Sermon: "All for the Lord"

Fourth in the "Come, Let Us Worship" series.
Delivered January 29, 2006 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Theme: There are all kinds of things important to us personally in worship, but what things are always important in our corporate expression of worship? There are core elements around which we express our diversity. We want to emphasize these things, even as we express them differently from time to time, group to group.

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Psalms 150: "Praise the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and flute, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord."

Let's pray. Thank you God for your word and we pray now that you will open our eyes and our hearts to your word and to your spirit. For it's in Jesus' name we pray, Amen.

I want you to imagine with me: someone invites you to a worship service, and the trusting person that you are you go with him. Somebody here might have done that today, I'm sorry you're here. But when you go the first thing that strikes you is that it's not in a building, they are outside worshipping. Now that automatically means that there is a good chance that there aren't any chairs available and there aren't. Everybody is standing up and they have their hands raised and they are swaying as they worship. On top of that the guys have long hair and beards: all of them. It seems to be sort of the thing with these people and then the women have earrings on, but they also have nose rings on too. In fact, there is a whole lot of silver and gold on their faces. It's very different. On top of that they are singing a song and the song is awfully long: it's 18 verses and they are singing it and it seems memorized and you are getting the sense that this is not the worship service for you. And so right about the time that you are turning to leave all the women are picking up tambourines to play and dance during the service.

Now, as I described that service what comes to mind? You know one thing that comes to mind for some people is that this is a cult; they are dangerous folks. Or maybe you are thinking this is some leftover 1970s hippies and they are a little too burned out in the head to do much more than that while they are together. I have some friends that would feel very comfortable in that group. Or it could be on the mission field because we have heard even from the pulpit people describing worship services that are very different from ours, but actually that worship service happened in Exodus 15. It's one of the first recorded worship services in the life of Israel. It's very different than what we are comfortable with and its okay that we have different expectations, because we all develop expectations about what a real worship service is all about.

For me, a real worship service usually happens inside a building and there are seats and in a really good place they are comfortable seats and certainly no one, well no one is expecting me to memorize 18 verses of anything. So there is going to be a bulletin there to give me directions or there is going to be something on the screen so that I can know what to do. The instruments are likely to be organ and piano or guitar and piano and drums. Those are the instruments that I expect to be played. In addition, when we do sing it's not 18 verses; if it's a hymn 4 verses is sufficient, 6 verses and you are pushing it and if it is a more contemporary song, let's only repeat it 3 times, because when we get to the fourth time I am thinking, "have you forgotten that we have to end this service today?" We have these expectations and they are natural, but what we've go to remember is that our expectations and what we bring to corporate worship is not identical to what pleases God. Let's remind ourselves of that. We have talked over the past few weeks about how important the interior is. That's the big battle in worship; the inside.

But even what we do on the outside, God is very eclectic in his taste for worship. I've got some statistics here. 70% of all Christians alive today live outside of North American and Western Europe. The church in Latin America, Asia and Africa has increased 1,100% in the last century. Today 27,000 people will become a Christian, today. Most of them are in countries other than North America or Western Europe. So that means that there are churches in a lot of places that are different than us and their worship services are different where all of these people are becoming Christians. Some of these places they have four hour worship services: four hours! In the middle of that four hours they have a two-hour sermon. Do you realize I could do a whole month of sermons in one day; two hours. And they meet in buildings not like ours. In fact, some of their buildings don't have walls on them. Some of their churches have no seats. When they praise, many of them raise their hands and there might be incense in the building and other's might be raising their hands and dancing. All of this is happening right now, today, all over the world.

Even within the United States there is variety: Episcopal, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Pentecostal. There is all kinds of variety. Even within contemporary worship you can have a folk mass, you can have Bill Gaither or you can have Derek Webb. There's a huge difference in those. All of that is going on and all of it can please God.

Now because all of this can please God, it doesn't though mean that everything we do in worship; anything we can imagine doing in worship would please God. There are certain things that we can get from scripture that tell us what the central things are that help us pull our worship together and that is what I would like to focus on today. What are the biblical principles that stand behind the kind of decisions we make in shaping our corporate worship? How do we make these decisions?

The first thing I would like to point out is that in Christian worship there needs to be scripture reading. I would like to go to 1st Timothy, Chapter 4, Verse 13 where it says this

"Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to preaching and to teaching."

