Priority: Worship
Introduction
Could you define the idea of worship? I’m aware it probably wouldn’t help church attendance if we regularly did pop quizzes on church topics but just stop and think about that question for a moment. It is harder than you might think at first to come up with a definition for worship. Maybe you have been a part of a church that has helpfully hammered home a definition for you, and you can easily go back and repeat that definition. But more likely, you are probably aware that you somewhat know what worship is, you are aware that you experience worship, but it isn’t as easy to define as you would hope.
Isn’t that the funny thing about our life as Christians: so often Christians talk about an idea, use words in sermons or with one another, or even live out life a specific way without really talking about it? Without acknowledging that we are using words and living in ways that are foreign to non-Christians and what those words mean and why we use them. Like calling each other brother or sister. Or saying the humble saying of, “Praise God,” when given a compliment or “Lord willing,” when you are talking about something you are planning to do.
Don’t be ashamed if your experience in the church includes things you don’t quite understand sometimes. Maybe you often feel like you can’t define or describe certain aspects of the Christian faith. For many of you, that isn’t entirely your fault. It’s a very common shortcoming of churches and Christians in general that we don’t often teach carefully what we would often consider the basics or important aspects of our faith. We get the gospel down (and sometimes even that is questionable) and then we assume that, over time, people will just pick up the rest. As though we believe people learn by osmosis and proximity?
That is quite sad in many ways because there are so many beautiful truths that God has shared with us that we can know. Ideas that when you learn about them and know them well, you will often have one of those “aha” moments as you realize God does speak to some of the most important areas of our life with him and with others here on earth.
There is the ‘flip-side-of-the-coin’ on this issue as well. Sometimes the problem isn’t that we don’t know about the amazing truths of our God, it’s that we know it too well. Which is a funny way to say it, but you know what that phrase means. It isn’t that we have examined it so much that there is nothing left to examine. Rather, it is an idea or way of living that has become regular, commonplace, mundane, or so ordinary that we don’t think about it anymore. We don’t try to look at it anymore because it has always been there. Why do we pray before dinner? I don’t know, we just do that. Why do we sit facing a stage in church? I don’t know, we just do that.
The same is true for more central Christian experiences and issues. Why do we call it the “Gospel” of Jesus Christ? I don’t know, that is just what we call it. Why do we call him Jesus Christ? I thought it was his last name… Why do we gather in groups outside of Sunday (Gospel Communities and Small Groups for us)? I don’t know, every church has those listed on their website so we made them too. You may have had an answer to some of those questions, but my guess is we usually engage with those ideas and actions as a Christian without thinking deeply about the “why.” Those actions have become commonplace for us and we stop considering the why deeply.
Both problems end with us in the same place. Whether you have not been taught or shown some of the amazing beauties of God and what God has shared with us through Scripture, or whether you have been a Christian so long that you forget to consider these questions deeply anymore because they are just the ordinary flow and ideas of your life, we live having lost the wonder and amazement of our Lord and Savior. Our life as Christians, a life where we have been brought back into right relationship with our God through faith in Jesus Christ, is nothing short of miraculous! It is incredible! It is amazing! Jesus has brought about life-shattering, mind-blowing, daily-existence-altering change in our lives. To not treasure the core beauties of our walk today with God either from lack of teaching, from ignorance, or from boredom is all tragic. We want to see anew, every day, the love and joy we now have in our God through Jesus Christ! This life of faith that we live now changes EVERYTHING!
Over this next several weeks we will be in a sermon series we are calling our “Priority Series.” These are ideas that come up in Scripture again and again because they are so important to our walk with God. Ideas that, when we understand them and remember them, change how we engage with God and one another daily. These are ideas that we will come back to regularly throughout the years to remind ourselves of the ideas that many of us may not know yet or the ideas that maybe we have forgotten to think deeply about in a while.
There are undoubtedly other topics that we could add to this list, and I am sure we will add some more to this list over time. But these are topics we hope to come back to regularly to remind ourselves of important aspects our life with our God and keep them forefront in our hearts and minds. We want to remember who our King is and who his Kingdom people have been made to BE, who WE are—so that we will treasure these ideas.
