-good morning everyone. As you can see, the pastors are away for annual conference so we’ve called in the third string today.
-before we begin today though, I have a volunteer who is going to come up here for a second. [DO TRUST FALL THING, HAM IT UP]
-now be honest, how many of you after a few minutes were thinking in your head “Fall already!”?
-here’s why I ask. How often do we do that? We say that we trust God, we say how much we love Him and want His will for our life, but how we live doesn’t mimic that? How many people are looking at your life and saying “Fall already”?
-why is it so hard for us to do that? I mean, we just sang it, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey.” Do you really believe that?
**Ps. 84:11-12 -> 11The Lord is our Protector and Glorious King, blessing us with kindness and honor. He does not refuse any good thing to those who do what is right. 12Lord Almighty, how happy are those who trust in You! (GNT)
-He doesn’t refuse those who do right, those who trust Him, they are happy? When it comes to God and your faith, here’s a tough question. Are you happy? Are you really trusting Him?
-and realize I don’t say this lightly or to try and impose guilt, I just want you to think. This is something that has been taught to us, how to put God in a box in our lives.
1. THE HISTORY OF COMPARTMENTALIZATION
-I used a big word to try and seem smart, sorry.
-but I wants us to take a look at our history. When America was founded, most people lived in a way where there was no separation in their lives. For instance, say daddy was a cabinet maker. Daddy would make cabinets at home and sometimes even sell them out of the front room of the house. The kids, they would be with daddy and mommy all day as they worked. The parents were in charge of teaching their kids the trade as well as reading, math, and they were in charge of teaching their children about faith. Yes, the family would go to church once a week, but the other days it was mom and dad having church as a family at home.
-so everything was wrapped up in one life, job, family, faith, education, there was no separation.
-then we entered the Industrial Revolution, papa’s chairs were no longer made at home, papa went to a factory where he would make chairs. Now the majority of working people did not work at home. What that did is remove daddy from the family for many hours a week, and when he got home, he was tired. He didn’t want to teach kids math and he definitely didn’t want to talk about work. Leave work at work. I only talk about work at my work place during my work time.
-but the kids need to learn math. So we started sending the children outside of the home for an education. Now just like daddy had his work place and his work time, so did the kids. They had their education place and their education time.
-but then something amazing happened, daddy started making money. He had a little extra. And suddenly entertainment and sports and things daddy could spend some extra money on appeared. Now daddy had another piece to his time and another place to spend it. Don’t talk to me about work, don’t talk to me about the kids, I’m golfing [TAKE SWING]
-and as we progressed forward, we kept building more compartments. Mommy got a job too and had her work place and her work time. Now we even have exercise places and exercise times. We go the gym or the Y.
-so what happens is now we have a family where work takes place at our work place during our work time, education is done at school on our school time (how dare they try to cross that line with homework), we have our leisure time at our leisure places, we have our family time at our family place and somehow in the midst of all that God got shrunk down to instead of living a life that is all God all the time we just do the God thing at the God place during the God time.
-and now we’ve done this for so long that for some people when two of these compartments overlap it’s like worlds colliding. I know, because I see it all the time. I go sit in at lunch at the high school.
-when I do that one of three things will happen. You have the students who have no problem, God is not in a box for them. They come over, they say hi, they introduce me to their friends, “this is Troy, my youth pastor” and I sit at their table and talk. No problem.
-then you’ve got the students who cannot handle the worlds colliding. It doesn’t compute. They see me across the lunch room and you can see it going through their heads. “What’s he doing here? This is school. He belongs at church, not here, this is school time.” And their minds can’t handle it so they do this [WALK BY HEAD DOWN]. I still remember one girl, she couldn’t do it, her worlds collided and she couldn’t handle it, but she knew I saw her so she’d walk by like this [WALK BY IGNORING, QUICK SMILE, THEN KEEP GOING].
-but my favorite is the third group. For them the worlds have collided and they know they have to reconcile it somehow, so they come say “hi”, but their friends see them talking to the creepy old guy in the lunch room (they don’t know I’m the youth pastor), so they ask who I am and how I know so-and-so and then it inevitably happens. They find out their friend goes to church, and they are shocked!
