Spiritual Disciplines: Worship
February 24, 208
It’s Sunday morning at 9:23 a.m. and a young mother shouts upstairs to see if her five year old has finally brushed his teeth and found any socks that match. Emptying unfinished cereal bowls in the sink, she checks the clock one more time, knowing that if she changes the baby’s diaper, the whole family will once again be late to church.
The hardest part of the morning is containing her resentment against her husband, who has somehow found time to read the sports page while she has been expected to prepare herself and three crabby children. She’ll have to put on lipstick in the car.
Across town a twenty-something young man presses his snooze alarm for the third time. Why did he cave in and agree to meet his friend at some church? To get the guy off his back after saying “No” on five other weekends. He wonders if it’s too late to beg sickness, or if he should just get it over with and grab some coffee to give him a jolt to ease the slight hangover from last night’s party.
A single dad honks the horn to pick up his fifth-grade son, hoping to give his boy a consistent religious experience and looking forward to their weekly donut stop after church.
A grandmother carefully buttons her best dress and frets over the casual attire of most contemporary church goers.
A thirty-two year old single woman catches herself smiling at a stoplight, filled with anticipation at the opportunity to go to church and thank God for the job promotion she thought would never come.
A fifteen year old girl has fought with her mom all morning about why she had to get up so early on one of her only days off, why her skirt is too short to wear to church, and why a Diet Coke and half a donut aren’t considered a nutritious breakfast.
A young couple who have diligently prayed for a baby the last four years get into their sedan, longing to have need for a minivan someday. Going to church has become a painful reminder for them of the hole they feel, and they secretly hope they can emotionally handle the sight of so many happy families arriving in the parking lot.
Every Sunday morning a minority of people in our town prepare to go to church. Each man, woman and child has a story - a life that goes on from Monday through Saturday. Many of them rush to get to church on time. Some were on the fence all morning about whether they would really show up. So, for those who do arrive, who walk into a church and take a seat, what is at stake? How much does it really matter what takes place in the next hour?
Out of about 300 or so people here this morning, we have come for many different reasons. Some are hoping to experience Jesus, some are here because they have always come, it’s where the car automatically comes on Sunday mornings; some are here because they were told they had to be here, they came against their will and maybe even their better judgement (and I’m glad you are here); some are here, very honestly for reasons that do not yet make sense to them.
We have all come to this building knowing Sunday morning is about WORSHIP. That is the focus of our time together this morning. As we move through a discussion of the various disciplines, the Spiritual Discipline of WORSHIP may seem like anything but a discipline. Yet, if we do not understand the point of worship and even get a clue about how to worship, then when we come here, we are just opening ourselves to a time of frustration and aggravation, instead of a time of joy and praise and life giving celebration.
When we come into this building, which we call a church, we have some options available to us. We can come into this building and we have all been down this road, we can be bitter and angry at the world, including God, for the rough times of our lives. Or we can come in here and give thanks and praise to God for all of the amazing ways He has blessed us in our lives.
We all have experienced difficult times in our lives, yet God has promised us that He will never abandon us, He will never bail out on us, He will never fail us, instead He promises us “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11).
With promises like these, promises which lead us to better understand God’s plans for you and I, His plans to prosper us, to give us hope and a future, not to harm us - - - should lead us into worship because we are thankful, despite our difficult times. Because we know God is for us and if God is for us, frankly that is our greatest asset.
So, what is worship?
Worship is not about us. It is not about what I want or what makes me happy. Worship is about my coming into this building, called a church, so I can respond to God’s character and presence in my life. In other words, I come here and thank God for who He is. I look at the characteristics of God . . . and I believe He is filled with LOVE, GRACE, JOY, PEACE, PATIENCE, MERCY, COMPASSION and many more what we might call character traits. I come here and I thank God and recognize God’s grace in forgiving my sins, for sending Christ to love me and die for me, I come ready to say thank you to God for His compassionate and never ending love, His promise never to abandon me, no matter how bad I become, I come wanting to thank Him for His acts of mercy, for His creativity, for so many different ways I have been blessed because of who God is.
I also come here because I recognize how God is present in my life. Even in those moments when I pull away from God, when I become rebellious, I know that God is present with me. He has promised to be with us forever. To do that He sent His Holy Spirit, so that when Christ ascended and went to heaven, the Holy Spirit could be with each one of us, all at the same time. It is something we cannot explain, I take it on faith, and I thank and praise God for being with me and my family, and with you every milli-second of everyday.
Richard Foster wrote,
"Worship is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father. It is kindled within us only when the Spirit of God touches our human spirit. Our spirit must be ignited by the divine fire. . . When Spirit touches spirit the issue of forms is wholly secondary."
