DEEP CHURCH (PART 5) WORSHIP

Transcription

1 DEEP CHURCH (PART 5) WORSHIP INTRODUCTION Worship is an industry now. One of the exciting aspects of worship music is that it is a field open to virtually anybody with the desire. All you need is a dream in your heart, a lot of talent, a well connected agent, a management team, a few hundred thousand dollars worth of instruments, fruit baskets and white towels in the dressing room, an ep available on i-tunes, T-Shirts, stickers, a distinct sound, a distinct look, either edginess or strict adherence to whatever has worked in the past, a catchy name, an album cover featuring you looking earnest, angry or completely disinterested and, of course, the Spirit's leading. How can we evaluate worship? Should we evaluate worship music? Sometimes you ll hear an artist say, God gave me this song. Well, maybe He s disciplining you. Where do we find the balance between common practices and being led by the Spirit?

2 Our subject today is adoration. Granted, worship is our life. Paul tells us to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1) But when we speak of going to worship most of us are talking about going to church. A worship service is a gathering of the local body of Christ and includes prayer, preaching, baptism, communion, giving and singing. So, most of us define worship as singing. When we talk about worship options, we re not talking about what kind of prayers we pray (formal or extemporaneous) or what we use to receive the offerings (baskets or plates). We re referring to the type of music being employed. We re talking about singing, because in singing we vocally declare God s glory together. Psalm 29:2 2 Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. When my wife and I came back to Jesus in the early 90 s, the first church we attended was the Moody Bible Church in Chicago. This church only sang hymns out of a hymnal. And God used those old hymns mightily in my life. Four stanzas of weeping. I grew to love old hymns. Then we moved to California, land of the white guy with a guitar, where we encountered Vineyard music (the Hillsong of its day). And God used these new songs mightily in my life. We attended a church primarily for the worship. Two different churches with two completely different styles of music, two different cultures of church. Thus, I was introduced to the worship wars, which most of the time have to do with personal preferences. We all have personal preferences. Right now, beards are in. Facial hair for men is trending high. Something had to replace the tight jean craze. This is a personal style preference. There is even a code between bearded men: if one beard crosses the street at the same time as another beard, the biggest beard has the right of way. Now, wouldn t it be odd if we started a worship option just for bearded men? Nothing wrong with beards, but it s hard to make a biblical case for it, even though Jesus had a beard. How quickly our preferences become biases. And how easily our biases become walls which keep us from the larger Body of Christ and from fuller expressions of worship. (Gerrit Gustafson) Because various worship songs and hymns were so used by God in my life, I could have easily absolutized my preference for either style as the correct way to worship. Gerrit also points out that what we don t often realize is that we are not just saved from the dominion of darkness into the Kingdom of God s Son, but we re saved from the culture of the world into a particular church culture. If you come to know Christ in a church culture where hymns are the standard, then you soon begin to adopt this cultural distinctive as the normal Christian life. Sometimes we don t just view these things as our preferences. We view them

3 as God s ways. This is why the church practices what is called the regulative principle, which simply means that we go to the Word of God to find the principles God gave us to regulate our worship. We get the content of our worship from Scripture. This is why we always have certain elements in the worship service: prayer, singing, giving, preaching, communion and baptism. So, Scripture gives us the content for our gatherings, but it also tells us in what spirit we should worship. John 4:24 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. 1) There are people who worship what they do not know. Many people in our culture who view God as a life force present within everything do not verbalize this god in personal ways, because a life force is impersonal. They serve a god they do not know. You have to know God to worship Him. To worship God you must have His Spirit within you, meaning you must be born again. The only way a person is born again is by the truth of the gospel. So, the truth is your entryway to worshipping in spirit. It s your entryway to know God. Now there are some elements of a worship gathering, such as communion and baptism, which are wonderful and preach the gospel to us in visual form, but today we re going to focus on the aspect of the worship service that most of us associate with the word worship, which is the singing. As we focus on the singing, we re going to see an amazing corrective. Something that I think will be a revelation for many of us and if we apply it -- could transform how we worship. Ephesians 5:19 19 addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, 2) Notice what it says here. Addressing one another... Most of us, in fact, I would say all of us view the singing portion as singing to the Lord, which we certainly should do. But realize that as we sing to the Lord we are addressing one another with whatever we are singing. This is why lyrics matter. We are lifting one another up. We don t sing alone. We sing together. And by doing so we build one another up. Or not. If you stand and do not lift up your voice to the Lord you are discouraging others from lifting up their voices to the Lord. Likewise, if you sing loudly, you are addressing your brothers and sisters in Christ. One worship leader put it this way, The Christ in you meets the Christ in me. This idea that you sing to an audience of One is commendable in one way, but in another way it s not accurate regarding public worship. We address the Lord in our singing, but we also build each other up as we sing. We address one another. Again, this is why lyrics matter. 3) Now, the Apostle Paul lists three different types of songs both here in Ephesians and in Colossians: Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.

4 Colossians 3:16 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. I would distinguish them this way. Psalms are the Old Testament praise songs to God. Hymns are songs that contain the doctrine of the Christ. They are more theological in their content, not that psalms aren t theological, but the hymns of the early church had that specific purpose, to train new believers, especially Gentiles in who Jesus is and what He has done. They are sung specifically with this purpose of letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Here is an example of a hymn from the early church. 1 Timothy 3:16 16 Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. 2 Timothy 2: The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; 12 if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; 13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful for he cannot deny himself. 4) But if we take note of the content of these hymns we will notice that it is not the singing that unites us. It is the gospel. The gospel is why we re united. If we re united because of a musical style, then we are not united around the right thing. It is the gospel that unites believers. It is the joy we have deep in our souls because of what Jesus has done for us. We have the joy, joy, joy, joy down in our souls because the Spirit of God has been poured out in our heart. This is all because of Jesus and His gospel. That s what should unite a local church. The church segregates because of age. Now, why is that? Because different generations have different preferences. Different generations prefer certain styles of music and dress and hairdos. We must realize these are cultural distinctions that separate us, not biblical principles. You know what a root word of cultural is? Cult. We have various cults within church culture. We have the organ cult and the choir cult and the electric guitar cult. Paul writes in 1 Cor. 14:20 - Brothers & sisters, do not be children in your thinking. The thing that unites our worship is the gospel. That should be our focus. Worship that celebrates the God who saves by the power of the gospel, worship that encourages the church formed by the gospel and worship that addresses the world in need of the gospel. I love this quote from Mike Cosper s book on worship, The declaration that there is one God, that his name is Jesus, and that he had died, had risen, and will come again is an

5 all-out assault on the saviors extended at every level of culture around us. Jean-Jacques von Allmen says this: There is no more emphatic protest against the pride and despair of the world than that implied in Church worship. This is what the Psalms do. This is what the hymns and the spiritual songs, when they are biblically grounded, do. (Define spiritual songs.) 5 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ephesians 5:19 19 addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, 5) But here s the crux of the matter regarding our worship, before Paul lists the types of songs in the local church, he begins with this: Colossians 3: Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. 12 Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. He does the same thing in Ephesians before he gives this same list. Ephesians 5:1-2 Walk in Love