I said last week that in thinking about worship, we need to begin with the principle that our worship is only and entirely about and for God. As I noted, this statement raises an important issue: why is that OK for God to demand our worship? Having answered that question, however, there’s actually another one which we ought to address. In order to understand what it means to worship God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we need to make sure we’ve defined our terms properly. What is worship?
Circle Dance
(Genesis 1:26-28; John 14:15-26, Galatians 4:4-7)
As I was praying and thinking about the sermon schedule for this year, I found myself being led to begin the year by preaching on worship. Ken Priddy, who leads the EPC’s task force on church revitalization, divides the ministry of the church into four areas which he calls “faith centers”—outreach, evangelism, discipleship, and worship. For a while, I was thinking about doing a series on each, but the discipleship series wasn’t coming together, and so I ended up moving in a different direction.
One of the things Ken notes, though, is that there’s an upward spiral through these areas of ministry. As we worship God, we’re motivated to reach out and share the gospel with others; as they come to faith and are drawn into the church, they become disciples of Christ and learn to worship him; and then they in turn are motivated to share the gospel, and the cycle continues. You can begin talking about that at any point, but it seems to me that worship is the critical element. Worship defines our relationship to God and God is the one who makes everything else happen. At the same time, we have to see that worship extends beyond Sunday morning. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Unless life is a form of worship, your worship has no life.” So we’re going to start by talking about worship, but with the aim of showing how worship connects into the rest of life.
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Prince of Peace
We are promised a king who will reign in the wisdom, power, and faithful love of God; therefore he will be the Prince of Peace. Remove any of the first three names, and this fourth one becomes impossible, inconceivable, unfathomable. Coming after all three of them, however, this one is almost inevitable. Isaiah describes a ruler with the love and commitment to desire only what is good and right, the wisdom to understand how to make all things good and right, and the power to make that happen and to defeat any who would try to oppose him. What else would such a monarch bring but peace?
This doesn’t just mean the absence of war, either. If a king were powerful enough, he could accomplish that without being either wise or loving. The biblical concept of peace is much bigger and much greater than that. As I’ve said before, this is one of those Hebrew words that’s worth learning for everybody, because you can’t translate it with anything less than a paragraph. This is the word shalom.
At its root, it means to be whole, perfectly complete and unmarred; it carries within it the concept we call integrity. To experience shalom, to live in the peace of God, is to be in complete harmony: first of all with God and his will; and because of that, second, within yourself. The result is a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety. This in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. There will always be those who aren’t, whatever their reasons; the peace of God gives you the ability to behave peaceably toward them regardless, and to pursue peace with them even so. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will.
Everlasting Father
In reading Isaiah 9, I’ve always snagged on this third name: “Everlasting Father.” For one thing, you’d think Isaiah’s contemporaries must have had trouble with that one, too. A child is born to us, a son is given to us, and he will be called Everlasting Father. Putting those two things together, the fatherhood of a child, seems odd. If the people of Judah and Israel had been in the habit of using “Father” as a title for their kings, that would have been one thing—they would have been used to seeing that sort of name hung on baby boys—but that had never been the case. God was described as the Father of his people, and he didn’t even share that title with David. To have this baby called “Father” is unprecedented. To have him called “Everlasting Father,” one who will be the Father of his people for eternity, is even more so. This is a title which could only be given to God—and here God’s prophet is using it as a name for a human baby boy.
Now, this looks less strange to us, since we know “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey would say; we know how Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled. But is Jesus ever called “Father” in the New Testament? No—he’s the Son, Son of Man and Son of God. If we were to call him “Father,” wouldn’t that make God the Father our grandfather? But Jesus doesn’t teach us to pray, “Our Grandfather,” he tells us to pray, “Our Father,” to see God the Father as our Father as well as his. So how does it make sense to call Jesus “Everlasting Father”?
To understand this, we need to hold fast to the first principle of biblical interpretation: let Scripture interpret Scripture. In particular, we need to learn from the great rabbis, such as Gamaliel who taught the Apostle Paul: if you want to know how to understand a word, go see where it’s used elsewhere in Scripture. So when the Old Testament calls God Father, what does it say?
