One of my favorite books on worship is a short, simple book by Louie Giglio titled “The Air I Breathe”. Toward the end of that book, Louie wrote something that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me the first time I read it. But in the 10 years or so since I first read those words, I think I’ve come to develop a much better understanding of what they mean. The concept found in those words is also reflected by Paul in the section of his letter to the churches in Rome that we’ll study this morning. I pray this morning that these words will speak to your heart as much as they have to mine. Here is what Louie wrote:
Most of my life I thought that you went to church to worship. But now I see that the better approach is to go worshipping to church.
I would certainly agree with Louie. Like him, I spent most of my life thinking that I was supposed to go to church to worship. After all, I’ve been told by the church that I’m coming to a worship service. That term implies, at least to some degree, that my worship is somehow limited to those times when I gather together with other believers in a building we call a church and attend a formal service in which we “worship God.”
But, as I’ve grown in my understanding of worship, as you may noticed, I’m trying, as much as possible, to avoid using the phrase “worship service”. The problem, however, is that I’ve had a hard time coming up with a better term to use. In the past I have tended to use the term “worship gathering”, which is probably only a bit better. But as I worked on the message this week, God brought to mind the idea that what we really have this morning is a “gathering of worshippers”. That phrase more accurately describes our purpose this morning. We are gathered here merely to continue the worship that should already be ongoing in our lives.
So my goal this morning is to use the inspired words of Paul in Romans chapter 1 to help all of us understand better how our entire lives are to be characterized by worship and why we are therefore to go worshipping to church rather than to go to church to worship.
Open up your Bibles to Romans chapter 1 and we’ll pick up where we left off last week. I’ll begin reading this morning in verse 8.
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God's will I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.
(Romans 1:8-15 ESV)
My guess is that right now some of you are probably thinking that I’ve completely lost it. After all, I introduced this morning’s message by talking about worship, but the word “worship” isn’t found even once in our text. But I’m confident that this morning, I’ll be able to show you this passage is indeed about worship that we can define like this:
Genuine worship is a matter of
serving God by serving others
I struggled a bit with how to approach this passage until I finally figured out that the first part of verse 9 is the key to this entire passage. Once I understood that, it was much easier to see that what Paul is telling the people in the churches in Rome is that he wants to go to church with them so that he can continue with them the worship in which he is already engaged.
Let’s look at those key words from verse 9:
…For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son…
The key word here is the verb “serve”.
“serve” = Greek “latreuo” =
“to render religious service” or “to worship”
In Greek literature, this term can be used to describe service of any kind, even working for money. But in the New Testament it always refers to service to God so in several places it is appropriately translated “worship”. We’ll see this down the road when we get to this familiar verse in Romans 12:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
(Romans 12:1 ESV)
In that verse, the two English words “spiritual worship” are the translation of the one Greek noun from which the verb latreuo is derived. And in that verse Paul emphasizes the idea that our worship is a matter of serving God by presenting our entire lives to Him as a living sacrifice. I’ve always admired how Eugene Peterson captures the essence of that verse in his paraphrase in The Message:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering.
(Romans 12:1 The Message)
The way latreuo and the related noun are used by the New Testament writers, and Paul in particular, makes it clear that we can’t separate our worship from our service to God. We’re going to use the “Connections” time to develop that idea more fully. We also see that our service to God is to characterize our entire life – not just what we do when we get together on Sunday morning. And that confirms the point we have already made:
Genuine worship is a matter of
serving God...
And when we view worship like that, it becomes apparent that my worship is not limited to a one hour meeting that I attend once a week, but rather it is a lifestyle in which I continually serve God. In fact, in verse 9 the verb “I serve” is in the present tense, which means it describes continuing action. I t would be accurate to translate that phrase like this:
For God is my witness, whom I continually worship…
In verse 9, we find that Paul gives us some further insight into how he worships with the phrase “with my spirit”. Some have suggested that this merely means Paul serves God wholeheartedly. The NIV takes this approach by translating that phrase “with my whole heart.” But if we look at what Paul writes here in the context of his entire letter and especially what we saw last week in the first sentence of that letter, I think Paul has something else in mind.
Let me take you back to verse 5 from last week for just a moment:
through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations,
(Romans 1:5 ESV)
When Paul writes about serving God with his spirit in verse 9, he is merely giving his readers some additional commentary on verse 5. His serving worship consists of carrying out the role of apostleship that he had received from God. That apostleship had been received from God along with God’s grace. So when Paul writes that he is serving God with his spirit, he is acknowledging that he is not capable of serving God in his flesh. His service to God is completely dependent on the operation of God’s grace in his life. He is also reminding his readers that the genuineness of our worship is not revealed by what we do externally as much as it is revealed by the condition of our heart.
As a Pharisee, Paul had spent a good portion of his life engaging in external acts of worship – participating in endless rituals and reciting prayers and engaging in liturgy by rote – believing that was what pleased God. But he now recognizes that God is much more concerned with his heart – a heart that is completely sold out to Jesus and dependent on Him.
