Worship: A Posture
Notes
Transcript
Closing it down
Closing it down
Wow. This is really cool to be in this space with all of our church communities worshipping together. Hope you 9:30 folks enjoyed your extra 30 min of sleep. Contemporary people, thanks for getting up an hour earlier. Your sacrifice is duly noted.
But seriously I’m grateful to be here, and have all of us together as we come to a close of this sermon series. Can you believe it’s already been a month of 2023? Where has the time gone? I think it’s pretty poetic that as we move to having 1 combined worship service on 5th Sundays of the month that the first month of the year would contain a 5th Sunday. So it only seemed good and right that today we would talk about the spiritual discipline of Worship.
If you’ve been with us over the past several weeks, we have been in a series called Brand New, which has focused on spiritual disciplines that we can incorporate into our lives here in 2023 that will ignite our love for Jesus, stretch our love for our neighbors, and transform our spiritual lives. So we’ve talked about reading scripture, prayer, fasting, and service so far. Like I said, today we’ll look at worship, and how worship truly is a spiritual discipline that can change our lives forever.
And the cool thing is that if you’re here today, in person or online or even listening to this message on the podcast then you are engaging in the act of worship. And that’s because I’m assuming you’re here, or you’re at least listening, with the anticipation of experiencing something. Perhaps an encouraging word, a feeling of hope, the warmth of being in community with one another. You come hoping to encounter the Living God, and that my friends is what worship is really all about. Worship is the means by which we come with holy expectation to experience the very real presence of God, and in that experience expect God to move.
Thin Space
Thin Space
There’s something about being in worship, and in worship spaces that really feels different than when we are in the rest of the world right? It’s as if there is a very real and tangible closeness to God. It’s what we call a thin space. A place where the veil between heaven and earth is almost transparent. A place where heaven invades our space, and for a moment the presence of God is more obvious to us than the mess of our world.
This phenomena almost becomes routine when we are in a church sanctuary, so much so that we stop noticing it sometimes. Which is something that we really need to be conscious of. Like when we enter into this space we are entering into a place where God wants to meet with us. But that’s really just the start of practicing the spiritual discipline of worship. Because worship isn’t something we only do in a sanctuary on a Sunday, and a sanctuary isn’t the only place where we can find that thin space between heaven and earth.
When we look at the life of believers in the Bible, their lives were often soaked in the act of worship. The entire book of Psalms is a collection of Israelites worship material. If you’re reading along in the Bible with us this year then you’ll recall that Moses and the Israelites had a time of worship after God delivered them through the sea. They were out in the desert, certainly far from any kind of formal sanctuary!
Perhaps my most memorable worship experience, where I truly felt the presence of God in my life for the first time was in the woods in Eastern Pennsylvania at a United Methodist summer camp. Around a campfire in my late elementary school years I came face to face with the presence of God and walked away fundamentally changed.
Maybe you can think of a place for you where God’s presence seems so much more real. Maybe it’s in the mountains, at the beach, the Grand Canyon. Or maybe its somewhere terribly ordinary, like your hometown or the house you grew up in.
Regardless, these are spaces that remind us of an important truth about God and our relationship to God. God is not constrained to traditional worship spaces. And that means that our worship shouldn’t be either. Now don’t read between the lines here. I’m not saying don’t come here because this place isn’t special. You gotta go to church, because in church we worship and we connect with one another and we are equipped for ministry to the world.
What I am saying is that the spiritual discipline of worship is not a once a week deal. It’s a daily, almost every moment deal. It’s how we are called to orient our lives. It’s a posture that we take. I want to bring us to the book of Acts today to illustrate this reality today.
At this point in Acts, which is the story of how the Gospel began to spread after Jesus’s death, a guy named Paul is traveling around and starting new Jesus communities around the Roman world. When he and his companions end up is Philippi, there’s a pretty famous encounter that occurs. So this is Acts 16 starting in verse 16.
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.
While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”
She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.
So what’s going on is this girl is possessed by a demon. And the demon is causing a scene. Paul and his buddies are like ok, enough with this mess, likely because they are trying to keep a somewhat low profile. Neither the Jewish authorities nor the Roman authorities took too kindly to Paul’s missionary activity. He was typically run out of town because of it. So he’s not trying to draw unnecessary attention.