Mighty God
To us a child is born, to us a son is given, and that child will be the king who will bring an end to war and oppression and all the darkness of the world. He will be the perfect king who will rule forever and bring eternal peace—but not the peace of the tyrant, who brings the peace of the grave by crushing dissent and killing anyone who opposes him. His peace will be a peace of life and growth, in which all the world will flourish. He will bring this about through his wisdom, for he is the miraculously-wise counselor, the one who speaks and leads with the perfect wisdom of the Lord of all creation. He will bring this about through his power, for he is the mighty God.
The word for “mighty” in the Hebrew is an adjective, but it was often used as a noun, rather like our national anthem calls America “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” When it was used this way, it meant a great warrior or a great hero. The meaning is clear. This child who is king because he is God will not only rule with the wisdom of God, he will defend his people with the power of God, and so he will be incomparably mighty in battle. He will defeat all his enemies, and he will never be overcome. His kingdom will endure forever because there will never be any power that can conquer it; it will grow forever because there will never be any power that can stand against it. His people will know absolute security and freedom from any threat.
That all sounds conventional enough. Empires grow by winning battles and wars, after all, and they start to shrink when they start losing. If you’re going to envision a ruler who will reign forever and whose kingdom will never stop expanding, it’s probably going to have to be someone who never loses a battle, let alone a war. That’s why the greatest empire-builders in human history have been military geniuses like Alexander the Great. But the funny thing is, that’s not actually what God has in mind.Read more
Wonderful Counselor
(Isaiah 7:1-17, Isaiah 9:1-7; John 12:20-26)
The people of God were a house divided. They had been ever since the death of King Solomon. In the later years of his reign, Solomon turned away from God and the ways of his father, King David, to worship the false gods of the surrounding nations. In judgment, God took the ten northern tribes away from Solomon’s son and successor, Rehoboam. The northern tribes became the kingdom of Israel, which was sometimes referred to as Ephraim, for its dominant tribe. The south was known as the kingdom of Judah, after its dominant tribe. One people became two nations; as is the way of the human heart, self-will and the desire for power and control turned that separation into rivalry, and often enmity.
In the days of King Ahaz of Judah, Israel allied with Syria to launch a plot against Judah—a plot to remove Ahaz from the throne of David and replace him with a Syrian puppet king. This was nothing God would ever allow to happen, whatever might be said for Ahaz himself—which wasn’t much, to be honest—because it would violate the covenant promise God had made to David. To reassure and encourage the king, God sent Isaiah to tell Ahaz that hewould take care of those two burned-out torches. Just sit quiet, don’t worry, and don’t do anything, Isaiah says, because God will stop them. What’s more, the prophet makes clear that this is the king’s only hope: “If you don’t stand by faith, you won’t stand at all.” To confirm his promise, God invites the king to ask for a sign—anything at all—and God will do it.
Unfortunately, while Ahaz has spent his entire life around the worship of God, he doesn’t really worship God himself. In our terms, he’s the sort who’s in church every Sunday but isn’t actually saved. Like a lot of folks like that, he’s become adept at using the Bible and spiritual-sounding language to make excuses for not doing what God has explicitly told him to do. He’s so good at that, in fact, that he thinks he can pull that on God’s own prophet and get away with it. He doesn’t.Read more
God of All Nations
(Isaiah 56:1-8, Micah 4:1-8; Matthew 28:16-20)
That’s what it’s all about. It’s often said that churches need mission statements. It’s sometimes said more perceptively that the church has a mission given by God which it needs to discern. A few go beyond that to realize that it isn’t that God’s church has a mission; rather, God’s mission has a church. We invoke that mission each Sunday when we pray, “Your kingdom come, and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” At the beginning of this series, we saw what that looks like from God’s end, when all the heavens and the earth are finally made new. In that video, we see it from ours: all peoples, tribes, nations, and languages, and every region and landform on this planet, gathered together to pray and praise the Lord with one voice. As of now, it’s just a vision; but it will be a reality, because God has already done it. In the Great Commission, we see the road he has laid out before us to follow him in obedience as he makes it happen. The only question is, will he do it through us, without us, or despite us?
Joy in the Lord
Friday morning, I drove down to South Charleston, Ohio. It’s a little town between Dayton and Columbus with a good-sized EPC church which was hosting our presbytery meeting. Everything went fine until I pulled off the interstate and stopped at the sign to turn onto the state highway for the last nine miles of the trip. When I stopped, there was a loud “clunk”; when I started driving again—well, I didn’t start. I tried, but the car seemed to think it was in neutral. I found that if I put it into first gear, it would engage; I then discovered that I could work my way up one gear at a time until it was back in fourth gear. Then I made it into town and stopped at the light, and I had to do it all over again. Instead of an automatic transmission, I had a stick shift without a clutch.
