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Preached in Markham Baptist Church,
January 22, 2006
Romans 12:1
WORSHIP THE LORD: PART 1 -
WORSHIP IS A LIFESTYLE
I’d encourage you to open your Bibles to Romans 12:1. The
first two verses of Romans 12 are a unit which introduce the last four and a
half chapters of the book of Romans. They introduce what is sometimes called
the practical section of the book and encapsulate all that is discussed in
the remaining four chapters. This morning, for our study I only have time to
look at the one verse as it applies to our situation at this time.
As you may be aware, during the past year we as a church
have been talking a great deal about worship. We have been talking about how
best to express our worship; we’ve been discussing it in our business
meetings; we have had focus groups; and we’ve been searching for a Worship
Director for some time now. (I hope you continue to pray for that search
committee as they continue to seek the person of God’s choosing).
So we’ve been talking about worship for some time and we
understand its importance and centrality in our lives and the life of this
church. We know the words of Jesus in John 4:23 and 24 - “The time is
coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in
spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God
is spirit and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
We have a desire to be true worshippers. We don’t want to
be false - we want to steer clear of all hypocrisy and playing any kind of
game. Our souls long for a genuine encounter with the living God and a
genuine expression of worship that honours His name.
So it is with this desire that we begin a series focusing
on worship and studying what the Bible says about worship and how to express
it. And this morning I want to give you one way to deepen your worship
experience.
Our text is a short one - Romans 12:1. This will be a
familiar text to many of you and I want to mine its riches again for it has
much to tell us about true worship and how we can deepen our worship
experience.
“Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God’s
mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God –
this is your spiritual act of worship.” (Romans 12:1)
The text begins with the word therefore. That word
therefore could be called the hinge of Scripture. Like a hinge links
a door to the wal,l so that word therefore links what has been said
with all that is about to be said. So what he is saying is in view of all of
God’s mercies which I have just outlined for you in the first 11 chapters –
offer your bodies as living sacrifices.
So Paul is urging us to offer our bodies as living
sacrifices. He will go on to say that this is our spiritual act of worship
and I will look at this in a moment – but at the very start he makes the
motivation for such an act plain. “In view of God’s mercies” - the NRSV has
mercy in plural and that is correct according to the Greek.
As a result of God’s mercies, and he has just outlined
them for the Roman Christians in the preceding 11 chapters. He speaks of how
we are lost in our sin, but through faith in Christ we are forgiven and our
old self is now dead. Not only this but the life of Christ is now in us and
the old monarch of Satan is now defeated, the old master of sin is now
deposed and the old marriage that we had to the law is now dissolved and we
are new creations. And all of this Paul calls God’s mercies, for it is all
done by His hand.
In light of this glorious message, in view of the fact
that you have been released from sin’s penalty through Christ and from sin’s
tyranny through the Holy Spirit – in view of the mercies of God I urge you
to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.
This is important for us to grasp - in view of God’s
mercies - or else we think that God is wagging His finger at us saying, “You
had better worship Me! You had better sing My praises!” But that’s not what
God says. It is always an invitation - you can accept or you can decline.
Look what God has done, says Paul, and in view of that offer your bodies as
living sacrifices.
So spiritual worship springs from a view of the mercies
of God. And this then is the way to deepen the worship experience. The first
way – important, if you want a deeper worship experience, if you want us as
a church to have a deeper worship experience then we, you need to deepen
your knowledge, your relationship with God. For this is the spring of all
true worship – it springs from a relationship with God.
It springs from an experience of God’s grace, it springs
from an experience of God’s goodness, His mercy, His love. Worship is a
response to God and what He has done. This is always the case. Thanksgiving
is a result of a recognition of what God has done in your life through
Christ. Adoration wells up as we allow our minds and hearts to be captured
by the majesty and wonder of God. Confession is voiced as we recognize the
holiness of God. Supplication is a result of knowing God’s fatherly care. A
deep worship experience is a result of knowing God and His character.
Those who do not know God or have a relationship with God
cannot worship. In fact, worship is boring to those who have not experienced
God. I have told you before about Dr. Michael Quicke who grew up going to
church three times on a Sunday. He would go Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon
for Sunday School, Sunday evening for worship again, and the whole thing was
boring. If they could get under the skin of the Sunday School teacher that
would be fun, but otherwise it was boring. His dad was the preacher and
during worship he would do all sorts of things to try to pass the time. He
would fill in the “o’s” in the bulletin, he would count the knots in the
pew. Anything to pass those boring hours of worship. “But then everything
changed,” says Quicke. “I met Jesus. The whole worship experience changed
for me. The hymns were the same, the preacher was the same, the Sunday
school class was the same, but I wasn’t for I had met the Saviour, and lover
of my soul and had to worship.”