From the very start of the church preaching and teaching, but also this issue of the reading of scripture has been part of who we are. In fact, the fastest way for a church to go off the mark is to stop paying attention to scripture. And so in our worship, we have the Bible read and quoted in our call to worship, in our confessions, before the sermon, in the sermon, in the benediction, in our dramas. Again and again we come back to "What does the scripture say? Let's hear it together." It's an important part of what identifies us. It's important part of what held the church to be faithful over the years. Christians are people of the spirit and of the word. The word is essential to our corporate worship. That's the first thing.

The second thing is preaching and teaching. It's mentioned in the same verse. Don't neglect the reading of the word or preaching and teaching. But I want to go to another passage that talks about preaching from the Book of Acts. Acts, Chapter 20, Verse 7.

"On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and because he intended to leave the next day, he kept on talking until midnight."

Now here we are, Paul was a gifted and long-winded expositor of the word. In fact, any of you who know this story know that Paul preaches so long that somebody name Eutychus is sleeping in a window and falls and dies and they actually have to pray for him and he comes back to life. Now I have preached some dangerously long sermons, but never this bad. What's fascinating about that is that after he prays for him Eutychus comes up, he's alive, he goes out and then Paul goes on in Verse 11 talking until daylight. We have a long way to go before we get there. Anyway, preaching and teaching, to be able to think together about what the scripture says is always part of who we are as God's people. Worship will never be us lifting to God what's already inside of us in our praise and adoration and concern. There will always be a two-way conversation where God speaks back and sometimes that will be words of comfort, sometimes that will be words of challenge, sometimes it will be rebuke and that comes from the scripture. The way we hear back from God accurately is primarily through the preaching of the word in our corporate worship. So, we are going to have the reading of the word and we are going to have the preaching of the word, because listening and learning, taking these things to heart is part of worship.

The third thing: singing. It comes from the Book of Colossians, Chapter 3, Verse 16.

"Let the word of Christ dwell in your richly."

Okay? Here is the word being mentioned.

"As you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom"

there's preaching and teaching right there,

"and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your heart to God."

And there is singing. Paul mentions three things, psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. We don't know everything about each of those categories, but we know a lot. The first is psalms. Psalms come from the Old Testament; so the psalms they were singing are the same ones that we sing now; the same words that we read; Psalm 1 to 150. And in that time they were probably doing it the same way synagogues would have done it at Paul's time, so that meant in many cases they would have had a cantor, a single individual who was gifted in singing who would sing a psalm to them as an assembled body and then they would sometimes sing together, but here is this pattern that they have adopted from the Jewish community that they are using. It's very different that what we experience: psalms.

The next one: hymns. These are theological statements that the church was writing themselves about who Jesus Christ was and they would sing it together. We see one such hymn in Philippians, Chapter 2, where it talks about Jesus Christ putting down all of his glory to come and be with us and die for us. That is an early hymn of the church. We even have a tiny piece from the 3rd century of one of those hymns that even has musical notation on it. Hymns were being written and then expressed in the life of these local bodies. The third is spiritual songs. Spiritual songs were much more emotional things. They were things that spontaneously came about in the different congregations: possibly some were even sometimes in tongues and I've got my new word for the week as I was studying about this; melismatic. These songs were melismatic, which means that many tones were sung on one syllable of a word. We've heard that kind of singing where you go eight or nine different notes maybe on one syllable and you move to the next syllable. Anyway, these early spiritual songs may have been like that. The point is, even if we don't know exactly what those songs were like, the point is from the very earliest part of the life of the church there was variety. And so even now in the life of our congregation we will have variety in our singing and in our songs.

The fourth point: prayers. It's 1st Timothy again, Chapter 2, Verses 1 and 2.

"I urged then first of all that requests, prayers, intercessions and Thanksgiving be made for everyone, for kings and all those authorities that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness."

Faithful worship is going to have to take prayer seriously. It's one of the greatest privileges we have, is that we as Christians have access to the throne of God, and yet corporate prayer is one of the more difficult things to do in worship. One thing we do is we let the pastor sometimes lead in worship. Now I have sat out there enough times to know that it can kind of get boring sometimes and the pastor is praying about Indonesia or something and my heads over in California. And so we struggle with what does it mean that a pastor or elder leads us in prayer, how long can those prayers be, but then if we offer an opportunity for everyone to pray, then we sometimes have trouble hearing what they say. So there are all kinds of logistical problems. Generally the traditional service here has had a better track record on this than contemporary worship. We have been all over the map, but we are always working at it and we will continue to work at it. What does it mean to have a faithful and full corporate prayer life, as well as an individual prayer life? It's an important part of worship.

