The Power of Vision, Part II

Dynamic Worship. A Sermon Preached August 22, 2004

by The Rev. David Harper

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Dynamic Worship

Father, your word is a lamp to our feet. Your word shows us where to walk. It is a light to our path. It shows us where you want us to go. Lord we are hungry for your word, for without your word we are simply left to our own devices, our own thoughts, our own ideas. Lord come to us, and speak that word which will give us direction, that word which will point your way for our lives. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Last weekend I began preaching a series called “The Power of Vision.” I ended by saying that God has given a vision to our church. The way we’ve described it, the way we’ve written it, the way we’ve defined it, is by using the word “calling.”

God is calling us “To make visible the power of God’s love, so all will come to know Christ.” The power of God’s love is already here. And so the question for us is this: how can you in your life, and how can we as a church community, make it visible?

I recounted the powerful story about Gideon that’s told in the book of Judges. With three hundred men he routed a Midianite army of scores of thousands. The strategy God gave him was to position his three hundred men around the valley where the Midianites were encamped. In the dead of night they had torches lit, but with jars placed over them—they didn’t want the Midianites to see the light at that particular point. When Gideon sounded the trumpet his men banged their jars together, smashing them. All of a sudden the light that was inside the jars blazed out. The sound and sight of that totally routed the Midianite enemy. It was a spectacular victory. I concluded with the question, “How can we break the jars that are keeping whatever God wants to make visible through my life and your life from blazing out?”

I want to answer that question over the next few weeks by talking about each of our church’s five mission statements. I don’t want to explain them; I want to preach them!

Each mission statement describes one of the five purposes that God has for our church, and for our individual lives. We learned about these during the Forty Days of Purpose.

The first way in which we’re going to cause the light of Christ and power of his love to become visible through the church is through dynamic worship.

I would like to begin by telling you a story. On October 11, 2001, I came to lead our Friday night service, The Father’s Blessing. I was feeling weary, exhausted, and discouraged. There was a great deal going on, not the least of which was my wife’s asthma, which had kept her home that night. Normally we come together—she leads The Father’s Blessing ministry—but not that night. I came feeling as though I were in the worst possible condition for God to use me. I would have preferred to have been anywhere else, just resting somewhere. I have to admit that I was feeling sorry for myself!

I sat in the front row, where my wife and I position ourselves so we can be in contact with the praise band. The people behind me began to worship. I knew who they were; I had seen them as I walked in, and I knew a little bit about their lives. I knew that it was no easy thing for those people to worship. Because of my pastoral relationship with them I knew that they had certain struggles.

I made a decision that night to enter into this worship. I needed to lay hold of the One who had laid hold of me, and not look down. And as I did that, as I made the decision to enter into worship, God began to reach me. He began to touch me, and to speak to me. As a matter of fact, He spoke a word of challenge, which came in the form of a pointed question. I found myself responding, “Yes Lord, I want to respond to what you are challenging me to lay hold of.” I left that meeting late at night feeling very, very different from how I had come in.

It was the experience of worship, within the fellowship of God’s people, that got me out of where I was and into a totally new and different place.

Worship is God’s first purpose for our lives. We learned during the Forty Days of Purpose: “Love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” But worship isn’t simply God’s first purpose for our individual lives; it is also God’s first purpose for his church.

Let me take you into Exodus, chapter 3, verse 12, where God gave this stunning word to Moses. He had been called by God to become Israel’s liberator. He didn’t feel up to the task; he felt very inadequate. But God said, You are the one I want to do it. He went on, “When you’ve brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” “Your goal, Moses,” God was saying, “isn’t simply to liberate people so that the shackles of their slavery are broken and they become a people with their own self-government and self-determination as a nation. The goal is that, once your people have become liberated, I want them to worship me.”

The goal of our church is the same. We saw it in Julissa’s baptism this morning. The reason why she has been set free from the old life, from the “Egypt” life, and has been baptized today, is not just so she can feel better about herself. It’s so that she can worship God on this mountain. Worship is God’s purpose for the church as we are born again, as we come to know and love the Lord Jesus, as the shackles of the old life fall away from us. We are to become a church and a people who worship God on this mountain. Dynamic worship is at the very heart of who we are as a people.

But what kind of worship is going to make visible the power of God’s love? What kind of worship is going to allow the power of God’s love to break out through our lives and to break out through this church?

