SE092009
CHRISTIANITY: ITS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE
4. Worship
Every profession or hobby has its own lingo, or jargon. When you use that jargon, outsiders understand what you're talking about, and it makes any profession seem like ROCKET SCIENCE. About 20 years ago, you might have heard me utter the phrase:
"Don’t be a creamer! Get the plugs in your cache and no duff, red rot or leaners, and the checker wants your screefs 8 cm.
What do you think I was taking about? I was a treeplanting foreman, and the rough translation would be:
“make sure to place the box containing your tree seedlings under a tarp and be sure to not plant your trees in forest debris or rotting trees and the gov’t quality control guy is looking to see that you have cleared an area around each tree down to the soil…” oh and “creamer” means, don’t hog the all the easy planting areas to yourself – share the good ground.
When you’re an outsider and you don’t get the jargon, it feels complicated. Then when you get it, you realize it was never rocket science. Christianity has its own jargon, words like justification or sanctification or propitiation –and you have no idea what they mean.
- Like, “Amazing Grace” and you think that’s must be a particularly great prayer before a meal:
- Or you heard a Christian ask, "How’s your walk?" What are supposed to say to that?
- “My Wok is black, round and sitting in my kitchen waiting for the next stir fry”?
Then there’s WORSHIP jargon and habits. Christians don’t sing “songs” they sing “hymns”. Isn’t that sexist? Why can’t we sing “hers”? You go to a Christian worship service and what are your supposed to do? Sit up, bow, stand, sing, read? How are you supposed to know this stuff!
Well, I want to convince you that worship is not ROCKET SCIENCE, and to do that, I’m going to answer a series of questions. First:
1. WHAT IS WORSHIP?
A friend once told me about a man he knew who was dating this woman in college who drug him to church one – he’d never been. Ah, the things we’ll do for women! Now this was a fancy church, not like this one. So he walks in and he’s sort of awestruck by the architecture, the statues and the stained glass, the high cathedral ceiling and the massive pipes for the organ.
As he’s gazing all around, his girlfriend knew that you don’t just walk into a church. First, you show obsequiousness for the Eucharist by genuflecting* - duh! So as the man was looking all around, he didn’t see his girlfriend bow on one knee in front of him – which caused him to walk straight into her back, causing her to scream in pain as he fell heels over head in front of her with a loud thud beside the pew. That wasn’t quite the “falling for her” she had in mind… and, that relationship didn’t last.
- Maybe that scene defines worship for you… traditions, buildings, and mysterious symbols and priests in weird robes chanting in languages you don’t understand.
- Or maybe it’s defined by the scene out of Blue’s Brothers, with people jumping pews and swinging from chandeliers, and it’s the people in the pews that are chanting in languages you don’t understand.
Either way, you know when it comes to worship, you won’t understand it.
To get past that, we have stop thinking about HOW Christians worship and ask, WHAT is it they are doing?
What they’re doing is simple. They are showing honor and adoration to God.
- The English for WORSHIP literally means, “WORTH – SHIP”. So when you think about WORSHIP think about what is WORTH a lot to you.
- Those things that are worth a lot, I honor with special acts of: praise, sacrifice, thanks, love, devotion – worship logically flows from the value of the object being worshipped.
- Bible words translated “worship” describe acts of honor, humbling myself, bowing, giving praise and adoration.
Now let’s admit that if that’s what worship is, we’re all set up to find it difficult because we are an honor-deficient culture. Our constant emphasis on equality sometimes leads to such a casual familiarity with EVERYTHING that we think honor is a joke or worse, evil.
IN fact, we sometimes think dishonor is noble:
We got a picture of this last week in the Senate when the President was giving a speech and he was actually heckled by a member of Congress. In the middle of his talk someone yelled out, “you lie”! Well, we all know that politicians are capable of lying, but in that venue to jeer a man who carries the office and the weight of responsibility and authority of the President of the United States? Wow. That’s dishonor.
My point is simply that deep honor and profound respect are difficult ideas for us egalitarian Americans. In fact, when some of us see Christians involved in the act of worship – be honest – we sometimes have thought their giving of honor to the Invisible God was at best a little weird and at worst – wrong… like, “they look brainwashed”. People in worship brings to your mind pictures of Nazi youth surrendering their brains to the Fuhrer.
