Hebrews 10:5-10 (Fourth Sunday in Advent)

Posted on January 3, 2025 by salooper57

Excerpts:

Some years ago, Queen Elizabeth visited the U. S. She brought with her four thousand pounds of luggage, including two outfits for every occasion, a mourning outfit in case someone died, forty pints of plasma, and white kid‑leather toilet seat covers. She brought along her own hairdresser, two valets, and a score of other attendants.[1] How different was the royal visit to Bethlehem. When the King of glory came the ancient gates were not raised; the doors were not opened. Even Motel 6 didn’t keep the lights on. He had no royal attendants. He did not bring pints of plasma. Quite the contrary: he came to donate blood.

The King of Glory did not come to earth so that he could lie in a manger. Bethlehem is momentous and mind-boggling, but it is only phase one in God’s plan to rescue humanity from ruin. Bethlehem leads to Calvary, Calvary to the empty tomb, and the empty tomb to the life-changing, humanity-transforming Spirit. God’s plan is comprehensive. He has thought of everything.

I said a moment ago that people in Israel were already deeply religious. But the Son of God did not undergo incarnation – bilaminar disc formation, cell mass differentiation, organogenesis, and nine month’s internment in a womb – to make people religious. He didn’t die on a cross to make you religious; he died to make you good – that is, strong, loving, joyful, faithful.

After Thanksgiving, many people go to their garage or shed and take out their nativity scenes and set them up in their front yards. They put up cows and sheep, wise men and shepherds, Mary and Joseph, and then they take the newspaper wrapping off the Baby Jesus and place him in a plastic manger. When the season ends, they swaddle baby Jesus in newspaper again and bury him in the back of the shed until the next holiday season comes ’round.

Some of us do the same kind of thing. We love the baby Jesus. We get excited about him every Christmas, sing songs about him, listen to sermons about him. But when the holiday season is over, we wrap him up and bury him in the back of our minds until next year. It’s the American way to do Christmas.

Christ did not come to Bethlehem to sleep in a manger. He came to offer God his love and obedience, even to the point of death. But he did not offer this life of love and obedience so that we wouldn’t have to—that is the “we’re off the hook” theory of the atonement. He lived a perfect life, died a sacrificial death, rose from the dead, and was exalted to God’s right hand so that he might give the Spirit that was in him to us. Because of what he has done at Bethlehem’s stable, Calvary’s cross, Jerusalem’s empty tomb, and heaven’s throne, we, too, can say, “Here I am … I have come to do your will, O God.”

  [1] Philip Yancy, The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan, 1995)

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Hope! I Need Somebody (Hope! Not Just Anybody)

Posted on December 28, 2024 by salooper57

I was once searching for a title for a sermon on Colossians 1. Having grown up in the sixties, I naturally thought of song-inspired titles: “Hope Me, I Think I’m Falling”; “With a Little Hope from My Friend”; and “I Can’t Hope Myself,” (which is both solidly biblical and delightfully Motown). But I settled on, “Hope! I Need Somebody.”

The beginning of the new year finds many of us short on hope. We blame the state of society, or government corruption, or our spouse’s unwillingness to change for tearing a hole in us and draining our souls of hope. But these things did not make the holes through which our hope is leaking; they only exposed them.

Years ago, after officiating at the funerals of numerous – far too many – victims of suicide, I realized that people don’t kill themselves because their lives are so hard. They kill themselves because they have lost hope. Hope really is a lifesaver.

Of course, not all hopeless people take their own lives. Many people hold down jobs, drive their kids to school, go to the movies, plan vacations – they carry on normal lives. But all the while hopelessness stalks them like a wild animal. They can feel its presence, especially when they’re tired, especially when they are still.

And so, they try never to be still. They go, go, go. They shop, buy things they don’t need, go to places they don’t care about, take pictures they’ll never look at, get addicted to pain killers (or porn or booze), all because they can’t stand to be still. They sense that if they stop, hopelessness will pounce.

Distraction is one of the chief symptoms of hopelessness, and we have made it into an art form. Or perhaps a science. If you don’t have hope, you’ll need a shot of distraction, the way a type-one diabetic needs a shot of insulin. The more dependent a person is on distraction, the more serious his or her hope deficiency.

Hopelessness is a disease of the soul. Distractions treat the symptoms pretty effectively at first, but it requires higher and higher doses to keep it in check, for hopelessness becomes distraction-resistant. A diagnostic test for hopelessness is this: how long can you go without seeking distraction—skimming your news feed, checking your phone, doomscrolling Tik-Tok videos or, if you’re older, binge-watching episodes of MASH.

Can hope be renewed? Before that question can be addressed, it is necessary to think about what hope is. Hope is the confident expectation of a preferred future. That differentiates it from a wish, which is merely a desire (albeit sometimes an overpowering desire) for a preferred future.

A wish can be also distinguished from hope in another way: a wish proceeds from us but hope comes to us. We cannot find hope by “digging deep,” since hope is not sourced in us. Hope comes from believing in something outside ourselves.

Hope may not seem possible in our situation. When we look down the tunnel, there is no light at the end. We see no end. We cannot even think of a way for things to get better.

Here’s a suggestion: Stop staring down the tunnel and try looking up to heaven instead. That’s where your hope will come from—from God. The Psalmist knew this. “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.” We can see no light at the end of the tunnel. God brings the light with him.

Years ago, I met Scott, who was in the last stages of ALS. When I went to visit him at his home, I found an emaciated young man who was nearly paralyzed by the disease. Even his vocal cords were beginning to lose function.

I sat in a chair by his bed and we talked. Scott told me that he had become a Christian two months earlier. We talked about that and other things and, after a while, I asked him if he was afraid of dying.

He told me something – and it was hard for him to talk, so I had to listen closely – that I have never forgotten. He told me that the last two months, since he had come to faith in Christ, had been the two best months of his life. I looked at him in wonder. Here was a man from whom everything had been taken. His former life was gone. His world was a bed. His body was a prison. And the last two months had been the best two months of his life?

How was that possible? What had happened? The God of hope had come and put hope in his soul.

If Scott could have hope, so can we. But hope comes from God, not from government, not from material acquisitions, not even from some wished-for event. So, it is to God that we must look for hope. When we do, we will find that “hope does not disappoint us.”

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The Visited Planet

Posted on December 21, 2024 by salooper57
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Ours is a visited planet. Our little world, situated as it is in a lower-middle class solar system, circling a mediocre star on the outskirts of a commonplace galaxy, has little to commend it. If the entire planet exploded in a fiery conflagration that could be seen from the sun, some 93 million miles away, it would attract no more attention in the universe than a gunshot in a ghetto.

And yet ours is the visited planet. The Wonderful Counselor himself, the Mighty God, has come down our dead-end street and stopped at our place. And he came in the most extraordinary way: He was “made flesh” in the Virgin’s womb.

That he came is remarkable. How he came no sage could ever have imagined. But why he came – that is the profoundest mystery.

People seem to think that God’s great and glorious Son came to earth to establish a religion. But that is “too small a thing.” The Eternal one was not straight-jacketed by time, the infinite one did not wear the shackles of space in order to make us a little more religious, or so that we would attend church two out of every four Sundays. He visited our planet in order to save people, or so the angel declared.

