You may have noticed we spent an extended period in worship this morning. Amen. To be honest, the reason we did it is because we wanted to truly prove that we do value worship here at Bellevue Christian Church. I imagine that some of you aren’t used to spending time singing that many songs. I was standing in the back and I could look around and see that maybe people were starting to think about other things. Maybe checking the watch or checking the phone to see what time it is. Some of you might have even been a little bit distracted. Your mind was wandering off somewhere else throughout the songs, and it was hard to stay focused. There might have been the few of you that were even getting a little bit nervous and antsy because you are just not used to that much singing. Then there are the people that are just getting tired. They were just getting tired of standing. They are thinking I would really like to sit down but if I sit down then maybe people will look around and think that person isn’t very spiritual. They should just keep standing like me. Then I know there are those people that are thinking we spent that much time in worship and now if Chuck goes on and preaches the length he normally preaches, we are going to have big trouble on our hands. We will get out of here at midnight. The good news is that my sermon is actually going to be a lot shorter. Actually probably about ten minutes shorter. The bad news is that what I have to say is probably going to sting a little bit. I am putting out the primary idea that the attitude that you have in any sort of worship can be a reflection of whether or not you really do value worship and more importantly whether or not you really value and love God. What I am saying really is that worship at its core is a matter of the heart.
If you have your Bibles with you, please open up to Mark 12:29. I know a lot of people weren’t here last week. Last week we opened up the whole idea of where we are going in the fall. Really, in the fall, we are heading towards a focus on our four core values, which are worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. There is a little clue over there so you might be able to get an idea. The idea is that you are going to remember what those values are. Last week, I talked about how those values were a vital part of the first century church. We looked at the book of Acts. We looked at chapter 2, verses 42-47. We saw those elements present. We saw a church that was really excited about Christ. They had just come off of the reality of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so they were excited about worshiping the triune God. They also had a bunch of believers that were new to the faith so they wanted to learn about this God. They wanted to learn about Jesus. They wanted to start connecting the dots between the Old Testament and the New, so they wanted to study. They wanted to disciple each other. We also know we had a church that was intentional about outreach because as they were getting saved, as they were getting renewed, as they were putting away their old ways, they were intentional about going out and telling other people about it. It was all surrounded by just this sense of community where people were dining together, enjoying each other’s company, taking care of each other. That was the environment that was there at the first century church. What I said was that little band of disciples from that first church ended up growing up to be the largest religion currently in the world. I also mentioned that, unfortunately, in America, the church seems to be going backwards. The church seems to be dying a long, slow death. I felt that the reason was that the church had gotten away from these core values. I also said at Bellevue Christian the good news seems to be that we seem to be bucking the trend a little bit. We have actually been increasing in numbers. But I also said that we cannot sit back on our laurels and just be complacent because pretty soon we could die a slow death too and not even know it.
So the focus for the next several months actually will be on these four core values. The four values that are really summarized nicely in our church logo. We are actually able to break the logo down and each part has a reference to one of our values. The tree represents worship. It is the upraised hands of worship. We have the roots going down which represents the deep-rooted discipleship. We have the tree that is budding which represents the intentional outreach that is happening. And all enclosed by the circle that represents community. That is what we are going to do over the next few months actually. Each week, what we are going to do is highlight one particular value. You will see a banner relating to the values. In your bulletin you will see a devotional or bible study related to that value. You will also see some real practical opportunities where you can work out those values throughout the week. The idea or what we are getting to is we don’t want to be a church that just hangs banners and talks about these ideas or puts them on the bulletin or whatever. We want to be a church that truly does value worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.