And yet surely we can agree that even if a president isn’t worthy of honor, God is WORTHY. Maybe the most reasonable thing, if an all good God exists, is to say God is WORTHY. And to give him honor, adoration, and devotion isn’t weird at all. It’s natural, and it’s right.
So that’s all worship is. Now the next question is
2. HOW SHOULD WE WORSHIP?
Jesus taught us how to worship in John 4:23,24 when he revealed God’s secret desire:
Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
So let’s break this down:
- ONE: God desires people who worship him not out of ritual but out of their spirits, their insides, their true selves, who they really are, authentically.
- TWO: God desires that people understand him more as they approach him, that they dive into the truth about him, not just vague religious feelings.
To explain this, think about a marriage relationship. Before I got married to Johnna:
- I wanted to know about her. I wanted information about her, truth. Because information enhanced her worthiness to me. What kind of home did she grow up in? What where he likes and dislikes? Some information was gleaned before I actually met her. I asked around. Found out she was 3 years older than me*. That she was an American*. That she had a crush on the super stud of the soccer team. Then, I learned how devoted she was as a follower of Jesus, I learned how sensitive and creative she is, how loyal, how diligent, and I learned that she got better grades than did*. All this information enhanced her worthiness.
- But it was more than information. I could have learned all that from a dating service page. I wanted to experience her. I wanted to touch her, I wanted to laugh with her, talk with her. There was some things that mere information transference about her could never tell me, chemistry, intimacy, love. Would she return my affections? This was the spiritual/experiential side of our relationship which also enhanced her worthiness.
That’s a picture of what God wants WORSHIP to be like:
In Spirit and Truth.
In Knowledge and experience.
When we don’t put these two together, worship can get sideways.
WORSHIP IN TRUTH
People all around the world are trying to worship gods or something divine, but these mutually contradictory notions about God can’t all be true can they? Some say yes, but I say that’s nonsense. Truth matters in worship.
Think if your neighbors started to worship you. Awesome! They bring you sacrifices. Even better! Let’s say everyone leaves a TV on your doorstep. Cool! But after three or four, they just fill up your garage. Still, they keep bringing ‘em. Like a cat who keeps bringing you dead mice out of respect and love, but he doesn’t know you well enough to know you don’t eat mice.
If you were God, wouldn’t you kind of get upset with all this “adoration” because people don’t KNOW you. In the Bible God says:
Ps 50:21 “you thought I was altogether like you.
But I will rebuke you and accuse you to your face.”
Part of getting worship right, is getting the right answer to the question:
“WHAT IS GOD LIKE?”
And mark this down… everywhere on earth that you see a degraded culture, every place where life isn’t working right, every family in crisis, I guarantee you it started in the mind with an inaccurate idea about God.
SPIRIT IN WORSHIP
But some people have very high, very accurate ideas about God, but don’t worship in spirit. They know about God, but they don’t know God. They forget that God wants the kind of quality of relationship that a husband shares with a wife. Some of you maybe it makes you uncomfortable that God wants to be this intimate with you. Maybe you thought Christianity was very business like, very professional, and proper.
Well, friend, the Bible says that God has emotions. God is not a thing, God is a Person. God is zealously devoted to us, like a spouse. And like a spouse, the Bible says, the Spirit of God is grieved when we offer our hearts to anything or anyone other than him. He wants our full engagement in the relationship.
Which is why this worship is not only about what we do in a service. It’s also about what we’ve given our hearts to as expressed outside a worship service throughout the week. Imagine your spouse totally knew everything about you, said all the right things, performed service to you flawlessly, but was seeing someone else on the side.
Not cool.
So God says in the Bible:
Isa 29:13 - These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
They worship but is it worship in spirit? No.
In contrast… worship as God wants it both word and deed, heart and head: total devotion in Spirit and Truth.
And let’s be honest today… if you’re just investigating the claims of Christianity today, you might admit that there’s a sense that you just can’t enter into that SPIRIT and TRUTH thing:
- You have some knowledge of God, from Sunday School, but beyond that, you’re really unsure of WHO it is you’re worshipping. Frankly you’re suspicious of people who think they have TRUTH about God.