Foster is telling us that when God’s Spirit touches our spirit, it leads us into worship. Because when we are worshiping, we realize it is all about God, and not about us. We seek to give back to God by thanking and praising Him. It comes form passages like Revelation 4:8-11, which is on the cover of your bulletin . . . when the
8 the four living creatures never stop saying: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come." 9Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, 10the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say:
11"You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being."
Do you get a picture of the heavenly scene. They are praising God because God is WORTHY. This is what worship is about. Worship is our response to God’s worth, we seek to give God the glory and honor and power, because God is the Creator and we are the created. We come and thank God for who He is.
When you follow the pattern in Revelation, in the very next chapter, in Revelation 5, we read . . .
11 Then I (John) looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. 12 In a loud voice they sang:
"Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!"
13 Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing:
"To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!”
14 The four living creatures said, "Amen," and the elders fell down and worshiped.
Now, we might think this is a pretty boring scene in heaven. Actually, it excites me. This is how I picture it, if you are a sports fan, picture yourself at your favorite sporting event with your favorite team involved. You leave your home early enough because you know there will be traffic. You double check about 10,000 times if you have your ticket. You get to the stadium and you are dressed for the game, you’ve got your teams jersey on, your face is painted, you’re pumped up before you ever walk into the stadium.
You get there and you are actually sweating because you are so excited and so nervous, all at the same time. You are ready to join thousands of other people you don’t know to do one thing to cheer on your team. When they stand and yell at the officials, you will stand and join them. When there is a bad play, you will talk about it. When your team scores, you will stand and cheer. By the time the game is over, win or lose, you have been so totally absorbed in the game that if the world crumbled all around you, you would not have known and you would not have cared. You were totally engrossed in the game.
Folks, that is how worship should be. We should be so totally engrossed in worshiping that if it took longer than usual, we wouldn’t complain, we wouldn’t be worrying when that roast is going to be done, we wouldn’t be wondering about where we are going for lunch, we wouldn’t be thinking about last nights adventures, we would be immersed in God, passionately, fully engaged in praising God for His blessings in our lives.
The problem comes in that we are not wired that way in church. Because we often talk about Sunday mornings as coming to church. That’s the building. On Sunday mornings we come to a WORSHIP CELEBRATION. My hope is that on Sunday mornings when we gather together, we come wanting and willing to have a WORSHIP CELEBRATION.
However, our society has turned us into a me first society. We think about what is in it for me, we are in a society that bases everything on entertainment. If we are not being entertained, we are not too happy. Our attention spans have become shorter and shorter. This is why television programs never keep the same angle on a performer for more than 20 seconds. We easily become bored with that angle and need the picture to change. When we come to church, we think the same thing. We consider the fact that worship is about us, not God.
So we walk away on Sunday saying, “I am not getting fed,” yet, that is not the purpose of worship. I believe we will all be fed by God when we GIVE ourselves to God in worship. You know that old saying, “it’s better to give than to receive” is true, because when we have really given ourselves to God, we walk out of here having received from God, which feeds us and inspires us and compels us to grow and change and become more Christlike.
Yet, the messages we hear all week on television, in magazines, on the radio, on the Internet, remind us it is about us. So the message we hear for 167 hours per week is
satisfy yourself
you come first
wear the right jeans and you will get the right boy or girl
drink the right beverage and you will live the high life
drive the right car and people will think you’re cool
and the list goes on and on.
So on Sunday morning we come to church, we’re a little tired, maybe we’ve felt like we’ve been beaten up a little and we come here wanting the same thing we’ve heard about all week. The problem is, we feel like nobody treated us like we were number 1, instead, we were treated like we were at the bottom of the cesspool.
Psalm 100 tells us,
1 Make a joyful shout to the LORD
Come before His presence with singing.
4 Enter into His gates with thanksgiving,
And into His courts with praise.
Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.
5 For the LORD is good;
His mercy is everlasting,
And His truth endures to all generations.
But we don’t feel like praising, we just want someone to do something for us.
We come to worship as if we were going to Swifty’s to get gas. We tell the attendant how much gas we want, and are served. It’s like going to a restaurant, we put in our order and the tip we leave is dependent upon how well our needs were met. We have that ‘what’s in it for me attitude.’
But worship is not about what’s in it for me, and that is why Worship is a Spiritual Discipline. Sometimes we have to discipline ourselves to come here; other times when life is not going as we want it to go, we have to discipline ourselves to come with a sense of thanksgiving and praise for the blessings of God.
Worship is not a passive event; it is an action oriented event in our lives. We cannot come here and just sit and be a grump. We may try to be a grump or have a sour look on our face, but how is that worship, when there is no joy in our appearance?
In worship we respond to God’s activity and focus on Him.