In view of God’s mercies “OFFER”. Give to God the worship
He deserves.
Worship is a response to God’s goodness, love and mercy
in our lives. We sometimes put too much responsibility on our leaders Sunday
morning, saying, “Okay I’m here, now lead me into the presence of God so we
can worship - take me there.” And often we go out of this place and we say,
“They failed, I did not worship. If only the leaders had been more
sensitive, if only there was more contemporary music, if only there more
reverential quiet music, or if only the people were more relational and
there was a great sense of warmth and community then I would have been able
to worship.”
I’m not denying that we leaders have some responsibility
in the worship event but to lay it all on their shoulders is wrong. And it
is to rely on the externals when what really matters in worship is the heart
– allowing yourself to be touched with the grace and love of God. And then
when your heart is touched, when your eyes are opened to the goodness of God
– it doesn’t matter who is leading, what is being played because your heart
is welling up with praise and adoration and you cannot contain what is in
your heart so you sing, “Holy, Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!” What’s
the leader doing? I don’t know because I am lost in wonder, love and praise
because I have seen God and I have experienced His grace!
A. W. Tozer once wrote, “O, how I wish I could adequately
set forth the glory of that one who is worthy to be the object of our
worship! I do believe that if our new converts… could be made to see His
thousand attributes and even partially comprehend His being they would
become faint with a yearning desire to worship and honour and acknowledge
Him, now and forever.” 1
And isn’t it true not only for new converts but
also for those of us who have been in the faith for a long time? If we could
get a glimpse of His thousand attributes and even partially comprehend His
being we all would become faint with a yearning desire to worship and honour
Him. Were the drums playing? I didn’t notice. Was the organ playing? I
didn’t notice, because I was lost in wonder, love and praise.
What we try to do on Sunday morning is to enable you to
voice what you have experienced of God throughout the week, so there is
praise, there is confession, joy, delight, there is room for tears, for
quiet, thanksgiving, supplication, petition. All in response to God to what
God is doing in your lives.
So if you want to deepen the worship experience here at
Markham Baptist Church, the first thing we need to be doing is pray for
ourselves, for one another, for our church – Remember that prayer in
Ephesians 1:17? “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ the
glorious Father may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that
you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be
enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he ha called you,
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”
“Open our eyes to Your love that we would respond to You
in gratitude, open our hearts to your grace that we would respond to You in
repentance, open our wills to Your desire that we would respond to You in
obedience. O Lord, visit us.” Then we need to be reading His Word and
stepping out in faith – and I will guarantee that our worship experience
will be deepened and be enriched.
That’s the first way to deepen your worship experience.
Let it flow out of a relationship with God.
That is the motivation for worship. What is the content
of our worship?
Paul says offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy
and pleasing to God for this is your spiritual act of worship.
Let me explain this. The New Testament is filled with Old
Testament images. And this is one of those images. In the Old Testament,
especially in the books of Leviticus and Numbers all sorts of sacrifices are
outlined for the people of God. They can be categorized into two different
kinds. There were those offerings that lead to reconciliation with God, sin
offerings that brought cleansing to the believer. The other kind are those
sacrifices which are an expression of celebration after reconciliation was
accomplished. Thanksgiving offerings - this is the type of sacrifice Paul is
speaking of here, for clearly reconciliation with God has been achieved for
us through the death and resurrection of Christ and now in response we are
called on to offer the ourselves to God.
John Phillips has a beautiful saying, “All other faiths
make sacrifice the root, Christianity makes it the flower.”
So the text says, in view of God’s mercies, offer worship
to God how? We come together Sunday morning and sing. Certainly that is
part of it, but Scripture calls us to something deeper. It says, “in view
of God’s mercies offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Give
yourselves to God this is your spiritual act of worship.”
Strange, you may say, I always thought that worship is an
event which happens every Sunday morning between 11am and 12:30. That’s the
trap we fall into, we get to thinking that worship is something we go to and
do at a set time and a set place. But that’s not what this text says.
Worship according to this passage is a daily event, a moment by moment
experience a continuous expression in our daily lives.
Offer your bodies – that speaks of the total self.
Don’t just offer your souls, but your bodies.
This is what Paul is saying in this passage - offer the
whole of yourself to God. Being a living sacrifice is saying every day, Lord
I am available to you. This is the basic disposition of New Testament
Christianity and it is an act of worship.
This is your spiritual act of worship, a total giving of
self.