That he is savior is the good news of great joy. We often get this confused. We think that the good news is peace on earth, good will to men. But peace is a consequence of the good news, not its content. The angel told the shepherds, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

The good news was that a savior had been born. Normally when we hear the word savior, we think of one person who rescues another (or others) from a desperate situation. The new coach saves the football program from disaster. The CEO saves the corporation from bankruptcy. The Coast Guard saves the boater from drowning.

If we were to make a list of the things from which we need to be saved, sin would probably not be at the top. If it made the list at all, it would come somewhere after hair loss and high cholesterol.

But we, at least most of us, are not in a desperate situation. So, a savior has been born to us; what difference does it make? Will he save us from irrelevancy? Or insolvency? Or lunacy?

To answer that question, we have to turn to another of the Christmas narratives; this one in Matthew’s gospel. There an angel appears to Joseph, who had resolved to leave his fiancé, Mary, after hearing the shocking news that she was pregnant. But the angel assured Joseph that Mary had not been unfaithful to him. No, the Baby in her womb was miraculously conceived. Joseph’s fiancé was carrying the child of promise, the long-awaited deliverer. He was to be named Jesus (which means, “Yahweh saves”) because he would save his people from – from what? Boredom? Illiteracy? Hardship? No – he would save his people from their sins.

I suspect most people experience a letdown upon hearing those words. If we were to make a list of the things from which we need to be saved, sin would probably not be at the top. If it made the list at all, it would come somewhere after hair loss and high cholesterol. Even Joseph may have experienced a momentary disappointment. He was expecting a Messiah who would save people from their enemies and from the armies that occupied their homeland, not from their sins.

Why do we need a savior from sin? That is the fundamental question. According to the theologian Millard Erickson, sin is an inner force, an inherent condition, a controlling power. It is a disease that has been passed down through every member of the human family. It manifests in a variety of symptoms – some more apparent than others – but whatever the symptoms, the outcome is always death. Thus, St. Paul says, “The wages of sin is death.”

There are also more immediate consequences. Restlessness is one. The prophet speaks of those who are “like the tossing sea; for its waters cannot rest.” Another consequence is guilt – the kindthat our own efforts cannot absolve. Sin also brings trouble on us and our children, leaving us weary and sorrowful.

Even more disturbing is the self-propagating nature of sin. Sin begets sin; it fosters evil. The 100,000+ deaths that have occurred in current armed conflicts in places like Ukraine, Palestine, Myanmar, Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere are not occurring in a vacuum. Sin layered upon sin has resulted in hatred and malice and, inevitably, death.

We don’t have to go to Kiev to see the results of sin. We can look in our own homes, where sin results in anger, unkindness, and division – division from people and, more ominously, from God.

Now go back to Bethlehem. Here lies the Baby over whom so much fuss is made. He is about 19 inches long and weighs about six pounds. How can this helpless baby save his people from their sins?

We look in the manger and see a baby wrapped up like a mummy to ward off the cold. God sees the Bridge between heaven and earth—Jacob’s ladder, if you will, by which heaven descends to earth in order to carry humanity back with it. He is like every other baby ever born: he is fully human. He is unlike any other baby ever born; he is fully God. He is the bridge between humanity and God, the doorway to eternal life. In Bethlehem that first Christmas, by the very nature of what this Child was, the long work of salvation had begun.

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Mary Knew Who (No, it’s not a Dr. Seuss Story)

Posted on December 19, 2024 by salooper57

Orville and Wilbur Wright somehow persevered through one failure after another in their attempts to get their new flying machine off the ground. If you’ve ever sat on an airport terminal floor with thousands of other people waiting for flights to resume, you may have wished they hadn’t. But they did. On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville achieved the first successful manned flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle. After some very public failures, it was their moment of triumph. The brothers were so excited that they ran to the nearest Western Union office and wired their sister Katherine, “We did it [stop]. We have actually flown in the air 120 feet [stop]. Will be home for Christmas [stop].”

Katherine was elated. She showed the telegram to the newspaper editor, who read the message and was impressed. His story appeared in the next edition. It was headlined, “Orville and Wilbur Wright Will Be Home for Christmas.”  

Like that editor, we can miss the point, especially when Christmas is involved. This Advent Season, we want to look at the point of it all – what Christmas is really about – and we are going to begin with the first scene in the Christmas story, which takes place nine months before Bethlehem and its overcrowded “inn.” We are going back to what the Church calls “the Annunciation” – the day when Mary was told that she would give birth to God’s Son, the Messiah.

Look at verse 26: “In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee.” Luke was writing to Gentile readers for whom the name Nazareth would mean nothing. Nazareth was a little town, undistinguished by association with any great men or women, and few Gentiles would have ever heard of it, so he informs his readers that it was located in Galilee.

God sent the angel Gabriel to a young woman who was engaged to a descendent of King David, a man named Joseph. There are some important words to note in the 27th verse. First the word, virgin. Any reader familiar with the Old Testament would immediately recognize an allusion to the messianic prophecy of Isaiah: “This will be a sign unto you: the virgin shall conceive, and shall bear a son, and he will be called Immanuel.”[1]

Bible scholars point out that the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7 can signify any young, unmarried woman, and not just a virgin. That is true enough, but that that is what Luke intended to convey is beyond doubt. Look at Mary’s question in verse 34, “How can this be,” (that is, “How can I have a child?”), “since I am a virgin?” Though the NIV uses the word “virgin” to translate both verses, a literal rendering of verse 34 runs, “How can this be, since I know not a man?” To know in this context is an ancient euphemism for having sexual relations. Mary was a virgin.

The other word to look at in verse 27 is the one the NIV translated, “pledged”. It is a perfect tense verb meaning to betroth. In Jewish culture, a betrothal or engagement was as binding as marriage. If a man wanted to end an engagement, he didn’t just ask for his ring back. He had to file divorce papers! We know from St. Matthew that this was just what Joseph had decided to do, because he believed Mary had been unfaithful to him. She told him she was pregnant, and he knew it wasn’t his baby.

Apparently, the meeting between the angel and Mary took place indoors, because verse 28 says (literally), “And entering to her he [the angel] said…” Do you remember what happened when this same angel Gabriel entered the temple to deliver a message to the priest Zechariah? The text says Zechariah was “startled and afraid.” Mary doesn’t seem to be either. While she was “troubled,” it was by the angel’s words rather than his presence. This was an altogether extraordinary young woman.

“The angel went to her” (v. 28) “and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favored!’” The Douay-Rheims Version, following the Latin Vulgate, translates, “Hail, full of grace!” which is, of course, the language of the “Hail Mary” prayer. But the idea here is not that Mary is so full of grace that she is able to dispense it to others, but that she herself is graced by God—is highly favored. Even contemporary Catholic versions translate it that way.

Verse 29: “Mary was greatly troubled (or “very perplexed,” as in the NASB) at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.” Mary was troubled and wondered what… Now, that’s beginning to sound like the rest of us. We are frequently troubled by what: What is going to happen? What does this mean? What am I supposed to do? Apparently, the mother of our Lord, blessed among women (as Elizabeth calls her in verse 42), also wondered about these things.

Verse 30 is a restatement of the greeting in verse 28: “You have found favor with God.” We are liable to think that those who have favor with God will have an easy time in life, but it doesn’t really work that way. Having favor is not at all synonymous with being pampered. Those most favored by God are those from whom God expects most. Noah found favor with the Lord and was given a hundred years of labor. Mary, who is highly favored and is blessed among women, is promised a soul-piercing sword.