I want to take you into Revelation 4:1, which we read a few minutes ago. This verse says three things about the kind of worship that allows God’s light and the power of his love to break out.

The first thing that Revelation says about worship is: Look up! “After this I looked and I saw a door that opened into heaven.” The reason why he could see a door open into heaven was because he was looking up. He wasn’t looking down. Neither was he looking around.

If he had been looking down, I would have understood! He was a prisoner on the Island of Patmos, in a maximum security facility. It was the place where the Romans sent criminals they considered to be especially dangerous, and they didn’t want them to escape. John was there because of his profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, not because of any crime he had committed—and he was surrounded by the most dangerous criminals.

He was on an island that was volcanic and wind­swept, where there were no trees. It was a barren and desolate place. If he’d looked around at the awfulness of his environment, he would have become consumed by discouragement, anger and self-pity. If he’d looked down into his circumstances, he might easily have spiraled down into depression, rage, and resentment. But on the island of Patmos, he looked up.

Some of you have been on “Patmos Island” places in your life, where you look around and nothing’s the way you want it. You look down, and all you can see are the ruins of your life. But in worship, we look up, as John did. He saw an open door into heaven. A door is a place of access. When he saw the open door, he realized that there was a place for him to go—the most magnificent, the most fantastic, the most liberating, the most beautiful and glorious place. He would never have known that if he hadn’t looked up.

It’s difficult to look up on Patmos. It’s also difficult to look up if you’re in a Philippian jail, as Paul and Silas were in Acts 16. It says there that “about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing praises to God.” They’d been lashed with the thirty-nine strokes. (They stopped at thirty-nine because forty was considered severe enough to kill you.) These apostles been brutalized by this kind of torture, and now they were in this dank cell, manacled, their feet in the stocks, with no way to get comfortable. If there was any situation where they might have looked down and in, it would have been in that jail. But like John on Patmos, Paul and Silas looked up, and in this terrible place they were praying and singing praises to God.

Some of you have been in Philippian jails, where you have felt confined, where you have felt that life has abused you, where you have felt victimized. If you want to become the kind of worshiper that’s going to allow the power of God’s love to become visible, you have to learn to look up, no matter what your circumstances may be.

Worship is not based on what we like: it is based on who we love. It is a decision. I made the decision to worship on October 11, 2001, because others around me had already made the decision—and that encouraged me to join them in what they had decided. It was not my natural inclination to worship in the place that I was in. The fact is that, when we worship God, we are often on a Patmos or in a Philippian jail. Our starting point doesn’t matter!

Believers who worship always look up. And let me tell you something: whenever we do, God will show us the open door. He will show us that door even when we see nothing in our circumstances where anything could ever change, where we feel we have run out of options. But when we make the decision to look up, when we look through an open door, we see that God has got something for us. So don’t look down into your circumstances, don’t look around at the other people and wonder what they’re doing if they’re not worshipping, if they’re standing there looking bored, if they’re not participating. Don’t be distracted. And don’t look in, because that’s going to kill you. Look up!

Here’s the second place that Revelation 4:1 tells us: Enter in. Don’t just look up and say, “Wow, that’s nice.” The open door represents an invitation. “Then the voice that had spoken to me at first, and that sounded like a trumpet said come up here.” God is saying: You have seen the open door, but now I want you to come through it.

It may be some time since you entered in. Maybe you have been looking down for a long time, or looking around. Perhaps you haven’t been very good at looking up because you’ve forgotten how to. But even if you have known how to look up, and you’ve faithfully done that, it may be a while since you’ve entered in. Sometimes we look up, get a little bit of refreshment from that, and think that’s all that God has for us. But he says, “No, there’s more. Hang in there. Don’t check out yet. When you enter in, when you allow me to draw you through that open door, there are things that I want to do in your life.”

Here’s the third thing that Revelation tell us about the kind of worship that makes the power of God’s love visible: Let him minister to you. “Come up here,” God said to John. “I will show you what must happen next.” Do you know what’s meant to happen next in your life? There’s more, there’s a “next place” that God has for you. There’s a “next place” that God has for our church. The status quo isn’t where he’s going to leave us. But we have to look up, we have to enter in, and then we have to let him minister to us, so he can show us the next place.

Maybe everything around you looks as though it’s shut down right now. Maybe you feel locked in, or trapped; but he says “No, there’s a next place for you. It’s a better place. It’s a glorious place. It’s a fantastic place. You can’t envisage it, I have to show it to you.