Over these next several weeks we will tackle these topics:
Worship
Witness
All People
Discipleship
Mutual Care
Compassion
Prayer
Leadership
Spreading
Each of these are aspects of the Christian life that are repeated throughout Scripture and aspects we want to make much of here at Main Street Church. If you want to read a small snippet about each topic there are QR codes around the building today that you can scan to read an overview document on these priorities and then come and enjoy as each topic is unpacked for us each week through preaching. This week, as I have already mentioned, we start with the idea of worship.
Worship: A Definition
Worship might be one of the grandest, most overriding images that we will find in Scripture of our purpose as God’s image-bearers. Scripture oozes with many passages, descriptions, and statements that all call for us to be worshippers. Worshipping really is an all-encompassing idea and image for our identity as God’s kingdom people.
And yet, when most of us think about worship, we think about the couple of songs we sing at the beginning of services and the couple of songs we sing after the preaching. Or you think of your favorite worship group, your playlist mix, or even radio station. And sometimes we think (not anyone in this church), “We’ll just be a little late to church today, but that is okay, we will just miss worship.” The idea of worship for many of us starts (and sometimes ends) with the idea of music and singing. And sometimes because we think it is only singing, it isn’t as important as it should be in our lives.
Now, it isn’t wrong to think about singing when we think about worship. Worship of God is often described within a context of singing:
Sing to the LORD, all the earth! Tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples! For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and he is to be feared above all gods.
(1 Chronicles 16:23–25, ESV)
Sing to the LORD; praise the LORD! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.
(Jeremiah 20:13 ESV)
‘A’ way to worship is to sing, but singing is not the totality of worship. Worshipful singing, with its multiple voices (melodies and harmonies), instruments playing together (notes arranged in chords and progressions), is meant to connect us something larger than just ourselves. Worshipful singing is meant to point us to someone. Worshipful singing is meant to express something grander than merely singing. But how do we define that bigger thing that singing is a part of? What is the larger category that Scripture is calling “worship” in which singing is just a piece?
C.S. Lewis does something interesting in his book The Magician’s Nephew. He takes the idea that we commonly think of as worship—singing—and he uses singing to describe and image a different idea that we probably would never have thought of as connecting with singing—God’s creating. I know we have our children in the service this morning, so I want the children to stop and listen to this piece of his story for a minute. I want you to think about why C.S. Lewis would use singing in this piece of the story. Here is what he says:
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing… the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it… Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out… If you had seen and heard it..., you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing…
The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter… Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn gray. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing… The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose… The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.
It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song and it was about three hundred yards away… And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave… Soon there were other things besides grass. The slopes grew dark with heather… And when he burst into a rapid series of lighter notes she was not surprised to see primroses suddenly appearing in every direction… But now the song had once more changed. It was more like what we should call a tune, but it was also far wilder. It made you want to run and jump and climb… Showers of birds came out of the trees. Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose… And now you could hardly hear the song of the Lion; there was so much cawing, cooing, crowing, braying, neighing, baying, barking, lowing, bleating, and trumpeting… Then there came a swift flash like a fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: ‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
C.S Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Harper Trophy, 1983), chapters 8-9. The latter part of the excerpt follows the editing in C.S. Lewis, A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C.S. Lewis, edited by Clyde S. Kilby (New York: Harper One, 1968, pp. 242-243).
C.S. Lewis masterfully uses the imagery of singing—worshipful signing—as the way his god, Aslan, creates his world, Narnia. By overlaying worshipful singing on the act of creation, Lewis is begging us to ask the question, “Is God’s creative acts worship? Is it right to replace the image of God’s creating with another idea we have of worship—singing—because his creating is actually worship?” That is a very good and very profound question. And I would say yes, God’s act of creation was an act of worship, which is why many people have found Lewis’s imagery here in the creation of Narnia helpful, even worshipful itself, as we think differently about God and his creation of our world and his creation of us as worship.
