Sermon: "Knowing God"

2nd in the "Being a Jesus Follower" series.
Delivered January 10, 2010 by Rev. Laura Crihfield.
Sermon Text: Psalm 100

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Good morning! Here we are a week into the new year, and we are a week into our series on discipleship. Last week, Pastor John laid out the four components of discipleship that we are gearing up for here at Central that we have, that the leadership of this church, the four areas that the leadership of this church believes are crucial areas for us as disciples of Jesus to be thinking about, honing in on, and more importantly, acting on if we are intending to grow in our relationship with the Lord.

It is important to note that they do not necessarily follow a linear path; although, knowing, growing, serving, and sharing seem to be... we're calling it the discipleship path. Anybody can jump on board with any of these at any time. It's not necessarily one, two, three, four; the crucial thing is that if we are going to grow as disciples, we need to be engaged in all four of these - working through them, thinking about them, acting on them.

So today, we are focusing on the first one which is knowing God. John 17:3 is the key text that the leaders, the session of this church has honed in on as the key text for this particular aspect of discipleship. John 17:3 says, "Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Now the presupposition that we are working on from here is that what we understand from Scripture is that knowing God comes first and foremost through worship as God reveals himself to us and we experience God.

We'll see a little bit, we're going to get back to that presupposition in a minute, but first I want to ask you to start by thinking about something that I hope never happens to any of us. I want you to imagine for a minute that over the course of time maybe, or maybe this is sudden, you lose all of your sight and all of your hearing. You are completely blind, and you're completely deaf. Imagine that for a minute. How hard would it be to interact with the world around us? Pretty hard. Would you still come to worship? Remember, you can't sing. Well, you can sing, but you can sing if you were able to carry a tune without being able to hear the musicians. You can't see the people around you. You can't read the songs on the screen. You can't read the Bible, unless it was in Braille. Would you still come? Would it still be a priority for you to be here for worship?

It's an interesting question that gets at the heart, I think, of why we come to worship, what is our motivation. Why are you here? I'm sure there are a million things that we could all put on our lists of to-do's. Why are you here when you could be home, perhaps in front of a cozy fire, maybe still in your pajamas; although, it is 12 o'clock? That would be pushing it a little. Maybe sipping a cup of hot chocolate with some marshmallows or some tea, getting psyched up for - Is there a game at one o'clock? Do you want me to have you out of here by then? Okay, I will. Why are we here? Why are we here? None of us has chosen to stay home today. All of us have made the choice to get up, to get dressed, to get out the door, to warm up the car, to get here to worship, and it makes me wonder why.

Some of us are here looking for encouragement, perhaps healing or support, hope in the midst of despair. Maybe some of us are looking for people with whom to celebrate because life is going really well, and we want to join together in celebration. Some of us are here because of what we have learned in Sunday school and the Shorter Catechism. That the very purpose of life is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever, and we believe that being a part of the community of faith to worship is part of that.

Some of us are here out of duty or obligation. Some of us are here to connect with friends. Some of us are here because our parents said we had to be here. Some of us aren't sure why we're here. Whatever the reason, it's really good that we are here. We are called to worship. In fact, worship is so important in our life as a community that we are referred to as a royal priesthood gathered for one main purpose. I want to look to 1 Peter 2:9, one of our texts for this morning.

First Peter 2:9 says, "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession" (and here is the reason why) "that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."

We are a royal priesthood. Are you feeling priestly? It is an honor to be in the priesthood that God calls his own. It is also a challenge, isn't it? Especially as we think about our motivation for worship, why we come.

One of the biggest misconceptions, I think, in our culture about worship is that the purpose of worship is to help us along and take us deeper in our faith. That it is about what we get out of it or how useful it is for us. Where did we get that? Where did we get that idea? According to 1 Peter, that is not what it is about. From the beginning, worship has been about God, not us.

