10/16/22 John 4:19-26 “Passionate Worship”

14 Oct 10/16/22 John 4:19-26 “Passionate Worship”

10/16/22   John 4:19-26       “Passionate Worship”

I would like to begin today with a question.  Have you ever been rolling along in life, doing things the way you always do them, and someone talks you into trying to do something a little different or a little new?  I have been a pastor for almost 17 years now and I have developed ways that I study and write a sermon.  Today and for the next couple of weeks we will be in a sermon series which is something that I haven’t done much.  What I have found as I have been doing this is that it is much easier to start with a topic or series topic and find Scripture that fits.  It is easier to write sermons like this because I don’t have to wrestle with the Scripture like I do when I just start in the Bible.  I guess the difference for me is that when I’m doing a series like this I know where I should be at the end of it when I’m just starting.  When I start in the Scripture I don’t always know where I’m going until I get there and that is the work of the Holy Spirit.  This is just my observation and I’m sure that many fine pastors might disagree with me.  Today, we are going to continue our series on being fruitful by talking of passionate worship.  Let’s see if we can learn some tips for worship.  After all worship is what you do and not what I do.

Scott Weber tells of a woman from New Mexico who was frying tortillas when she noticed that the burns on one of them resembled the face of Jesus.  She showed her family and friends and they agreed that it did indeed resemble the face of Jesus.  So, the woman took the tortilla to the priest to have it blessed.  She testified that this tortilla had changed her life and her husband agreed that she had been a more peaceful, happy, submissive wife since the tortilla arrived.  The priest who was not accustomed to blessing a tortilla, reluctantly agreed to do it.  The woman took the tortilla home and put it in a glass case with piles of cotton to make it look like it was floating on clouds.  She built an altar for it and opened a little shrine for visitors.    Within a few months, 8000 people had come to see the shrine of the Jesus of the Tortilla.  All of them agreed that it looked like the face of Jesus except for one reporter who thought it looked like Leon Spinks, a retired boxer.  I really don’t put a lot of faith in these types of things because I don’t think that we really know what Jesus looks like.  So, I think that we have to be very careful in what we worship and how we worship.

It is always hard to take a good look at worship because we all worship in so many different ways.  Today, I will mostly talk of the corporate worship that we try to have happen here every week.  Hopefully, we all worship Jesus at other times of the week when we are on our own.  And if we are going to look at worship, we really need to know what it is.  One of the definitions of worship is that it is anything that brings pleasure to God.  It is an encounter with God.  It can happen any place and at any time.  It can happen all the time.  It is interaction with God.  It is praying unceasingly.

This is what I try to do each week online.  Through worship, God pardons sins, restores relationships and changes lives.  Every time I have done a baptism or wedding or funeral, my prayer is that we have changed lives because of it.  Worship comes through the sacrament of communion.  Worship may be through the music.  It may be through the sermon or it may be through the readings.  It may just come from being in a church setting.  Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans have far more ceremony than we have here and this is ok.  Worship covers such a wide variety of things that it is hard to talk about and it is even harder to try to put together.

So, I guess that we should talk about what worship isn’t along with what it is.  I have talked a little about this before and I don’t want anyone to get offended.  There are churches in the area where you have to worship in their certain way or you really aren’t worshipping in their eyes and worse yet, you are not even a Christian.  We can find this mind set everywhere in the world.  We need to remember that worship comes any time God wants it to come.  It is all about God and not you.  Music has nothing to do with worship, nor does the sermon or anything else we do.  Worship has to do with what is in your hearts.  It is your interaction with God.

So, the first thing you need to have in order to have passionate worship is that your hearts have to be right with God.   If you come here expecting the music or the message to make your worship experience, you will be disappointed every time.  As a matter of fact, and this is where people get upset with me, if you come here expecting to get something out of the service, you will always be disappointed.  Worship is not something where you come to get something.  Rather it is a time when you come to give to God.

This is one of those dichotomies that we find about God such as you can’t have freedom until you surrender to God or you cannot be Christ like unless you are first a servant.  You cannot experience worship unless you give yourself to Jesus for this hour or any other time you worship.  You will not receive unless you first give.  You have to give yourself to God before you receive.  For some reason this is hard for us to understand.  The music, the readings, the sermon are only tools that God uses to talk to us.   So, the first thing you should want to do as you enter into Sunday service is to get focused on God so that He can talk to you in return.  When you are doing this then we will have a person over here, hearing one message and someone over here, hearing another and someone else hearing a third message. This is God talking.  This is passionate worship.

Another way of saying all of this is that worship is not a passive behavior.  It is not like you are watching the Vikings or your favorite show on TV.  These types things are for your entertainment.  If you ask me, we have too much entertainment in our lives and it has led us not to want to work, but that is a whole other topic.  Worship is not entertainment!  We attended one of the largest churches in Fargo several years ago and when we left, we felt that the service was all about the music.  It was about the show.  We didn’t feel the worship around us.  I also understand that they are struggling a bit.  Strong churches have passionate worship and even large churches struggle with this.