And that story begins to help us think about this larger category of worship and how we would define it. There must be something going on in our singing songs at church about God, there must be something happening in God creating, there must be something in the sacrifices of the Old Testament, in praying, in praising, in reading Scripture, in meditating on God—there must be something that is a common thread that runs through all these many ideas we find in Scripture that are all connected to worship. And there is. The common thread is God.
We need to go back to the old English phrase for worship and find it had a helpful original meaning. In English, worship comes from the phrase “worth-ship,”
Worship = “Worth-Ship”
Something worthy of our attention and energies
Meaning something worthy of our attention and energies. The common thread through any moment in Scripture that we can connect with worship is that worship means making much of God. We are seeing in those moments that call for worship that God, and God alone, is worthy of our attention and our energies. He alone should be the focus of our love, our affection, and our attention.
We see this all over Scripture. When Job loses all that he has—his family, his possessions, his health—we are told that he stops and worships God, yet music or singing is never mentioned. In fact, we see his worship most clearly in his responses again and again to the calamity that happens to him:
“Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.””
(Job 1:20–21 ESV)
Job declares the goodness of God and turns to God even in his tragedies. He worships God in his declaration.
When John is brought in the Spirit to see God’s future plans that are written in the book of Revelation, he falls before an angel and is told to stop, and instead “worship God.” The problem wasn’t that John was singing songs to the angel and about the angel, rather he was laying himself before the angel in deference and worship of the angel. His body posture and his actions demonstrated worship, not a song.
The common thread that ties all images of worship together in Scripture is it’s object—worship is what we do when we make much of God. Worship is what happens when we show that God is “worth-ship,” worthy of our attentions and energies. Creating a definition of worship will always be hard because it is such a grand idea, but we might begin to rightly describe worship like this:
Worship is enjoying and displaying the worth of Christ in God–centered, Christ–exalting, Spirit–led, Bible-saturated affections and actions throughout our lives individually and corporately.
Note the object of our worship here: “the worth of Christ.” That is who you and I are trying to make much of—Jesus. And we see here in this definition several helpful pairings. We have words like enjoying and affections, which point to an inward aspect to our worship, as well as the ideas of displaying and actions, which point to an outward aspect of our worship. We also see the ideas of individual worship and corporate worship—worship should happen on our own and with others. We also see here a grounding for worship. Our worship cannot be whatever WE think is worshipful. Rather, worship must be grounded as God-centered, Christ-exalting, Spirit-led, and Bible-saturated. There is a definition to what is truly worshipful, and God gives us that definition.
Worship: Internal
Let’s start with this idea of our worship being internal. Why would we split up the worship experience into one that is internal and connected to our emotions and affections, and then external and the idea of our worship experience of God through our actions and the ways we display this outside of ourselves? Well, we split the two because Jesus splits the two!
We have seen this already in Matthew recently. In the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount that we just went through, Jesus talks about the two different groups of people who say “Lord, Lord.” Both groups do the same external actions—prophesying, good works, casting out demons. But to one group Jesus says, “I never knew you, depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matt 7:23). We hear that word “knew” and often think of a lack of knowledge, but in Scripture the idea of knowing is a relational issue. Jesus and these hearers did not have a relationship. There was no internal connection. There was no emotional connection or affection between them, just outward displays. Only actions. Jesus is pointing out to us that this is a problem.
Note what Jesus says later in Matthew 15 about the Jewish people of his day:
This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
(Matthew 15:8–9 ESV)
Jesus gives further clarity to what he was saying in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says that if our hearts are not close to him, then our worship is “vanity.” That means our worship is zero. Worthless. We can do all the outward signs of worship, and if our hearts are not close to him, it is “zero” worship. We can go to as many church services as we want, we can sing as many songs as possible, we can do many good works. None of it will be as worship to God if our hearts are not close to him. It will be vanity, and empty doctrines and commandments. God wants to have our hearts.
Main Street, worship doesn’t start with singing, it doesn’t start with doing, it doesn’t start with a specific outward action. Worship starts with enjoying! Worship starts with your affections and your relationship with Jesus.