You can’t figure it out for yourself; I have to show it to you. It’s not just a figment of your imagination. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not optimism, hoping that the next thing will be better than the status quo. I have to show it to you. Look up, enter in, and let me minister to you.”

What happens when we do that? What happens when we look up, and enter in, and let him minister? I want to suggest that there are two things that happen to us.

Firstly, he reveals his presence to us. There’s nothing like being in the presence of God. There’s no place on earth that’s like being in that place. There are four ways that he reveals his presence in our public gatherings, like this one today.

He reveals his presence in our worship and praise. You heard in the Old Testament lesson the story of the consecration of the temple of Solomon. The last verse says “Then the temple of the Lord was filled with a cloud, and the priests couldn’t perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God.” That’s the goal of worship—to reach a point where were no longer controlling what happens. It’s what happens when the presence of God begins to take over, when something stirs inside you, and you can’t just go on. I’ve been in services where things have literally had to stop, where we’ve just had to allow God to move—like that account in II Chronicles. I love it when that happens, where in the middle of a sermon or the liturgy, all of a sudden God begins to move. The preacher has to stop preaching, because were all on our faces before a holy God. Nobody’s told us to do that; it’s what we want to do. It’s the most liberating place, because we’ve looked up, we’ve entered in, and now God begins ministering. And when God begins ministering and reveals His presence, things like that can happen.

It doesn’t always need to be dramatic, where a whole congregation is on their faces. Many of you have found yourselves weeping because of the presence and power of God in this sanctuary. I know that because I hear your stories. That is like the II Chronicles story. You begin weeping. You lose control. You lose a sense of time, because God has come to you and is doing something in your life that’s good. You are not weeping because you are unhappy! It’s because something is changing in you, something’s being released, joy is welling up! There’s something that’s shifting in your life. And the only response is tears, that begin flowing down. He makes his presence known to us in our worship and praise.

He also makes his presence known to us in the preaching. Jesus said to us in John 15:3: “You are already clean, because of the word I have spoken.” It’s not just any word that makes God’s people clean. Frankly, we’re pretty grubby people. We’re not clean. Our lives are soiled. We need to be cleansed, and we long to be made new. We don’t like carrying all that garbage in our lives. But it’s not any word that gives us a sense of cleanness. It’s only the word that has the authority of Jesus behind it.

In our church we believe in preaching out of this book, because it has to be his word that we preach, not ours. Any word that comes out of figments of our fevered imaginations, any words that may seem appealing and interesting and engaging, words that may give us a little bit of a lift, will not clean us, they won’t cleanse us. They won’t get into our lives and mess with what’s there, so that we become more and more like the Lord Jesus. He makes his presence known to us in the preaching of his word.

And thirdly, he makes his presence known to us in our fellowship. “May they be brought to complete unity, to let the world know that you sent me, and have loved them even as you’ve loved me.” There’s something about unity that attracts the power of God’s love. There’s something about unity that attracts his presence. If there’s a church which is disunited, where people are at odds with each other, the Holy Spirit will be grieved. Though we go through the motions of worship, his presence won’t be felt as strongly. The Lord is faithful: He will always try to come among his people—but what attracts the power of his presence most is our unity. And that’s such a powerful witness to those who are looking on.

I’m going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute, but here’s the final way in which he makes his presence known to us: In the breaking of bread.

In the story of the Emmaus Road (Luke 24:13-31), a husband and wife were walking away from Jerusalem. It was after the crucifixion of Jesus and they were returning to their town. They were disconsolate. They were broken. They were despairing and grieving. Jesus walks beside them and speaks. They don’t know who he is. They invite him into their house and as he breaks bread with them at the table, this is what happens. “When he was at the table with them he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.” (We are going to be doing that this morning, because he commanded us to “do this in remembrance of me.”).

What happened next is significant: “Then their eyes were open and they recognized him.” How interesting. Their hearts had been stirred when he was preaching to them and teaching them on the road. He was putting things together from the scriptures which made them feel differently about their grief and their hopelessness. But it was when they recognized him in the breaking of bread that they became transformed people. They went right back to Jerusalem, another three and a half mile walk. They were tired, but they went right back to the very place they’d been fleeing from, the place that represented brokenness and disillusionment, because recognizing Jesus changed their entire reality.