Now, look at the second part of the angel’s message. It answers the what question. Verse 31: “You will be with child and will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.” Now, we have the what: this young Jewish girl will conceive and bear a Son who will be a great and powerful king, and will be called the Son of the Most High.

That sounds wonderful, but there is a problem. There usually is. The problem is not with the content of the message, the what – that’s great – but with the fulfillment of the message, the how. “How can this be,” Mary asks (this is verse 34), “since I am a virgin?” Or, as it is in the Greek, “since I have do not know a man.” That is, “I’ve not had sex.” The “What” leads Mary to ask “How?” God’s favored people often find it so. The what can be so unexpected, so unmanageable, that they cannot get a handle on it. So, of course, they ask “How can this be?

The Lord says to Moses, “I am going to free my people from slavery in Egypt. So, you, Moses, go and do it.” That was the what, and it left Moses in shock. “How can a failure like me do this? How is anyone even going to believe me? How can I, of all people, go to Pharaoh?” When the Lord tells Samuel what – “It is time to anoint my new king” – Samuel says, “How can I anoint the king? When Saul hears about it, he will kill me.” To Nicodemus Jesus says, “Your only hope of even seeing the kingdom is to be born again.” That was the what. Nicodemus’s response: “How can this be?” Jesus says to Philip, “Feed this massive crowd.” Immediately, the good Philip’s mind asks, “How?” “Feeding this crowd would take eight month’s wages!”

But whenever God tells us what, he already knows how. And when he shares with us the how, we will find that it is His way, not ours. Who would ever have guessed that God would free Israel from Egypt the way he did, with an army of frogs, gnats, and locusts? Who would have thought that he would send his people to conquer Jericho with trumpets and ram’s horns, or use the farmer Gideon and his three hundred men to defeat an invading army? He does things his own way. Look at the answer to Mary’s how question, verse 35: “The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God’.” The how was something that no one would have guessed. The Virgin will conceive by the direct and miraculous intervention of God.

I wonder what Mary thought of that answer. We moderns have somehow got the idea that ancient people could believe in virgin births without much trouble. They were, after all, unenlightened, uncivilized, credulous innocents. But that is nonsense! Mary was no more likely to give credence to virgin births than you are. Nor was her fiancé, Joseph, who planned to call off the engagement when he heard about the pregnancy. I think Mary must have been expecting a different kind of answer, something like: “You’ll marry Joseph and you will soon bear him a child, and will live happily ever after, as befits the mother of a king”—a Hallmark movie ending. That’s what we would expect. It was not what God did. His way was completely unexpected.

The angel understands how hard this is to believe and helps Mary resolve her doubts. This is verse 36: “Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.” The angel does not go into the technical aspects of miraculous conception, mitosis, and cell division. He knows that what Mary needs is not instruction, but assurance. Some of you older folks remember the song “It is no secret what God can do.” The second line is, “What He’s done for others, he’ll do for you.” That is how the angel encourages Mary to trust God. He says, “Are you worried that God cannot handle the how? Just look at what he did for Elizabeth! That was impossible, too, but what is impossible with people is a lead pipe cinch for God.”

That verse, verse 37, reads literally, “Because with God every word is not impossible” or, smoothing it into English, ” Nothing God says he will do is impossible for Him.” If God says it, he will do it.

Mary takes him at his word, which is the essence of faith. “I am the Lord’s servant,” she says. “May it be to me as you have said.” Here is a shining example of faith, a beautiful model of the submission that we also are called to offer to God. But when Mary said yes, do you think she had a clue about what she was getting herself into—the rumors, gossip, ostracism, and hostility? Instead of the beautiful wedding young girls dream about, a quick and private ceremony. Then compelled to relocate to a new community. And that was all in the first nine months. Unwelcome in Joseph’s hometown, alone at the birth of her son. And as if that were not enough, when things finally settled down, the family was again uprooted and forced to flee as refugees to Egypt. But even that does not touch on the great pain that faithful Simeon predicted would come: “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” Did Mary know what she was getting into when she said yes to God? Not a chance. Will we know what we are getting into when we say yes to God? Certainly not. But we don’t have to.

You see, Mary was able to take God at his word and yield to his will because she knew the answer to a more important question than what or how. She knew that answer to the question, Who? We get all frazzled with the what and how whenever we fail to ask, Who? Mary knew Who. Look at her famous song, called the Magnificat, which begins in verse 46 with “My soul praises the Lord,” or “My soul magnifies the Lord.” She knows who is at work in her life. He is the Lord. He is, verse 47, the savior. He is the one who, verse 48, is mindful of our state. (One thinks of David in Psalm 8:4: “What is man that thou art mindful of him or the son of man that Thou carest for him?”) Mary knows her God is deeply concerned about his people. What about you? Do you really believe that God cares for you? That he wants what is best for you? Or do you feel like you are on your own?

There is more. Mary’s God is not only mindful, He is masterful; he is the Mighty One, verse 49. He wants what is best for us – that goes to his character. And he is able to bring it about – that goes to his ability. He performs mighty deeds with his arm. He brings down rulers, verse 52. He is sovereign. Mary knew all this. Do you? If your God cannot do what he wants to do, if he is not strong enough to govern the universe or caring enough to govern your life, your God is too small. You must come to David’s conviction: “That you, O God, are strong, (you do what you want), and that you, O God, are loving (what you want is always our good).[2] You will never be able to take God at his word, you will keep stumbling over the what and the how, until, like Mary, you can answer the question, Who?

Now, there is one more question that can plague us and, unanswered, can keep us from the obedience of faith: The question, “Why?” Mary does not get deeply entangled in “Why?” because she knows Who. She gives the why question a brief answer in verse 55: “…to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.” Why? Because he said so. He keeps his word. Why is not a big problem when you know Who.

But when you don’t know Who, Why can ground you into dust. Why, God, did you allow this to happen to me? Why did you let my wife suffer this illness? Why let the business I work for close down? Why make me the way you did? Why? Why? Why?

Glenn Chambers was a young man from New York who was planning on working with the Christian organization, Voice of the Andes. It had been his dream to serve God in the lives of South Americans through Christian Radio. He was on his way to fulfill that dream when the Avianca Airline flight he took from Miami to Quito crashed into a mountain outside Bogota. Glenn, the entire crew, and all the passengers were killed.

Before he left the Miami Airport earlier that day, Glenn decided to write his mom a note. He had no paper so he picked up a scrap of advertisement from the floor that had the word WHY printed in large letters across the front of it. He dashed off a quick note to his mom, stuck it in a mailbox, then got on the ill-fated plane.

A few days later, after she heard about the plane crash, an envelope with Glenn’s handwriting was delivered to Mrs. Chambers. She opened it to find the word WHY in large, bold print, staring up at her. The jarring echo of her own thoughts must have stunned her. But Mrs. Chambers did not get stuck on WHY because she understood WHO. The sovereign one who works out all things according to his plan – that’s Who. The Caring one who is concerned with our eternal well-being – that’s Who. The Mighty One who has the power to do whatever he chooses – that’s Who. He is too kind to do anything cruel and too wise to ever make a mistake, though he is too deep for shallow creatures like us to understand.[3]    

But he is not too far to hear us, or too busy to come to our aid. He has come. And he did so by a route we could never have imagined: via the virgin’s womb. He has taken our humanity on – and into – himself. And he will allow nothing to separate us from God’s unending, unstoppable love.

