Imagine that you are driving through northern Minnesota on state route 53 when you see a sign for an antique shop. You love antique shops, plus you’ve been driving for hours, and you need a break. So, you pull into the parking lot, go in, and explore. At some point, it dawns on you that this antique shop with its stained-glass windows was once a church building, a place consecrated for the worship of God. You almost feel like you should take off your hat and lower your voice. You are in a place of worship and didn’t even know it.

The patriarch Jacob had a similar experience. He discovered that the place he set up camp was a portal between heaven and earth. These are his words: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it … this is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16-17).

Earth, as we saw that last week, was created to be a temple, but like Jacob and my antique shopper, we may not realize where we are. That’s understandable: the temple courts have been defaced by eons of sin, and the temple itself has been repurposed by humans for their own use. We can spend 80 or 90 years here and never wake up to the fact that we live in a temple.

Humans have repurposed the temple, but they cannot repurpose themselves. Because we were made by an all-glorious, all-loving, all-powerful God, we will always have the impulse to worship. We can decline to worship God, but we cannot decline to worship. If we won’t worship God, we will worship something else, usually one of the fashionable idols of the day. Only the worship of the true God can free us from us from the worship of false ones.

We will always be worshipers, but the damage caused by sin has bent our worship away from the joyful and good Creator. When by grace we repent and believe on Jesus, that starts to change. A revolution begins in our life, and we are brought slowly back into orbit around our God. Until that happens, we will worship what should be sacrificed and sacrifice the One who should be worshiped. That is what happened on Calvary. That is what has been happening ever since sin entered the world.

Before we get into the meat of this – how we can worship God – let me sum up what we’ve just seen. Humans are inveterate worshipers; they cannot help themselves. But when sin collided with humanity like an asteroid striking the earth, the impact knocked our worship out of it proper orbit. We see that in the pervasive worship of celebrities but even more in the ruinous worship of the self. Only in Christ can our worship be redirected toward its true object: the Living God.

There are five assumptions which act as pillars or supports for what I am going to say today. These kinds of assumptions are present in every sermon, like 2x4s behind drywall. Or, to change the image, they are like the bones in a body. You usually can’t see them, but neither can you live without them. Occasionally it becomes necessary to X-Ray them, and that is what we are going to do now.

Here are the five assumptions:

1. Without real, joyful, from-the-heart worship, no one can live the beautiful life God intends.
2. Worship is not instruction – even biblical instruction – directed to the worshiper, but expressions of admiration, love, and submission directed to God from the worshiper.
3. Worship always involves performance, but it is not an entertainment.
4. Christians worship God when they express the reverence he deserves and the submission they intend through appropriate means: songs, hymns, prayers, confessions, declarations, offerings (and other building blocks of worship).
5. Worship that does not include sacrifice, is not Christian worship.

Without real, joyful, from-the-heart worship, humans will not live the beautiful life God intends. A Christian who doesn’t worship God is like a computer that doesn’t compute, a boat that doesn’t float, a phone that doesn’t make calls. Of course, it is possible to repurpose the computer as a doorstop, the boat as a flowerpot, and the phone as a coaster, but they were made for something more—and so were we.

We cannot thrive when we’re not worshiping God, but when we are, other things start falling into place. Decisions we once agonized over almost make themselves. Trials become easier to endure with faith. Relationships are set in order. We are nearer, or more continually near, to joy than ever before.

But when we are not worshiping God, decisions paralyze us, trials defeat us, relationships get crazy, and discouragement dogs our every step. You will never be fulfilled until you are a worshiper – and not just on Sunday mornings, but every day of the week. And the truth is if you’re not worshiping on Tuesday and Saturday, you’re probably not worshiping on Sunday either. Some people think of church as if it were a spiritual or emotional filling station. I’m running low, so I’d better go to church, or I won’t make it through the week. But that makes it all about me, which makes worship impossible.

But what is worship? To understand what it is, we need to understand what it is not. Worship is not a sermon (not even a biblical one). It is not music or readings or prayers coming from the platform to the worshiper. Those things are important, but they are not worship, which involves admiration, love and submission coming from the worshiper to God.