Number Five: physical actions. Again, 1st Timothy, Chapter 2, now Verse 8.

"I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer."

You know if somebody comes from the Middle East, from the Christian tradition there and their first experience in worship here in the west, when somebody up front says, now let us pray and they notice that everybody bow their heads and a few fold their hands, they are surprised because in many Middle Eastern Christian traditions, you raise your hands and your face to pray. Now, hands up, face up, bow down, hand folded, which one does God hear? Of course, both. But what it means is that we are shaped by different expectations of what is appropriate, what is normal. We sit a lot when we pray. That never happens in the Bible. Sitting is not one of the postures that you see people praying in: Old or New Testament. And yet we do it and I don't think its wrong, but it just shows that our expectations and our habits are not always from scripture. There are some things in scripture that I am not ready for yet. You know is says greet one another with a holy kiss. It says that in 1st Corinthians 16. I am not ready to be pastor of Central Presbyterian Church of the Holy Kiss. I got a little working on to be ready for that.

But think of the physical expressions of worship that we feel constrained about right now, because of who we are raised in our cultures. I have just done a quick look in scripture and here is some of the things that are done in the scriptures that we don't do often together. Clapping our hands, dancing, kneeling, lying flat on our faces, raising our hands in praise or prayer, saying Amen or Hallelujah out loud and together as a body. All of those things are things that happen in scripture. They don't happen as often for us. The main thing that we have got to remember here is that there is a lot of liberty in scripture and the things that we are comfortable with or not comfortable with are shaped more by our culture than by scripture. And so we have to remember that when the edges are pushed a little bit as we visit or in our own worship here.

The final point and these are not all the points in scripture on worship. I am just picking out a few to talk about today. The next one is orderly freedom. Go to the Book of 1st Corinthians, Chapter 14, Verse 26 for that.

"What shall we say brothers, when you come together everyone has a hymn or word of instruction, or a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church."

A final point is that we need to have freedom in worship. The picture we get in the early church is that the early church people gathered together and they were probably in small enough groups that everybody felt like they had something to contribute, different gifting, different leanings and different leadings. But the fact is, as early as the Book of 1st Corinthians, we find that people were abusing that freedom and so all through the New Testament there are increasing instructions of how to have the freedom, but also how to have order in worship. And so here we are as a church 2000 years later and we have certain habits in order to protect the order of the church. So only a few people preach; not everyone. There is only a few people who play the instruments or lead in worship; elders and people like that. So there is a limited number of people who contribute from the front, but we still want to have that opportunity for everyone to contribute.

There is only a limited opportunity as we gather together in this group, but as a total body, this isn't the only worship we do. Remember we have been talking about worship happening all of the time; even corporate worship happens other times. In your small groups you can have an opportunity where someone who has the gift of teaching and all is teaching and someone else can lead in a song. There are different things we can contribute in that atmosphere. There is opportunities with the ministry of Women on Wednesday, Presbyterian circles, men's ministry, the Alpha course. There are all kinds of opportunities to use our gifts to build up the body in worship, because it all doesn't happen here. Orderly freedom is always a goal in what we are doing; to allow spontaneity, to allow God to use us and yet be able to move forward in a way that edifies everybody.

So what does this all have to do with Psalm 150, because that is where we started? I want to go back to it for a moment. Psalm 150 talks about certain musical instruments; trumpets, harps, lyre's, tambourines, strings and flute, cymbals resounding, clashing cymbals, okay? Now, this is not a list of the approved instruments for worship. If so, we couldn't use that one out there the organ. We couldn't use the piano. It has very little to do with that. What does Psalm 150 have to do with? In six verses we are told 13 times to praise the Lord. That is what Psalm 150 is all about. And that's how I want to end this series on worship. One of the things that we need to do when we gather together corporately is to praise the Lord. Let all that is in us praise the Lord.

Let's pray. God we thank you for your word and we pray now that with whatever instruments we have, with whatever is within us, with whatever grace is in our lives, let all that is within us praise you: Praise the Lord.

© 2006, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org