Worship is an activity.  It is active.  This is a place where you come and you listen to the readings.  You sing the songs or at least you sing the words to yourself and God if you don’t feel you can sing.  This is a place where you come and you pray or you pray along with me.  This is a place where you listen as God speaks to you through the message.  Worship takes work.  I will let you in on a little secret.  I even get to worship a little during our services especially during our sermon, our readings and our prayers.

Another thing if we want to have passionate worship, we have to embrace the service that we do.  We have an online congregation so our choices for music are endless.  You can go to YouTube or Spotify for any music.  But we are limited with audio visual aids because I’m not that good with computer graphics.  You can go online for this too.  There are lots of things that we really cannot do.  It is up to me to try to bring the best message that I can every week.  This only comes as God helps me or that I make myself available to God’s message.  It is up to you to find the best music and other things.  It is up to God through me to have a meaningful Scripture.  All of us have to be passionate about our prayers.  There are many things that you have to try to bring to the table for passionate worship.

So, I hope that you understand that in order to have passionate worship we all have to be on the same page.  Now I know that I don’t do as well some weeks as others.  That is just the nature of things.  But I hope that even when I’m off a bit, you will still be able to worship.  I hope that you will see past me and see Jesus.  If everyone is doing that, then we are having a great worship service.  It was just a week ago that someone said that they could just feel the presence of Jesus in our worship.

So far, we have discussed worship from the view point of our world.  There are two other things that are absolutely essential to worship.  The first one is spirit and we have alluded to this a little bit already.  There are two aspects of this that we must consider.  First and most important is that the Holy Spirit is present.  Now you may say that the Spirit is present everywhere on earth and you may be right.  But I’m talking about the Spirit inside of us.  If you haven’t been doing very well lately in your worship, stop blaming all the things I have already mentioned and turn your eyes inward.  How is your relationship with Jesus?  Do you find yourself being critical of all that goes on in church?  Maybe you need the Holy Spirit or maybe you need to get reconnected.  I guarantee that the Holy Spirit has never left you.  It is you who have left.

Having a relationship with Jesus is not essential to worship but it is essential to passionate worship.  You can try to worship, you can work at worship, you can lip sync worship but you cannot have passionate worship without Jesus in your hearts.  This is why I always say that if you don’t have Jesus in your hearts, confess to Him and ask Him to live there today.  This is essential to passionate worship.

The second part of this is that you will still have to do a few things that will help you to experience worship.  When you come to the doors of our church or our broadcast, leave all your troubles out in the car or pickup or at home.  Don’t bring in your troubles or your anger.  As we talked about earlier, make sure that your mind is able to focus on Jesus.  It is up to you to be able to come into the presence of the Lord.  Whatever it is that is keeping this from happening for you, try to leave it at the door. I try to help by casting Satan out of our services before we start.  So, we need the Holy Spirit here and your spirit has to be right to worship.

I know that last week I got a little razzing from some of you for saying that you have the best church broadcast in the eastern half of North Dakota and you do.  But it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with you and God.  This week I’m going to tell you that you should be excited to tune to church every week.  Make this the most exciting hour of your week.  You should be excited because you will be able to join others in being in the presence of our Lord.

The second thing that is absolutely essential to worship is the truth.  If you have been paying attention at all these last few years, you know that I try to start with the Scripture and go from there.  I start there because it is in the Scripture that you find the truth.  Today’s Scripture tells us that you will be able to worship anywhere.  You can all have the truth.  It is not something that only I can have and I share it with you.  It is for everyone!  If you ever find that I am mistaken, and it happens, then I want you to tell me about it.  Help me to make a correction so that we can get it right.  In essence you are my proof readers or proof listeners in this case.

The other problem we have with the truth is much more widespread and churches are dying because of it.  This is the false hoods where we as people go and change the Bible and its meaning.  I will grant that you are to love everyone.  That is not the problem.  The problem lies in the fact that the Bible says certain things are wrong.  Adultery is wrong.  Divorce is wrong.  Homosexuality is wrong.  Sorcery is wrong.  There is just no way around these things and the Bible is very clear about them.  Many of our churches have decided that these things are ok for whatever reason.  The truth is they are not ok but you are to accept these people who do these things anyway, after they know that God isn’t in favor of what they do.  How these things get remedied is between them and God.  So, you have to anchor yourselves in the truth because the truth will set you free.  Therefore, you have to anchor your worship in the Spirit and truth.

When these things are in place then you have passionate worship.  It is the worship where you can’t wait to be here on Sunday morning or whatever day you choose to watch this.  Scott Weber tells us another story, supposedly true where a woman entered a Haagen-Dazs ice cream store on the Kansas City Plaza for an ice-cream cone. After making her selection, she turned and found herself face to face with Paul Newman, the famous movie actor.  He was in town filming the movie Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Newman’s blue eyes caused her knees to buckle. She managed to pay for her cone, then left the shop, heart pounding. When she gained her composure, she realized she didn’t have her cone. She started back to the store to get it and met Newman at the door. “Are you looking for your ice-cream cone?” he asked. She nodded, unable to speak. “You put it in your purse with your change.” When was the last time you were this excited about Jesus.  When was the last time the presence of God quickened your pulse?  He does this, you know, all the time.  And thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.