[1] Isa. 7:14

[2] Ps. 62:11

[3] William Peterson, How to Be a Saint While Lying Flat on Your Back. Quoted in The Tardy Oxcart by Charles Swindoll. Nashville: Word Publishing, C 1998. Pp. 245-246

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A Case in Point: Christmas and the Competence of God

Posted on December 14, 2024 by salooper57
Event Planning Photo by Startup Stock Photos on Pexels.com

If God were to write a resume, what kinds of things might he include on it? One thing is for certain: it would not be like any other resume ever written. Who else has worked as a universe creator, galaxy-spinner, nuclear engineer, quantum mechanic, genetics specialist, wind-maker, earth-shaker, sky-walker, life-giver? His resume is endless. One important role it would include is Event Planner.

God is the ultimate Event Planner. We see evidence of his extraordinary ability throughout Scripture, but especially in the incarnation. He started planning a long time before the event, laid the groundwork perfectly, and pulled it off with enormous grace and supernatural ability.

After Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph took their new baby to Jerusalem to make the required sacrifice. God led Simeon, an old man living there (Luke 2:25), into the temple at just the right moment for the four of them to meet. George Balanchine himself could not have choreographed it all so well. (Of course, Choreographer is also on his resume.)

But even the greatest choreographer needs dancers who know the steps. God will not use marionettes. His people need to learn the dance, and old Simeon was well-practiced in it. He knew the steps.

I’ve wondered what Mary and Joseph thought when this old man took their special baby from them. Were they worried? Was the old guy some kind of crank? Some religious nut? Was Jesus safe with him?

Ah, but Simeon was one of the great ones, though the people around Jerusalem may not have noticed. Who pays attention to old men with no money and no political power? But that didn’t matter to Simeon—he did not dance for them! He lived before the Audience of One, and it was his approval that motivated him.

He took the baby from them and felt the consolation of Israel, for which he had so long watched and waited, squirming in his arms. And Israel’s consolation weighed about six pounds. He looked down at the Lord’s Messiah, (2:26), and though his feet were still on the ground his heart soared to heaven.

Filled with perfect contentment, this beautiful, holy man says to God, “Dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation . . .” Other people saw a baby carried by a poor woman and her husband, but Simeon’s eyes saw salvation. Not only had the old man taught his feet to dance, he had taught his eyes to see.       

What he says next (2: 31) brings us back to God’s event planning superpowers: “…your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people.” Here we see the Event Planner at the top of his game. The word translated “prepared” is the same word used of preparing a room for guests, of preparing a meal, and of the preparations under way for us in our “Father’s house.”

Simeon says that the preparations for this child had been made in the sight of all people, or literally, “in front of the faces of all people.” Preparations were begun before the foundations of the earth were laid. A thousand years earlier, the Event Planner revealed that a descendant of King David would reign on his throne forever. Then, he issued a press release: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). 700 years before Mary and Joseph met Simeon, the Event Planner’s publicist Micah announced that Bethlehem would be the site of the big event (Micah 5:2). The Event Planner does not procrastinate.

And when there are hiccups, he knows what to do. The virgin Isaiah mentioned did not live anywhere near Bethlehem. She was already well-along in her pregnancy, and her home was in another part of the country. Her new husband had a job in Nazareth, in Galilee, and they had no intention of going to Bethlehem. So how could the Event Planner make things turn out right? Even though he had an eternity to make plans, it seemed as if he had run out of time.

But the Event Planner never breaks a sweat. He has the resources of heaven at his disposal and the duration of eternity in which to work, and he has thought of everything. We see it in the incarnation. Mary is in Nazareth, with no reason on earth to go to Bethlehem. But then a man living 2,500 miles away, whom Mary knows almost nothing about (and who certainly never heard of her), speaks a few words in a conference room. “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” That was all it took to get Mary to Bethlehem. Does the Event Planner know what he’s doing, or not?

George Balanchine, watch and learn! The Master brought it all together, and he used steps in the choreography that others would never have thought of—would have said were impossible. But then he not only plans, he also has the resources to work “out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1:11).

The Event Planner uses the skills displayed in the incarnation in our lives too. He is able to make all things (and people, including us) co-labor with him in bringing good for his children. Christmas is the proof that he “is able … to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20, NLT).

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Holy Communion: What Is All It About?

Posted on December 12, 2024 by salooper57

“For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself” (1 Cor. 11:29, KJV).

If that verse has ever scared you (or some pastor has scared you with that verse), you might want to read this sermon.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com

The church of Jesus Christ has repeatedly divided over what our church is going to do a few minutes from now: take the Lord’s Supper. In the Fourth Lateran Council, held in 1215, the Church of Rome officially adopted the view known as transubstantiation, which holds that the substance of the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. 350 years later, at the Council of Trent, the church determined that the Eucharist (which is another word for the Lord’s Supper) is propitiatory, which means that by taking it we can turn away God’s wrath and find forgiveness.

The monk and reformer Martin Luther rejected those views. He taught his followers that Christ’s body and blood are truly present in the bread and the wine, but that the bread and wine do not change substance to become body and blood.

In 1529, Luther met with another key player in the Reformation, the Swiss pastor Ulrich Zwingli, and they tried to unite the two branches of the newly minted reform movement, the Evangelicals of Germany (we know them as Lutherans) and the Reformed Church of Switzerland. They failed. They couldn’t get past their differences regarding the Lord’s Supper.

Protestants divided from Catholics over the Communion Table. Then Protestants divided from other Protestants – and continued to divide. Did you know that America’s greatest theologian, Jonathon Edwards, was removed from his pulpit and fired because of his view that only church members should be allowed to take part in Communion? In the last twenty years, controversy over the table has erupted again in the Roman Catholic church, with archbishops denying communion to high-profile politicians.

How ironic that this table, which proclaims the unity of Christ’s church, has been the cause of so much division. But it is not merely ironic. It is diabolic.

There remains a lot of confusion over the Lord’s Supper. Some large American churches have dropped it from their worship gatherings. The process of serving communion to thousands of people is too unwieldy and time-consuming. And besides that, according to something I read a few years ago, the Lord’s Supper does not fare well in focus groups.

But we want it to fare well at California Road Missionary Church. It is important, and it is beautiful. But I’m afraid that many people do not see it that way. I say that because there was a time when I did not see it that way.

After I became a Christian, I was reticent to take communion. The preacher would always warn us to examine ourselves, which is entirely biblical, but he never told us what to look for in that examination. He did, however, make the consequences of a slipshod examination perfectly clear: Unless one discerned the Lord’s body – whatever that meant – he would eat and drink (this was the King James Version) “damnation” to himself – whatever that meant. I, for one, didn’t want to find out.

So, I examined myself for sins – which were about as hard to find as snowflakes in a blizzard – and tried to feel sufficiently sorry for them. But I never knew if I succeeded, and so I couldn’t be sure whether I was eating and drinking damnation.

Things that the Lord’s Supper should have done it did not do (at least for me, though I think this was true for others as well). Instead of uniting me to other Christians, it isolated me from them in an introspective bubble. Instead of helping me look to Christ and remember him, it led me to look to my sins and remember them. Instead of evoking wonder and inspiring faith, the Lord’s Supper evoked discouragement and inspired dread.

I think this happened for a couple of reasons, one having to do with my failure and the other with the church’s. The Lord’s Supper did not bless me because I was often not in a place where I could be blessed. I did not know Christ as my life but only as my ticket to the afterlife. I did not share St. Paul’s desire to please him; I only feared the trouble that would come from displeasing him. I thought (at least when it was time to take communion) about losing my salvation but not about living my salvation. How could someone like that be blessed at the Communion Table?

