I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon that has taken the world by storm over the last several years. In 2004, a college student named Mark Zuckerberg created an online social networking tool for Harvard students to connect. He called it The Facebook. It was only available to students of Harvard, but as the popularity of The Facebook grew, he expanded it to Boston area college students, then to all college students, then to all students, and finally to everybody older than 13.
Since 2004, Facebook has become a monstrosity. Not only can you network with people from all over the world, you can take learn important things like, "Which Pokemon character are you?", "What 80’s song are you?", and "Which Golden Girl are you?" through various quizes available. You can also waste countless hours playing games that vary from simple car-racing to complex Nascar-inspired racing careers.
Facebook has defied traditional logic by appealing to people regardless of age, nationality, and religion. It is estimated that Facebook currently has 250 million active individual users. It has been banned in several countries. It has been blocked by countless companies citing the fact that employees, instead of doing work, were "surfing" on Facebook.
This little website allows people to connect. And it reflects a desire that has been a part of humanity from the beginning. It seeks to fulfill our need to be connected. Right from the get-go, humans needed to be connected. Adam, the first man ever, sat around the newly created world, full of every animal imaginable and said, "You know…this is all well and good, but I need somebody I can connect with". Throughout the ages, the desire for connection has driven people to great lengths.
And today, the internet and Facebook are doing their part try to fill that void. I currently have 490 "friends" on Facebook. And those of you who are members of the Facebook community understand what that means. While many of these people I don’t necessarily connect with on a regular basis, here are some of the people I can network with on facebook: which include my wife, my 13 year old brother, my 16 year old sister, my 20 year old brother, my 22 year old brother, my friends from high school, my friends from college, most of my professors from college, my youth group, parishioners from the church, Pastor Reg and Janice, my parents, pastors from around the district, the District Superintendant, and Marie Wallace. And by the way, Marie, I LOVE that And by the way, Marie, I LOVE that you use Facebook!
Facebook has given us the ability to connect in a way that even five years ago, we never would have thought possible. Because we are people who crave connection. We crave intimacy.
And it’s not just connection with each other. We also have within us the desire to connect with God.
A.W. Tozer, the prolific Christian author, once said that God has "put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit [of God]".
In John 12, Jesus is speaking with His disciples and He says to them, "I will draw all men unto me ". Pastor Reg talked about the idea of prevenient grace, the grace God gives us that allows us to be drawn to Him. It is the principle that is reflected in John 4:19 which says "We love him because he first loved us."
We have the innate need to connect with the living God. If you’ve noticed on the overhead behind me, you’ll see the title screen of our sermon series is Faith: Connecting with the Living God. And that is our goal as Christians is to connect with God, to not just know him as an idea or a thought, but to know him in a way that is personal, to know him intimately, to have a true and vibrant connection with him.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be looking at ways we can connect with God, how we can create that vibrant connection with Him.
This morning, we will turn our focus to worship. Pastor Reg unknowingly acted as a tremendous springboard for our discussion this week when he touched on worship in last Sunday’s message.
So, if you have your Bibles with you, please turn with me to Isaiah 1:10-14 and Isaiah 29:13. I’ll be reading from the NIV this morning:
Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom; listen to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah!
"The multitude of your sacrifices-- what are they to me?" says the LORD. "I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts?
Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations-- I cannot bear your evil assemblies.
Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts my soul hates. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.
And then flip over with me to chapter 29, verse 13:
The Lord says: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men.
Last week, Pastor Reg spoke briefly about how our lives need to be lived in worship, how worship needs to be a way of life, how worship needs to be more than words from our mouths, but something truly from the heart.
A.W. Tozer wrote "It is possible to worship God with our lips and not worship God with our lives. But I want to tell you that if your life doesn’t worship God, your lips don’t worship God either".
A.W. Tozer was a man who was passionate about worship. You’ll more than likely see that throughout the message because he is very much an inspiration to me and a role model I hold to in my own life when it comes to a lifestyle of worship.
So going back to the passages from Isaiah. You may have noticed the prophet referring to Sodom and Gomorrah, but you may remember (if you’re familiar with Biblical history), that those cities were destroyed by God in the book of Genesis for refusing to turn from their evil lifestyles.
