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06.08.08

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time

SERMON SERIES: THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

PART 1: WORSHIP

PSALM 96; 1 CORINTHIANS 14:1-25

• The Drive for Ministry
• What Drives Your Church?
• In his best-selling book on church growth, The Purpose-Driven Church, Rick Warren asks the question, “What drives your church?”
• Rick is the founding pastor of the Saddleback Valley Community Church in Southern California
• The Saddleback Church is one of the fastest growing churches in the country
• It started with just one family and grew to over 10,000 in worship every Sunday in just 15 years
• Rick doesn’t consider himself an expert on church growth and evangelism, but over the years he has learned a number of lessons about what works and what doesn’t, and he is willing to share the lessons he learned with others
• To answer the question he poses, “What drives your church?” Rick presents a summary of some of the things that churches focus on as they seek to do ministry
• Some churches are driven by tradition with the goal of simply perpetuating the past
• “We’ve always done it that way,” is the motto of churches driven by tradition
• Some churches are driven by finances
• The question at the forefront of everyone’s mind in a finance-driven church is “How much will it cost?”
• Other churches are driven by programs, and the more programs the better
• All of their energy is focused on maintaining and sustaining all of its various programs
• The nominating committee becomes the most crucial group in the church because they are responsible to find people to staff all the programs, and the only requirement for leadership is “Do you have a pulse?”
• Still other churches are driven by buildings
• Paying for and maintaining the buildings becomes the biggest budget item
• None of these are effective in helping the church succeed in its ministry or in leading the church to achieve the vision of what God wants the church to be and do
• The purpose of the church as Jesus defined it is to be a caring, forgiving, compassionate community of grace, dedicated to discovering and meeting the needs of others while sharing the good news of God’s love
• As we seek to become a compassionate community of grace, there are five core values to which the church must be anchored
• Jesus gave these values to his disciples in the words of the Great Commandments, “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind; and love your neighbor as yourself,” and the words of the Great Commission, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
• From these two statements of Jesus we get the five core values that define the work of the church: worship, ministry or service, evangelism, fellowship, and discipleship
• Over the next five weeks, we will look at each of these and what they mean for the church in the 21st century