But the church failed too. It lifted the Scripture about examining oneself out of its context and used it to evoke guilt so that church members would try harder next time. I don’t blame the pastors at our church; it’s what they had been taught. They were just doing what they had seen done. But this approach to Scripture amounts to biblical malfeasance.

Let’s look at St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, and we will find there three things that the Lord’s Supper should do: (1) unite us to other Christians; (2) help us remember Christ; and (3) stimulate our faith.

First, we’ll look at those cautionary verses that were always read in my home church, verses 27-31: “So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment [damnation in the King James] on themselves. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we were more discerning with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such judgment.”

I do not want to downplay the warning that is present in these verses. It is serious. But if we lift these verses out of their context, as I have just done, we are liable to misunderstand what we are being warned against. So, let’s place them back in their context.

Beginning in verse 17, Paul sternly rebukes the Corinthians for the way they eat the Lord’s Supper. Notice (verse 18) what is uppermost on his mind: “I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it.” The idea that when they gathered to worship there were divisions (we get our words “schisms” from this Greek word) and that those divisions were intentional, horribly upset Paul.

In verse 19, he adds: “No doubt there have to be differences (this Greek word passes over into English as “heresies”) among you to show which of you have God’s approval.” I take this to be sarcasm, as do most biblical scholars. Some people disagree. I once heard a man argue that there must be differences in order to reveal who is genuine and who is not. That idea is wrong for two reasons: one, this part of the letter drips with rhetorical flourish. One of the Corinthians’ criticisms of Paul was that he lacked the oratorical skills of Corinth’s best public speakers, so Paul was giving them rhetorical flourish with both barrels, and sarcasm was standard ammunition in ancient rhetoric.

Secondly, and more importantly, Paul never uses the word for divisions nor the one for differences (“schisms” and “heresies”) in a positive way. They are always condemned, and I find it extremely unlikely that he made an exception in this case.

Paul hated divisions in the church, which is God’s living advertisement for his reconciling power. In its race-, nation-, and ethnicity-transcending love (think of first century Jews and Gentiles), the church offers a foretaste of the age to come. Its unity reflects the eternal unity of the Father and the Son. But the Corinthian church was undermining its own message by allowing, ignoring, and reinforcing divisions.

We need a little background to understand what is happening here. The Christians in Corinth met together in homes (church buildings would not exist for a couple of centuries). At least on occasion, they all met together in the same home, which seems to be what verse 20 is describing. Perhaps they only took the Lord’s Supper at these big gatherings, but they may have done it at their smaller meetings as well.

When they celebrated the Lord’s Supper, they did it differently than we do. It was not part of an hour-long worship service, but part of a shared meal. We don’t know if they celebrated the Lord’s Supper before or after the regular meal. What we do know is they incorporated the Lord’s Supper into a church fellowship meal.

That meal had become an occasion of division. These large gatherings required a large house, which meant the church gathered at the home of one of its wealthier members. The best room would only seat a small number of people – twelve, at most. The rest of the church would be seated here and there around the atrium.

This was very similar to the other large dinner parties that wealthy people gave. (Large dinner parties were a thing in first century Corinth.) And like those parties, the host’s friends (usually other wealthy people) sat in the triclinium (the dining room) and were served the largest portions, the best cuts of meat, and the finest wine. People in the atrium got poorer quality and less quantity. Some Christians – probably slaves who came late to dinner because of work – even went without. By the time they arrived the only food left was the bread of the Lord’s Supper, and the only drink the wine of the cup of blessing.

The Corinthian church mirrored Corinthian society. But the church was meant to reflect Christ, not culture: “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Colossians 3:11).

The church of Jesus was designed to be different from every other people group on earth. Men are brothers, women are sisters, regardless of their race, their nationality, their language, or their economic status. And the Communion Table proclaims this. Paul had just written, “Because there is one loaf [at the Communion Table], we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.” The Corinthians’ behavior at the Lord’s Supper contradicted that proclamation.

On a Sunday not long after the Civil War ended, people were at church in Richmond, VA, for worship. Unlike us, their practice was to go forward to receive communion. To everyone’s surprise, the first person to go forward was black.

A shockwave ran through the congregation. People gasped and murmured. The Episcopal priest refused to give the man communion. The rest of the people – all white – remained fixed in their pews. Then, Robert E. Lee himself rose and went forward. But instead of acknowledging the man as a brother, he acted as if the man didn’t exist. The rest of the all-white church followed his example, including the priest. That week, Richmond’s newspaper praised General Lee for his “dignified and self-possessed manner” and called it “a grand exhibition of superiority by a true Christian.”[1] The church mirrored society, not Christ. The Apostle Paul would have rebuked them with both barrels.

This table proclaims our oneness. Those who come to this table not only accept Jesus into their hearts; they accept his people there too. If you are unwilling to do this, you are unready for this meal. This is the primary meaning – I don’t deny that there are others – behind Paul’s words about “discerning the body.” And it is about this – again, I don’t deny there may be secondary meanings – that we examine ourselves.

This table is also the occasion for our remembering Christ. We do this as a remembrance (verse 25). A remembrance is more than a thought captured in a memory. When the Jews remembered Passover, they didn’t just have a thought about it; they reenacted it. For example, they removed all the leaven from their homes and made and ate the same meal their ancestors made and ate on that first Passover. When they remembered the Lord’s faithfulness during their wilderness wanderings, they built lean-tos and put up tents and lived outdoors for a week, just as their ancestors had done in the wilderness. They didn’t just remember with their heads, but with their hands and their bodies. We remember Jesus and what he did not just with words, but with actions, not just with our heads but with our hands and our mouths. We reenact the covenant meal Jesus and his disciples ate.

When the Jews reenacted Passover, they took their place as God’s covenant people. When we take the Lord’s Supper, we take our place as God’s new covenant people. The Lord’s Supper is not just a ritual, it is a reminder. It is not just a custom, it is a commitment – a reaffirmation of the choice we made to be in covenant with God Almighty and, more importantly, the choice he made to be in covenant with us at great cost to himself.

When we come to this table, we step into the past or, perhaps, bring the past into the present. Here we are, with Christ. We affirm our place in the covenant of blood. We share in his death. We say to the Lord Jesus, “I take my cross and follow you.”

I said a moment ago that when we come to the Table, we step into the past or bring the past into the present. But there is more to it than that. The Lord’s table exists as an eddy in time, a temporal vortex where past and future meet. We reenact that night. We gather around Jesus and hear him say, “This is my body, which is for you. This is my blood of the new covenant.” We meet him by faith at the table. Those without faith who step into the eddy are flung back out. Those with faith are nourished by grace.

When we step into this temporal vortex, we don’t just remember; we taste the past. It tastes like unleavened bread and like grape juice. We hear it in Christ’s commands, “Take, eat!” and “All of you drink it.”

And we don’t just find the past here – here’s the wonder of it – we encounter the future; and that inspires our faith. Jesus said, “I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Luke 22:18). From our vantage point at the table, we can see the kingdom of God coming. We can almost taste that feast for all peoples, prepared by God himself, with its “best of meats and finest of wines” (Isaiah 25:6). At this meal, we can hear the voice from the throne saying, “Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, both small and great!” (Rev. 19:5). We hear the great multitude shouting: “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready” (Rev. 19:6-8). We join in the shout: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).