We’re seeing God speaking to the people of Israel, but referring to them as Sodom and Gomorrah. He’s also referencing the different traditions of Jewish worship. Now the problem God is having is not with the rituals themselves. He was, in fact, the one who instituted most of these rituals himself, but the problem was with those who were performing these acts of worship.
And you see that made clear in Isaiah 29: They were worshipping God in word, but their hearts were not in it. They sang and they sacrificed, but they did not worship. They fasted and they feasted, but they did not worship. Because their hearts were far from God. Their lives did not reflect a true heart of worship.
We were created to worship, not just in word, but with our lives. We see this in 1 Peter 2:9, " You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light" .
Worship needs to be our lives. Our lives need to be worship. And in the church today, I believe that we need to see a worship renewal; a worship revival; a worship renaissance, if you will. Now, let me clarify what I mean by that.
For a lot of people, the word worship is synonymous with music. Music has become a sticking point with many believers. But let me tell you, I’m not here to talk about music. Music can be divisive. But worship unites. Musical tastes come and go, but music is not worship. Worship isn’t about music. Music can be a form of worship, a facet, an outlet, but it is not worship. Music styles, they come and go. For the most part, we don’t participate in the Gregorian chants in the 6th and 7th centuries. I’m not here to advocate for a certain musical style. I’m not here to say we should go one direction or another, because in the end that’s not what’s important. What’s important is worship. Popular songs, they rise up and die out, but worship is eternal. It is a constant.
So, you may wonder: what is worship, then? As I have been working through that very question, I have come to a simple definition that I feel properly encapsulates it.
Worship is our response to experiencing the presence of God. It involves all the ways in which we can respond to Him, all the ways that we can praise him by what we do and say. It is all the ways we can demonstrate that God is worthy of all praise and glory and honor and power and might.
And unfortunately, like in Isaiah’s day, we have lost some of the essence of worship. Our worship has become empty. As the prophet said, we worship God with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him.
Stephen Charnock, a 17th century Puritan said this about worship: "Without the heart, it is not worship; it is a stage play; an acting part… We may be truly said to worship God, though we [lack] perfection; but we cannot be said to worship Him if we [lack] sincerity".
We come here on a Sunday morning, not to be your entertainment. We may BE entertaining, but that’s not our purpose. We don’t stand up here and expect perfection, which is fortunate because oftentimes we fall short. But if we stand up here and perform our music perfectly, but we lack sincere, heart-felt worship, then it is pointless.
Worship must be more than words from our lips, but must start in our hearts. It must be a way of life. It must be something that consumes us in every way.
This morning, I believe that a worship renewal can start right here. I believe that God has given us the keys to begin right now. There are three keys that I believe help spearhead a renewal in worship. They are things that I have incorporated in my own spiritual life and have changed the way I look at worship and enhanced my relationship with God
The first key, this morning, is this: Understand Who God Is. Understand Who God Is.
Now, we have to know that we will never fully understand God. He’s is far greater than anything we can comprehend. But we can understand His nature and the nature of His relationship with us.
It’s easy for us, especially in our society, to have a warped view of God. The problem is, though, that our ideas of who God is oftentimes formed through the world around us, through popular culture and, believe it or not, other religions. And we neglect the source of our knowledge of God: the Bible.
We hear a lot about a God who is a fiery judge hell-bent on bring about swift retribution on those who do wrong. We’ll call that the "Bully" God.
There are a lot of believers that still look at God as the "bully". They feel that they need to earn his love. We try to fulfill a check-list of things to make ourselves acceptable to God. We too often forget that through the grace and mercy of God, and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we are already made acceptable to Him. There’s nothing that we can do to earn that acceptance.
Think of it like this: imagine a little girl is all excited because she is bringing her daddy a gift. He sees the box, wrapped in wrapping paper left over from last Christmas on it and there’s as much tape as paper. There’s a ribbon tied around the paper and a bow smushed on top. She presents him with the gift all proud of her accomplishment and waits in anticipation as she watches her father struggle to open it. She stands there doing a little dance until he’s got the wrapping paper off and is ready to open the gift.
