All that being said, I preached on Sunday, July 12. Pretty much everyone liked it. How about you guys? (apologies to Will and Brian for using the hallelujah thing, but I liked it.)
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Sermon Title: Worship With the Heart
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set for in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.”
Hallelujah! What a word. People say it all the time (at least some people do.) Well, I love saying it anyway. It is an exclamation of joy, is it not? Of course you wouldn’t say it just any old time. We say it when something great, miraculous, or astounding happens. We say it when a friend comes out of the hospital in good health. We say it when we are successful at work. We say it when we make a major accomplishment. Some people even say it if their team wins a game, although that’s not the best way to use it. Whatever the case may be, it is used as a joyful exclamation.
A friend of mine, who has an interest in the Hebrew language, explained it to me this way. The word comes from two Hebrew words, Hallelu, or “Praise ye,” and “Jah,” a shortened version of YHWH, the LORD. All together, it means “Praise ye the Lord,” or in more modern English, “Praise the Lord.” However, it’s not the words in and of themselves that convey the meaning of the word “Hallelujah” or “Alleluia,” but how it is said. Hallelujah is not meant to convey merely “Praise the Lord.” It is meant to convey “PRAISE THE LORD,” in all caps, italics, underlined and bold. It is the highest, loudest, and most exuberant phrase we can use to praise God. So repeat after me. HALLELUJAH! PRAISE THE LORD! Good. Glad to know you are all listening.
So why do I bring up the word today, aside from trying to get you guys engaged? I bring it up because it relates to this passage today. It brings up the questions that haunt churches even today: “Why do we worship? What does it mean worship?” And then there’s the big one: “How do we worship?”
Well, let me just go through this passage a little bit, and the Why will become self evident. Paul starts out with a declarative statement: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The rest of the passage is his reasoning. 11 verses of reasoning, of poetry, for saying Praise the Lord. The next time someone asks you why you go to church, go to this passage, because it says it all right here.
He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless before him in love. The operative word here is “in love.” He planned for us to be holy and blameless, but we can’t get there on our own. It is impossible for us to be holy and blameless without God. That’s okay. Remember that in Christ, we go on to perfection. Every day we spend in Christ, we become more perfect than we were the day before.
He destined us for adoption as his children. We belong to God. We are his children. Remember how Dr. Harrelson keeps saying God has no grandchildren? It’s true. We are all God’s children, every single person.
In his Son Jesus, we have redemption, and we have an inheritance of grace. When we heard the good news and accepted it into our hearts, we were marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit. This is why we praise God.
You know what it all adds up to? We were made to worship God. It’s our purpose. It’s what we are designed to do. Everything about us can be used to glorify God. Everything we do can be a song to the glory of God, no matter what our calling. That is why we worship. That is why we wake up early on Sunday mornings.
So that’s the theological “why” of worship. Wonderful. Now to the second part of this line of questioning is a bit more difficult, and that is “What does it mean to worship?” What is our purpose here, this morning, in Crosby United Methodist Church?
Believe it or not, you are currently at what is commonly called a “worship service.” Big shocker, I know. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. A worship service. A service is something you do for someone, and in this case, that something is worship, and that someone SHOULD be God. I say SHOULD, because there is a troubling trend in the way that Christianity as a whole thinks about worship.
Let me illustrate. Can I get a show of hands here? How many of you would describe this as your church? Okay, how many of you would describe it as God’s church? When we forget that worship is about God, it becomes about us. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase “Well I just didn’t get anything out of church today.” To that I have to say, “Well of course you didn’t.” Worship is not a service for us, but the other way around. Worship is our service to God. It’s the “I didn’t get anything out of church” mentality, the consumer mentality that truly distracts us on Sunday mornings.
You don’t get something for nothing. What you reap, so shall you sew. When you put your whole heart into worshipping God, you get the whole heart of God in return. When you put nothing into worship, don’t complain at that results. Who knows, you might still get something, but that something is so much more substantial when you truly worship God. When you worship with the heart, you are truly fulfilling the purpose that God gave us, and in so doing, we are filled with the Spirit of the living God. This Spirit is what compels us to live out our lives for the glory of God, to go out into the world, to show love, and kindness, and justice, and everything that is asked of us in the Bible. Remember, we cannot be holy or blameless without God.