And when we leave here and go back into our time and place, our routines, our hassles, our sicknesses, the threats we face, even the coming of death itself, that shout rings in our ears. We know that “All things are [ours], whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are [ours], and [we] are of Christ, and Christ is of God” (1 Cor. 3:21-23). We know this because we touched the future when we came to this table.

We not only touch the future; we are a portent of it. In Dubai, you can tour the newly-opened Museum of the Future. There are 23 floors of exhibits, one of which is named, “Tomorrow Today.” Another is a three-floor exhibit of life in 2071. You can see what futurists think people will be like and what they will be doing in time to come.

You don’t need to go to Dubai to see an exhibition of the future. You can just go to church. We put the future on display, or at least that is what God intends. By declaring that Jesus Christ is Lord, we anticipate the day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. By loving each other and living in unity, we show what the people of the future will be like. It is an act of faith to love our brothers and sisters now and here as we will love them then and there. But when we do so, we become a sign to the world that the future – the kingdom of God – is coming upon them.

PRAYER

We are about to transcend time, touch the past, herald the future. If you have faith in Jesus Christ, I invite you to step into the vortex. I invite you to eat this bread, and drink this cup, and love these people.

[1] Quoted by Skye Jenthani in What If Jesus Was Serious About the Church, Moody Publishers, © 2022, p.89

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Church, Church Life, Encouragement, Peace with God, Sermons | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Searching for the Gate of Heaven

Posted on December 7, 2024 by salooper57

Your doorbell rings. You open the door and find two strangers handing out pamphlets. They ask if you know whether you will go to heaven when you die. You know where this is heading, but you go with it and say, “How can I know I am going to heaven?”

Depending on the religious tradition, they will tell you how you can know, or tell you that no one can know. If they are from an Evangelical Christian tradition, they will tell you that if you believe in Jesus, you can know that you are going to heaven, and they might use (or misuse) 1 John 5:12-13 to support their claim.

Gate of Heaven, Pura Luhur Lempuyang, Bali (Wiki Media Commons) Photo by Mehmet Kalcay on Pexels.com

It’s interesting that people today want to know how they can get into heaven. In earlier ages, people were very interested in where they could get into heaven. The idea that there is a portal – or portals – into heaven is very old.

Even today, there are numerous places on the planet that are reputed to be gateways into heaven. In China, for example, there is the Tianmen Mountain, with its enormous opening that appears to lead into the heavens. There is a Hindu temple in Bali that features the picturesque “Gates of Heaven.” Tourists travel from around the globe just to see it.

The ziggurat mentioned in Genesis 11, known as the Tower of Babel, was likely constructed to be a gate of heaven. The idea that humans could advance upon God, could enter his space unbidden, is a powerful idea. Those who control the gate of heaven can control humanity—just think of the churches and religious leaders who have appointed themselves the gatekeepers of heaven. No wonder God intervened to put an end to the construction project.

Later in Genesis, the patriarch Jacob has left home in a hurry. He has deceived his father, infuriated his brother, and worn out his welcome. He is on his way to visit relatives in Paddan-Aram, about 450 miles to the northeast. After traveling about fifty miles, he makes camp near the ancient town of Luz.

Jacob finds a flat rock to use as a pillow, and as he sleeps, he has a vivid dream. (If I slept on a pillow like that, I suspect I would have dreams too.) In his dream, he sees a ladder (or better, a staircase) reaching into heaven. On those stairs are angels ascending and descending, and from the top of the stairs God speaks to him.

When Jacob awoke, it was with a sense of awe. He said to himself, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” He had stumbled on a portal into the heavenlies. He set up a marker for himself, and named the place Beth-El – “House of God.”

Humanity has always been fascinated with the idea that there are gateways on earth that lead into heaven. That fascination showed up again in the 1990s, and the results were tragic. Marshall Applewhite left his post as a music teacher at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and then met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse who was deeply interested in the occult. The two of them launched a religious movement that became known as “Heaven’s Gate.”

Early on, Applewhite and Nettles taught that people could transform themselves into immortal, extraterrestrial life forms by practicing a kind of asceticism. They described this transformation as the next step in evolution. Applewhite and Nettles represented themselves as the bodily vehicles of extraterrestrial beings with superhuman knowledge.

After Nettles died of cancer, Applewhite shifted his teaching. Instead of ascending to the next level of evolution through asceticism, they would ascend via a spacecraft. The Gate of Heaven was to be the Starship Enterprise—or something like it. Of course, only those who were following Applewhite’s lead would be qualified for transport.

When the Hale-Bopp comet came near to earth in the mid-1990s, Applewhite claimed that a UFO hidden in the comet’s tale was coming to take away his followers. He revised that teaching later, saying that only the spirits of his followers would be able to ascend, and so it would be necessary for everyone in the group to free themselves from their bodies, i.e., commit suicide. The group posted the following message on their website just prior to the mass suicide: “Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate … our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion… We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go…”

Jesus also used the language of heaven’s gate. He did not suggest the gate into heaven was fixed locally at places like Beth-El or Tianmen Mountain. He presented himself as the gate of heaven (or better, the gate into life). “I am the gate,” he says in John 10:9; “whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief” – think of Marshall Applewhite – “comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

In language intended to evoke Jacob’s experience at the “gate of heaven,” Jesus told the disciple Nathaniel, “I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

Today, people talk about how to get into heaven. The ancients talked about where to get into heaven. But there is a better question than “How?” and “Where?” We should be asking, “Who?” Who can lead us into life? Who can bring us to God?

Jesus is the one who grants access into God’s grace (Romans 5:1). The Greek word for “access” is “prosagōgē.” The prosagōgāse was the powerful official who had authority to grant men and women access to the king. The Bible presents Jesus as the prosagōgāse. He is the “door into life,” the true “gate” of heaven, the one who suffered “that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18; Hebrews 10:19-21).

The Gate of Heaven is not a place, like the temple at Pura Luhur Lempuyang in Bali. It is not a thing, like Marshall Applewhite’s hidden UFO. It is a person.

Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (1 John 14:6)

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What Are We Doing When We Worship?

Posted on December 5, 2024 by salooper57
Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels.com

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.

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Grateful People Know These Two Things About God

Posted on November 30, 2024 by salooper57
Photo by Gu00fcl Iu015fu0131k on Pexels.com

A grateful Christian is a walking advertisement for the life that Jesus offers. The person “overflowing with thankfulness,” as Paul describes it, is the best publicity there is for the truth. He or she is a principal selling point for the Christian way of life. The grateful person honors God and brings him glory. The Psalmist says, “I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving glorifies God. The thanksgiving of God’s people, St. Paul says, “overflow[s] to the glory of God.”

Gratitude is also a thermometer of an individual’s spiritual health. Where gratitude is low, spiritual health cannot be high. Where gratitude is absent, courageous faith is missing. When gratitude is not present, the glory for accomplishments inevitably rests with gifted people, not with the gracious God.

A life “overflowing with thankfulness” not only glorifies God and pleases him, it opens the door to new opportunities—opportunities that an ungrateful person will never see. “He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.” The grateful person sees God at work in his life, sees the “salvation of God” with his own eyes. The ungrateful person does not.

This, of course, makes the grateful person more grateful and the ungrateful person more of an ingrate. Newton’s first law of motion has a spiritual counterpart: In the absence of a net force, a spirit in motion remains in motion indefinitely along the same line. Just so, a grateful person will continue to be grateful, and will grow more grateful; an ungrateful person will grow more ungrateful—apart from a net force.