Today, in the remaining minutes, I just want to briefly touch on the idea of worship. When you say worship, it means a lot of different things to different people. To be honest, I really struggled with where do I begin talking about this concept of worship. First I thought I will talk about defining worship. Doing some word studies and looking up some scriptures and that sort of thing. I could go that route or I could go and begin to talk about the different styles of worship from traditional to contemporary. The different types of denominations and how they worship. I could talk about the different elements that you find in most worship experiences. Obviously the singing, the prayer, the message, all those things, and even the communion would be part of a traditional, typical service. After I thought about it, I thought the best place to start is in the heart. Because really when you think about it that is where worship starts. We will see that in today’s passage in Matthew. We see that that is the beginning point of anything. A heart after God. A heart that loves God. I am going to read through this really quickly but before I do I want to give you real quick context. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this but basically Jesus is out there doing what he does best. He is teaching. He is hanging out with people. He is talking with people and he obviously begins to engage and have some intense discussions with the Pharisees and the Jewish scholars. At some point, what happens is he starts engaging and they start to begin to trick him up. They said is it right to give taxes to Caesar. They start talking about if a wife has seven husbands because of all these deaths or whatever, which one will he spend eternity with. Finally, one of the teachers just goes up to Jesus and says I have a question for you. Of all the commandments, which one is the most important? Jesus says the most important one is this. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” If you know that passage, you know then that Jesus goes on to say and love your neighbor as yourself.
Today, I just want to focus on this first part of it. The first and greatest commandment. What Jesus is quoting from is the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. This actually has a name to it. It is called the shamah which basically is a Hebrew word that just means hear. This passage says listen up I have something important to say. The first thing is that the Lord our God, he is one. Back then, they had a lot of competing gods and a lot of foreign gods. There were idols and all these things going on so Moses had to make it clear there was only one God. If there was only one God, then he deserves your complete love, your complete attention. This prayer would be said early in the morning. It would be said at midday. It would also be said at the end of the day. The idea is to keep this idea in front of the people that the Lord our God is one. We are to love the Lord with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, and with all of our strength. In other words, what they are saying is with your entire being give your love to God. I don’t have time to really break down all the parts that he is talking about here, the heart, the soul, the mind, and the strength. Really what I want to talk about is the heart. The heart is first. The heart is specifically listed first. The heart has a lot of references in both the Old and the New, especially if you look through the book of Proverbs or Psalms you see the word heart popping up over and over and over again. When I talk about the heart, I am not talking about the physical organ that pumps blood. They think of the heart as a spiritual organ that really begins to pump out things like thoughts and desires and actions and attitudes. That is what the heart does. Those things that it pumps out could be good or bad. In the book of Matthew, Jesus is talking to the rulers and is about to sit down with the disciples and have some lunch and what happens is the disciples don’t wash their hands before lunch. Back then, it was more than a hygiene issue. It was a ritualistic thing. It was a thing you had to do. They say their hands are unclean. Jesus basically says it is not the hands that are unclean. The thing you have to worry about is the thing that comes forth through your mouth because what comes through your mouth starts out in the heart. He says the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart. These make a man unclean for out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. You have thoughts coming out of there. You have actions. You have words that stem from a bad heart.
The apostle Paul carries that theme into the book of Romans when he begins to give a picture about how bad things have gotten in the world and how bad humanity has gotten. He begins to reference the heart as a really dark spot at times. He goes on to say in Romans 1:21 “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” The heart can be a seat of sin. That is what they are saying basically. The heart can be a very dark, black place. It can be a place some would say of total depravity. While it can be a place of depravity, it can also be a place of divine activity. It is a place where God does his best work. I can’t look through a lot of passages, but we know when somebody accepts Christ as Lord, there is something that happens right then. We are removed from the dominion of darkness and placed into the kingdom of the Son, which means we are given brand new hearts. Purified hearts. Brand new, spanking clean hearts. Not only are we given clean hearts, we are given the love of God that is poured directly into the hearts.
