Transformed Worship
Notes
Transcript
We are in week three of our series Transformed: How Jesus changes everything. Our first week, we introduced the idea and looked at how Jesus changes our hearts, our destinies, and our minds. Last week, we looked at how Jesus changes our relationships by first changing us, helping us to relate to each other with a Christ-like love. This week, we are looking at how Jesus can transform our worship.
No matter where you may find yourself on the faith spectrum, whether an extreme atheist on one side or you are so religious that even us pastors look at you go “really?” on the other, a universal fact of humanity is that we all worship something. Some people worship a god, some worship a thing, some a person or people, and others may worship an ideal or a philosophy. All people, in every culture and in every time period engage in worship at some level, even if they wouldn’t call it that. So because it’s a universal trait of humanity and because it impacts our lives in significant ways, it’s important for us to understand what worship is and how we should direct it.
So, what do you think of when you think of Christian worship? I would guess that most of us watching would think of sing-along music from church, wouldn’t we? Whether its in our weekend services where we sing corporately, or it’s just you and Jesus driving 40km/hr over the speed limit, screaming “Way Maker, Miracle Worker, Promise Keeper get me to my meeting on time” worship is often defined in Western Christianity by the music we sing. And worshipping God through music is great but Christian worship is so much more than that. William Temple, the former archbishop of Canterbury, defined worship as, “…the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose -- and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.”
You see, our worship is our whole life, body, soul response to who God is and what he has done. And that sounds easy. But because of the brokenness of sin that is within each of us, it isn’t. We all have this propensity towards idolatry.
Idolatry is trusting, serving or worshipping of anything other than God. Whether we pray to a carved idol, obsess over our money, or just focus on ourselves instead of Jesus, we are participating in idolatry and, God doesn’t like it when we commit idolatry.
In the Old Testament, God gave Moses 613 commandments for the people of Israel to follow. But of those, 10 were set apart and special, written by God himself on two slabs of stone. And the first one of those ten commandments says,
“You must not have any other god but me. “You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations of those who reject me.
In the ancient near east world that the Bible is set it, idolatry was everywhere. Almost every religion had idols as the focus of their faith. The Philistines had a giant statue of Dagon, the Babylonians made a 90 ft. statue of Nebuchadnezzer (or a bunny, depending on your familiarity with VeggieTales) that people were supposed to worship and many of Israel’s kings led the nation into worship of foreign gods through idols over and over again.
This is true into the New Testament times as well. The Greeks and Romans each had a whole pantheon of gods that each had statues. And the purpose of these statues wasn’t for decoration. They were seen as conduits to the gods - objects to pray to so that particular god could hear you and, if you were acceptable to them, would answer your prayers.
One city was particularly known for its idol worship. It was Ephesus, which was a port city on the south west side of modern-day Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea. As a major port city, and the third largest city in the Roman Empire and it was home to the famous Temple of Diana (or Artemis). Thousands of people would pilgrimmage there every year to worship her. It also had a diverse population of people from different cultures who worshipped up to 50 different gods and goddesses. Also, there was a cult for the emperor, which had its own statue and shrines for people to worship. It was a city where the worship of idols was normal and prevalent.
And in that context, the apostle John, who lived and pastored in Ephesus wrote this at the end of his letter that we call 1 John:
Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.
Why would John write this? Because the worship of idols is insidious. It quietly worms its way into our hearts and minds and often, we don’t even see it happening. In the times of the Bible, those idols were carvings of wood and stone. Today, the idols we worship are concepts and inner longings. And when we allow these idols into our hearts, it begins to negatively change us. It negatively changes our worldviews, it negatively impacts our relationships with each other and it negatively affects our relationship with God.
Which is why we need Jesus. Jesus transforms our worship. Because we, as followers of Jesus believe in his atoning death, physical resurrection and bodily ascension to the right hand of the Father, He sends us the Holy Spirit to dwell in us, and the Holy Spirit helps us see the idols that we worship.
Now you may say to me “Pastor, who are you preaching to? I love Jesus and I don’t worship idols.” And if that’s true, then that’s amazing. You are a much better Christian than I am because I have found, in looking at myself and inviting God to examine me, and through pastoring others for 20 years, that most Christians love Jesus and are committed to him, but we have a idol or two as well, and we try to keep Jesus from finding out about them. It’s kind of like an affair. We married to Jesus, but there is this other thing that we secretly keep.