- Also, you might get that sense of AWE out in nature, but you have yet to give your whole heart to God in worship. Maybe in part because you aren’t at all sure that God has a heart for you. So your SPIRIT is in reserve.
Maybe friend, that’s why WORSHIP seems like ROCKET SCIENCE to you. To someone who has never fallen in love, what’s the standard response when you see two young lovers fawning over each other?:
“no snookems, I love you more, no my little love chicken, I love you more...you’re just a moochy, choochy, coochy…”
Does that ever seem entirely normal? No. But admit it, if you’ve ever been head over heels in love, you find yourself doing this... baby talk! (Don’t even try to pretend you haven’t done this – I’ve got tapes.)
But that’s WHY Christians worship as TRUE worshippers. We don’t just have a vague ‘sense of the divine’. No, we’re in love! Not because we’re so great. No! Because we’ve BEEN loved! God reached out in grace to touch our depravity with his forgiving love through his Son, Jesus Christ. The only right response is worship – in spirit and in truth.
But if one has never received this lavish love that comes from God’s Spirit in them, worshipful responses of singing, sacrifice, adoration, can seem a little strange. That can’t be helped.
That’s why when the apostle Paul was teaching a young church about worship, he said be sensitive in your public gatherings to inquirers and outsiders. In this passage Paul underlines that he understands how strange really exuberant and intimate worship can be, and so he encouraged public meetings that emphasized understanding, and instruction when inquirers were present.
That’s what we try to do. Some of you just can’t enter into heavy participation in intimate, SPIRIT and TRUTH expressions of love to God, because you’re an “inquirer” phase. So we don’t ask you to. But while we want to be sensitive to where you’re at, we want you confronted with the reality of God in our midst! Friend: the end game for God is simple:
God is seeking worshippers, true worshippers who will worship him in SPIRIT AND in TRUTH. So we provide that opportunity every week, like it will be today after service to declare the worth of our God in spirit and in truth.
So assume you have that grace encounter with Christ and you’re ready to be a true worshipper… we have one final question to answer:
3. WHAT’S IN A WORSHIP SERVICE?
The answer is, three primary roles. And what separates a good worship service from a bad one has nothing to do with your denomination or style. What separates a good worship service from a bad one is when everyone understands their proper role – or not.
What does this configuration remind you of? A theater? A stage play? And we all know about those settings, don't we? When the curtains open, there are three roles that we observe:
- The ACTORS come out, and perform...
- Back stage the PROMPTERS and stage hands give cues and move props.
- And we are the AUDIENCE, and we sit back and spectate.
But if you take those roles and insert them into a worship setting, you’d be making a huge error! But we do all the time! People come in and *…
But that’s not the way it should be! In WORSHIP there's the same three roles, ACTORS, PROMPTERS and AUDIENCE, but they're totally switched:
- In worship, the people on stage are not the performers, they are merely the prompters and stage hands. They give cues and move props that facilitate the performance of the actors. The prompters or stage hands are not who the audience came to see, right? Theirs is a support role only.
- So in worship, the people out here, are the actors in the worship drama. This place where you sit is the stage as the worship drama unfolds.
- And the audience? The audience is, behind, and above and all around looking in, appreciating, and enjoying the show. It's an audience of ONE. The audience in worship is GOD.
In worship, you are not the audience, you ARE the show. And your performance is not just your words, it’s not your excellent singing voice, it’s not your body posture or if you know when to say “amen.” Your performance is your heart laid bare in adoration and openness to God, in SPIRIT and in TRUTH.
And your audience of One is PRESENT. Jesus said, “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Your Audience never misses a show!
CONCLUSION
I admit, until you have a personal relationship with God, worship may seem like ROCKET SCIENCE. But as you grow in knowing WHO God IS and WHAT HE’S DONE, it will seem less and less weird.
Grandpa Thiessen.
- A moment to honor and adore him and delight his heart
o And we missed it – focused on US, not HIM.
- Now, I would give anything to delight his heart.
You were created to commune with God. Jesus gave everything to draw to himself a New Community of TRUE worshippers. Don't you want to be part of that number? A nation of every tribe and color who can say with their whole hearts:
You are worthy.. because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God. Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb."