Think about that word for a moment: enjoying. Finding, holding onto, and embodying the joy that we have in Jesus. Having and holding the joy of God in our hearts and minds as we come to love and know what he has done for us in Jesus Christ!
When we behold the object of our worship, Jesus, our worship is meant to start with joy—enjoyment! We are commanded to have joy in our Lord Jesus again and again in Scripture:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.”
(Philippians 4:4 ESV)
“These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
(John 15:11 ESV)
“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,”
(1 Peter 1:8 ESV)
Rejoice—we are told to come back to joy again and again. We are told believers are to have Christ’s joy for us and fully in us. We are told we are given joy that is inexpressible and joy that glories in our God. True worship starts with joy—joy in knowing Jesus!
The starting place of worship beings with having right affections—specifically joy—about God. We are to have a real relationship with God. We are to know God and be known by God (Gal 4:9). We start internally, not externally.
Worship is enjoying and displaying the worth of Christ in God–centered, Christ–exalting, Spirit–led, Bible-saturated affections and actions throughout our lives individually and corporately.
Worship: Grounded
But we can’t just have enjoyment over any idea of God. For some, you may have been uncomfortable with all this talk of enjoying and affections wondering where truth fits in. We have to have us some truth! Some rules! Some regulations (you might be saying to yourself, or at least thinking)! You may have been worried as though we think worshipping is centered only around a feeling. That isn’t true because Jesus never makes that kind of a split between affections and truth. That is a problem with our way of thinking, not God’s. Jesus says this to the Samaritan woman:
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
(John 4:23–24 ESV)
Jesus says “spirit AND truth.” Note that when Jesus talks about worshipping in the spirit it is not contrasted with worshipping in your body, so the difference here is not about physical worship vs some sort of other-worldly spiritual worship, as though Christians need to enter some kind of spiritual trance to truly worship God. Rather, the contrast here is spirit with truth. The point is that when we worship—our right spiritual or emotional or affectional heart-grasp of God’s supreme value must be tethered to his true revelation of himself. We must worship who God truly is as he has shown himself to us. Our right worship, our good worship, our pleasing worship depends on a right mental grasp of who God really is—Truth (with a capital ‘T’). If we worship an idol of our own creation and our own understanding, we are not really worshipping God.
And we are incredibly blessed that God has given us himself, Jesus, the God-Man, that we might rightly see and know him. We are not stuck guessing at who God is as though he is this unknowable spirit existing somewhere out “there”. We are not stuck needing to go on a spiritual quest to find out who God is. We no longer even have to do the hard work of hearing God’s good and righteous character and wondering what it would really look like for God to act that way. We find that God is totally knowable in Jesus!
[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
(Colossians 1:15–20, ESV)
We worship rightly when our affections and specifically our joy is found in knowing the truth of who God is as seen in Jesus Christ. A God who is loving, patient, long-suffering, gracious, and merciful. A God who has loved you and I with a love we never deserved and can barely even grasp in Jesus Christ. Yes, our true worship must start with our affections and our enjoying of God internally as we put our internal energies and attentions towards God and what he has done for us in Jesus Christ. But those affections are grounded by God’s revelation of himself through Scripture and through the very personhood of Jesus. In that way our worship becomes:
God–centered, Christ–exalting, Spirit–led, Bible-saturated
As our thoughts and our affections—spirit and truth—are aligned to who our God is and we worship him—as we love God—with all heart, mind, and soul, we see our worship is both affection and truth. Spirit and truth, as Jesus says. Worship starts internally in our affections and enjoying of God, but those affections and enjoyment are tethered to who God really is, what God has really done for us, and who God is calling us to be.
Worship: External
It is that piece—who he is calling us to be—that begins to make us think about the external for the first time. Again, staying in Matthew this morning, think about Jesus’s parable of the field with a treasure in it:
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
(Matthew 13:44 ESV)
Jesus tells us here that the kingdom of heaven—right relationship with God again as his kingdom people, his sons and daughters—is like a treasure that has been hidden in a field. At some point, people, like this man, come to realize this amazing treasure has been placed in front of us in God’s grace. We finally see God, and in that moment, we should have a reaction. Like this man it should be JOY for us! Our response, our worship, starts internally. We have a shift of what we value—we see relationship with God as possible again and we enjoy that reality.