The Israelite community understood this, focusing on community above self and joining together to worship in order that God would be glorified and they would declare the power and the wonder of the Lord to those around them. They knew that they were chosen as a sign to the nations, not for what they would get, not for special privileges, but because of the special responsibility to declare God to the rest of the world.

While worship may be useful for any number of reasons, and it is, whether that is reducing stress or building community, whether that is teaching us about the Scriptures and the doctrines of the church, all of those things happen in the course of worship, and they are good things, but we do not gather together for worship to accomplish those ends. Worship of God is the end.

Marva Dawn is a well-respected writer and teacher in the area of worship, and she puts it this way, and I love this quote. She says, "Worship is a gathering intended for no other purpose than to offer our praise, our thanksgiving, and our laments. While trusting the Spirit to bring us into the presence of the risen Christ." Here's where the rubber really meets the road. "It is not adult education. It is not socializing. It is not therapy. It is not networking. It is not a rally to support programs or causes. For all practical purposes, it is and ought to be use-less." Not useless and not divorced from life and from the realities of the world around us but use-less where we approach it with no other end in mind other than the worship and the praise of God.

If we see worship as a way of achieving some other end, we are missing the point and ultimately, we are making it all about us, about our needs, about what we want to get out of it. Worship is not about us; it is about God who is worthy of our unadulterated glory and honor, praise and thanksgiving. Contrary to how it may feel at times, you the congregation are not an audience; you are participants, and those of us who are up here leading, whether it is preaching or playing or singing or doing community life as Joe did this morning, we are not performers. In fact, our primary goal when we plan worship is not (this is going to be a little secret) to please you. At least, it shouldn't be. Perhaps all too often it is. But it shouldn't be.

We are all in this together, and the only one whom we should be concerned about pleasing is the Lord who is our audience of one. Worship is not about us. It is about knowing God. It is about responding to God. It is about experiencing God. It is about evaluating a service not by what I get from it but by what I am able to give to it. That's an important enough statement that I want to make it again. It is about evaluating a service not on the basis of what I get out of it but by what I am able to contribute or give to it.

Are we important individually as we walk in the doors on a Sunday morning, and is what we bring where we are, whether we are in pain or feeling joy, struggling...whatever, is that important? Absolutely. But what is more important, what is more important is that we bring who we are into worship not for our sake but for the sake of the glory of God and the community being built up, for the sake of the community. That is what is most important.

It is not about us, is it? Which is why we're making the changes on Switch Sunday, February 7th. You might have heard about it. Completely switching what we are doing on Sunday morning in order to proclaim to the world more effectively the truth about Jesus Christ, in order to schedule our life on Sunday mornings together so that more people will want to walk in the doors and hear the public declaration that we make about who God is. That's why we're doing it.

Worship is not about us, and everything we do on Sunday morning as it relates to worship should be focused on that one purpose of pleasing an audience of one. Whether it is responding to the call that Anne has put forth to serve in children's ministry so that not only are children edified and they learn and they grow and they are nourished, but so that their parents are free to come and to worship. Or maybe it is joining the parking team so that as the parking lot gets more crowded because we're doing two services at the same time, people can literally find a parking space more easily and get in the doors for worship.

Or maybe it is joining the hospitality team and being a greeter so that when people get out of their cars and they get to the door, if they are new or of they are not familiar or they are feeling a little bit like they don't necessarily have a place here that they see a friendly face, someone greets them with a smile and says, "Welcome, we're glad you're here!" So that when they come in the door to worship, they know they have a place and that they are welcome.

Maybe it is sitting with high school students in getting to know them so that when they anticipate coming into worship and they're not sure where they fit, maybe their families don't go to this church, they will know that there is a friendly face in there who is a friend. Everything we do on Sunday morning as it relates to worship is about what worship is about which is about God, not us.

