Tear in Worship

Call To Confession:

The prophet Isaiah reminds us that God desires more than outward acts of worship; God desires hearts that truly turn toward Him.

Hear the invitation of the Lord:

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

Trusting in God’s mercy and grace, let us come before Him and confess our sins.

Prayer:

Merciful God, You call us to worship you with our whole lives, yet we confess that our hearts are often divided. We sing your praise with our lips while neglecting the needs of our neighbors. We seek your blessings but ignore the suffering around us.

Forgive us, Lord, for worship that is comfortable but not compassionate, for prayers that are spoken but not lived, and for faith that does not reach beyond ourselves.

Tear open our hearts, that we might return to you fully. Fill us with your Spirit so that our worship may be true, our love sincere, and our lives a reflection of your mercy.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Words of Assurance:

Hear the good news.

The prophet Isaiah promises that when we return to the Lord,

“Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly.” —Isaiah 58:8

In Jesus Christ, the tear between God and humanity has been healed. Through his life, death, and resurrection we are forgiven, restored, and made new.

Friends, believe the good news of the gospel:

In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.

Isaiah 58:1-12

“Cry out loudly, don’t hold back! Raise your voice like a ram’s horn. Tell my people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins.

2 

They seek me day after day and delight to know my ways, like a nation that does what is right and does not abandon the justice of their God. They ask me for righteous judgments; they delight in the nearness of God.”

3 

“Why have we fasted, but you have not seen? We have denied ourselves, but you haven’t noticed!”

“Look, you do as you please on the day of your fast, and oppress all your workers.

4 

You fast with contention and strife to strike viciously with your fist. You cannot fast as you do today, hoping to make your voice heard on high.

5 

Will the fast I choose be like this: A day for a person to deny himself, to bow his head like a reed, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast and a day acceptable to the Lord?

6 

Isn’t this the fast I choose: To break the chains of wickedness, to untie the ropes of the yoke, to set the oppressed free, and to tear off every yoke?

7 

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your house, to clothe the naked when you see him, and not to ignore your own flesh and blood?

8 

Then your light will appear like the dawn, and your recovery will come quickly. Your righteousness will go before you, and the Lord’s glory will be your rear guard.

9 

At that time, when you call, the Lord will answer; when you cry out, he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you get rid of the yoke among you, the finger-pointing and malicious speaking,

10 

and if you offer yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted one, then your light will shine in the darkness, and your night will be like noonday.

11 

The Lord will always lead you, satisfy you in a parched land, and strengthen your bones. You will be like a watered garden and like a spring whose water never runs dry.

12 

Some of you will rebuild the ancient ruins; you will restore the foundations laid long ago; you will be called the repairer of broken walls, the restorer of streets where people live.

Sermon: (Screen)We are moving right along with our Lenten series, Torn. We started out remembering that we were created from dust, and to dust we will return. Then we moved to the first tear, which was a double tear in the garden. Man and woman ate from the tree they were told not to eat. The tear between man and woman began, but also the tear between humanity and God.

In the next generation we see that the tear became so deep that a brother killed his brother. Last week we saw the tear reach the point where a man after God’s own heart slept with another man’s wife and then had him killed, breaking the trust of a nation and the people around him.

Today we see that the tear has reached the very place it should never exist—our worship.

Today’s passage is about how our beliefs in God and our living for God are not cohesive. They are torn apart by our sin. The passage talks about fasting, which is a sign of worship. The people of God were fasting, but not for the right reasons.

Most people today who practice fasting do it for the wrong reasons. Think about Lent in general. People give up things for forty days thinking that their fasting somehow makes them right with God. Yet they never truly get to know God during those forty days. It becomes all about what they are doing and how they are somehow earning their salvation.

That is what God, through Isaiah, is warning the people about. You are fasting for yourselves and not to know me. God goes through a long list of things they are doing and things they should be doing. (Screen)

This is one of those things I have been saying a lot lately: their “Sunday” faith—or in their case their Saturday faith—was not transcending into the rest of the week.

It was happening in the time of Isaiah, about 2,700 years ago, and it is still happening today. All the research shows that the younger generations want to know that faith means more than just showing up for an hour on Sunday. They want to know they are part of something that matters and that they are making a difference.

This is where sin has put a tear in our worship.

Look at what Isaiah is saying in this passage today. The people were fasting like they were supposed to, and yet God was silent.

They were crying out, (Screen)

“Where are you, God?”

(Pause)

And God answers them.

But the answer is not what they expected.

Those words echo something much more modern.

In the 1990s, Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins wrote a lyric that asks almost the exact same question: (Screen)

“Jesus, are you listening up there to anyone at all?”

That question is not new.

People were asking it 2,700 years ago in the days of the prophet Isaiah, and people are still asking it today. (Screen)

The same questions. The same frustrations. The same feeling that maybe God is silent.

But in Isaiah 58, God shows that the problem was never that He wasn’t listening.

The problem was that their worship had become disconnected from their lives.

And throughout all these centuries the focus of worship has been off and directed in the wrong direction. The focus of the Israelites in Isaiah’s time was on themselves. The focus of people today is on themselves.

In men’s Bible study we often say people have an “I problem,” as in the letter I or first-person vocabulary. But there is also an “eye problem,” in how people see the world—and that vision is influenced by the other I problem.

(Screen) We see in the passage that they were fasting like they should be, doing their acts of worship. Yet God says to them, you do this, but at the same time you are doing these other things.

They fast but oppress those who work for them. They fast but strike with their fists. They fast but are quick to anger and strife.

They were worshiping, yet they were oppressing people, fighting with each other, and living in conflict.

Our own history in this country shows this as well. During the time of slavery, there were God-fearing people who worshiped on Sunday and then beat their slaves and did horrible things to them.