But gratefully, we are not apart from such a force. There is an outside influence at work in us, calling us to become a people known for their gratitude. But how? Do we have a part in this? Is there something we must do to become grateful people?

It is easy for us to get ahead of ourselves. Our first concern is not with what we must do, but with what we must know. Grateful people know two fundamental truths about God. They have not only grasped these truths; these truths have grasped them.

The first of these truths is that God is strong: An ungrateful spirit testifies against us that our God is too small. He is not the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac. He is not the “great and terrible” God of Israel. He is not the God who “is in heaven, who does whatever pleases him:”

The other of these truths is that God is loving; he pursues the good of his people at all times. Ingratitude testifies that our God is not the one who so loved the world that he gave; not the awesome, loving God of Calvary. These two fundamental truths about God – that he is strong and loving, great and good – must become part of the fabric of our thinking if we are to be thankful people.

These are truths the Israelites rehearsed again and again. The theme of Psalm 136 is that God is strong, and the psalmist hits the high notes of that theme again and again. But the refrain of that same Psalm is that God is loving. Twenty-six times, as if to drill the truth into our minds, we hear the refrain, “his love endures forever.”

In Psalm 62, God’s strength and love are brought together: “One thing God has spoken, two things I have heard: that you, O Lord, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving.”

You may think: “I already know that. God is strong. God is loving. Everybody knows that.” But our worry and our ingratitude testify that it has not gone from doctrine to practice, from head to heart. 

How can we move this knowledge from head to heart? One thing we can do is immerse ourselves in Scripture that magnifies God’s greatness and his goodness, his power and his love. So, for example, we could read Romans 8:28-39 every day for two weeks. When we’ve done that, we might want to read Isaiah 40-66 and jot down all the characteristics of God we find there, whether explicit or implicit. These truths will help wash out some of the false beliefs we have about God that linger in our minds.

A second step is to agree with God about what is good for us. Apart from such an agreement, gratitude will often be impossible. Conformation to the image of his Son is what God calls good. If that is also the good we have chosen, we can be grateful regardless of what is going on in our lives, for this is the good to which God makes all things work (see Romans 8:28-29).

One more thing: we can practice thanking God. We can be intentional about it. Intentional gratitude is something that mental health professionals recommend and that many people try. But if our thinking is not being changed, or if we are committed to a different “good” than the one God knows we need, we will not practice for long.

Addendum

My wife, who reads my column before it posts, said to me, “There are other Scripture you could cite to show that God is loving.” I agreed, but added that there are so many of them that my small article would become a book. A few minutes later, she said, “What about Psalm 103?”

sts, said to me, “There are other Scripture you could cite to show that God is loving.” I agreed, but added that there are so many of them that my small article would become a book. A few minutes later, she said, “What about Psalm 103?”

Psalm 103 is wonderful, and it includes what amount to the credal confession of the Old Testament: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.” This statement can be found in Psalms 86 and 145, in Exodus, Numbers, Nehemiah, Joel, and Jonah. The gist of this confession can be found in hundreds of other passages in the Old and New Testament.

It also needs to be found in our hearts and minds.

Psalm 103 is wonderful, and it includes what amount to the credal confession of the Old Testament: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.” This statement can be found in Psalms 86 and 145, in Exodus, Numbers, Nehemiah, Joel, and Jonah. The gist of this confession can be found in hundreds of other passages in the Old and New Testament.

It also needs to be found in our hearts and minds.

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Created to Worship

Posted on November 28, 2024 by salooper57

(This sermon was preached at California Road Missionary Church on November 3, 2024. The following two weeks look at other aspects of worship.)

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:14-22)

We’re going to surface into that passage in a few minutes, but first we’re going to do a deep dive into the biblical story, and we’ll start by thinking about “The Fall.” Do you know the expression? Theologians call the sin of Adam and what resulted from it, “The Fall.”

Our mental image of “The Fall” might be of a slip at the bottom of the basement stairs. That kind of fall can be pretty debilitating, but with a little rest, and maybe some physical therapy, will be fine. And if not, we can always see the surgeon.

But when we think of the Fall of Adam (“Adam” means “human”), don’t think of grandma on the basement steps. Think of Humpty Dumpty’s great fall. Or, better yet, think of Brad Guy. Brad is an Australian man who got a surprise on his 21st birthday. He was a big-time thrill-seeker, so his parents gifted him with a fourteen-thousand-foot skydiving experience. Since this was his first time, he went tandem with a veteran instructor. Brad was all geeked to try it.

They jumped out of the airplane and went hurtling towards earth. At 4,000 feet, when the instructor deployed the chute, Brad heard him swear. When you are falling from a height of over two miles at a speed of 120 miles per hour that is not what you want to hear. The primary chute tore when it opened, and sent the skydivers into a dizzying spiral. Brad asked the instructor, “Are we going to die?” and he answered, “I don’t know.”

Then the instructor pulled the chord on the back-up chute, but it got tangled in the primary chute, and the two men continued their wild spiral towards the earth. They landed in a shallow pond or swamp. The instructor hit the ground first, Brad landed on top of him, and, miraculously, both of them survived. But they were horribly broken up, and the mental anguish of the experience was almost unbearable.

When you think of The Fall of humanity, don’t think of grandma on the basement steps. Think of Brad at 14,000 feet.

The Fall of Adam shattered us. It broke our relationship with God and with each other. It damaged our ability to think. Our mind and will and emotions are all out of order. Humanity suffers a kind of spiritual PTSD to this day. If you think there might be something wrong with you, you are not mistaken. You are suffering from “The Fall.”

And it’s not just us who suffer. It is all of creation. If, when you watch the news or hear about natural or human-instigated disasters, and you think, “It’s not supposed to be this way,” you’re right. When man fell, he not only shattered himself; he broke the world. It’s damaged. It’s under a curse.

Maybe you’re thinking, “But that’s not fair! Why should so much hardship should result from one man’s mistake?” But what the humans did was not a mistake. It was a rebellion. That’s why C. S. Lewis said, “Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.”[1]

The Fall disordered the world God had so carefully ordered. You remember the story: On the first day of creation, God made light, separated it from darkness, and called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” And he saw that it was good.

On the second day, he separated the waters below from those above, and he called the expanse above sky. On the third day he divided the waters below by causing dry ground to appear. He named the dry ground “land” (or earth) and the waters “sea.” And just as on day one, he saw that it was good. Then he made vegetation – seed bearing plants that would reproduce. And that was good. It was a well-ordered world.

On the fourth day he placed lights in the sky – the sun, moon and stars. In so doing he gave us seasons, months and years. And he saw that was good.

On the fifth day, he filled the sea with creatures and the sky with birds. And he saw it was good. He blessed the sea creatures and the birds to reproduce and fill the earth.

On the sixth day he made land creatures of all kinds: cattle and sheep and horses and monkeys and snakes and giraffes and squirrels and dogs – every kind of creature you can think of; and God saw that was good. Then he made a human. And when he did that, he said, “It is very good.”

Then on the seventh day God rested.

When we ready this story, we tend to ask questions that would never have occurred to its first readers. We think of Genesis 1 as a defense of a six-day, supernatural creation. But the author wasn’t trying to prove a supernatural creation—he didn’t need to. When Genesis was written, no one doubted that the universe was divinely created.