In the late 1990’s Matt Redman was the worship leader at Soul Survivor Church in Watford, England. When the pastor of that church, Mike Pilavachi, sensed that the people were getting caught up in the externals of worship, he implemented a plan that led to the writing of the song that we’ll be singing to close our service today.
Before we sing that song I’m going to let Matt tell you in his own words how that song came about. I’m praying that will allow us to leave here with an appropriate reminder of how our worship must flow from a heart that is completely committed to God and dependent on His grace.
So far we’ve seen that…
Genuine worship is a matter of
serving God...
But exactly what does that service look like? As we’ve already seen in going back to verse 5, Paul’s service to God, his worship, consists of carrying out his call to apostleship. And as we see clearly here in our passage from this morning, that apostleship is focused on serving others. This confirms what we determined earlier:
Genuine worship is a matter of
serving God by serving others
When Paul serves God by serving others, there are two different spheres in which he does that. And since we, too have been called to the role of apostleship, it follows that we are also to serve others that same way.
Two spheres in which we are to serve others:
1. Unbelievers
We see this aspect of Paul’s service in verse 14:
I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.
The phrase “under obligation” is a single Greek noun that literally means “a debtor”. This is one of those places where the KJV translation is actually more accurate:
I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise.
Paul is using typical Hebrew parallelism here so the phrases “Greeks and barbarians” is intended to be synonymous, at least to some extent, with the phrase “wise and foolish”. As some of your Bibles may note in the footnotes, the word barbarians is not referring to Conan and his associates. It is merely the word the Greeks used to describe non-Greeks.
The point Paul is making here is that he is indebted to all unbelievers regardless of their race, education or any other distinctions.
But why would Paul say he was in debt to these people? First, we need to point out here that Paul doesn’t say that he is a debtor to God. It is certainly true that at one point in our lives, all of us, like Paul, had been debtors to God. We were in debt to Him because we have stolen His glory. Instead of seeing God’s glory as a valuable treasure, we exchanged it for something else that was more important to us. The Bible calls that sin and in a couple weeks we’re going to look at this concept in much more detail.
But by the grace of the gospel, Jesus paid that debt, one which we had no way to pay, on our behalf. So once we receive that grace we are no longer debtors to God. If we somehow owed God for that grace, it wouldn’t be grace would it?
So why is Paul a debtor to all these unbelievers? It’s certainly not because they had given or loaned anything to Paul. But having received God’s grace personally, Paul is now in debt to others who need that grace just as much as he had but who had not yet received it into their lives.
Because grace is a gift that is given to us for the purpose of sharing it with others, we who have received that grace are all indebted to others who have not yet experienced it. And the way we repay that debt is by telling them about the gospel with our words and our lives.
I would suggest to you that if we really understand the full extent of the magnificence of the gospel, we can’t help but want to share that with others. So that means that if I’m not excited and enthusiastic about sharing the gospel with others I probably need to take a look at my own life and consider whether I’ve really experienced God’s grace in its fullness personally.
But since Paul’s letter is written primarily for the benefit of the believers in the churches in Rome, it is not surprising that Paul goes into much more detail about serving others in the second sphere of service:
2. Believers
Because our concept of the gospel is often much more limited than the fullness of the gospel we see in the Scriptures, I think Paul’s words in verse 15 catch us off guard a bit:
So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.
I know my first reaction to those words was “I understand why Paul needs to preach the gospel to unbelievers, but why would he be so eager to preach it to these believers?” If the gospel is, as I’ve suggested the last two weeks, not just a set of facts to believe but rather a life to be lived, then it makes a lot more sense that Paul is eager to preach the gospel to believers as well as unbelievers. Although we’re going to have a number of opportunities to see how Paul views the gospel in this kind of comprehensive way as we continue our journey through this letter, let’s look at just one verse that confirms this idea:
We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
(Romans 6:4 ESV)
Here we clearly see that the purpose of the gospel is that we might walk in newness of life. That means that the goal of preaching the gospel for Paul, and for us, goes far beyond just getting someone to prayer a “prayer of salvation”, which, by the way, is a term that is never found in the Bible. It is much more far-reaching than just getting someone to believe in Jesus and commit his or her life to Him by their words alone. The goal of the preaching of the gospel is, as indicated by the title of this sermon series, to equip each of us to live a life in which every facet of our life is shaped by the gospel. And that’s exactly what Paul longed to do in the lives of these believers in Rome.
There are three aspects of Paul’s desire to serve these believers in Rome through the operation of the gospel that are instructive for us:
• A genuine concern for others
Paul’s desire to come to Rome is not about just checking some item off his “bucket list”. He has a genuine concern for the spiritual development of the believers in Rome. That concern is expressed in the way Paul describes his desire to come minister to them.
In verses 9 and 10 he writes about how he is constantly praying for them. But there is something about the way he prays that we need to take note of. You’ll notice that when he prays for these fellow believers, he also prays that God would use him as part of the answer to those prayers. He asks that if it is God’s will that he would permitted to come to Rome so that he could serve the needs of his brothers and sisters in Christ that he is praying about. We’ll come back to that important principle in just a moment.