Are you ready for one that's really going to challenge us? This will be the pot calling the kettle black, so I'm right there with all of us in this, well maybe not all of us. But whether we arrive on time. I was really a little softer on this at the 8:30 because they were up early, but you don't really have an excuse. I don't have an excuse when I come into worship at 11:30 and we're late. And I don't mean that as a strong chastisement, I mean that as an encouragement that what we bring to worship is important, and us literally arriving on time and getting in the doors at the start of worship speaks to what we are offering to the community and to the Lord as we worship. It's important that we be here on time. These are hard words for me, hard words.

My father has been harping on this for years. I'm 40 years old, we went home for Christmas, and if we had been late to worship, it might have ruined his day. Well, Dad, you're right. He's right! He's right. We need to be at worship on time because what we bring to worship is an offering to the community and an offering to the Lord. Worship is not about us.

Back to 1st Peter, "You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light." That's the call, so how do we live it? Exactly what does this priestly worship look like? Well certainly, worship has both a corporate and an individual aspect. Today, we're focusing on the corporate nature of worship, and next week we're going to be focusing on the growth, the growing, the individual walking with Christ, having our life centered in Christ.

So today, we've looked so far at 1st Peter, which clearly puts before us the call to worship and the challenge to set worship as a priority. I want to encourage you to turn with me in your Bibles; it is page 549 to Psalm 100. We have heard it this morning already. Joe used it to call us to worship, but I want to read it again because Psalm 100 is a plea from the psalmist to the hearts of his readers to look to the Lord and to exalt his name.

A little bit of background... it's a summary of the previous five psalms, which celebrate God as king over the earth. It's about giving an offering of thanks, and it's a direct reference to Leviticus 7 where we see regulations, instructions for presenting thank offerings to the Lord. And ultimately, and perhaps most centrally, it's a wonderful picture of perfect worship that teaches us about it and leads us into it.

So let's look at this together as I read Psalm 100.

"Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations." Amen.

It's hard to miss the underlying tone of this psalm, which is so full of passion and energy. You combine that with the simple beauty of the poetic structure of this psalm, and you get a good idea of how full worship is intended to be, how strongly the psalmist feels about it, and how the community is called to respond. It's no wonder that it's perhaps the most frequently used of all the psalms in terms of calls to worship. It literally, at least for me, draws me in and makes me want to worship.

And as we break it down, we notice that there are seven commands or imperatives that are imbedded within this that make up this blueprint for worship, this perfect picture of worship. I want to look at them kind of quickly here. They are shout, worship, come, know, enter, give thanks, and praise. Seven... the perfect number. Seven aspects of what make up God-honoring worship. They're fairly self-explanatory, but there are a few things that I want to point out about them.

The first is really intriguing to me, and that is this. We look at how this psalm is structured. If you look at this list, there are some natural pairings that happen, and we can work outward toward the middle. Shout and praise pair up pretty nicely. Worship and thanksgiving pair up beautifully. Enter and come pair up. Six of these that are on either side of the list pair up to create this what's called a chiastic. Andy filled me on that word, chiastic, or this paralleled track that leads us to the heart of this psalm.

So I want to look at these pairings just for a second. Shout and praise. Together they tell us that we are to verbally declare our praises, to say it out loud, to shout it, right, so that the whole world hears. There is something about shouting our praises, isn't there? Now in our house, we often try to keep the shouting at a minimum, but when it comes to worship, shouting our praise forces us to declare it loudly. To get out from behind anything that we might be scared of, the reason we might be hiding about it, and to declare it publically to the world.

It takes me back to places that I was only nine, ten, eleven when this was going on, but maybe it will flash you back places you don't want to go, and I'm sorry about that. But it takes me back to a song that many of you know, and if you do, please sing along with me. "I'll shout it from the mountain tops. I want the world to know the Lord of love has come to me; I want to pass it on." I'm sorry if that took you places you didn't want to go back into the middle of the 1970s. It is a good one, and it is spot on. It is spot on.