-if you are living a life in which God is first place and you are trusting and obeying Him, no one should ever be shocked to find our you believe in God. I’m not saying you need to wear your church nametag wherever you go, but when someone finds out you believe in God, their reaction should be “oh, that makes sense”. If they are shocked, you might want to ask why.
-for me, this separating life into compartments never happened because I was never taught how to do it. My dad taught at my school, the only one not shy to say he was a Christian, he coached my baseball team and was my Sunday School teacher. In my house there was never any separation, it couldn’t happen. It was impossible for me to split my life up into pieces even if I wanted to.
-and now, I mean look at me, I work at a church with my wife. There are no boxes, not even if I try. Even if I go somewhere no one knows me after your name what is the first question people ask? “So, what do you do?” and right away all my worlds are back together.
-but that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s:
2. TRUE WORSHIP
-a while back I heard a guy speak where he talked about the importance of firsts. When something appears for the first time in history, it’s usually quite significant. So when it comes to worship, do you know when it first appears in Scripture?
-there’s stories in the Bible of Adam talking with God face to face, but they never use the word worship. When Able gives his acceptable offering to God, nowhere does it say the word worship. After the flood, Noah gets out and builds an altar to thank God and we get a rainbow as a sign from God, still no mention of the word worship. Enoch never dying but going straight to heaven to be with God, still nothing. Eventually we get to the story of Abraham and he talks with God and God promises him a son, and there is still no mention of the word worship. Then the Word of God says this:
**Gen. 22:1-5 -> 1After all this, God tested Abraham. God said, “Abraham!” “Yes?” answered Abraham. “I’m listening.” 2He said, “Take your dear son Isaac whom you love and go to the land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I’ll point out to you.” 3Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey. He took two of his young servants and his son Isaac. He had split wood for the burnt offering. He set out for the place God had directed him. 4On the third day he looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5Abraham told his two young servants, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I are going over there to worship; then we’ll come back to you.” (MSG)
-that is the first reference of worship in the Bible. Not the offerings, not the altars, but when God asks Abraham to trust Him, when Abraham is obedient to God even when it doesn't make sense and he doesn’t like it but he follows God because he trusts God, that is the first recognized act of worship.
-incidentally, verse two, that’s also the first time in the Hebrew Bible we see the word “Love”, a father’s love for a child that he is being asked to sacrifice. Kind of fitting, isn’t it?
-but the trusting God despite what our head says, the obeying God even when it’s hard, that is true worship. What we do here on Sunday mornings is us worshipping together, but a true life of worship that we are all supposed to be living, that doesn’t happen here, it happens out there.
-there’s a section in Micah I love that goes with this. Too often we focus our lives and where God fits in around what we do together or what we do here on Sunday, and the people in Micah’s time were doing the same thing, but then Micah is asked by God to tell His people this:
**Micah 6:6-8 -> 6What can we bring to the Lord? What kind of offerings should we give Him? Should we bow before God with offerings of yearling calves? 7Should we offer Him thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Should we sacrifice our firstborn children to pay for our sins? 8No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what He requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. (NLT)
-I read that and I wonder if we here over two thousand years later are still asking the same thing. “God, You don’t seem real or You seem far away. What should I do? Go to church more? Sing louder on Sunday? Give You more money?” and God is saying the same thing still, “I want you to live right, I want you to love mercy, I want you to walk humbly with Me, trusting Me.”
-as a famous preacher, A.W. Tozer put it, “ If you cannot worship the Lord in the midst of your responsibilities on Monday, it is not very likely that you were worshipping on Sunday!”
-true worship goes on outside these four walls, outside this one hour. It’s not so much about what you believe:
3. IT’S ABOUT WHAT YOU DO
-we’ve put so much emphasis on faith in our 21st Church that we seem to be losing the part about action, the part in James that says faith without deeds is a dead faith. We seem to put so much emphasis on what we believe. I don’t care what you believe, I care about what you do. I can’t see what you believe, all I can see is what you do.
-in Matthew 21 there’s a story Jesus tells where two sons are asked to work in their father’s vineyard, one says “okay” and doesn’t go to work, the other says “no” but goes anyway. Everyone knows the son who was right was the one who still went and did something.