The question was not, “Did a God create the world?” It was, “Which god created the world?” The Egyptians credited several of their gods. The Babylonians thought Apsu and Tiamat brought the earth into being. Just around the Mediterranean, there were plenty of Creation stories and plenty of gods to choose from. But Genesis claims that Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, created the world.

Before we go on, let’s pause to consider the word translated “created.” It always and only takes God as its subject. This word never refers to the creative act of any human. God stands alone as the Creator. We should also note that this word, which is used rather often in Scripture, is elsewhere never used of creating matter. Rather, it is used in regard to function. It has the idea of getting things up and running.

Now before you jump to the conclusion that God didn’t create matter – that it was already here and he just arranged it – you need to remember that other passages of Scripture, like Colossians 1 and Hebrews 1, teach that he did. He made everything. But Genesis is more interested in what he made everything for. In Genesis 1, God is getting his world up and running for a purpose. What is that purpose?

If you were a Jew reading Genesis in ancient times, you would notice something we often miss. You would say to yourself, “Oh, I see what’s going on here. The Creator God is making himself a temple.”

In ancient times, when a temple was completed, there would be seven days of dedication. So, when Solomon built the first temple, we read that he and all Israel “celebrated it before the LORD our God for seven days and seven days more” (1 Kings 8:65). They were so excited they celebrated a second seven-day dedication. In other ancient Near Eastern literature, we find the same seven-day period for temple dedication. That’s why an early reader coming to this passage would say, “Ah, the God is setting up a temple.”

And when he came to chapter 2, verse 15, and read that Adam was to work the garden and take care of it, his hypothesis would have been confirmed. Without exception, when those two verbs are used together in the Old Testament, they mean “to serve and to guard,” and are used most frequently of the priests who serve God in his temple, and guard it from any unclean thing that might enter. This is temple language.

When Genesis 2 tells us that God finished all the work he had been doing and on the seventh day rested, we need to realize he wasn’t taking a nap. He was taking his place – his place in the temple he had built. Eden was its holy of holies, where the humans met and worshiped their Creator. God’s plan was to extend his temple until it filled the whole earth. And the humans were to be his priests.

But the humans were not satisfied with being priests; they wanted to be gods. Do you remember the temptation to which they succumbed? “Eat of the fruit…and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). The humans who were made to worship chose rather to be worshiped. They imagined they could take God’s temple as their own; no longer his servants but his peers; perhaps even, his rivals. It was with the words “You will be like God” ringing in their ears that they ate the fruit. They did not make a mistake; they launched a rebellion.

And that rebellion resulted in a fall – a Brad Guy-fall-from-the-sky, crash-and-burn fall. Humanity survived, but we are not the same. The fall shattered the image of God in us. Instead of being his worshipers, we became self-worshipers. The temple (that we call earth) became a place of thorns and thistles, of water shortages and air pollution and hurricanes and tornados. The happy place where humans met God became the tragic place where humanity lost itself.

But here is the good news. God did not give up on his plan. The day will yet come when people will know and communicate with God. “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD,” as the prophets declared (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14). “No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah 31:34). God did not give up on his plan. He still hasn’t.

But how would God make it happen? That is the story of the Bible. After the Fall, God intended to establish a new covenant with humankind. Under that covenant, God would return humans to their rightful place – “they will be [God’s] people,” not his peers nor his rivals. And God would take his rightful place – “and [God] will be their God” (Jeremiah 31:33).

But a covenant must be ratified before it can take effect. And to ratify a covenant there must be a sacrifice. Do you remember what Jesus said on the eve of the crucifixion: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” (Luke 22:20). The plan to lift us up after The Fall, to restore the divine image in us, to reestablish fellowship between humans and God, and make the world once again into a temple has hinged on Jesus from the very beginning. He lifts up the fallen, restores the broken, reconciles the alienated, and becomes the mediator between God and humans. Through him the whole earth will again be God’s temple. Jesus is the key.

And that brings us to our text in Ephesians 2. “The Fall” not only resulted in the alienation of humans from God but in the alienation of humans from each other. But through his death, and as a sign of his power, Christ brought the most divided people – Jews and Gentiles – together and reconciled both to God. Now look at verse 18: “For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.”

Access to the Father by the Spirit—that’s temple/worship language. Do you see what’s happening? Through Jesus the restoration God promised has begun. Through what he’s done and who he is, humans can again meet with God. What the first Adam threw away the second Adam (Jesus) has recovered.

The first Adam made us a race of usurpers; the second Adam (verse 19) makes us God’s people and members of his household. The first Adam made us sinners. The second Adam makes us saints. Because of the first Adam we were lost; because of the second we are found. Jesus is the Restorer of lost things.

There’s a wonderful scene at the end of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Sam, the simple hero of the story, awakes from a coma-like state to find that all the horror of death and destruction is past. The rebellion and the myriad evils that accompanied it are over. To his amazement, he finds his dear friends alive and well, and he says, “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What has happened to the world?”  

Once we see what God has done and is doing through Jesus, we might ask the same question. “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” And the answer is yes. The rebellion will be put down, the lowly will be raised up, and our Humpty-Dumpty lives will be put back together again. Creation itself will be healed of its deep wounds.

Most of that is future, but the people of Jesus are a sign in the present, pointing to that future, especially as we overcome the alienating barriers of race and ethnicity in the church (Eph. 2:14-17). We are more than a sign. We are a construction project (v. 20), being “…built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone…”

But being built into what? That’s the question. What is this great purpose God has in mind for us? Well, go back to creation and ask what God was doing then. He was building a temple in which he and humans could meet and know each other and be known by each other. That purpose has not changed. God is still building a temple. Not a temple of dead stone but of living people. Verse 21: “In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.”

God’s plan is for us to be the entryway into his presence. In ancient times, inquirers went to Solomon’s temple to encounter God. Now they come to us (or we go to them). What a privilege! What a responsibility! This is why Paul tells the Corinthians, “…we are the temple of the living God,” and then citing Isaiah 52 and Ezekiel 20 adds: “…As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.’ Therefore, ‘Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.’” (2 Corinthians 6:16-17). That is temple talk.

He goes on: “Since we have these promises…” (that we will be his temple and he will live among us), “let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.” (2 Corinthians 7:1). The idea is that a temple must be pure for the god to indwell it, and we are the Lord’s temple. God intends to reveal himself through us to our neighbor, our family member, the server at the restaurant, and the mechanic at the garage. You and I individually and, even more importantly, you and I corporately, are to become the meeting place between God and people. We, verse 22, “are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”

And listen: the day is coming when the project will be completed, the dedication will be held, and “Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple…” (Malachi 3:1). People wrongly refer to that coming as “the end”; it is just the beginning.

Many things happen in a temple, but chief among them is worship. To belong to Christ is to be a worshiper. Worship shapes us. Worship heals us. Worship makes us whole.

When we do not worship God, we fall where Adam fell – into self-worship, fear and alienation. Worship is not something we go to; it is something we do – and can learn to do – all the time. Learning to worship is to a Christian what learning to fly is to a bird. Too many Christians never leave the nest because they never learn to worship. Next week we are going to get practical about the act of worship. If worship is crucial to our wellbeing, and to the world around us, then we need to learn everything we can that will help us be better worshipers – and what we learn might surprise us.

Blessing/Sending

Brothers and sisters, go into the world in the name of our great High Priest Jesus. Worship the LORD with gladness. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1952/2001), 56.

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