Sermon from January 27, 2008
Worship is our response to God. Just being here today, singing and praying and giving and hearing the word of God is one such response. We may respond in many other ways, both more sacrificial and more beautiful. But don’t belittle the enormous power of being here, doing these acts of praise, week after week, and year after year.
That is a heavy paragraph with which to begin a sermon. Take a deep breath. Don’t let it turn you off. I will say it again; it’s that important.
Worship is our response to God. Just being here today, singing and praying and giving and hearing the word of God is one such response. We may respond in many other ways, both more sacrificial and more beautiful. But don’t belittle the enormous power of being here, doing these acts of praise, week after week, and year after year.
People often say, “I think I’ll go to church today,” as if they were doing God a favor by fitting church into their schedule. I want to say this to you, who are right here, right now: You’re here, because God called you away from your cluttered schedule, so that you could meet with Him in this company of your fellow believers.
You say, “I didn’t hear Him call.” I know you didn’t hear His audible voice; but why did you come? Did you pay any attention to the actual reason you came here today? Have you considered the possibility that God had something to do with that reason? Even if you came here by impulse, why are you so sure that God did not put that impulse into your heart?
You are here. Now that you are here, are you making the most of the experience? Jesus put His finger on what we have to do make the most of this experience of worship. We should hear what He had to say. So, turn with me to John 4:23-24.
In Spirit and in Truth
“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. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
If we want to make the most of this experience of worship, we need to do it in spirit and in truth. What does that mean? I don’t know if we’ll ever understand what it means, unless the end of verse 23 captures our hearts. “They are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”
Have you ever asked, or have you ever heard someone else ask, “How do I find God?” I’d give this answer: “Just take a step in some direction toward God, and He’ll find you.” He’s looking for people like us to worship Him. I’m a lot less confident that we want Him to find us.
Be that as it may, the Father is seeking people to worship Him in spirit and in truth. That’s why I was bold enough to say that God may have put that impulse into your heart to come here today. That’s why I want you to pay closer attention to the actual reasons that motivated you to come here today – God is seeking you to worship Him, and why shouldn’t He propose reasons for you to come here as surely as I do?
We may say and sing glibly or sincerely: “As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee.” Jesus turns the whole idea on its head. Maybe the passionate one in this exchange is not the congregation but the God we have come to worship. The Father seeks those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth.
Does anything in your heart answer to the passion in God’s heart, when it comes to worship? If it does, then you have a significant clue to what it means to worship in spirit. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is passion. Passion can be loud, or passion can be quiet. Passion is another name for love. Love is desire, the longing to have something, to be united with something.
When Jesus said that the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and in truth, He was talking about God’s love, God’s longing to be united with us. He wants us to answer in kind, with passion, with a longing to seize God, if that were possible, but not with tedium and time-marking. And if our experience tends more toward tedium than passion, I suspect some of the problem is with our bloodless and cold participation in worship.
By the way, a preoccupation with truth about God can kill your passion for God. I did not say that truth about God can kill your passion for God. I said that a preoccupation with truth about God can kill your passion for God. I know this danger from the inside. If you love the life of the mind, as I do, knowledge can be intoxicating. What people like me often learn too late is that a preoccupation with knowledge can also be lethal to love.
The only rescue from this danger is the wisdom of the apostle in 1 Corinthians 8:1-2: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. Humility about knowledge sets your soul free to love again, to love God again, to worship Him in spirit and, even though it seems like a paradox, in truth.
The Father does seek us to worship Him in truth. Truth keeps our passion for God from being overzealous or disorderly or fanatical. The first Great Commandment does say to love God with all your mind – Mark 12:30. Jesus did say, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” – John 8:32. And what is the alternative? Lying, distortion, half-truth, innuendo, gossip, propaganda, character assassination!
But we are talking about worship. The Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and in truth. It’s time we became specific about how we do that in our worship together at BVBC. I’d like to make two applications.
Spirit and Truth in Singing
I am more than willing to concede that prayer and scripture reading and singing do more to draw people close to God than preaching does. I don’t think that is a false humility on my part. Prayer, scripture reading and singing can do something effectively that preaching does not do as well: they can be repetitive without being boring. We can, for example, sing the same hymn or praise song many times before it starts to become “old.” It escorts truth about God into our hearts far more easily than preaching does.
However, the songs we sing carry with them two liabilities that can undermine worship in spirit and in truth. The first liability is language we don’t understand. Here’s one example. We have in our hymnbook a hymn entitled, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” It offers a pleasing melody, easy for a congregation to sing.
But its language causes problems for some worshipers, who take seriously what they are singing. One example from the hymn will capture an enduring problem of church music. The second verse opens with this statement: “Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by thy grace I’m come.”
The troublesome word is Ebenezer. The only Ebenezer most people have heard of is Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and they know the hymn can’t possibly have anything to do with that. They may cheerily sing on, but they have just sung what is nonsense to them. If people sing enough lines like that, the singing may put them in good spirits, but it becomes increasingly detached from their lives.
Here’s what to do about it. The word Ebenezer comes from 1 Samuel 7:12: Then Samuel took a stone and . . . named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far has the LORD helped us.”Israel from their old nemesis, the Philistines, under Samuel’s leadership. He celebrated the victory the way most of us would: he set up a marker, in his case a stone, and he named it Ebenezer, which means “Stone of Help.” To raise my Ebenezer is to celebrate God’s help in time of trouble.