How often do we shout our praises from the proverbial mountaintops? I don't do it often enough. I fear we don't, we all collectively, don't maybe do it often enough. And it makes me wonder, "Are we embarrassed? Are we indifferent? Are we too busy?" If so, I would suggest that we all have some serious self-examination to do because what we have to shout from the mountaintops is nothing less than the truth of Jesus Christ, and that is nothing about which we should be embarrassed. And it is nothing about which we should be indifferent, and it is certainly nothing about which we should say, "I'm too busy." We are called to shout it from the mountaintops so that the world knows.

Well the next two that pair up nicely are worship and thanksgiving. And specifically here it's this idea of worshipping with gladness. Some translations say, "Serve the Lord with gladness." And in this context, gladness literally means "mirth," or "joy." Mirth or joy. Reminding us that our service, our worship, our time together as a community is to be filled with joy. That it is a reason for rejoicing. It is a reason for giving thanks, for offering our thanksgiving to the Lord because we have the privilege of worshipping. Are we worshipping with joy? Singing so loudly that it's not just the band that causes this room to resound, but our voices resound and just shake the place. Or are we glibly mouthing the words as if it's an obligation?

Friends, worship, as I just said a minute ago is not obligation. It's a privilege, and it's a privilege that much of the world does not share. The freedom to come, the freedom to worship, the freedom to publically declare who God is, to tell God's story. I hope we're treating it as a privilege, not an obligation because if we are, we will be drawn into the next pairing, which is come and enter.

Come and enter. Come before him literally with joyful songs. Literally, with a ringing cry, is what this means, and enter his gates with thanksgiving. Both of these commands focus on our attitude when we come into worship. Have we planned our morning so that when we come into worship we are ready to worship? Have we planned our day and our morning so that we have some time with the Lord, some time of quiet so that we can set aside the things that are distracting us? Have we gotten here on time?

You see how it all fits together? It's all about what we bring when we walk through those doors. Are we ready for worship? It's so easy to go through the motions. Isn't it? To come in, to sing, to participate, to pray, to greet those around us, and then to leave having not really entered into worship. Well that call is to enter in because worship is not about us.

Well the picture is almost complete... shout, worship, come, enter, give thanks, praise. We have six out of the seven, but we are missing the central command, which is to know. Know that the Lord is God. It is not a fluke that this command is in the middle; that this command is central in this perfect picture of what it means to worship. In western thought often we bookend our thoughts with the most important thing that we want people to remember, but in Hebrew thought, often the most important part of the message was in the middle. It is very true of this particular psalm.

Knowing that the Lord is God. This bring us back to that presupposition that we mentioned at the beginning of the service that we believe that we come to know who God is best and foremost as we worship, whether that's corporately or individually. That we experience God, that we know the depths of who God is, what God's heart is as he reveals himself to us and as we discover more and more of who he is.

When we have an attitude of praise and thanksgiving, when we shout our worship, when we come in, when we enter, when we give thanks, when we praise we are getting ourselves into that place where we can know the truth of who God is as he reveals himself. And this passage, I love, it doesn't just leave us to guess at what we come to know. We come to know that the Lord is God, that the Lord is God. That it is he who made us, and we are his. We come to know that we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. That the Lord is good, very good, and that his love endures forever. We come to know that his faithfulness and his alone is what endures through all generations.

That is what we come to know as we worship. And if we believe Psalm 100, then we will come to worship because we believe that God has made us, that God knows us, and that we are his. We will come to worship because we believe God is faithful and we want to declare that faithfulness to the world, to enter his courts and shout it aloud, to praise his name and give thanks for what he has done.

We will come to worship because we believe that through worship, what is in our heads, our knowledge of God can make its way more easily from our heads to our hearts. That happens as we worship. And we will come because we know that it is all about God; it is not about us. We will come because we believe the words of Ephesians 2:8 that say, "It is by grace that we have been saved." It is because of what the baby that we celebrated two weeks ago, or three weeks ago, or was it longer than that now? In the manger, the baby Jesus who came to us in the form of a baby is the same baby who grew up, who ministered to the people around him and who chose to go to the cross for us to die and make a way for us to live.