There’s no more powerful place on the face of this earth than Holy Communion. It’s not just a ritual. We’re not people who think that the bread and wine are mere reminders, emblems, of some long ago experience where Jesus died for us on the cross. We understand that Jesus is actually present with us in the breaking of bread. He’s as much with us here as he was with those two on the Emmaus Road. There’s no more powerful place to be healed than receiving the body and blood of Jesus. That’s where he makes his presence known. It’s better than touching the hem of his garment, like the woman did in the gospel story. We embrace him. We take him into our hearts and into our lives. That’s his gift. And as the bread and the wine—his body and his blood—go into us, we explode with transformation! We are the most privileged people, because when we look up, and enter in, and let him minister, he reveals his presence in these ways.

In worship, God reveals his presence. But He does something else: He touches those around us.

Worship is not just about us. It’s about the people who watch us. I want you to look at a couple of scriptures here. What I’m about to say will reveal how our dynamic worship makes visible the power of God’s love, not just within our fellowship, but to those who are worshipping with us, and those who see our lives outside this building.

On the day of Pentecost, thousands of people from all over the Roman Empire had come—Jews and proselytes and people like that—and they heard the disciples worshipping God. They say—remember, these are the bystanders—“We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.”

When we talk about the miracle of Pentecost, we focus on the miracle that, while the disciples were speaking their native Aramaic language, the bystanders were hearing in their own languages. But there’s something else really important going on here: it wasn’t just the languages that impressed the people: it was the content of what they heard. They heard the disciples “declaring the wonders of God.”

The crowd there never realized that you could say the kind of things about God that these one-hundred-twenty disciples were saying. They had no comprehension that God was so extraordinary, so amazing, so wonderful and powerful, so loving and gracious, and so merciful. While most of them may have believed in God, they didn’t have very much to praise about, because they didn’t really know him.

When people are standing around us as we declare the praises of God, something happens. When Peter began to preach, the people were hungry to hear what he had to say. What they wanted to know was, “How do you worship like that? What is it about your relationship with God that makes you so different from us?”

Let me tell you something: every person on planet Earth is hungry to worship. We have already said that worship is God’s first purpose for our lives and for our church. If we don’t find the ways to declare His praises and wonders in the way that he wants us to, through knowing the Lord Jesus Christ, then we will worship idols. We will have to find objects to worship. We may worship ourselves, our jobs, or our families. We will worship sex, money, or pleasure. We will worship anything at all. There is so much out there for us to worship, vying for our allegiance. What these people on Pentecost discovered was that, when you pay allegiance to Jesus, when you give your worship him, that taps into the deepest longing in our lives. Their response is “I want that!”

Sometimes we think that, in order for the church to engage a watching world, we need to dumb down the worship. We need to do things that are accessible to people. What they did on the day of Pentecost was inaccessible! Those bystanders had never heard tongues before! All those thousands gathered in Jerusalem had never heard that kind of cacophonous praise where voices were raised together. They had never seen before what these people were doing. Yet far from being put off, they were drawn, because it was dynamic worship.

Here’s one more story from the New Testament. I read you earlier the story of Paul and Silas in that Philippian jail. I want you to notice how the story progresses. “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing praises to God while the other prisoners listened.” Let me tell you something, church. When we are worshipping, there are people listening to us. There are people watching. Where we are the most likely to get their attention is when those watching us know that we are struggling, like John on Patmos, or like Paul and Silas in prison. When they see us worshipping out of a place that is not a natural place, yet we are still declaring the wonders of God, they sense that something extraordinary is happening.

The bystanders in Jerusalem knew that these one-hundred-and-twenty people worshipping on the day of Pentecost had just lost their Lord. He had been crucified. Now they were being persecuted. It wasn’t safe to do what they were doing, yet they did it. It was not just their declaration of praise that impressed them; it was the context of where and how they were doing it.

Church, God is calling us to make the power of his love visible through dynamic worship. We are going to be looking at some other things over the next few Sundays, but it has to start with dynamic worship. And he is calling you in your life, and me in mine, and us in our life together—and if you’re a visitor today, join us and become part of what God is doing in this place—to look up. He is calling us to enter in, he’s calling us to let him minister to us. And as the world watches that, they will experience the power of his presence, and they will be drawn, as Julissa has been drawn, and Les has been drawn, and others like them who have been recently baptized in this place. The world will want to become part of a church that is so in love with him that we can’t stop declaring the wonders of his love. Church will you do that right now?