We worship Jesus, but we also worship power and enjoy being “over” others.
We worship Jesus, but we also worship sex so we indulge in a porn addiction or we go from relationship to relationship
We worship Jesus, but we also worship other people’s opinions of us, so we bend who we are and we compromise our values to fit it.
A lot of us worship Jesus, and we worship an idol of some kind. But John challenges us to keep ourselves away from idols. In the New Living Translation our verse says,
Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts.
This is the great challenge of the Christian faith: to continually allow Jesus to examine your heart, root out any idols and break their hold over you so that you can be free to love Jesus fully. The question is, are you willing to let Jesus transform your worship? Are you ready to root out those idols that you have kept in your heart that keep you from fully worshipping Jesus?
If you are, I want to show you how do it.
Step 1: Identify - Maybe God has already brought it up to you, while I have been speaking, what that idol is that he is calling you to root out of your life. But maybe, you need to spend time in spiritual contemplation on it. That means you need to set aside time where you can be quiet and invite Jesus to examine you and bring to your mind what idols are residing in your heart. This needs to be a regular practice of every Christian - we all need to commune with God and invite him to examine our hearts.
Step 2: Repent - to repent means to “change your mind” or to “change directions.” So you start by changing your thinking around this idol. You begin by start seeing it for what it is - as something that pulls you away from intimacy with Jesus and then you change your direction. You turn away from running to this idol and you turn to Jesus instead.
Step 3: Confess - get your spiritual community in on this change. Maybe its a close friend or two, or the people in your triad, quad or small group. You tell them that you are struggling against this idol and invite them to hold you up in prayer and in accountability so that the power of the idol is broken in your life.
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.
Christianity is a communal faith - we don’t walk in it alone. If you want to see Jesus transform your life, you need to get a few people to go deep with.
Now, while I have presented these as an easy three-step system, I know from my own life, how hard each of these steps is. You will need courage to embark on this journey of worship transformation. You will need to give yourself grace because healing and transformation take time and you may stumble and trip a little on the way. You will have to be honest and vulnerable with others about this, which is terrifying for some of you.
But if you will allow the Holy Spirit to empower you, and you keep in step with the leading of the Holy Spirit, you will find that your intimacy with Jesus will deepen in such profound ways and your worship will be both honouring to God and life-giving to your soul.
I have spent a lot of time in prayer this past week about this sermon. I was asking God about what idols are prevalent in the church and in our culture that we need to be on guard against. There’s a lot of them. And what you struggle with may be different that what I struggle with, or what others struggle with. But, as I kept praying, I found three unconventional idols that the church struggles with kept popping into my mind so I would like to share these with you so that, if these idols are within you, as they are within me, you can begin the process of allowing Jesus to root them out so and transform your worship.
1. The idol of happiness
1. The idol of happiness
Everybody wants to be happy. Everyone wants to have that feeling of joyful elation. And being happy is good thing. But the problem we have in western culture seems to be that we pursue happiness in and of itself, and not the one who can make us happy.
When happiness is our goal, then all we need to do to experience it is do things that bring us pleasure; things that give us that shot of dopamine in our brains. Which is what we often do. We live out a sexuality that is about making ourselves feel good. We want to be comfortably rich so that we can enjoy life and be happy. We stay addicted to our phones because in them, we have a constant source of happiness - whether its through the likes and follows on our instagram, tik toks or youtube or whether its through the constant scrolling to find funny content or through our games as we experience that dopamine hit each time we crush that candy.
We live for the things that make us happy. But many of us have come to realize that the feeling of happy doesn’t last. The dopamine wears off after a while and leaves us feeling empty and lost so we go out to do the next thing that makes us happy. And the next thing. And the next thing. And that’s how the idolatry of happiness gets into our hearts.
Our scriptures teach us that instead of pursuing the things that make us feel happy in the moment, we should pursue Jesus instead. Jesus transforms our worship so that instead of worshipping ourselves by pursuing our own happiness, he gives us something better to worship - himself.
Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.
If we want to experience true joy and happiness, I am convinced that we are to pursue holiness and intimacy with God and when we do, we will find that our hearts are happy because we are made in God’s image.
19th-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.”
That other object is Jesus. Let us not be people who pursue happiness. Let’s be people who pursue intimacy with Jesus because our happiness is best fulfilled not in the things of our world, but in the worship of our God.