But that joy can’t just stay internal. The man just didn’t enjoy the warm feeling. He went out and did something. Here, he sells all he has that he might have this treasure—the kingdom of God, right relationship with God again through faith in Jesus—at any cost.
This man had both the aspects of worship we have talked about already. He had internal affections raised by realizing that this treasure was there for him to have. And he rightly assessed it was a treasure. With those two aspects together, he could not contain his affections. He didn’t just sit there in the field and ponder the treasure forever. He also didn’t walk away and act like he didn’t know the treasure was there or forget it. This man had to have an outward expression that helped to make the treasure his. An outward expression that flowed from his joy in the treasure to making sure it was forever a part of his life.
What should it look like for us to have an external display or actions that flow FROM our internal affections and joy for Jesus? ONCE we have seen and treasured the supreme worth of Jesus Christ, who he is, his amazing love for us, and all that we now have IN him; and ONCE we know this truly is God as revealed by his Scriptures and in truth; THEN we should find this internal worship of our God bubbling up and we should find that it must flow outward from us in a myriad of ways. Ways that display through our actions that God is THE ONE we treasure most and the one who is most worth our attention and energies.
This is what Paul means when he says in 1 Corinthians 10:
So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
(1 Corinthians 10:31 ESV)
Or as Samuel said:
And Samuel said, “Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.
(1 Samuel 15:22 ESV)
Our enjoyment of Jesus is meant to overflow. It must be displayed. Out of our right thinking and heart-felt affection grows actions that conform rightly to our God’s character and rightly image him in our lives. In this way worshipping is also our reverence, our service, our submission, and our honor of God in all we do and think. The Protestant Reformers fought hard for this idea. They did not want people to think that it was only those who served in the church who were worshipping. Or that worship only happened within the walls of the “church” building. They were fighting for a right understanding of the priesthood of all believers:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
(1 Peter 2:9 ESV)
“That you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness.” That is worship in action—proclaiming the excellencies of God. That may be why many people initially think this is only talking about pastors, priests, or ministers in the church, but we are all meant to do this! We are all meant to be God’s priests.
Look back to the very beginning when God created humanity. God said:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
(Genesis 1:26 ESV)
That creation was an act of worship because it was making much of God. God wanted everyone to see his beauty so he ingrained it in butterflies and sunsets and cool summer evenings. And God has also made billions of tiny mirrors that are all meant to point everyone towards him. To show all creation aspects of his glory, his goodness, and his loving kindness. You and I are here to show that God and God alone is worthy of our attentions and energies. We show in everything we do that God alone is worthy of our worship.
God called all of humanity, in Adam and Eve, to be priests. To be worshippers by showing the world HIM in everything we do! The language in the garden of to “guard and protect” creation (Genesis 2:15) is the same language God gives the priests in Deuteronomy to guard and protect the temple of God (Deuteronomy 4:19; Numbers 3 & 4). As the image bearers of God in everything we do—work, play, enjoyment of creation together—we are meant to be priests calling others into worship of God as we worship him displaying of him in every action we take.
Our external worship can and should happen in everything we do. We can worship in our discussions after church, in our work dealings tomorrow, and as we connect with friends and family throughout the week. As we point others to the beauty of our God and what he has done in Jesus through our actions and words in many ways, we are truly worshipping.
Worship: Individual vs Corporate
And last, but not least, this is not just an individualist endeavor. Yes, we must individually have a relationship with God, but it is not solely an individual relationship. We are called to a people. To a family.
We saw this often in the Sermon on the Mount: We are now part of God’s kingdom and his kingdom people. If we go just one more verse in 1 Peter 2 we will see that not only are we all God’s priests again now through in faith in Jesus—those who can rightly worship him—but we are part of a people:
Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
(1 Peter 2:10 ESV)
God has mercifully given us one another, a new family, a people who are on mission together to be right worshippers of God. And we need one another!