Today we see people going to worship, fasting, and then gossiping, bickering, and fighting among themselves. There is that old saying: go out and party all week, sin it up, and then come to worship on Sunday.

Never think that somehow we are better than the people of the Bible because we know so much more or because we think we are more sophisticated. We are no better than those people 2,700 years ago. We are often doing the exact same thing.

And it is all because of that first tear in the garden.

That tear ruined it for everyone who came after.

Here is the thing about this tear. The tear we experience between us and God, and between us and each other, affects everything we do. The tear between us affects our worship of God, as we see in today’s passage. It affects the way we interact with one another.

So we try to do things to correct the tear—to mend it. We try to fix it ourselves by what we do. That is one way the tear affects our worship.

We start to say things like, “If I do this, then I will feel better.”

Now hear me: the things I am about to say are not bad. They are things we are supposed to do. But when we do them for the wrong reasons, they become bad.

(Taping up the sheet)

We think, “If I volunteer at this place or that place, it will make me right with God.”

“I must go to worship on Sunday because that is what I have to do.”

“I have to read my Bible or God will strike me down.”

“I need to dress a certain way to worship God because if I am not looking my best, He will not listen to me.”

And yet that same person may be completely full of duct tape, patching up the wounds of their past.

Women may put on layers of makeup to cover how they feel inside.

Men and women try to sleep with others in order to patch the tear.

Others turn to drugs or alcohol, all in an attempt to mend the tear that cannot be mended.

We come to worship because we are in love with the God who called us by name and redeemed us, restoring us through His Son Jesus.

All of those other things are people trying to earn their salvation.

When we come to worship the One who has done all these things, we then take our worship out into the world.

That is the next part of the Isaiah passage.

You fast—and while fasting you take care of the oppressed, treat workers justly, and live peacefully.

This passage in Isaiah echoes the passage we read today in Matthew.

Jesus says that when you feed the hungry, visit the sick, and care for those in prison, you are doing it to Him.

When your life becomes a continuation of your worship, then you are serving Jesus Himself.

When our worship on Sunday flows out into the rest of the week, we begin to see things change.

When we learn through worship that we cannot mend this tear ourselves—

we simply cannot—

(pause)

Only Jesus can mend the tear.

(pause)

And He did it by being torn Himself.

Only Jesus, through the tearing of His body—and as we will see in a few weeks the tearing of the temple curtain—can our tears truly be mended.

All around us will be like a garden that has been well watered, as Isaiah says. (Screen)

Your light will shine.

You will rebuild the ruins.

Restore foundations.

Repair broken walls.

Restore streets where people live. (Screen)

All of this comes out of proper worship that is focused on God and not ourselves.

True worship here on Sunday flows into the streets during the week.

Tony Evans, in his commentary on Ezekiel 47, says: (Screen)

“The reason our culture is drying up is because there’s no spiritual water flowing out of the sanctuary into the world. But we aren’t going to get the (Screen) water flowing down the streets of our communities, bringing life where there is death, until it begins to flow down the aisles of our churches.” (Screen)

Our worship has been compartmentalized as something that happens on Sunday.

But what happens on Sunday should affect the rest of the week.

When life feels heavy and dark, Sunday is coming.

When you feel the weight of Good Friday, Sunday is coming.

When the world feels broken beyond repair, Sunday is coming.

We cannot just show up on Sunday and think that is all we have to do.

Jesus calls us to follow Him.

To follow means to go where He goes.

He did not say, “Follow me and sit and listen for an hour one day a week.”

He said,

“Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.”

You are to go and do something—like caring for the orphans and the widows.

Caring for the sick.

Caring for the naked.

Caring for those in prison.

Caring for the least of these.

This comes out of your worship.

You love God with all that you are.

And then you love others because you know how much He loves you.

You cannot fix the tear yourself.

You cannot fix someone else’s tear.

Only Jesus can mend the tears.

And sometimes it helps to see what that looks like.

In the Pixar movie Brave (Screen), a tear forms between a mother and daughter.

The daughter slices the family tapestry in half.

In the picture, the mother and daughter are separated by the tear.

Healing only comes when the tear is stitched back together.

The tapestry is repaired—but the stitching remains visible. (Screen)

The stitching that heals our tear is the stitching of Jesus’ whipped back and nail-pierced hands.

That is what heals us with God and with each other.

Henri Nouwen talks about this in The Wounded Healer.

We minister best from our wounds.

From our tears.

Jesus’ wounds healed us, but we still carry scars until we reach heaven.

And it is out of those scars that we minister to others.

We are in a time of tearing.

But we are also in a time of healing.

Sometimes the tear gets worse before proper healing takes place.

But God is the one doing the healing.

Worship Him.

Keep your focus on Him.

And let your worship flow into everyday life.

This world needs Christians whose praise matches their lives.

We need to be Monday-through-Sunday Christians.

If our worship matches how we live the rest of the week, then the water of life will flow through the city and grow a beautiful garden.

That is the point of it all:

To live out what you believe on Sunday every day of the week.

When your worship matches what God calls true worship, you will not wonder if He is listening.

You will know He is listening.

Because you know Him.

As we move toward Easter, remember what we have seen in this series.

There was a tear in the garden.

A tear between brothers.

A tear in a king’s heart.

And today we see the tear in our worship.

But every one of those tears points to one place. (Screen)

The cross.

Because on the cross, Jesus was torn so that what was torn in us could be healed.

And when the curtain of the temple was torn in two,

God was saying the healing has begun.

So let your worship flow from this place into the world.

Because the world does not need better church attendance.

It needs people whose lives show that Jesus is alive.

And one day you will hear Him say,

“Well done, good and faithful servant.” (Screen)