There wasn’t any place in South Charleston that could work on it, so I had it towed to a shop in Springfield, about twelve miles away. They looked it over and told me they could probably have it fixed by Wednesday. Obviously, I couldn’t stay that long, so I hitched a ride home with the folks from the downtown church. I’m not sure how I’ll get back down there to pick it up, but I presume by God’s grace we’ll figure something out.
As you can imagine, the presbytery meeting didn’t hold my full attention. During the closing worship service, I was trying to focus, but I was also trying to figure out how I was getting home, and if I’d have to wait until Saturday to do it. Still, in the middle of my own little whirlwind, something the preacher said started me thinking about joy, and about this sermon and this passage.
What We Cannot Keep
(1 Chronicles 29:6-9; Acts 2:42-47, Acts 4:32-37)
At various places throughout the Acts of the Apostles, Luke scatters brief progress reports on the church. I included one of them in our reading last week, verses 12-16 of chapter 5. By my count, there are nine of them, and they get shorter as the book goes along. They serve to show us how the message and ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ are spreading across the Roman world. The first few go beyond that to give us snapshots of the life of the church so that when Luke says in Acts 16:5, just to pick one, that “the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers,” we understand what that really means. It’s not just that their attendance was up, it’s that they were living boldly in the way that we see here in Acts 2 and Acts 4.
That’s important, because it’s easy to talk about a strong church, or a Spirit-filled church, without having any real idea what that means; and since nature abhors a vacuum, that void of understanding will fill quickly with worldly ideas of strength and goodness. What’s a strong church? One that has a lot of members and a lot of money. What’s a Spirit-filled church? I don’t know, but those people seem to be nice, moral people, so I guess they must be Spirit-filled. But this is not what God has in mind. If you want to know if a person or a church is filled by the Holy Spirit, look at the fruit—how are they living, what are they producing, what qualities characterize their way of life?
What we see in Acts 2 and 4 is a church that has chosen its world, and it isn’t this one. Everything they have in this world, they’ve placed at the disposal of the world to come. They had one common goal, and so as Acts 4:32 tells us, “They were one in heart and mind”—or, better, in heart and soul. This doesn’t mean they never disagreed, or even that they never fought; we know they fought. Disagreement and conflict are inevitable—and more, they’re often necessary for growth. Because we’re all limited, we need our different perspectives in order to make good decisions. Real unity isn’t just superficial agreement, it’s something deeper.Read more
Steadfast
(2 Kings 6:8-23; Acts 5:12-42)
I imagine all of you know that this Tuesday is Election Day; and I trust that all of you of voting age will go out and vote. I put that insert in your bulletins because we do need to vote wisely, as a matter of prayer; I also put it in because I found that website to be long on information and short on telling you what to do. But understand this in light of 1 Corinthians 7:29-31: “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.” As John Piper says, “so it is with voting. We should do it. But only as if we were not doing it.”
I don’t tell you to go out and vote because your vote matters. I do believe it matters to you, but on the larger scale, it probably doesn’t. I’m not telling you to go out and vote because we the people are the real source of authority in this nation. In human political terms, that’s purely theoretical anymore—the country is too big, power is too centralized, and most people are too far from the centers of power. We’re ruled, not governed, by an elite, and it’s hard to see how that realistically could be any different. And in theological terms, Godis the source of all authority; he raises up and brings down whom he will. We should vote, but not because we think it will do anything important. As Piper says, and as Paul would have said, we should vote as though we were not voting.
Now, that might seem defeatist, and even pointless. If my vote won’t change anything, why should I vote? Well, because that’s what God has given you to do. Because what matters isn’t what you can make of it or what the human system will make of it, but what God is going to make of it—and that, only he knows. And because you can vote as though you were not voting, because you don’t have to think it’s crucial, because you know that government isn’t all that and a bag of chips. Vote without discouragement, because however the election goes, it’s all in God’s plan. As Piper puts it, “In the short run, Christians lose. In the long run, we win.” We’ve seen the back of the book, remember?Read more