fairly central place in our service of worship, for it is during this time that we come together as the people of God to listen, be encouraged and challenged, and to seek to hear what God might want to say to us as His children. It is generally my job to use my training, my skill, and my relationship with God and with this church to spend time sharing with you what thing or things I believe God wants us to hear from Him.
When you stop and think about it like that, preaching is a pretty scary thing. What if I am wrong? What if I haven’t listened to God and I get the message wrong or deliver it poorly so that it isn’t heard? What if the things in my own life get in the way?
Luckily I don’t think like that too often – at least not anymore. When I was a youth pastor I used to look at Senior Pastors and think, “You guys are nuts.” I still look at some of my colleagues and think the same thing, but now for different reasons… I used to look at it and be completely intimidated by the task of preaching regularly – how on earth can people do that?? Early on in my learning to preach weekly, I asked a friend and mentor, Terry Fossen of Central Baptist, that very question – how do you do it week to week to week? He had an excellent answer – “we do our best to prepare and to pray, and then we rely on the Spirit and on the gift that the Spirit has given.”
How To Hear A Sermon:
Last week I had the privilege of listening to a sermon instead of preaching one. Kelly Wiens shared a message that she had felt was God-prompted, and so Kelly was obedient and shared it with us. It was a challenging message – I’ve made some copies for the back table for those of you who might be interested in reading it. She read this story: (Luke 10:38-42)
“As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!"
"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
Now, I am not going to preach Kelly’s sermon again, but basically Kelly shared a bit about some places where she had felt like she had been like Martha, and how God had challenged her about those things. And she asked us to look at our lives to see if there were places that we were being like Martha – running around, taking care of all the preparations, being busy – and missing the fact that Jesus is right in the midst of it wanting our love. Where is our focus? Where is our motivation?? We were confronted with the essential question of the entire New Testament – does Jesus have our hearts? That is a pretty challenging message! And I got to hear it too, and it got me to thinking: what do we do with a sermon? If it is a worthwhile sermon, we must have some sort of response to it, it must touch or challenge or encourage some part of our hearts. What do we do with that?
In 1 Cor 14, Paul gives us the answer. Now, to put it in its proper context, Paul is here talking about words of prophecy given in church and not the prepared sermon which Paul calls “a word of instruction” (vs. 16), but I believe the same principle applies. Paul says, “others should weigh carefully what is said” (vs. 29). As we listen to sermons, our responsibility is to “weigh carefully what is said.”
I AM Martha!
So last week, after listening to the sermon, I did exactly that. I thought about the story, and my first reaction was, “I AM Martha!” That is my job each Sunday morning – to make all the preparations so that when all of you come to worship, it is ready and prepared and hopefully will facilitate your ability to “sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to what he says”.
I didn’t really like that realization! I don’t want to be Martha! Mary “chose what is better”, I want to be her instead. So I thought about that a little more, and I came to this realization – Martha wasn’t in trouble for her activity, she was in trouble because her heart was bitter and self-righteous towards Mary, who in her opinion was just being lazy. But Jesus knew their hearts, and in the moment affirmed Mary’s worship instead of Martha’s bitterness. That realization brought me to the next place – looking again at my heart. I still have to be Martha on Sunday mornings, but the question that matters is the one that cuts to my heart: am I gladly serving, doing it for Jesus and for you so that you can sit at Jesus’ feet; or am I jealous and bitter because I have to work? I was able, in that reflection and examination of my heart, to affirm that I am ok – it truly gives me great joy whenever I see any of you sitting at Jesus’ feet in adoration and in listening to Him. And I do try to carve out a few minutes in the service to do the same; usually during the music when I don’t have active responsibility, and that is why I choose to sit among the congregation instead of on stage.
We need Marthas, but we need them with Mary’s heart. Could you imagine what it would be like if there were no Marthas? If we all ditched the preparation and just sat at Jesus’ feet? We all have needs, and whenever there is a group of people together there are a whole bunch of needs. Toilets have to be cleaned. Somebody needs to get some chairs. We need a way to make sure that a message can be heard. If there is music involved, somebody will need to have made sure that there are instruments and musicians and a common knowledge of the songs, or else it would be completely disastrous. Could you imagine what would happen here at church if nobody came prepared to serve others, to facilitate others ability to “sit at Jesus’ feet and listen”? It would not be pretty… The key is, all the “work” needs to be done for Jesus – that is the true heart of a servant; doing it for Jesus.
Whenever we hear a sermon, we need to “weigh carefully what is said” and pray about how it might apply to us. I shared about how I did that; I have also had a number of really good conversations this week about last week’s sermon. In one of them, one of our Elders made an excellent observation: the passage only tells us what Jesus said to Martha. What would Jesus say to Mary? He affirmed Mary’s choice in the moment, and He affirmed her heart. But isn’t it conceivable that Jesus also might have told Mary that she could have helped out ahead of time – before Jesus got there – so that Martha wouldn’t be stuck doing it all? That sounds like the parable Jesus told of the wise stewards, who thoughtfully used the money their master had entrusted them with so that when he returned they could be prepared to show him what they had done with their resources. This Elder said, “You have to do both - you have to be in the moment and having prepared ahead. You have to be able to "entertain" a friend in need at the drop of a hat but you also need to spend the time cleaning your house, tidying, cleaning, cooking (prep work)… (the key is that)… the timing of prep work is flexible (sermons can be written at mid-night; cookies can be baked at 4:30 in the morning) - the timing for people is in the moment. If you miss it, its gone.”
In another conversation about last week’s sermon, someone else said: “I got convicted myself. While I’ve never minded coffee in the sanctuary, children yelling, youths dressing like....well, youths, or loud music, I have a tendency to be annoyed (okay, down right angry!) with people who I perceive won’t change. They don’t want to move ahead or try anything new and that makes me mad. And then I take it a step further and start thinking we should throw all their opinions and ideas out the window. And that what I was convicted of last week because God moves in the old and the new, in the loud and the quiet, in tradition and change. We need all in balance. It doesn’t negate what God is telling me, but it shouldn’t negate what God has been and continues to tell others either. I’m guilty of self-centeredness and intolerance which I hadn’t realized until last week. So I’m thankful for the sermon and hopeful that I can strike a balance in love also.”
Love One Another Deeply:
Those of you who have listened to my preaching for a while have doubtless noticed a few recurrent themes. Most recently, the theme that we need to love one another deeply. That is what I heard in both of those examples. Loving each other sometimes means doing all the work so that others can sit at Jesus’ feet. Sometimes it means leaving the work till an inconvenient time so that you can be with people. Sometimes it means ignoring the work because Jesus is present.
But it always means listening when we differ. It means being respectful of the things that matter to others, and being glad to choose things that will enhance someone else’s ability to offer their worship and love to Jesus. When we are alone with Jesus we need not worry about how our actions and behaviors effect others, but as soon as we come together as a larger group we must love one another enough to care about how our actions might effect others. I don’t wear a ratty t-shirt to church because of how it might effect others, but I certainly don’t mind praying to God while cleaning my garage in a ratty t-shirt. No one else is effected in my garage, but if something I do at church distracts others, causes them to look somewhere other than to Jesus, then I am in the wrong. That is what it means to love others deeply.
And really, this is what Paul was talking about in 1 Cor 8, in a different but very much parallel situation, and with this I’ll close:
“1Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. 3But the man who loves God is known by God.
4So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. 5For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"), 6yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
7But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. 8But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.
9Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? 11So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.”
COMMUNION:
