How many of you are currently part of a blended family or have ever been part of a blended family? Blended family meaning that there are kids living under the same household who basically were part of a previous marriage or a previous relationship. Debbie and I are part of a blended family. A blended family is just strictly nothing but a blessing, right? Piece of cake right? Seriously though. A blended family can be a real blessing, and it is really a blessing when the kids start moving out and you get your space back. Amen.
Really, as I begin to think about this idea of a blended family and I look around the church especially today, I realize that, in many ways, our church is a blended family. We have people from all sorts of religious traditions that are coming together under the same roof to honor God. That is a blessing because I think it is kind of a picture of what Jesus said or Jesus’ ideal in the Book of John. In His high priestly prayer he prayed to the father before he went up to heaven that they would be one. That his people would be one just as he and the Father are one. So it is a blessing to have many different people from many different backgrounds worshipping God together. But just like a regular traditional family when you merge all these people from different backgrounds, from different traditions together you have some challenges. Believe it or not, some people come into a church, especially our church which is a nondenominational church, and they have certain expectations as far as how things should be done. Do you believe that? They come in and some of them are good but some of them are not so good. Some of them can be a little bit of a nuisance. Really, a lot of these ideas that they have tend to center on this idea of the worship experience or the worship setting. For example, let’s say you are from one of the traditional religious denominations such as Presbyterian or Lutheran or Methodist. You may like a certain style of music. You may be used to things like hymns. Hymns are great and we try to do them sometimes but we don’t do a whole lot of hymns. Some of you may even ask where are the hymnals. You may notice if you look in the pews there are no hymnals. What did you do with the hymnals? I’ll tell you what we did with them. We use them to prop up different Christmas things around here. They are propping up the nativity in the back. Anyway, I suspect that some of you come from traditions believe you should have hymnals in the pews because that is in the Bible somewhere, right? Or you come in and you have this idea of how communion should work. Some of you have a real problem with the fact that we celebrate communion every single week. The people that are Presbyterian or are from different Protestant denominations don’t like that because that is kind of a Catholic thing. In their mind the Catholics do communion every week so we shouldn’t do communion every week because we are protesting against the Catholics, correct? On the other hand, the Catholics come in and they like communion every week. They enjoy that because they like the idea of some sort of a regular structure. They seem to be more into structure. They seem to be more into pomp and they expect you to dress a certain way. They wonder why I don’t have a formal collar on or the choir is not wearing robes. They think about that stuff. Or why aren’t we following a set pattern of creeds and confessions and that sort of thing. They expect structure. When the structure is not there, they get a little nervous. Especially if we step outside of that structure and we do something like spontaneous prayer or something like that. That is a little bit uncomfortable for some people. Some of the Catholics and some of the Episcopals might not like the idea that we even use any form of video or even the fact that we use drums. They are just not used to it. It is outside their comfort zone.
In the other extreme, you have people from what we would call the charismatic or the Pentecostal background and they like the idea that we are a little bit contemporary. They see us as being a little bit boring. They really think that we should be more expressive in our worship. They like the idea that we pray, but they think we should be more spontaneous in our prayer. I tell you all these things simply because I want you to know that when we are looking at the worship experience, what we are doing is we are evaluating that experience through our own lens of tradition. Do you understand that? Everybody comes in with a preset idea of what church should be. Some of those ideas are very Biblical. Some are just simply what you are used to. I say that especially as we consider this value of worship. What I want to do in the remaining minutes is simply evaluate how God views worship. You may see by the end of the sermon there is a disconnect between how man views worship and how God views worship. I am going to mention five things.
The first thing that I think that God finds valuable in a worship experience is having his son Jesus Christ exalted. Lifting the name of Jesus high. That is why we sang that song. Lift the name of Jesus high. As the eagle goes up in the sky, lift the name of Jesus high. We are all about exalting the name of Jesus. When we say the name of Jesus, we are not just talking about the name Jesus; we are talking about everything that stands behind that name. His deity, his authority, his power, his majesty. Everything that stands behind that name of Jesus. We are a church that values Christ-centered worship. Unfortunately, there are churches that really aren’t Christ-centered. Sure they might drop the name Jesus once in a while. They may actually go through some of the traditional rituals of Christ-centered worship but really sometimes they just don’t feel like Christ is at the center. They may feel like a workshop or something where you get some good advice. In some cases they might just feel like entertainment, like a concert or something like that. But they don’t exalt the name of Jesus high. As I said earlier a few months ago, we are the body of Christ. That means the head is Christ. We exalt Christ. We sit under the headship of Jesus Christ. The way that is demonstrated is through song one way. We look at the songs we pick out. We take the time to pick out the songs that lift the name of Jesus high. Exalt the character of Jesus Christ. Exalt all the nature of Jesus Christ and everything that he is known for. That is what we do in the songs.
Also, we exalt Christ by making sure that the Lord’s Table or the Last Supper or whatever you want to call it, the Lord’s Supper is always part of our every week worship service. Because every week when we look at the Lord’s table, at least when the cover is not there, it says “Do this in remembrance of me”. What are we remembering? We are remembering the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we do that, we are exalting the name of Jesus Christ.
The third way that we exalt Christ is through the study of his word. Through the focus on his word. We don’t exalt the Bible. We exalt the one who is in the Bible. We exalt Jesus Christ. We know in the Bible is where we find out about the person of Jesus Christ. It is where we find out the message of Jesus Christ. About the coming kingdom of God and it’s how we find out about the ongoing ministry of Jesus Christ in our lives even today. When we lift the name of Jesus high, the main thing about it, and I hope you are beginning to see, the churches that exalt the name of Jesus Christ, that put that first and foremost, what happens is they begin to draw people into their congregation strictly on the fact that we are lifting the name of Jesus high. There is a passage in John that speaks of this. Jesus says “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself.” That is an amazing passage. In that particular section there, what he is talking about is when he is lifted up on the cross. Today, we can exalt him because he was lifted onto the cross and we exalt him because he is the resurrected one. When we lift up the name of Jesus Christ, all people are drawn into the church, drawn towards him, drawn into a relationship with him. The first thing how God evaluates worship is whether or not we exalt his son.
The second way God would evaluate our worship is whether or not hearts are open. In other words that hearts have been made humble in the presence of God. Last week we talked about Philippians 2. We talked about the passage that speaks of the Lord’s descent. I remember I used the word called kenosis. It is the idea that being in the very nature of God, Jesus did not consider that deity of God something to hold on to but was willing to make himself nothing. To become a slave. To take on the form of man. It says that he humbled himself. Consequently, because he humbled himself, we go on to read in verse 9 that he was exalted. It says “Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” Christ was exalted. But what do we do? We become humble. Every knee should bow. That is a picture of humility. That is the picture of somebody in the presence of royalty that they bow down before the king. So bowing down in a worship service is an expression of humility. There are a lot of expressions of humility in any worship service. Of course we have the idea of bowing down, but we also have the idea of raising up hands. That is a picture of surrender. It is a picture of saying God I am all yours. I give up. I am here. Please accept me in. We have other things. Just singing is really a picture of humility. It is the idea of lifting up praises. We see other actions. It could be just sitting with head bowed down. All these things contribute to what we would call expressions of humility. Expressions that are going to be evident when we get to heaven. It is going to be something we are going to be doing all the time. In fact, the song we sang earlier spoke of the idea. Blessings and power and honor given at all forever and ever and evermore. That is what is going on there. Our worship experience is really a practice session for all eternity. It really is.
Having said that, I have to also make the statement that just because in a worship experience or worship setting people are being very expressive that is not an indication that necessarily the hearts have been humbled any more than the absence of those expressions are evidence of pride in the heart. Do you get that? Because a lot of prideful people are very expressive. A lot of people that are not very expressive are very humble people. But I say if you have been a Christian, again I am talking about people that say they are a Christian or a born-again believer. They have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord. They committed their life to following Him. If week after week, month after month, year after year the only expression of humility that you are comfortable displaying in a church is either getting up or sitting down, then there is a problem there. Don’t you think there is a problem there? The problem is that you have yet to really exalt Jesus Christ as Lord or at least to the fullest that you can. What it means is that maybe you are dealing with some sort of pride in there. Because you are worried about if I was to sing or if I was to kneel or if I was going to raise my hand, what would the people think of me? It says that you are still dealing with a little pride because you are more concerned about what the person next to you is thinking rather than what God is thinking. A story is told about a pastor who was standing at the door at the end of the service and a lady said to him, listen pastor, I think if you wouldn’t ask that we raise our hands so much, the church might actually grow because when you ask us to raise our hands or kneel or that sort of stuff, it kind of injures our pride. About that time he says, injured your pride? What I am trying to do is kill the pride. I don’t want to injure it, I want to kill it. It is our job as pastors and musicians and everything to bring you to a place where you are made low and Christ is made high because until we kill that pride, we are restricting the presence of God coming into this place. When we are willing to lay ourselves low, when we are willing to go down low that is when we open the pathway to a fuller experience of God’s presence within the congregation.
That is the third thing that I talk about when I am talking about how God evaluates worship. God values a church that is hungry for His presence. God values a church where people really want God and really even expect that He might show up. People go to church for a lot of reasons. Some of you are not sure why you are even here. Why you are even going. Some people go because it is traditional. It is an obligation or whatever it is. Some people go just because they like the fellowship. They like being around people. Some people go because they are dragged in by relatives to go. That is reality. But the sad thing is few people come to church because they are expecting to encounter God in a real way. They really don’t. I had Debbie sing the first song about will you come in expectation. Do you really or are you just mouthing the words? Do you actually come in expecting to meet God in a very real place? There are churches that really don’t expect God to show up and He never does because God is a gentleman. He is not going to intrude on anybody that doesn’t want Him there. Frankly, some churches wouldn’t know what to do if God showed up like he showed up in the second chapter of Acts. They would freak out and run down the street screaming because that would be too much. We read about that but we say we hope you don’t show up quite that much. We are not quite ready for that. The reality is that every single church has to determine how much they desire God. How welcoming they are to the presence of God in this place. To the degree that we welcome the spirit of God into this place is the degree that we are going to begin to experience the blessings and the rewards that God wants to give us.
There I have to stop because I suspect people are saying what do you mean blessings and rewards and all that kind of stuff? Isn’t worship about God? Worship is ultimately about the Triune God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. No doubt whatsoever. But I can make a pretty good case that when we come into worship, it is not God who benefits, it is us who benefits. God really doesn’t need our worship. We need our worship of God. As we humble ourselves and we begin to seek his presence and expect that he may show up and give us something, he probably will give us something. He may not give us something that we want. A lot of times he is going to give us something that we need. We don’t even know what we need. For example, he could give you some sort of nugget of revelation about him. Some new insight that you never ever thought of in his word or in a song. He can give you a new revelation about yourself. Maybe something that he wants you to work on in your character. He can give you a sense of comfort about a situation that you are in. That peace that says everything is going to be okay. He can give you a little bit of encouragement. Show that gentle love and say, you know what, I know you just need some encouragement so I am going to let you leave with a little bit of encouragement. He may convict you of some sort of a sin. He can give you all sorts of things. In fact, he can turn your life around 360°. There are so many people that have been changed simply by coming into a worship setting and that their entire life has been redirected simply by God showing up at a particular worship setting. I shared that before about a few years ago. That happened to me. My whole life went 360° from the business world to ministry on one worship service.
Actually, it reminds me of a story in the Gospel of Luke. It is a parable and it is the story about two people. It is the story about a Pharisee and a tax collector. You may recall that the Pharisees were supposedly the good guys. They were the religious guys. Then you had the tax collector. They were the bad guys because they ripped off people and that sort of stuff. They took too much tax from them. They took their extra little cut. There is a story in Luke that both these men went up to the temple in Jerusalem and began to pray. The Pharisee started praying and said, listen, I’m just glad I’m not like all these sinners. I’m glad I’m not like the robbers and the thieves and I’m especially glad I’m not like the tax collector here. He goes on to say I pray, I fast, and I even give 10% of my money. On the other hand, the tax collector goes up and he begins to pray a little bit different. We see that in Luke 18 where it says “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven but beat his chest and said God have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus goes on to say “I tell you that this man rather than the other went home justified before God.” In other words, we talked about that word justified, it means made righteous. In this case it is called the imputed righteousness of God. This man because of his humility was made righteous. Was made right with God. Was justified with God. Jesus goes and sums it up. He says “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” You get it? So Christ was exalted, we become humbled. As we become humbled, we get exalted. That is what we are really talking about today. It is making sure that we are not coming in with an exalted status or a status of pride or something that is keeping us from being exalted, keeping us from getting the blessing that we desire.
If you think about what does God value in worship? It is the idea that he values when his Son is exalted. He values the idea that we have been made humble. He values the idea that we are hungry for his presence. He values the idea that a church really believes that they can get a blessing from God.
The last thing I think he values is when you take those blessings and actually extend God’s love to others. Not just outside the church but within the church. If we are really humbled and we are before God, we may get a word and that word actually may not be for us. It may be for somebody else in the congregation. It could be somebody here today. It could be somebody that is not here today, but he gives a word and it’s is something that he wants us to give to somebody else. He wants us to actually take our spiritual gifts and use those gifts to administer the blessings of God to others. We have said before that we believe that every Christian whether or not they know what it is or not, they have all been given a spiritual gift. The word says that when Christ ascended up, he gave gifts to men and women. Those gifts can include all sorts of things. They can include gifts like mercy, gifts like compassion. Some people have the gift of giving. Some people have the gift of hospitality. Some people have the gift of leadership. Some people have the gift of discernment. There are about two dozen different gifts that are for the body to be used by the body to administer the blessings of God onto others. Really the idea of administer comes from the word ministry. So when I am up here using my gift to preach, what I am doing is administering the gifts of God to you. When you use your gift to give the blessings of God to others, you are becoming like a minister. You are administering to others. You are serving others. That is very clearly stated in 1 Peter where it says “Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve other faithfully, administering God’s grace in its various forms.” It goes on and talks about the various gifts. We have all been given gifts. We sit on those gifts. Some of you don’t even know the gifts you have been given. You see it in action. Some people recognize it in you and you don’t even realize that is a gift that you have been given. But it’s not a gift to hoard on to. It is a gift to be used again to take whatever God has given you and give it out to somebody else. Some of you are familiar with our first Wednesday service. It has been going on for about two years now. The most important element, I think, or one of the most important elements of that first Wednesday service is when we all break into little groups of three and four and all we do is pray for one another. We started about two years ago and it was brutal. Everybody just talked. Nobody would pray. I don’t know what to pray. I don’t know what to say. You just pray like you are talking to God. You just talk. Praying is not that difficult. You don’t have to say all the right words. I never say all the right words so you don’t have to either. It is just the freedom to just go up to somebody and say can I pray for you. What do you need? I need you to pray for health, finances, whatever. You say, Dear Lord, would you take care of this person’s health or finances or whatever, Amen. You do that. It’s not that difficult. To be honest, I think what we’ve got is we’ve got people who have been coming there for two years. People who have gotten comfortable with praying that now have to graduate up to a different level. Now they have to become ministers because we are all called to pray. We are all called to administer the gifts. Some people aren’t ready, but there are people that have to learn to step way out of their comfort zone and begin to use some very practical giftedness to minister to somebody else. That can get very risky because if somebody has the gift of discernment, which basically means you are able to look at a situation and recognize everything about it and have clarity, and the mercy person is sitting over there holding the person’s hand saying I’ll pray for you, I’ll do this. The discernment person might come and say listen, you need to clean up your act and stop doing what you are doing and get your life together. But sometimes you have the discernment there and you just need the mercy person to come along and just say, listen, can I hold your hand. Can I just sit here and hold your hand and pray for you? Then you have the person with the gift of giving. So somebody is saying I just lost my job and everybody is saying I feel for you and I’m very sorry about that. The giving guy who has the gift of giving and probably the finance to give it, he or she should be saying here is 100 bucks, go, take it. Those are gifts. Some people have the gift of hospitality. You say I have been struggling. I’m dealing with loneliness. Well, why don’t you come over to my house or whatever or we’ll go out and have a cup of coffee or whatever it is. All those things are gifts that administer the blessings of God. We have to learn how to do that. We have to do that in a safe environment and that is what is great about first Wednesday. It is scary to do on Sunday and a lot of times we have time constraints. Really, first Wednesday is the place where we come together and we begin to practice those gifts on each other so that when we are feeling comfortable within this safe environment, when we go out into the world and somebody is struggling with something financial or a job situation or dealing with some sort of a tragedy or a health issue, we can say can I pray for you? Can I give you money? Can I give you a hug? Whatever it is. That is what we are doing. When we start doing that, we are administering the gifts of God. We are extending God’s reach to others.
In conclusion, what I hope you are getting is that we evaluate worship from a totally wrong perspective. We are thinking about is it too hot in here, is it too cold in here, is the music too loud, is it too soft, is the sound working, is it not, why are we doing communion this way, why are we doing it that way, why don’t we use wine, why do we use grape juice, why do we do this, why don’t we sing more hymns? All this stuff that means nothing. It is important. Yes, it is a consideration and all those things do is add to the possibility that we would be able to usher people into the presence of God. So I am not saying they are totally unimportant, but they are not the main thing. They are not the things that God uses to evaluate worship. Again how God evaluates worship is whether or not it exalts Christ as Lord. The King of Kings. The Lord of Lords. That is our number-one priority. He evaluates worship whether or not we are willing to make our hearts low, to get low, to lay down low and realize that we are nothing in the sight of God. Jesus is everything and God is everything. As we begin to lay ourselves low, then we begin to understand how we are able to begin to experience the presence of God and that God desires a church who is really hungry to experience His presence. Not only hungry to experience His presence but actually anticipate that God will bless them in some unexpected way. Finally, he evaluates our worship on the idea of whether or not we are willing and available to extend that reach, that love to others. To administer the gifts that God has given each of us in order to extend God’s blessing throughout the congregation. When we do that on a consistent basis, we know that we will be a church that God begins to really value. We will have a worship experience that God really thinks highly of. Also, when a visitor comes in or a visitor comes in from the outside, they will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are a church that truly values worship. Let us pray.