So he does his thing and cures this girl of her possession. But, as the old adage goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Picking back up here, this is the reaction.
But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.
Ok so her owners are now like what the heck man, that was our Golden Goose, our means of making money. We need these men to pay!
When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews
and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.”
The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods.
After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.
Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
So our guys are in some trouble. They’ve been accused, beaten up, and are now in a Jail, which is not a really good time. Roman Jails weren’t a good place to be. But take a look at what Paul and Silas do in response to this really unfair treatment they have received.
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.
Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.
When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped.
But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas.
Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.
Paul and Silas are having a worship service in Jail. They expect the presence of God. And in that, they expect God to move. And God does move. They are offered a means of escape, which they don’t take. Rather they look beyond themselves and instead they use it as a chance to change the Jailer’s life.
The Jailer was so scared of what his fate would be having failed to contain the prisoners that he was intent on taking his own life. But rather than escape and leave the man there with his suicidal ideation, Paul and Silas stay and witness to him, then to his whole family who are baptized. Then the charges end up getting dropped against Paul and Silas and they go on their merry way.
But here’s the deal. Paul and Silas’ lives were steeped in the experiences of worship. They worshiped every day, in all types of situations. It was a posture they so regularly took that it was natural for them to engage in worship during this entire visit to Philippi. Their formative experiences in worship (and some annoyance let’s be real) is what led them to set free that woman who was being taken advantage of. Their formative experiences in worship gave them confidence to witness to the jailer. Their formative experiences in worship prompted them to create space to wonder what would come of the jailer if they escaped. These are not happenstance or random acts. It’s because of formative experiences in worship!
Paul and Silas’ lives were focused on and soaked in the act of worship, so much so that they expected God to do something amazing through their little visit to jail, and they got more than they probably could have asked for.
You see, worship is the act of Holy expectancy, where we enter into God’s presence and from that experience expect God to move — what we must realize is that what God moves is most likely going to be US.
Worship is how we meet with the Living God so that we are capable of living our lives as living sacrifices. Worship is the first step towards our liberation from the shackles of selfish and self centered living so that we can go about the business of liberating God’s people from the chains they carry.
A Posture of Worship
A Posture of Worship
The reality is that God is consistently and relentlessly seeking to be in an intimate relationship with us. God is unceasingly desiring for us to make each and every space that we inhabit a thin space. God wants heaven to invade your ordinary every day life, because it is in that space where heaven and earth collide that formative and transformative experiences occur.
In John’s Gospel Jesus tells us to worship God in Spirit and in Truth, and Paul in Romans tell us this:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Paul’s point is that as we take a posture of worship in our lives, in all of our situations — The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly — we are engage in the act of renewing ourselves and opening our hearts and minds to God’s will for us and our world. Paul say’s don’t be conformed to this world, and he says that because we are called to be people who are conforming this world, our world, into God’s vision for the Kingdom of God.
And so what would it look like for you to worship God in your daily life, to have spiritual worship, to take a posture of worship in your life?
What if the thin spaces in your world began to multiply. What if your car, your porch, your kitchen, your neighborhood, your whatever it is started to be less of a space where the world wears on your soul and more of a place where you encounter the Living God and are moved to bring the kingdom of heaven a bit closer to this world that we live in.
Last monday night I went and brought a message of recovery from addiction to about 50 men in the Martin country jail. You wanna talk about a thin space. It was Holy, seeing what God is doing in and through a bunch of guys who made mistakes. There’s real transformation happening in there, I could feel it.
A posture of worship orients our lives around God rather than around ourselves, regardless of where we find ourselves. Paul and Silas were worshipping God in the synagogue, in the market place, and in the jail, and then in the home of their former captor. There were no limits set around it by their geography or their situation.
And so here, in 2023, are you going to worship God on Sunday morning, or are you going to take a posture of worship, and let heaven invade your space, all of your space, and move you into a new, more God and others focused future? I promise that if you do, if you take a posture of worship then you are going to be changed and so will the world around you.