This may be the hardest thing for us to grasp. Our consumer culture leads us to believe that we go to church for a worship experience. But do you see what that does? It puts the focus on us, and makes worship impossible. Worship ceases to be something we do – a verb – and becomes something we experience – a noun. Then we think we’ve worshiped if we have had a certain kind of experience and that we have not worshiped if we haven’t.

The experience we’re looking for is usually an emotional one – tears welling in our eyes, shivers running down our spines – and that becomes the measure of our worship. But we can have tears and shivers without having worshiped. And we can worship without tears and shivers. Those may be the marks of a successful performance at the theater, but not in the sanctuary of God. It’s not that they are bad – they are not; they are good and welcome – but we mustn’t mistake them for worship.

In the 1990s, there was a popular worship music label that carried the tagline, “Experience the Presence of God.” I never read that without being annoyed. A whole generation of Christians were led to think of the presence of God as a chill down their spines. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the children of that generation have left the church en masse. We must understand this: worship is something you do. So, if you come to church and don’t do anything, you haven’t worshiped. At best, you’ve been instructed and entertained. But even the best instruction or the most glorious entertainment is not a replacement for worship.

That brings us to our third assumption. Worship involves performance, but it is not an entertainment. Americans entertain themselves to death—or at least to debt. A few years ago, MarketWatch estimated that Americans spend about 100 billion dollars annually on sports alone. A decade ago, the average American was spending approximately ten percent of their income – which sounds suspiciously like a tithe – on entertainment. Now, I am not objecting to that. I am merely pointing out that entertainment is a priority for us, and so it is easy for us to think of worship as one more form of entertainment. It is not.

It does, however, involve performance. The musicians and singers perform, but they are not entertainers. More importantly (we need to grasp this), they are not the only performers in a worship service—or at least they’d better not be.

We’ve got the wrong idea if we think the musicians and singers are the performers, and we are the audience. The musicians and singers support the performers – that’s us. We’re on stage, they’re our band, and God is the audience—an audience of one. A worship service isn’t a flop because church members didn’t like it; it’s a flop if God didn’t like it.

The Bible makes this clear. God is the one who receives or rejects worship. He either receives it as a “sweet-smelling aroma” or rejects it as a stench in his nostrils. That metaphor was first used in Genesis 8, when Noah and his family worshiped God in the aftermath of the flood. We find it again in Exodus, in Leviticus (which is all about acceptable worship to God), Numbers, Ezra, and even in the New Testament. Paul writes that “Christ has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Eph. 5:2).

The point here is that God is the receiver of worship, not the congregation. We are the performers of worship. But that raises a question: what is it that we are performing? Are we worshiping when we sing? What about when we pray? Listen to a sermon? Put something in the plate?

Those questions introduce our next assumption: Christians worship God when they express the reverence he deserves and the submission they intend through the means they possess. Those means include songs, hymns, prayers, confessions, declarations, offerings (and other building blocks of worship). In different cultures, those building blocks of worship will be different, but they will be used for the same purpose.

Notice that worship is not something that is happening inside of you, like thinking or meditating. Thinking and meditating are good, but they are not worship. Worship doesn’t stay inside us; it moves from us to God. In worship we express to God the reverence he deserves and the submission we intend. Now worship is not the only thing that happens when we gather: we also gather to love each other, to be discipled in the Scriptures, to be encouraged, to find out what is going on, and to serve. But worship doesn’t happen at all if we don’t express to God the reverence he deserves and the submission we intend. Some people, I have no doubt, have gone to church for years and have yet to worship once.

Singing can be a part of worship. We can sing a hymn, for example – a song that praises God for what he has done and extols his character for doing it. Prayer can also be a part: prayer rehearses God’s power, rests on his love, and addresses him as Lord. The offering acknowledges to God that he is worthy of all that we have and all that we are.

So, if we sing, pray, and put something in the plate, have we worshiped? Not necessarily. It is not the act of singing or of placing money in the plate but the act of reverencing God and submitting to him that is worship. The hymns, the prayers, the offerings, the declarations of Scripture are helps in doing that but not a substitute for it.