In verse 11, he writes that he longs to see these people so that he can strengthen them.
And finally in verse 15, we see that Paul is eager to come and preach the gospel to them.
As we read this passage, we have absolutely no doubt that Paul has a genuine concern for these believers. His desire to come and minister to them is primarily about serving their needs and not about Paul.
And because of his genuine concern for them, Paul takes the time to write this extensive letter we’re studying because he wants to help them develop a deep faith, not one that is a mile wide and an inch deep.
If Paul were here today, I can’t imagine he would subscribe to all the latest advice on how to build a big church. I don’t think he would be influenced a whole lot by the advice of most so called “church growth experts”. I don’t think he would be real worried about making sure that our gathering didn’t exceed one hour. I’m confident that he wouldn’t worry about preaching too long or in too much depth or about offending anyone with his preaching. And I’m convinced Paul would never preach what one pastor calls “sermonettes for Christianettes”.
And because of my genuine concern for all of you, I cannot and will not do that either. Instead of building a church on the advice of these so called “experts”, I’d much rather use the examples of Paul and the early church as a model for my personal ministry and for how we operate as a body. That means that, barring God’s miraculous intervention, we’ll never be a mega church. But hopefully, with God’s help we will be a church who produces mature disciples who follow, serve and proclaim Jesus.
• A willingness to use my gifts to serve others
We’ve already touched on this idea briefly. When Paul prayed for others, he always did that with the idea that he was willing to be used by God as an answer to that prayer. I’m not sure we often pray like that.
There is a sense in which we’ve been programmed to automatically react to the need of our fellow believers with a rote response of “I’ll pray for you.” And how many of those times do we even forget to pray for that person? I’m speaking here from personal experience because I‘ve done that more times than I would like to admit. But even on those occasions when we do pray, do we do that with the attitude that we’re willing to be used by God in answering that prayer?
In verse 11, Paul writes that he longs to see the believers in Rome so that he can impart some spiritual gift to strengthen them. When we get to Romans 12 we’re going to read Paul’s teaching regarding spiritual gifts. And there Paul makes it clear that it is God who gives and assign those gifts. So here in chapter 1 Paul is certainly not implying that he can somehow impart those gifts to the believers in Rome. What he is saying, I think, is that he is going to take the gifts that God has given to him and use them to benefit his fellow believers.
If you’re a follower of Jesus, then the Bible is clear that God has given you at least one spiritual gift. He has also blessed you with material wealth, talents and abilities. And God has not done that just for your own personal good. He has, as we’ve discussed frequently, blessed you so that you can bless others.
So when we see a need in the life of another person, we need to immediately ask God, “What have you given me that I can use to meet that need?”
• A desire to spend time with others
Paul writes something rather surprising in verse 12. Not only does he want to come and encourage and equip the believers in Rome, but he expects that when he comes to do that, he is going to be encouraged by their faith as well.
As a pastor, I can really relate to what Paul is saying here. As the pastor I’m usually expected to be the “expert”. I’m often viewed as the one you’re paying to come and nourish you with God’s Word. But the truth is that many of you encourage me and help me to grow in my faith.
When you stay for “Connections” after the gathering of worshippers on Sunday morning and I get to listen to your insight into the Scriptures, I am encouraged and strengthened. When I get to sit around a table on Monday morning with a group of men and talk about the Bible, we’re all mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.
But in order for that to occur, I have to make spending time with other believers a priority in my life. If Paul were here with us this morning, I can’t imagine that he would miss “Connections” to go home and watch his favorite football team play on TV or leave to beat the crowds at his favorite restaurant or head home to read the Sunday paper or post on Facebook or play Candy Crush or to just “chill” because he had a busy week and he “deserves” some down time.
And I can’t imagine he would miss the Monday morning Bible study because he couldn’t get up early enough because he’d stayed up too late the night before. I know that 6:30 on Monday morning is early, but I also know that many of you men don’t have a problem getting up that early to go hunting or fishing or to get an early start on your vacation trip or do something else that is important to you.
Jesus has given us all a tremendous gift, his body the church, in order to encourage us and help us to grow in our faith. But unless we make spending time with our fellow believers a priority, we’ll never reap the benefits.
We’ve learned this morning that…
Genuine worship is a matter of
serving God by serving others
So here is my question to you as we close this morning:
What are you going to do this week to be a worshipper who serves God by serving others?
• How are you going to serve unbelievers by sharing the gospel with them through your words and your life?
• How are you going to serve your fellow believers?
o Do you have a genuine concern for their spiritual development and are you willing to put their needs ahead of your own?
o Which of your God-given gifts, talents, abilities and resources are you going to use to serve the needs of others?
o What changes are you going to make in your priorities and your schedule to make time to spend with other believers so that you can mutually encourage each other?
Together let’s make sure that when we gather together next Sunday morning, that we’re worshipping as we come and not coming to worship.