Here is the second way we can deepen our worship
experience. Stop thinking of worship as only an event, and start thinking of
it as a lifestyle where you say daily, “Lord I give myself to you.” That’s
worship.
Sunday morning then doesn’t become a kick start to your
week, instead it becomes a crescendo of living with the wonderful mercies of
God and of giving yourself to Him. So that when you come in on Sunday
morning it is a grand culmination of a week of living with God of giving
yourself to Him. That frees you from being dependent on what is sung and
what is done in the worship event, as worship becomes a lifestyle.
For those who do not experience God or live with God all
week, worship on Sunday morning is all about the externals, about what
everyone else does - is the music just right, does the leader say the right
things, do the instruments play the right way? But that’s not worship -
those are the externals, and really make for only 10 % of the worship
experience. I’m not the first one to compare worship to an iceberg. There is
the 10 percent that is above the water that you can see. It’s an important
10% - you can’t ignore it. It’s the hymns, it’s the choruses, it’s the
soloist, it’s the prayers, it’s the way they are linked together.
But with the iceberg there’s the 90 % that you don’t see
that is underwater. And it really matters. So in worship, there’s the 90 %
that you don’t see - it’s the relationship you have with God throughout the
week. It is as the Lord works in your life at depth.
We become so obsessed with the 10 percent that we can
see, when actually it’s the 90 % that we cannot see that we need to pay
attention to. That’s when worship happens - as we give ourselves daily in
relationship with God.
Notice too that it is to be a living sacrifice. Every
sacrifice I’ve heard about ends up dead. Every lamb, every bird, every bull
placed on the altar ends up dead. But Paul says, offer your bodies as a
living sacrifice. My friends through faith in Christ you have been given
life – now offer that life back to God. So it is a living sacrifice that we
give to God.
And notice it is to be a sacrifice – that means
you are giving something to God. The Oxford dictionary defines sacrifice as
“the giving up of a valued thing for the sake of another that is more
worthy.” That is what we are doing in worship, giving up our whole self to
God for He is worthy.
My friends if you want to deepen your worship experience
here’s the third way - stop thinking about what you get from worship – and
start thinking about what you can give in worship. Don’t go from this place
saying “I didn’t get anything from that.” That’s not worship is about, it’s
about giving to God, ascribing to God.
What is it you can give? Give your attention, your mind,
your anger, your bitterness, your jealousy, your sin, your praise, your
thanksgiving, your adoration, your silence, petitions, your fears, your
inhibitions, give your all to God. Don’t worry about what you get - He’ll
look after that. He promises us this in those words, “Seek first the
Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.” He’ll look
after what you get. You concentrate on what you give. Worship is about
giving.
Then this living sacrifice is to be holy. This means that
we are to be separated, or dedicated completely to God. We worship Him best
when we are given to Him completely and fully.
In Ottawa there are two well-known buildings, the Chateau
Laurier Hotel and 24 Sussex Drive (the Prime Minister’s residence). Both are
beautiful and have great views of the Ottawa river. Both are gorgeous inside
and out. But there is a difference between the two buildings when it comes
to their use. You and I can go the Chateau Laurier at any time and enjoy a
meal or a night’s stay as long as we have the money. But 24 Sussex Drive is
reserved for one purpose alone and that is to house the prime minister of
Canada.
So for you and me, we are to present ourselves to God as
holy, set apart for His use, His purposes alone.
And this deepens our worship experience. The fourth way
to deepen our worship - set aside your whole self to Him. God honours that
sacrifice with His presence. In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel we read
how God comes to the priest Eli and with some harsh words. He is really
upset with Eli and his sons because they were taking the choice parts of the
offerings and they weren’t offering them to God - they were eating the
choice parts themselves! And God was angry. He did not bless the house of
Eli with His presence. Oh, but when God is given the best parts, the whole
of the sacrifice, He blesses His people. He takes great delight in their
offerings. He shows up with fire!
God deserves our all – the best, worst, the whole of
ourselves and when we hold back, He won’t show up, but when we give
ourselves our worship experience is deepened because He shows up. Paul says
this kind of sacrifice is pleasing to God.
You have a hunger - don’t you have a hunger for a deeper
worship experience? We want God to show up in our corporate worship.
Then my friends I urge you:
snuggle up to God and get to know Him – know His majesty and holiness, and
love and grace, and let your worship flow out of that relationship. And then
give yourself to Him. Let that relationship be characterized by giving your
whole self to God - hold nothing back. Be a living sacrifice.
Copyright MBC and Tom Cullen - January 2006
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A.W. Tozer, Whatever
Happened To Worship, (Camp Hill, Pennsylvania: Christian Publications,
1985), p. 118
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