And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
(Hebrews 10:24–25 ESV)
Yes, we need our own relationship with God, our own affections and enjoyment of life with Jesus, but we also need others. They will encourage us, exhort us, help us to see the holes that we have in our relationship with God, and they will show us more of God as THEY walk as his image bearers worshipping him and pointing US to him through their lives. We need one another in this process.
Worship: Practical Conclusions
And there you have it. We just spent an entire service just defining worship! That should show us how badly we need to spend time on these Priority ideas together. We should want to see more and more about worship and how we can make much of God together. There will be so much more we can say about the topic of worship each time we come back to this topic.
But come back to this definition with me again:
Worship is enjoying and displaying the worth of Christ in God–centered, Christ–exalting, Spirit–led, Bible-saturated affections and actions throughout our lives individually and corporately.
Could you define worship today? Hopefully a little better now! Children, when you come up to me after service, the question I am going to ask you is, “What did you learn during church today?” And you want to know the answer now? The answer is, “We talked about worship.” And when I ask you “What is worship?”, you want to know what the answer is? You should say to me, “Worship is everything we do that shows God is most important to us. It starts with our feelings that should be joyful in knowing Jesus. Those feelings should come from the truth of knowing about Jesus through the Bible. And those feelings and truth should lead us to do worshipful things with our actions.”
Some of you may wonder, was it worth it to spend an entire sermon simply on defining an idea? I hope so! In fact, I think this definition of worship should really help you this week. We want this Priority Series to be extremely practical and hopefully this definition can help you better assess where you may need to grow in your understanding of worship these next week and months.
The Worth of Christ
Let’s start with the worth of Christ. Do you see how worthy Jesus is to be worshipped because of what he has done for us? Perhaps you don’t yet know the gospel (the good news) of Jesus. Perhaps you were saved at some point, but people didn’t teach you well about Jesus. Either way, come this week and see the beauty of our God who left heaven to be with me and you. Who stepped down to live a perfectly righteous life that we might have that life. See the God who came and died our sinners deaths on the cross. See the God who raised himself up in power again and is seated at the right hand of the father. See our God, Jesus, who offers us relationship with himself again through faith. See him of worthy of your worship!
Enjoying & Affections
Perhaps, as you think about this definition, what stands out to you is the focus on enjoying and affections. Have you lost your joy in Jesus? Are your affections not as warm for him as they used to be? Perhaps you need to slow down and simply be with Jesus and enjoy him this week. Stop, pray, be still with God this week. Allow yourself to have appropriate affections to what he has done for you this week.
Grounded
Maybe you see these phrases about being God–centered, Christ–exalting, Spirit–led, Bible-saturated and realize you don’t know enough about Jesus. Maybe you are not as grounded in your understanding of God as you would wish. Do you need to know Jesus more? Stop and study, read, and ponder your God anew this week through his Scripture.
External
Do you need to live out this worship of Jesus in real ways? Displaying and giving action to the worship you feel FOR God? Consider your job, your hobbies, your time. How are you using this life that God has given you to show in everything you do that God is the most important person to you?
Others
Or perhaps you are feeling stuck this morning. Maybe you need encouragement, help in your fight against sin or our constantly fickle heart that sometimes doesn’t want to worship. Turn and go deep with others. Share what your thoughts are and your needs that maybe, through God’s other image bearers, you might find yourself
Response
I pray you are moved to many different expressions of worship this week: reading, praying, sharing, discipling, and yes, even singing (including for those of you who don’t think you have a good voice). I want to encourage you to stop for a few moments and think about these aspects of worship. Where and in which ways might God be calling you to considering worshipping him this week? If you are here this morning with children, don’t be ashamed to talk with them during this time and engage them on what worship is and what we are learning about worship. Talk about how they might grow in their affections, understanding, and action of worship.
The worship team is going to come up and play instrumentally. We want to give you a few minutes to respond, and then, after the next song we are going to take communion. A chance for all of us to respond corporately to the beauty of our God in communion. As we begin singing that song please feel free to come and grab the communion elements and hold them and we will take them together after the song.
Communion
Benediction
May you have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God, and worship!
(Ephesians 3:18–19 ESV)
