We Are CR Students- Week 1

Introduction

GOOD AFTERNOON CR STUDENTS!!!!

We are so glad that MIDWK is BACK! It’s always exciting to be back on Wednesday nights worshipping with you and watching God move. We are praying for the Lord to move in our midst this semester as we meet together each week.

We are beginning a 6-week series tonight that we are calling “We Are CR Students” and the intention behind it is to set the culture in our student ministry. What are we all about. If you cut open our ministry, what do we bleed? What are the pillars that hold us up as a ministry? What do we want you guys to embody as a Christ follower that will make you a world-changer.

So tonight we are starting with our first statement that makes us who we are: We worship Jesus passionately. So the question that I want to answer tonight is: What is worship?

***Open the floor for others to answer the question from the audience.***

Worship. How would you define it? It has become so many things. Songs, services, singing, and industry. But what is it…really? More than anything we need to get this right. Worship is foundational - it’s the rock that everything is built upon. Worship is seeing the world and everything in and about your life as a way to glorify God.

So, open your Bibles to Romans 12 and let’s dive into the Word.

Read Romans 12:11-12

Romans 12:11–12 ESV

Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.

Worshipping Jesus Passionately involves your whole life

The verses we read are some of the most powerful worship verses in the Bible. What’s crazy is that it’s not referring to music or passionate singing.

So, based off of these verses, how would you define worship?

Consistent zeal

spiritual fervor

joy

hope

patience in affliction

faithful in prayer

giving to the needy

being hospitable

The text says to do all of these things with consistent zeal. Zeal can also mean to do something with great passion…or passionately.

As a Christ follower we should never become a spiritual debbie downer.

- Ex. Have you ever wanted to go visit a restaurant that the person told you it was “okay”.

NO!

Be practical AND passionate.

LIVE WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT WHILE YOU LIVE.

Don’t live your life half-hearted. The great commandment is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with ALL your heart and with ALL your soul and with ALL your strength and with ALL your mind” (Luke 10:27)

Your private passion for Jesus must fuel your public passion for Jesus.

Whole heartedness matters, zeal matters, passion matters. We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God.

You can’t spread what you don’t have.

How passionately you sing during a worship service doesn’t mean much if you aren’t stoking the flames of worship at 10:30am tomorrow morning at school.

CR Students worship passionately in here because we have first passionately worshipped in prayer with God on a Monday night before we go to bed.

Believe me, I am for passionate and expressive worship in here! But let that passion find expression where you live every day, too.

Hospitality isn’t what you think that it is

What do you think hospitality means?

Hospitality= “the process by means of which an outsider’s status is changed from stranger to guest.”

Our mission in CR Students is creating a culture of welcome for everyone that steps foot in this place to experience who we are as a group of students and adults. We want anyone who comes into this door to feel like they went from an outsider to a guest at a family gathering.

-Fridge rights with blakes family

-Inviting a friend into our home

-Tell story of my best friend in high school. (Real hospitality)

1 Corinthians 10:31 “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” , Colossians 3:17 “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” , Colossians 3:23–24 “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”

What does it really mean for you to worship God with whatever you do? (GIVE TIME TO THINK THROUGH THIS)

Worship that spreads into every fiber of our being, every moment of our day, and every appointment on our calendar is the kind of worship God desires from us. (PAUSE)

Give illustration of the compartments.

We can’t compartmentalize our faith and worship to God.

Application

Christ is all - His worth, magnified in our hearts. To see Him clearer and to know Him deeper.

When we view our lives as an act of worship to the God we serve, then we find great purpose in the things that we do, even when they don’t seem like very important things. When you view everything that you do as worship you do things with great excellence. You do things with great thought, great focus, and great passion. Our lives are worship to God. Live it that way. IF you do, you will live a life fulfilled, with great purpose, and with great passion. And people gravitate towards someone that lives life with a great fire for what they do.

We aren’t guaranteed to do great things, but we are all called to do everything great.

What do you do to maintain a hunger for Christ? How do you keep your heart on fire? Are we missing the point of true worship?

When was the last time you were really desperate for God? Where you felt like you really needed Him?

Do you remember a time when your desire to know Jesus was stronger than your desire for anything else?

Is Christ so valuable to you that everything else seems like rubbish?

“Teach me to love thee as thine angels love, One holy passion filling all my frame-The baptism of the heaven-descended Dove; My heart an altar, and thy love the flame.”

-Spirit of God, Dwell Thou Within My Heart. George Croly, 1854