Listening to God - Worship

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon

Sunday, June 20, 2010

This morning, we are going to breathe new life into worship. Pastor Burcham has been talking about the last two weeks in this Listening to God series about breathing new life into ancient practices and today, when we talk about worship, we have seen it’s a little bit familiar to us here. It doesn’t seem like one of those ancient practices that was lost long ago and that people are trying to revive.

Worship is something we have going on here five times on a weekend, five different opportunities to worship, to come here. We have contemporary, we have traditional, we have all kinds of blended stuff. We have this idea of worship that it’s here; but if we only look at the five services as our worship life, we have a very limited view.

But you see, we’re facing an uphill battle because in here and now, when we start to look at it, we start to see what’s happening around us. We start to see that society, culture around us is really wanting to compartmentalize our lives. So worship is confined to the church. Worship then is confined to walls and buildings and property.

There is something that was occurring, I took this Romans passage that I just read earlier and that’s what I used as my charge to meditate. How many of you went through that meditation process this week and found a verse, stuck with it, lived with it? Alright, we have a couple. That’s okay. That’s one of the things I did. I listened to it and I heard it and I said, “Alright, I’m going to live with this verse and I’m not going to study,” which is what I tend to do, what I would like to do, but what I did is I lived with it. I said, “What does this mean, this Romans 12 passage?” “Present your bodies as living sacrifices to God, holy and acceptable. This is your spiritual act of worship.” I started to live with that and I asked, “What does it mean in this context?” When I started thinking about worship, how does this help and guide listening to God’s word?

I start to think about it and if we start to look at the compartmentalization of our world and this is over here and this is over here and you can’t mix any of these, it really affects the way we think about worship.

I have some high tech gadgets here this morning. That’s the reason why you don’t see the pulpit here. I couldn’t use this high tech gadget and use the pulpit so what I have this morning is this flip chart. I know it’s something new that you’ve probably never seen before ever. But this is what I’m going to use this morning to kind of illustrate for you what’s happening in our current reality, what’s happening in our culture.

In culture, what we have is You. This is representative of You. And you have all kinds of different stuff going on in your life. You have your house. You have your home. You have your family. You have your work. You have your hobbies. You have friends. You have church here. You have all kinds of different things that are all happening in your life. And we know there are more and more circles that can be added here. But whatever it might be, this is what’s happening when we start to say we can compartmentalize.

So we have home over here and we have work over here and we have friends and we have family. It’s starting to look like a periodic chart. I heard a laugh, at least one. We also have home over here and hobbies. So we have all these different areas of our life and we’ve compartmentalized them all but, see, this is what culture tries to tell us. This is what our society is telling us. These things start to invade upon You.

For example, I’m going to use myself. In work, I am a pastor. That’s what I do. That’s my job. Now what is it that culture tries to tell? This right here, my work, is my identity. So this no longer becomes me. This becomes me. So I’m no longer known as Philip Robarge. I am known as Pastor. That has become my identify. It’s become who I am. But you see, this is what happens, any of these areas start to invade in and this, these start to become You.

So your hobbies, how many of you are golfers? We have no golfers, wow. I figured there has to be at least one, alright, there’s a hand. It was forcibly raised but yes, we have a golfer. When we think about hobbies and those things, I always go to golf but I don’t like golf that much because it’s a frustrating sport but see, when we have it as a hobby, that’s something we want to be good at. We’re trying to get out there and relax and go through all these steps and processes. But what happens when we jump into the game or we jump into a hobby, the hobby all of a sudden becomes our identity.  We’re no longer who we are but we’re a golfer. What happens over time is maybe when we retire, we now become retired. Retired becomes your identity. Anything that happens out here now becomes you. It becomes your identity. Is that what you want to be known as?

This is happening more and more, not even just these areas but what we start to see that people and their past, maybe you’ve encountered some of these people and keep living in the past, like high school. You say, “Yeah, I was a track star. I was a football star.” I was whatever it might be, fill in the blank, they’re always pointing back to what they were because that was their identify. That was who they were. You see, it’s invaded upon who you are because then you can’t let it go.

You can say, “Well, yeah, this is who I am.” But there’s a pitfall that’s happening in our current culture is all these things can be taken away, all of them. As they’ve invaded upon each of us, each topic, each one has invaded upon our identify until they can be taken away, though, so what happens to our identify? It’s gone.

It’s Father’s Day today. We start to look at this family one. We can be listed as a father. Father can become who we are but that can also be taken away. We start to see even what happens when children move away, when they go off to college, when they get married, when they have a life of their own, do you see what happens to the title “father?” You’re always a father but, all of a sudden, it’s no longer the same as what it used to be. And so you can tend to be lost in this kind of idea, if these things are coming in and becoming who you are, it’s a major pitfall to what’s happening.

I go back to that Romans passage when Paul’s talking about presenting your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God because this is your spiritual act of worship, but what happens here? Church is confined. Worship then is what usually is attached to this, is confined. If we only see worship in this small compartmentalized fashion, what happens? This is not worship then. We lose ourselves in these identities, these labels. This does not become worship.

Let me show you a picture that’s similar to what we’ve been looking at, but what I want to call this one is God’s reality. And so what I’ll put here on the top is Reality. And reality looks very similar to what is happening. We still have this center. We’re going to call this one still You. And we still have all these things that are happening in our life. We still have house and home, family and friends and church and work and hobbies and all those things are still happening. But do you see, something is changed in this setting.

