Worship The Saviour Series

“3 Things we can do to make this Christmas Meaningful – 2) Worship the Saviour

Gladstone Baptist Church – 6/8/06 pm

Where we spend our time is where we worship.

We’ve talked a lot over the last couple of years about what worship is. How would you define worship?

Worship involves all that and more. Worship involves every aspect of our lives – our time, our emotions, our thoughts, our energies, our money. Many of you have got jobs and I know that you have a responsibility to give your employer an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. But put that standard time aside typically 40 or 45 hours a week and think about the bit you have left. Some of you are thinking that you work 65 hours a week – but that is often what you choose to do or allow yourself to do, not what typically you have to do to satisfy the requirements of job you are employed for. Take out also the time you sleep and a reasonable time – say 1-1.5 hours per day to eat. Now you are left with your free time. Think for a moment about how you spend it. Write down on your pieces of paper 3 things which have consumed the majority of your free time in the last month …

For some it may be cleaning your house. For some, it may be that you spend more time than you should at work. For some, it may be that you have a hobby or a sport that takes up your time. For some, it may be watching TV. For some of you – your family takes up all your time.

What you spend your time doing tells you in a large degree what you worship. It shows you what you value, what you think is important and what you give your time to.

- For some of you, if you were honest – you worship your possessions and you spend a lot of time maintaining those possessions – cleaning them, improving them, upsizing them.

- For some of you, if you were honest – you worship your work or your ambitions. You are trying to impress your peers and boss at work in order to climb that ladder. Instead of the normal 40-45 hours, you are spending 65 hours and you are justifying this by saying that your job demands it of you. The bottom line is that you are allowing your job to demand that of you – if you didn’t want to do it, you would have found another job a long time ago.

- For some or you, if you were honest – you worship yourselves and your free time is spent in leisure activities focussed entirely on yourself. You spend time working out – honing your body. You spend hours in the beauty salon or styling your hair or doing your nails.

- For some of you, if you were honest – you worship your family. You spend all your spare time playing with your kids. You help your parents, you spend hours talking on the phone to your sisters & brothers.

When you honour something and give it your full attention and energies – you are essentially worshipping it.

You know at Christmas time, as I look around – I see people worshipping lots of things. But very few people worship Jesus at Christmas time. We need to worship the King. Tell me some of the things that people worship at Christmas … .

In the video clip we watched with the kids earlier, we saw people saying that Christmas was all about the gifts, the food, the family times. They were putting their attention and energies into these things and in essence they were honouring them. And the sad thing is that I think most Christians sitting in churches today would be guilty of having given more attention and focus to these things than to Jesus this last week. Because of the busyness of the Christmas season, Jesus seems to get pushed into the background over the Christmas period. It has always been like that.

Last week we started a mini-series in which we are looking at 3 things we can do to make this Christmas meaningful. We spoke about the Wise men who were busy men, but who gave up their time to go and follow the star. They were focussed on the star and in doing so, they left behind many of the demands of life and the distractions it brings. We said that to make Christmas meaningful, you need to focus on and follow the true star of Christmas – Jesus. In doing so, the wise men acted sacrificially and that is what worship is all about.