We will come to worship because we want to proclaim that to the world. That it is by grace and grace alone that we are saved. That belief, that belief and that trust in the grace through Jesus Christ should compel us to want to worship, not because it's an obligation, but because it is a privilege to join with God's people and make that public declaration to the world, which brings me to something that I'm doing a little differently in this service than I did at the first service.

First service I had this rope tied around my waist the whole time I was preaching, which a couple people afterwards came up to me and said, "I couldn't focus on a thing you said for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't figure out why you had that thing around your waist." Well I had this thing around my waist not because it's a new fashion trend. I don't recommend it. It's very scratchy and itchy, but I have it around my waist as a visual cue for us and a visual reminder for us of what it means to give everything we have for worship for the sake of the community and for the sake of God's honor and God's praise.

In the Israelite community, some of you may know that the high priest, once a year would enter what was called the Holy of Holies and that was the innermost sanctuary of the temple. He was only allowed to go in there once a year on Yum Kippur, which is the Day of Atonement. And he would go in once this time once a year in order to offer a blood sacrifice in the holiest of holy spaces and offer a blood sacrifice for the people for their atonement, to cleanse them from their sin. And he would go in, and this was a great honor to be the high priest, of course, and to be in this role, but it was an honor that came with a perceived risk as well.

It wasn't without risk because it was believed in ancient Israel that if you saw the face of God, you would die. And no one was quite sure whether the high priest was actually going to see the face of God when they got into the holiest of holy spaces, and so their very practical solution was they would tie a rope around the priest's waist. And this rope extended out to the entrance to the Holy of Holies. And you know what it was for, right? It was to pull him out if he died so that nobody else would have to go in and risk death. The priest was willing, this high priest was willing, to give everything he had for the sake of the community so that their sins could be atoned.

Well the good news is, unlike the high priest, we have our own high priest, Jesus Christ, who has gone to that place of death for us, and we don't have to fear death. We are able to approach the throne of grace with confidence to go into the sacred spaces where God is in our lives and to approach that God, the God who loves us, and the God who has made a way for us through Jesus Christ. We do not have to worry about literally physically dying as we approach the throne and as we come into that place of worship.

But just like the high priest who was willing to sacrifice if necessary, who he was for the sake of the community, for the sake of the worship of God, we are called to sacrifice, to set aside, perhaps, our needs, to set aside a bit of whatever it is God is calling us to sacrifice. Whether it's our pride, our sense of maybe being embarrassed, our busyness, our schedule, our time, so that we are able to fully and completely be drawn into worship not for our sake but so that Jesus Christ can be honored and glorified.

Why do we come to worship? Why do we come to worship? Do we come because it's an obligation, or do we come because it is such a privilege to join with the community and declare God's goodness to the world? The priest had the rope, and I want to suggest that we can take off the rope. That we can take off the rope that ties us to the securities of this world, to the cares of this world, and that we allow ourselves to be freed of the rope, to give ourselves fully and wholly and completely to the worship of God, not for our sake, but for the sake of Jesus Christ who deserves all that we are.

Will you pray with me? Lord God, thank you, thank you that you have called us to be a royal priesthood. That our call in that is not for our own sake, not for the privileges that come with that, but that the call is for the sake of those who do not yet know you that we might proclaim to the world your goodness in and through Jesus Christ. Thank you God that you have offered us forgiveness and salvation, and I pray God that you would help us to untie the rope, to risk who we are for the sake of who you are. That as a community we might do that together more fully than we ever have before and that individually you would challenge each one of us about what our role is in that. Thank you God for calling us. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

© 2010, Rev. Laura Crihfield
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org