Think of these worship components – prayers, confessions, scripture readings, offerings, songs – as stones, which we can use to build an altar, as Noah did in Genesis 8. Of course, we can also use them to build a monument to ourselves, as Absalom did in 2 Samuel 18 (and, frankly, that happens in “worship services” all the time). Or we can hurl them at someone else, as people did in Acts 7, when they stoned Stephen. The stones are just stones. What we do with them is what counts.

When we gather to worship, we take these various components – think of them as stones – and we build them into an altar. That requires intention. Worship doesn’t just happen; we do it.

Before a worship gathering, people like Elijah, Hannah, and Vicky gather the stones so that we, individually and as a group, can build them into an altar on which to offer worship to God. Building altars is a big deal in Scripture. Nearly all the great Old Testament characters – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, David, Elijah, and others – built altars. The Scripture gives directions on how – and how not – to build them. The Lord’s people were not to build their altars the way that people who worshiped other gods did.

In Exodus 20, the chapter that contains the Ten Commandments, God says: “If you use stones to build my altar, use only natural, uncut stones. Do not shape the stones with a tool, for that would make the altar unfit for holy use” (Ex. 20:25 NLT). The Israelites were to use the stones that were available to them. Likewise, we need to learn to use what is available to us in our gatherings – the songs, the prayers, the offering, the scripture declarations, the communion meal – to build an altar on which we can make an offering to God.

The more mature we become, the better we are at using what we have rather than complaining about what we don’t have. That doesn’t mean that our leaders aren’t responsible to gather good quality stones for the altar we build. It does mean that once they have been gathered, we need to use them the best we can.

So, let’s say we’ve been building an altar with the songs, hymns, and prayers that were provided for us today. What is this altar used for? What sacrifices do we offer on it? We offer the sacrifice of praise (Hebrews 13:15)—and praise can be a costly sacrifice. I suspect our praise is never more pleasing to God than when we don’t feel like offering it. When life is hard, and we are tired, and we wish things were different. When we then praise God for what he has done and for who he is, that is a pleasing sacrifice.

Thanksgiving is another sacrifice, according to Psalm 116:17 (“I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving.”) Thanking God can also be costly. We can learn to offer thanksgiving even when we don’t feel like it, and then it is all the sweeter.

However, when the congregation builds the altar, there is always a principle offering placed on it. The people who built the altar climb onto it and offer themselves. This is how Bill Mounce translates Romans 12:1: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God—this is a reasonable act of worship for you” (Mounce). The climax of a worship service is always the presentation of one’s body as a living sacrifice. If that doesn’t occur, worship has miscarried.

Notice that Paul does not say, “Present your spiritual life to God,” as if the climax of worship is to do something spiritual … in church … on Sunday. You don’t have a spiritual life that is distinct from the rest of you. You are a spiritual being – an embodied spiritual being. When you have built an altar through prayers, tithes, Scripture readings and praise, you climb up on it and offer yourself – your whole self – to God. The acceptable sacrifice is you.

Notice too that you are to be a living sacrifice, a sacrifice that keeps on giving because it keeps on living. This is the highest and holiest sacrifice – the kind that Christ himself gave. You see, he did not offer himself up only at Calvary. The cross was the culmination of a life of sacrifice. The God who so loved that he gave his only Son to the world has an only Son who so loved that he gave himself to the Father. He was a living sacrifice from the very beginning.

God does not want our songs and prayer and offerings as a substitute for our lives. When people tried to do just that in Bible times, he told them: “I cannot bear your evil assemblies … They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.” (Isaiah 1:13-14). He wants us, not just our rituals.

Today we have built an altar out of the stones of confession, prayer, song, and offering. Perhaps you would have liked to use different stones. That’s okay. Tell me or Elijah if you know a good stone to use. But that is, frankly, not all that important. The important thing is that, week after week, you use that altar to offer yourself as a living sacrifice to God. Let’s do that now.