One of my favorite passages, Romans 5:5, says “And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.” He has poured out his love, he has given his spirit, he has made us a clean heart. Now the problem is some people think it stops there. I am saved. I am in. I don’t have to worry about anything. But no we do have to worry about things. We have to cooperate with the spirit because we go out into the world, and just like anything else, you have something that is clean and it gets in contact with the world enough and what happens is it starts getting dirty. It starts getting spots on it. It has contact with the world in many different ways. That is the case of the heart. We go out into the world and we are brand new Christians but all of a sudden we start encountering things that we shouldn’t be encountering and doing things we shouldn’t be doing and that heart continues to be darkened. We have the responsibility to allow the spirit to come alongside of us and continue to work on our heart. Continue to re-clean the heart. Continue to cleanse the heart to take away the sins. To help us to deal with the dirt inside of us. Otherwise when we come to church on Sunday morning, we have no heart-to-heart connection with God. We don’t. If you go through your entire week and God is not on the radar whatsoever, you may come to church but what happens is after a while you are just going through the motions. Everybody who has been at church long enough or even a few times knows there is a routine so you just learn to work it. You get up and you know when to sit down, stand up, sit down or whatever. That is what you do because you have been trained how to do it. The problem is, after a while, those words are meaningless. It is like we are honoring God with our lips but yet at the same time our hearts are miles away.
That is exactly what the prophet Isaiah says. He says “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips but their hearts are far away from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men.” (Isaiah 29:3) Isaiah was a prophet that lived about the 6th century B.C. He was dealing with the religious people who had it all wired in. They had all the rules wired in but forgot how to worship God. They knew exactly what to do and say but they had lost that connection with God because they were so far removed from God. So the same thing that Jesus is talking about in the gospels and the same thing that Isaiah is talking about way back in the book of Isaiah 600-700 years prior can happen to us today if we do not nurture that relationship with God on an ongoing basis. What will happen if we ignore God long enough, we will not only be distracted in our worship, but we will be distracted from the vision and the mission that God has designed for us. What I am saying is that worship at its core is a matter of the heart.
About this time I need to pause for a minute because people are looking at me and some are a little confused, some are a little bored and still probably daydreaming a little bit and wondering when I am going to stop preaching and some of you might even be getting a little bit angry or a little bit irritated because you don’t like the things I have to say. I didn’t say I was going to be nice. This was going to sting a little bit. But I need to clarify some things before I finish off here. I need to clarify that when I talk about worship, and we will impact this more in the next few weeks and next few months, I am not just talking about singing, although music is a part of worship. If you don’t believe that, go back and read the Psalms because every Psalm was a song. Singing is a part of worship. That is something you have to get used to. But I am also not saying that worship is about some sort of hyped up emotionalism. That you have to get emotional or you are not really worshipping. I am not saying that. But I am saying that worship is emotional. If you don’t believe that, go back and read the book of Acts. People were all over the place. They were blown away. They could not help but become emotional because of what was happening in that church. I am not saying those things but what I am saying is that really when it comes down to it, worship at its core is a decision that you make whether or not you truly value God. Worship comes from the word worth. That is all it is. It is giving God the proper worth simply for who he is and what he has done for you. Actually for who he is is first. For what he has done for you is second. You worship God first for his sake and then you worship him secondly for our sake. Really worship is simply ascribing the value to God that he deserves. I say that knowing that on any given Sunday or any given week, we all get distracted. We all get distracted from God. Everybody. Even today, I would suspect that if you were to poll the band and the worship team that even while they are singing or playing, their minds might have been somewhere else. When I was standing in the back, my mind was wandering. It happens because we still have a taint of sin that we haven’t dealt with. So even if we are dealing with it on a regular basis throughout the week, we are never going to worship the way we are designed to worship until we get to heaven. That is just the reality of it. But that doesn’t mean we give up on it. Even though we are distracted, if week after week, month after month, year after year, if we are ignoring God throughout the week or on Sunday or whenever, eventually our hearts are going to be miles away from God. It is going to die out. It is just like a marriage relationship when you think about it. When you first get married everybody is excited. The couple is excited and everything is cute and all lovey-dovey. The cute habits and all this kind of stuff. After a while, it becomes annoying these habits. The things you found so cute at the beginning turn into annoyance and then life happens and you have kids and you start dealing with finances and you start dealing with car problems and you start dealing with work problems. And what happens is if you don’t work on that relationship, this big wedge starts coming in and you aren’t dealing with it. What happens if you don’t deal with it, if you don’t sit down and think about the thing that first put you together that spark of love that you first had, you are going to end up in a divorce court. You are. You cannot live like that. You were designed to live in a relationship with your spouse. You were designed to live in a relationship with God; an ongoing regular relationship with God. If you are not doing it, there is a problem.