-to put myself through college I worked at a music store, it was a great job, I played guitar all day long. But there were a couple of stores in the chain and I would get moved from one to the other occasionally. The scary part is most of the guys who ran the stores were named Al. Eerie.
-but I found out after working there and going back to visit one of the guys that these bosses knew I was in Bible College so they would purposely try to push me to see what would happen. Like one time one of them asked me if I believed that God would provide for me. I said yes and I remember thinking “alright, he actually wants to talk about God”. Then his next question, “So if I had to let someone go, you believe that God would take care of you if you didn’t have this job?” And I remember thinking, “Oooh, that’s not good.” He just wanted to see if I would say I trust God when it got real.
-and the other boss who I went to meet, they guy who used to constantly swear when he was around me just to see what I’d do, now he’s going to church, now he’s in a band making music for God that he sells with the intent of giving 90% of what he makes back to God.
-now I don’t say that to say I have it all figured out. In the back of my head I was feeling really bad because obviously he would have been willing to talk about God if I only had the courage to open my mouth. But at least I did my best to live like I should so that when the person who did talk to him about Jesus showed up he had at least seen it in action.
-because I don’t think the problem in our churches today is the message. The idea that there is a God who made all this, who loves us each and every one of us personally and fully, and this loving God, His Son came willingly to earth to die as a sacrifice for us so that we can be made right with Him, so we could know God ourselves and one day we would spend all of eternity in paradise with that loving God, if that is true, forget asking people to come to church, they would be breaking down the door trying to get in!
-so either it’s not true, which I think it is, or people have heard this story before and they know what it is but then they look at the church and see us up on our pedestal [CLIMB ON PEDESTAL AND SING TRUST AND OBEY, ALMOST FALL BUT NOT LET GOD CATCH YOU]
-it doesn’t add up. We need to the light on a hill, a city that cannot be hidden. A city on a hill doesn’t turn it’s lights on for one hour on Sunday, they shine all the time.
-and here’s the real catch. How you live for God, how you experience true worship, you and God have to figure that out. There is no cookie-cutter plan, follow these steps. The way God decided to do that with me is to have me become a youth pastor, but I’m pretty sure God doesn’t want all of you to quit your jobs and become youth pastors. You can, we’ll have lots of fun, but I’m pretty sure that’s not for all of you.
-instead, all you can do is spend time with God. All you can do is talk with Him and do your best to live a life that reflects who He is, one that is doing His will and at the same time trusting Him to take care of you.
-but it’s up to each and every one of us, and it’s got to be more than just an hour on Sunday. God designed many things in our universe alike, and I see our spiritual growth like our physical growth. If I only exercise one hour a week, but the rest of the week I sit on the couch eating fried chicken, it won’t matter how hard I work on that one hour, it won’t give me the results I need. What I need is a balanced lifestyle, one that isn’t eating healthy and exercising one hour a week but living a healthy way of life where I eat salads even when nobody’s watching or I take the stairs instead of the elevator, then I will start to see a difference and I will start to grow.
-for our spiritual growth, if we take God out of our work, and we remove Him from our family and from our education, and from our me time and from every part of our life except 8:30 to 9:30 on Sunday at church, is it any surprise that people are saying “God doesn’t seem real to me.” or “He seems so far away.”? Well of course He does, we’ve removed Him.
-I don’t know where you are with God, maybe you’ve never actually given God the chance to be trusted or maybe you’ve been doing this for decades and want me to finish so you can get to the donuts, I don’t know. But no matter where you are at, and I include myself in this, I can always trust more. I’m not perfect, I still make mistakes in living for God. I still need to be going out and living a life that tells people about Jesus, sometimes out loud, yeah one of my bosses is now a Christian, but he’s the only one. What if I had been a little more bold in my faith?
-we can always do more, we can always do better. I don’t think anyone has arrived. There’s a way I suggest to people, the guys and gals in high school and at NewSong are tired of me saying this, but I learned years ago the surefire way to have a more godly family, the way to make your church better, the way to improve whatever it is you think needs to be better. If you want your church to truly experience God, I was told all you need to do is draw a circle on the ground, climb inside and pray this prayer, “God, please make my church more like how you want it to be, start inside the circle.”