So really, what we get out of worship is merely a side-effect of our actions relating to God. I think that’s actually a pretty sweet deal. So sweet a deal, in fact, that I think it’s a real injustice that we relegate worship to one hour a week on Sundays, when we can worship God in all aspects of our lives. Paul himself said in 1 Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. God wants to keep an open line of communication with us so that we may know him better, and so that we might do His will. Sometimes, one hour a week is all anyone thinks about God, if even for that long. That is a tragedy. People have a difficult time thinking outside of themselves, outside of their experience and their immediate circumstances. It’s difficult to see life on God’s terms for the simple fact that we allow our lives to become so overfilled with other things that get in the way.
It is this notion that brings me to third part of the question: How do we worship? How are we supposed to worship? I believe the Psalmist had something to say about this in Psalm 150:
Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
Now I’ve been to a few worship services where there was a little too much clanging cymbals, if you know what I mean. Actually, as a drummer, I’ve been the one clanging the cymbals as well, so I can’t complain too much. But what the psalmist is trying to get at is the fact that worshipping God isn’t meant to be some kind of burden. That is the last thing worship is.
There are innumerable styles of worship. Some are more classical music oriented, some are contemporary, some are blended, and some are filled with old style gospel music. Something I’ve found out first hand is that more often than not, the way we worship is a reflection of who we are as Christians, and no two churches, even within the same denomination, are ever just the same. A by-product of our consumer culture is the endless variety and choices in worship we can participate in. What we need to keep in mind though is that no one style is any better or worse than the others when God is at the center of the worship.
Now then, my personal preference skews classical. I love classical music. I love Handel, Bach, or anything with an organ, really. I love that type of stuff. I also have a special place in my heart for contemporary worship music, considering it’s the only worship music I can actually play. All that being said, I can honestly say I’ve been to some really bad traditional services, and some really bad contemporary services.
You see, style of music is no real indicator of how passionately a church worships God, because you can always tell when a church is just going through the motions, just as much as you can tell when a church is really worshipping God with their whole hearts. When a church worships with its whole heart, it’s a moving experience. It’s uplifting and exhilarating. It’s thought-provoking, and sometimes you get a chill up your spine. Sometimes, worship can even bring you to tears. Worship can be somber, it can be quiet. Worship can be loud and joyful too. Worship can be any number of things. Worship is never just one thing.
When you worship with the heart, God is at our center. True worship is a reflection of the Cross: two arms out-stretched, reaching out to the community, yet it is always pointed toward heaven. Everything we do in worship is for God and God alone. It’s easy to get caught up in a good worship service, to love God and to show it.
There was a story I read about once about the Italian poet Dante Alighieri[1]. For those whom the name doesn’t quite ring a bell, he’s the Dante of Dante’s Inferno. Anyways, as the story goes, he was in a state of deep meditation during a church service once, so deep that he didn’t notice what was going around him and he missed a cue to kneel. Now then, Dante had a few enemies in the church, and they were looking for an excuse to get him kicked out of the Catholic Church. These people saw this minor infraction as an opportunity to get him, and went all the way to the bishop and accused him of sacrilege. When questioned, he defended himself with this statement: "If those who accuse me had had their eyes and minds on God, as I had, they too would have failed to notice events around them, and they most certainly would not have noticed what I was doing."
When was the last time you were so lost in worship that you failed to notice everything else in the world? More often than not, it’s the other way around. We’re so caught up with what’s going on around us that we neglect what’s going on between us and God.
The thing that I want you guys to take with you this morning is very simple. This church is our church, this is true. Some of you have been here all of your lives, and I can only envy that. But first and foremost, this church is God’s church. As members of God’s church, we don’t have to worship. We get to worship. It is our joy to worship God, not our burden. Since God destined us in love to be his children, we praise him for it. We praise God because God’s love is so life changing, so powerful, that we can’t help but praise him for this gracious gift of love that he gave us on the Cross. It makes me want to say Hallelujah, and really mean it. Amen.
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