The other thing I want to say is that the good news is that this doesn’t apply to non-Christians. If there is anybody in here that is not a Christian, you are off the hook. You are totally off the hook because worship does not apply to someone who does not have a relationship with God. Having said that, I as a pastor, I as a leader of this church, I cannot ignore the value of worship just because I am worried about how you are going to receive this. We are not a seeker-sensitive church. We are a God-honoring, worshipping church and worship is a value. If you don’t like that, really you might as well go someplace else because we are going to make worship a value. But having said that, we also have other values that won’t be listed. We have values like friendship. We have values like welcomeness. We enjoy people coming in and checking us out because we know the reality is many people just want to check it out before they buy into the claims of Christ, the claims of the gospel. We welcome people to come in and ask questions and sit and listen because we know that is part of getting to know God. Because we know that you are not wired for worship, when worship time comes or prayer time comes or whatever it is, feel free to pretty much do whatever you want within reason. Just don’t make it distracting. If we are all standing up worship and you feel like sitting down, sit down and don’t worry about what anybody thinks about it. When everybody is praying and you want to get up and go outside or whatever and call somebody or smoke a cigarette or whatever you want to do. Fine. Do it. You are free to do that. Just don’t make it distracting. That is all I say.
On the other hand, as we think about it, as I try to wrap this up, if you are a born-again believer of Jesus Christ, you have accepted the claims of Christ, you accepted Christ as your personal savior, then you are expected to be a worshipper. I cannot deny that because that is the way that God wired you. You were designed to be a worshipper of the triune God. That is how you were made. That is what everything is going back to so you might as well get used to it or check out of Christianity because Christianity, if it is about anything, it is about worship of the triune God. You say well Chuck why do you care? Why do you care about how I worship? The bottom line is I don’t care that much about an individual and how they worship but I care about this church. Like I said last week, I want this church to be like the first century church. I want it to be a place that is excited about worship. That just came off the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and just love sharing about love and love singing about it. They can’t wait to come to church because they know that God is going to show up. I want it to be a church that does not even have to take out an ad ever because they know that people are coming to this place because they know that there is something happening out here. There is something happening in this church that cannot find anywhere else in the world. Transformation of lives. People that were walking this way and turn around and walking this way. People walking in darkness and now walking in light. People that had a destroyed marriage and now got their marriage together. People who were bad parents and now they are back to being good parents because they know something is happening here. You don’t have to take out an ad. You don’t have to put it on Facebook. You don’t have to do anything. You just come out and you just be a church that values worship and people will come out in droves. I honestly believe that.
In closing, I cannot do it alone. It is not just about Chuck valuing worship because I struggle with it myself. It is about every single person that calls themselves a Christian valuing worship which means that if you find yourself going far from God, you do what you have to take to get close back to God. If you find yourself being distant from God, you spend time evaluating how you are spending your time in that particular week. What is going on in your head? You invite the Holy Spirit into your life to help you to deal with those things that seem to be separating you from the love of God. People who show up then at worship not to be entertained but to engage God. What I am looking for is people who have graduated from the idea that I give a round of applause when I hear a good song to praise to the one who created the singer and the song. I want people who don’t feel like if they show up on Sunday that somehow they bless us with their presence. No. I am seeking worshippers who seek out the presence of God in whatever form he decides to show up. People who realize it is not about spiritual gifts. It is not speaking in tongues. It is about how much of the spirit of God are you willing to allow in this church. That is what I am talking about. People that just want God in whatever way that he shows up. If we even get a small percentage of people like that, even 20% of people, we will demonstrate that we are not only a church that values worship, we are a church that truly values and loves God. Let us pray.