When he does, the father tries hard to keep a smile on his face and not disappoint his daughter, but inside the box, the gift that the little girl worked so hard to prepare, was a rag- a smelly, dirty, torn, used rag. But the girl gushes, "Daddy, don’t you love it? I worked hard on it for you? I love you Daddy! I’m going to go make you more!"
And the father is left to worry about what the next smelly, used "treasure" his little girl will bring him next.
In the same way, when we try to bring our gifts to God on our own merit, when we try to earn his love and acceptance, the Bible says that "all our righteous acts are like filthy rags". But unfortunately, we are too often like that little girl, rushing to offer God what we think is something really special. The truth is, though, on our own merits, we could never bring God anything worthy of Him.
But…there’s always a but…praise the Lord, He gives us His grace. The apostle Peter declares in his epistle: you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Did you catch that last phrase? Let me read it again: acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
The gifts we bring, the worship we give, they are acceptable not because of their merits, but because they have been made acceptable to God through Jesus!
Many people feel that they are unworthy to come to God and to receive his grace, but the truth is we aren’t! Like Isaiah said, all of our good works, the best we have to offer, on our own, is garbage, filth. But because God loves us, because God cares for us, he gives us grace. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, he gives us mercy. And because of that, we can bring spiritual sacrifices, or as the author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 13:15, a "sacrifice of praise- the fruit of lips that confess his name!"
Max Lucado, in his book In the Eye of the Storm, talks about worship like this:
Worship is the awareness that were it not for his touch, you’d still be hobbling and hurting, bitter and broken. Worship is the half-glazed expression on the patched face of a desert pilgrim as he discovers that the oasis is not a mirage.
Worship is the "thank you" that refuses to be silent…
Worship is the voluntary act of gratitude offered by the saved to the Savior, by the healed to the Healer, by the delivered to the Deliverer.
Worship is the one leper of ten going back to Jesus and saying thank you for his healing. Jesus, during his time on earth, healed ten men of leprosy. He told them to go to the priest to be proclaimed clean. So off they went, saying nothing to Jesus. But one turned around, came back and said, "Thank you". Our worship needs to be like that of the one leper, except multiplied because instead of being cured of an awful disease in this life, we were spared an eternal damnation in hell when we did not deserve it.
It is coming to Him, knowing what we have been spared, knowing what He gave up and simply saying, “Thank you… thank you… thank you!”
When we properly understand who God is, we can then enter into worship of Him. That’s the first key to experiencing a worship renewal.
The second key, this morning, to experiencing a worship renewal, is something we’ve been discussing at length lately, but I don’t believe you can ever discuss it too much. The second key is this: Root your worship in prayer. Root your worship in prayer.
This has been the rallying cry from the pulpit over the last several weeks with good reason. Prayer needs to be the backbone of your spiritual life. Without pray all other facets of your spiritual life will wilt.
But believers too often miss prayer. We do not root our spiritual lives in prayer. And without this underlying foundation, we will never fully accomplish the plans and purposes of God. We can never see the changes God desires without prayer. We can never see a worship renewal without prayer.
All the flash advertising, creative music, tech-savvy sermons, are all well and good, but they are not the answer. We may have strong programs, great teachers and leaders, enthusiastic volunteers, and lots of money, but they cannot stand as a foundation. Only through prayer can God create deep, wholesome, permanent change in people.
Jesus told us in John 15:5 that "Apart from me, you can do nothing".
Paul encourages us to "Pray without ceasing".
E.M. Bounds, the 19th century Methodist minister, once said:
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use -- men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men, men of prayer.
Look at all the major revivals throughout history and you’ll see one common thread. It wasn’t a well-rehearsed preacher. It wasn’t a strong music program, but it was bathed in prayer. Hours upon hours, days upon days.
Billy Graham’s crusades were so successful because he and countless others bathed his crusades in prayer. And God blessed that faithfulness.
The same must be said in our lives. Our worship to Him must be treated with the same passion. Without prayer, our worship will lack the strength and foundation that it gives.
Jesus himself modeled the necessity of prayer. Luke, in his Gospel, said that "Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed" If such prayer was necessary for Jesus, how much more important is it for us?