• The Call to Worship
• When asked what the greatest of all the commandments was, Jesus responded, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.”
• These four words indicate that we must love God with all of our being
• The heart is the center of our emotions and feelings, the soul is the center of our spiritual life, strength implies that we must love God with our bodies, since the body is the temple of God’s Spirit, and mind challenges us to focus all of our thoughts and decisions around the holy will of God
• The one word that describes this core value is worship
• The way we express love to God with our whole being is by worshipping God
• And worship isn’t just what we do on Sunday morning
• If we are truly seeking to love God with our whole being, every thought we think, every word we say, and everything we do is an act of worship, whether we are by ourselves or with 100,000 people
• In Matthew 4:10, Jesus says, “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”
• Notice that worship comes before service
• Worshipping God is the first purpose of the church
• Sometimes we allow ourselves to get so busy working for God, we don’t have the time to express our love for God through worship
• And we shouldn’t worship out of a sense of duty or obligation; we should worship because we want to
• We should enjoy expressing our love for God
• Two Reasons for Worship
• To Glorify God
• In the 96th Psalm, the Psalmist calls all people, even all of creation, to sing praise to God (Vs. 1-2, 11-12)
• This passage helps us to understand one of the two primary reasons for worship
• The first primary reason for worship is to glorify God
• Our word “worship” comes from the Old English word “worthship,” meaning worthiness and respect
• So the reason that we worship God is because God is worthy of our praise
• The motivation for worship is giving thanks to God for all that God has given to us and done for us
• The primary purpose of worship is not to meet our own needs or to entertain us in some way—it is to give honor and praise and glory to God
• The Swiss theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, describes what he calls the “Theater of Worship”
• He likens worship to a play, but the roles of the participants in the production are different from what we might imagine
• Any stage production has a director, a cast of characters, and a whole host of other people as support personnel
• When we attend a play, we are there as part of the audience to be entertained
• It seems logical to relate this to worship by saying that God is the director of the play, the pastor is the lead actor, the liturgist, choir and others who participate in worship are the supporting cast members, and those who gather in the pews are the audience
• But that’s not what Kierkegaard says
• Worship isn’t a spectator event; it’s a participatory event
• According to Kierkegaard, the pastor, liturgist , choir, etc., are the directors of the play, you who gather in the pew are the actors, and God is the audience
• So we don’t primarily gather together for worship to get something from God, but to give something to God
• And we give God our praise, honor, and glory as we sing songs, offer our prayers and commit to God our time, talents, and treasure
• Worship can, and does, take many different forms, but no matter what form it takes, it’s primary purpose is to glorify God
• To Prepare Us for Ministry
• The second purpose for worship is to prepare us for ministry or service
• As we gather together to celebrate and share all that God has done for us, as we hear the good news of God’s eternal love, as we experience the presence and power of God’s Spirit working in and through us, we are then equipped and empowered to go out in joy to share the good news we have received with others and to love them with the same kind of love we have received from God
• Worship that does not move us to service is not genuine worship
• Without service, our worship is not pleasing to God
• It is to this issue of preparing us for service that Paul speaks in our passage from 1 Corinthians
• While the way Paul frames this discussion, contrasting the differences between speaking in tongues and prophecy, may be confusing to us, his point is quite clear: Worship must be intelligible, understandable, and meaningful to all
• Speaking in tongues is a gift given by the Holy Spirit
• Overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit, a person is moved to utter unintelligible words, to speak a “holy language,” offering praises to God
• This is an amazing gift given by the Spirit, however, no one, not even the speaker, knows what he/she is saying unless the Spirit also gives the gift of interpretation
• Speaking in tongues was a gift greatly desired by the worshippers in Corinth
• Prophecy is also a gift given by the Holy Spirit
• In the Bible, prophecy has little to do with predicting the future
• Instead, it has to do with proclaiming the truth of God in ways that others can understand
• As Paul uses it here, prophecy relates more to preaching and teaching than it does to predicting the future
• While Paul acknowledges that speaking in tongues is a valid spiritual gift, he says that in public worship, proclaiming the truth of God is more important, and he uses music and foreign languages to illustrate his point
• If a pianist just bangs randomly on the keyboard, all he/she is doing is making noise
• Only as the notes are played in an orderly fashion de we appreciate it as music
• For those of you who have visited foreign lands, unless you know the language, you need an interpreter to communicate with the residents of that land and to understand what they are saying to you
• So worship, then, must be conducted in an intelligible and understandable way that is meaningful to all who are gathered if it is to be pleasing to God and if it is to equip us for service
• We cannot do the work of God if we don’t understand the Word and the will of God
• Worship In the 21st Century
• As we seek to be faithful to God’s calling to be God’s church in the 21st century, we have to ask ourselves, “Why do we worship?”
• What is the purpose and motivation for our worship?
• Do we worship simply because we want to get something for ourselves so we can feel good about ourselves, or do we worship because we want to give God the best of what we have, to express our love for God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind?
• We also need to consider how well our worship is equipping us and others for service
• Does our worship move us to action, or do we go home and forget about God for the rest of the week?
• Is it understandable and meaningful to all?
• If a stranger walks in who has never heard the gospel, will that stranger be able to hear, understand, and respond to God’s word of love and grace as it is proclaimed in our worship?
• If she/he can’t, then we have failed in the purpose for worship
• Truth is, to the stranger, the 21st century church continues to “speak in tongues”
• For the initiated, our order of worship makes sense, but to the outsider it may not
• We who are insiders know what the Gloria Patri and the Doxology are
• We know what the Lord’s Prayer is and whether to use “debts” or “trespasses”
• But to the outsider, we are speaking an unintelligible language—these are all Christian code words
• Our centuries-old music may be very moving to us, but to younger generations it may be cold and dry
• We can’t expect others to come into our worship and remain in our fellowship if they don’t understand what we are doing and if it doesn’t move them to hear and respond to the truth of God
• One of the marks of a healthy church is inspiring worship, and inspiring worship is worship that connects us personally with God
• It is worship where the music is uplifting, and where the call of God can be clearly heard
• When worship is inspiring, it draws people to the services all by itself
• How well are we meeting this first core value of the church?