If we are going to worship God in spirit and in truth, we need to translate words, whose meaning we don’t understand. Hymns are especially prone to difficult words, but modern praise songs have their fair share of them as well.
The second liability hits even closer to home. A hymn we sing is entitled, “Take My Life, and Let It Be Consecrated.” Its language does not pose problems for us. If anything, the language is too easy to understand; we have no excuse. For example, verse three says, “Take my silver and my gold; not a mite do I withhold.”
Really? This hymn is a prayer from our heart to God’s heart, and we are saying to Him, “Take my silver and my gold; not a mite do I withhold.” Why then do we have a budget shortfall? The hymn has also been set to a different melody and the following refrain added: “Here am I, all of me; here am I, all for thee.” Really? That’s a pretty devout statement. Do we mean it, or do we just like the melody? Remember: the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and in truth. If we are going to worship God in spirit and in truth, we do need from time to time to pay attention to what we are singing.
There are times when we sing to God, and the words hardly matter. It’s almost as if the congregation becomes an instrument of God, and the singing itself, apart from its rational meaning, becomes the sound the Holy Spirit plays on that instrument. God had delivered
Baptism in Spirit and in Truth
From singing I’d like to turn to another act of worship – Christian baptism. I have found myself hooked on the horns of a dilemma for forty years. I’ve never known quite what to do about it, and I doubt that anything I say today will change that. What I can do today is to come clean with you about the conflict I feel in my own heart.
All three congregations I have pastored in my ministry have practiced baptism by immersion, and all three have required a person to be baptized by immersion there or in another congregation in order to become a member of those congregations. That is of course the case here at BVBC.
I have no hesitation about practicing baptism by immersion. I do not want to practice sprinkling. I do not want to baptize babies. The conflict I feel comes from two sources. Let me illustrate. Dr. Bob Hall is a dear friend, a surgeon in Indianapolis. He and Linda and their four children came to our fledgling congregation in Upstate New York and decided to stay. They wanted to become members of the church, but baptism was more than a sticking point, and it explains my enduring conflict.
Bob became a Christian as a 14-year-old boy in Southern California. He was baptized by sprinkling in a Presbyterian church there. Bob’s family were atheists, and they strongly opposed his becoming a Christian and his being baptized. As a teen-age boy, he paid a price for his faith in Christ, and he endured. And now, he comes to our church, and we say in effect, “Your baptism didn’t count; you have to be immersed.”
My conflict arose from thinking that his baptism was just fine but still insisting on immersion for church membership. His conflict was submitting to immersion, which could feel like a betrayal of that life-changing act as a 14-year-old boy. Did we both act in spirit and in truth, given our inner conflicts?
If you were baptized as a baby, it may be easier to be rebaptized with a clear conscience. You can say: “I didn’t know what was going on as a baby. Someone else did it for me. This is my choice, my way of declaring openly that I believe in Christ and have begun a new life as His follower.” Not everyone, who was baptized as an infant, thinks that way. They see their infant baptism as obedience to Christ’s command to be baptized. I don’t try to talk them out of it, because I believe it would be wrong to do that.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
The Father seeks those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. Does anything in your heart answer to the passion in God’s heart for us to worship Him like that? Here are three usable suggestions that may help us worship like that.
First, don’t belittle the enormous power of being here, doing these acts of praise, week after week, and year after year. Just being here says powerfully that God has priority over politics, work, war and leisure. That gives glory to God.
Second is the flip side of that. By being here, doing these acts of praise, week after week, and year after year, we regain our perspective on what matters most in life. The content of a worship service surrounds us with that perspective.
Earlier, I talked about difficult words in some of our hymns. The truth is that when we are together to worship and to study, we use many words that will seem strange to unchurched people: atonement, walk in the Spirit, sanctification, the Lamb of God and many more. We need these words to express the realities we deal with.
It is not odd to need a special vocabulary to do this. Listen to a group of jet pilots talk about their work or a group of surgeons talk about their work or auto mechanics talk about what they do every day. They will use words we don’t understand. Those words are necessary to express the realities they deal with.
In fact, learning the language is essential to becoming a pilot or surgeon or mechanic. Language helps to create and maintain the perspective necessary for the work they do. It does the same for us. Do we need to explain the words? Of course we do. But the language of our faith helps us to regain our perspective after having been immersed in a secular world all week.
So, as you come here week after week to acknowledge and honor the priority of God over all life, I hope you will come here expecting what we do to restore you perspective on what matters most in life. That brings me to a third suggestion.
Don’t come here or go to any worship experience to find fault. We have so many faults that you will find yourself in a state of exhaustion from noting them all, and you’ll miss all the goodness that’s here. Instead of finding fault, open yourself up to anything good that is going on. Look for it. Focus on it. Let that be the center of your worship that day. Doing this changed the way I worship, when I’m not preaching.
I never go to evaluate the preacher. I am looking for something that speaks to my soul, something I can take away that will keep me closer to the Lord. We never know how God may speak to us in this intersection of heaven and earth. Seek the Lord with all your heart, and goodness will nourish your soul.
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