2. The idol of “back in the day”
2. The idol of “back in the day”
The second unconventional idol that I was thinking about is the idol of “back in the day.” We’ve all be guilty of this - of thinking fondly to previous era in our lives and thinking “life was better then.”
I remember looking at a newer playground as an adult and thinking back to how much better they were when I was a kid in the 80’s with the 20ft slides, the rusted metal monkey bars and the epic swings. It was better back then, right? Until I found an old playground and this was the seat for the swing:
As vintage, retro, old-school cool as this looks - this swing kind of sucks. The flat piece of wood wasn’t comfortable, more often than not was weather worn and splintering and if you jumped off it wrong, you got a sliver in a place you did not want the school nurse to extract it from. And if you had long hair, it often got caught in the chains, especially if you twisted the chains up to make it spin.
We often romanticize the past and believe that because life was perhaps less complicated for us back then, it was better. But every time period has its problems and every generation looks back with rose-colored glasses. And too many of us make an idol of the past, whether its about wanting and pushing for church to feel like it used to (whenever that was for you), or complaining about the culture shift that you have witnessed. For some of you, you are defined by the past - the past hurt or trauma you have experienced or maybe the past victories that you had in high school or college. It’s so easy to look back on those days and allow them to define you.
And make no mistake, there is some value in looking at the past. We are part of an ancient faith that goes back thousands of years. George Santayana said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But we can’t live in those times and we can’t bring them back. But as followers of Jesus, we are the privileged ones who get to to think about it differently. Instead of bing people lamenting the culture that we lost; instead of being people who are trying to recapture our youth; instead of being people who constantly look backwards, we get to look forward because our hope isn’t in the past, it’s in the future.
In the future, Jesus is coming and will make all things right.
So because our hope is in the future, we are free to give the church to our young people and set them up for gospel success and kingdom gains. Because our hope is in the future, we are free from the despair of what we have lost because we know what we will gain. Because our hope is in the future, we can let go of our past trauma’s and embrace the healing work of Jesus in our life.
Let’s be a church that celebrates the past, but doesn’t live in it. Instead, let’s look to the future and leave a legacy of faith for our kids, our grandkids, our great-grandkids and so on until Jesus comes back.
3. The idol of control
3. The idol of control
The third and final idol that I want to talk about today is the idol of control. I think control is a difficult thing for us to let go of. I should know, I recently taught my daughter to drive. There is nothing like handing the keys to a 2 ton vehicle to teenager and, after surviving them driving at 110 km/hr on the highway 10 minutes after getting a learner’s permit, you have to sit there calmly while they try to navigate a full Costco parking lot and park your car - that you haven’t paid off yet! That’s the day that you learn two things: 1) Why there is a handle above the passenger door and 2) about your need for control as you try to pump those invisible brakes on the passenger side.
Most of us like to be the ones in control of the things we are passionate about. We carry a subliminal belief that things would be better if we were the ones who were in charge. And there are some cases where that may, in fact, be true. But the desire, or in some cases need to control, is often rooted in fear or arrogance. Fear makes us hold tight and keep control so we don’t experience loss. Arrogance says that I know better, whether you actually do or not. Both those roots though are antithetical to the Christian faith.
As Pastor and author Mark Batterson said, “You can have faith or you can have control, but you cannot have both.” We are of those who surrender control to our sovereign God and trust him in our daily lives. And if we don’t, there can be disastrous consequences in our lives.
I have witnessed parents who controlled their children’s lives so much that it led to unhealthy rebellion and turning away from the family ideals and sometimes even the family itself. I have seen the friction when one person has so much control over a ministry that no one else can do anything related to that area. I have seen the disaster when the need to control overtakes faith.
But we aren’t like that. We are those who relinquish the idol of control and embrace faith because we know that our God is good and that no matter what we are going through, he is going to see us to the other side. After all, as the apostle Paul says,
For we live by faith, not by sight.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Listen, beloved: in our world, we are barraged with hundreds of things that are vying to become idols in our hearts. It’s the nature of the fallen world we live in. We are called to protect ourselves from them by drawing near to Jesus. He can transform our worship from something self-centred into something that brings glory and honour to God. So root out the idols in your life - identify them, repent of them, and confess them for prayer and accountability and see your relationship with God deepen in intimacy and power like never before.
Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts.
Pray.