But prayer is hard work. And people are lazy. I heard it compared to mining:
When mining, the bulk of the time is spent boring into solid rock. It requires patience and commitment but it is essential in the mining process. Once the boring is complete, a charge is placed in the hole and the fuse lit. Then large amounts of rock are blasted away. If the charge with detonated on the surface, the impact would not have been the same.
In the same way, many Christians are eager to light the fuse. They are eager to see the big explosion, whether that’s seeing people get saves, seeing new people attend the church, or seeing explosions of faith in your own life. We are eager to see the explosion, but few are willing to require themselves the difficult job of boring into the solid rock. Anybody can light a fuse, but it takes commitment and patience to do the hard work.
Before we can see a renewal in our worship, we must first root our lives in prayer, knowing that God’s word is true when it says in John 5:14-15: this is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us - whatever we ask - we know that we have what we asked of him.
Prayer needs to be the bedrock of our worship. To see a worship renewal in our lives and in our Church, we need to root it in prayer.
There’s a third key this morning to see a worship renewal in your life, and it’s this: Make worship a constant in all areas of your life. Make worship a constant in all areas of your life.
When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he responded saying, " Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength"
The wording differs some from the command given to the Hebrews by God in Deuteronomy. Jesus adds "your mind" because in that day, Greek philosophy was ruling the day. The focus of the world was on thinking and the mind. And Jesus wanted to stress that our relationship with Him must not just encapsulate all areas of our lives. It’s not just about your heart, soul and strength, but your mind as well. It’s every area of your life. Worship must penetrate all aspects of your life.
A.W. Tozer speaks of it in this way: "The total life, the whole man and woman, must worship God. Faith, love, obedience, loyalty, conduct and life- all of these must worship God. If there is anything in you that does not worship God, then there is not anything in you that does worship God".
Those are hard words. If there is anything in you that does not worship God, then there is not anything in you that does worship God.
Worship must be something that is done with every fiber of my being. As it says in 1 Peter 4:11: If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever.
So the question that needs to be asked: are you worshipping God in every area of your life?
Tozer says it well when he says "You are not worshipping right in any place until you are worshipping God in every place. If you cannot worship Him in the kitchen, you cannot worship Him… in the church".
So, again, the question is, are you worshipping God in every area of your life? At home? At work? In the car? At school? And, again, I’m not talking about singing. I’m not talking about bursting into “Oh, How I Love Jesus” while you’re at the dentist’s office.
What I’m saying is are your efforts constantly done, as the Scripture said, “so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” Are the words you speak, spoken as to bring glory to God? Are the actions your do, done to the glory of God?
Worship needs to be a constant in your life. It can’t just be something you come to church and do and then go home. If that is how you approach worship, you will always leave feeling empty.
Missionary to the Alaskan wilderness, Tricia Rhodes shared a story that can relate to this. She shares:
Years ago, as missionaries in the Alaskan wilderness, my husband and I drew our water from an indoor pump. We were city folk, and at first we didn’t understand the pump’s mechanics. Once a week, we pour a cup of water to prime it, pumped like crazy until the water finally sprung up from underground and then filled every bucket and pot we could find.
I well remember how an Eskimo neighbor laughed at our system. Then he explained that if we used the pump [several times a day] , it would always stay primed, ready to gush out with one easy thrust of the handle.
Worship must be understood in those terms. Too many Christians come to church, hoping to be nourished, hoping to be filled, so that they can hold onto that for the week. But coming once a week, priming the pump, and pumping like crazy is no substitute for a real, ongoing relationship with Jesus.
Worship needs to be a constant in every area of our lives.
This morning, as we close this portion of the service, I’d invite you to join us in worship. Not just by singing with us, but by entering into real, true worship that resounds from your heart to the heart of God. By responding to the experience of the presence of God in your life, remembering the words of Lucado:
Worship is the voluntary act of gratitude offered by the saved to the Savior, but the healed to the Healer, by the delivered to the Deliverer.
Because He is worthy of our praise! Would you stand with us as we worship Him. As we give Him the honor and glory and praise due His name. As we respond to the presence of God in this place? Would you stand with us as we do this?