It goes back to 2 Corinthians 5:17, one of the verses that’s been continually going through my mind, “We are a new creation.” You see, the old identities and the old way of doing things, they’re gone. See all this? It’s old, it’s gone. We live in a new reality, a new creation we are. But did we create this creation out of our own selves? Did we say, “Yeah, it’s all me.” No, Paul points to the direction. He says, “In Christ, we are a new creation.” The old identities have passed away. The old things of life have passed away. We no longer have to say, “I am a pastor.”

What happens in this current reality, like I said, we still have these areas of our lives that are still happening. We still have our work and our hobbies and our homes and our friends and our family and whatever all these things that are happening and who we are. But they no longer become this You, this identity. What happens in God’s reality is that these extend from. It’s all a matter of where the arrows are coming from. So the arrows coming in, are they invading who you are? Are you compartmentalizing everything in your life, even worship? Is worship confined to a space? Is worship confined to a building?

Or are we in God’s reality when we start to look at that verse again and we look at presenting our bodies to God as living sacrifices? You see, all of these things are then affected by it and all of these things become ways in which we worship.

The pitfalls in the other one were that identities can change. Who we are can change. But see here, when our identity is in Christ, it’s never changing. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. That can never change and that’s never something that’s going to shift. So what now has this become? We see that house and home, these things whether they may change or not, whether our house changes and the way our kids go off to school, whatever it might be, no matter what these do, this does not change.

So then our work no longer becomes the place where we’re going to go to and begrudge our boss and say, “Yeah, I’m really smarter than that guy but yet I’m just going to come in here and give a half-hearted job and get out of there and put in my work.” Work doesn’t become that place then. Work becomes a place where you’re saying, “How is it that I can put my worship into it?” Work then becomes that place where you’re saying, “You know what? I’m here. God has given me talents to use. God has given me the gifts and the skills to use. How can I put this into my work?”

Fathers, we start to see this then as, “How is it that I can be a godly example to my children?” If we looked at it in the Psalms, Pastor Burcham talked about the Psalms being David’s journal. He wrote about and talked about how it was the utmost importance for parents, particularly even fathers, to raise their children in the very words of God. “Meditate on them day and night. Teach them the laws and the commands of the Lord.” All these things are given as commands for fathers. This is what happens when we have that Christ centeredness. Everything is going to flow out of that, even our very nature as a father. As a mother, as a sister and a brother, all those different ones that come into play but now more than ever, I believe it’s utterly important for fathers to stand up in this way.

Fathers in our world do get a bad rap and, sometimes, for a good cause. They’re not there sometimes. Sometimes we look at the statistics of our nation and people are without fathers. Fathers leave. Fathers might be there and be nonexistent. But see, in this Christ reality, this Christ-centered reality, everything that’s flowing out is worship. Raising our kids is pleasing to God.

But in this current reality, what we find is that in living that Christ-centered life, we start to see the purpose then for this. “Why is it that I should live like this?” To me, it goes back to the Romans passage once again and Paul’s calling on all Christians. He says, “Present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God because this is your spiritual act of worship.” You see, what’s happening here is when we look at all these areas, church is no longer confined to a thing that we do, to the place that we worship but it becomes one avenue that we come together and worship. This is just a piece and it’s an important piece. We should be together as Christians, building one another up but we can’t just see it limited to this. There’s worship and everything else is my life. But worship comes in all areas.

We start to look at the purpose even more and looking at that passage and you still think what we hear is living sacrifices. A sacrifice is not something we think of as positive. We think about death. We think about sacrificing means that I have to die. And we go back to the Old Testament for this one. We look at God the way He commanded sacrifices for His people. He said, “Bring your sacrifices to me.” So that would be animals, that would be wheat, vegetation, anything that the people would bring as an offering. They would bring it before and sacrifice it to God. This started to become a ritual for them and they would just come and they would bring their stuff, throw it down there, “Yep, I’m forgiven.” But God spoke His word through the prophet and He said, “You honor me with your lips but see your hearts are far from me.” Because what happened? Worship became this, a place confined to sacrifice. Sacrifice was only just a piece and then they lived out the rest of their lives. And God said, “Your hearts are far from me.”

Then we take this into the New Testament. Paul defines for us and there are a couple of things, words you should hear coming out from that Romans passage, it’s like living sacrifices, holy, acceptable, spiritual act of worship. These are the words we could say Paul’s not talking about dying for Christ in this particular passage. He’s saying your life is given to God for worship, to live in worship. It’s talking about bodies and living and spirits. All these are connected to what we are today.

We start to see that worship is in all areas of life and God has commanded that very thing and He says, “I’m going to breathe new life.” In Ezekiel, we see the picture of dry bones and that prophet has that vision of the dry bones coming to life. Whose breath is put into those dry bones? It’s not mine. It’s not yours. It’s not their breath but it says, “God is going to speak into those dry bones, for them to come to life.” That’s what’s happening in worship when we live that worship in all areas of life, breath is put into it, God’s breath.

There’s a particular part of that opening hymn that said, “All breath and life come now with praises before Him.” That’s what’s happening here and now. We come into this place to worship our God. New breath is put into us so we can also go out of this place and find the different areas of our life that worship can be used.

And so that’s my challenge for you this week and maybe if you start using some of the other disciplines, like journaling, and maybe in your journaling time, what you find out is you start to figure out what it is and how you’re using worship in all areas of life. And that’s what my challenge is then is to look at those areas of life and figure out how you’re putting worship into all of it.

I pray that God does breathe new life into your worship. Amen.

Copyright 2010 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church