[Audio of this message may be heard here. The manuscript is below. Note that the sermon was not preached from the manuscript, so there may be slight differences between the two.]
Just Once Before I Die
The Implications of the Gospel, Part I: Worship
1 Corinthians 15:1
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand
In 1972, Gordon Dahl offered a description of Americans and our habits that is poignant and has proven increasingly prophetic. Listen to what he said:
"Most middle class Americans tend to worship their work, to work at their play, and to play at their worship. As a result, their meanings and values are distorted. Their relationships disintegrate faster than they can keep them in repair and their lifestyles resemble a cast of characters in search of a plot."
We worship our work. We work at our play. We play at our worship.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, I want to tell you this morning that New Testament actualization will never occur here or in any other church unless we stop playing at our worship. And I want to tell you that becoming “an authentic community around the whole gospel for the glory of God” means, necessarily, that we become a worshiping community. To have one, we must have the other.
Last week we began exploring exactly what is meant by being an authentic community around the whole gospel.
Specifically we began looking at what this gospel that we are centered around is. We said that the church has a content and that content is the gospel.
We defined the gospel in this way:
"The gospel is the eternal good news that through the person, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ, sin, death, and hell have been defeated and all who come to Christ in repentance and faith receive salvation, eternal life, hope, the blessings of God, strength for right living, and a place in the body and ongoing mission of Christ on earth, the church, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit."
This gospel is at the very center of the church. Without it, there is no church. If our buildings were taken away from us, the church would still exist. If our staffs were taken away, the church would still exist. If our budgets and our buses and our potlucks were taken away, the church would still exist. But if the gospel were taken away, there would be no church.
The gospel, then, is not just a creed and it is not just a confession. It is news that heralds a new family, a new community, a new way of life.
In other words, the gospel dwells at the center of the church in power, and it bears with it radical implications for our life together. Today and next week we’re going to look at two of the major implications of the gospel for our church. Today we will consider worship and next week we will consider evangelism.
But today I’d like to talk about the crucial need for gospel-empowered and gospel-centered worship.
I. Where the gospel is truly embraced, worship is inevitably offered.
If we are to become a New Testament church then we must embrace a New Testament understanding of the gospel, and this means we must see the gospel as the source of power for the body of Christ. It is the truth and reality through which the Holy Spirit works among us. We must, in other words, reject a static or sedentary view of the gospel that reduces it to a set of truths that we merely intellectually agree with. The New Testament speaks of the gospel as possessing power. Paul writes in Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” In 1 Thessalonians 1:5, Paul writes that, “our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.”
The gospel is our core conviction and our life together. Biblically understood, the gospel pulsates with power and with life in our midst, and this gospel power inevitably elicits the worship of God from His people. We might picture it like this:
When the gospel flowers and blooms among the people of God – when, that is, we embrace it with full conviction in its awe-inspiring, life-transforming wholeness – then it empowers the people of God to worship. It draws us in and, in it, we stand and offer praise to God. This is certainly one of the implications of our text this morning when Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 15:1 of the gospel as (1) something he preached, (2) something the church received, and (3) the reality in which the church stands.
When we embrace this understanding of the power of the gospel to enable and compel God’s people to worship, we end up with this kind of definition for worship:
“Worship is the natural response of the redeemed people of God to the observed and indwelt power of the gospel and its radical implications in our lives.”
That’s an imperfect definition, but I believe it is faithful to Scripture truth. Worship, in other words, is an empowered response to God’s gracious gift of His only begotten Son. A.W. Tozer seemed to have this in mind when he defined worship in these terms:
“What is worship? Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of that most ancient Mystery, that Majesty which philosophers call the First Cause, but which we call Our Father Which Are in Heaven.”
Worship, then is an inevitable response of awe and gratitude to the graciousness of God. It is easy to see, then, how a deficient view of the gospel undermines worship. For instance, will a person feel compelled to worship if they are not utterly convinced of “the amazing sinfulness of sin,” as J.C. Ryle once put it? Will we want to worship if we are not utterly convinced that we are fully deserving of eternal hell, that God would be just in casting us into hell at this very moment, but that by and through His amazing grace He has mercifully and wondrously saved us through the atoning cross and life-giving power of the resurrection of His precious Son and our glorious King, Jesus?
Listen closely to me: when we embrace the gospel in its astounding totality, when we raise the cross of Christ in our midst, when we stand in amazement at the empty tomb, we…will…worship! It is inevitable. It is unavoidable. It will happen. We must embrace the gospel. We must let it shine in our midst. We must let it live. It must be our consuming conviction and our driving motivation. And when this happens, we will worship!
And yet, there is a challenge here.
II. A return to gospel-centered worship would mean the abandonment of popular but false substitutes.
A return to gospel-centered worship would mean the abandonment of alternative models of and approaches to worship that are currently crippling the body of Christ. And let me challenge us personally on this front. I believe that a return to gospel-centered worship would help us combat some of the debilitating trends that even creep into our own worship:
Specifically, embracing gospel-centered worship would mean:
• that worship would be natural, not forced,
Have you ever noticed that nobody has to encourage a man who has just won the lottery to react with joy? Nobody has to say, “Now stand up, jump around, scream for joy. React!” Nobody has to tell this man to do these things. He does them because of the power in the good news he has just received. And nobody has to tell a small child on Christmas morning that she is to squeal with joy when she opens that gift. The overwhelming good news of the moment propels the child to a response of joy.
Ought not our response to the good news of the gospel be just as natural? Must we really be told to respond in joy to the glorious good news that the Son of God shed His blood for us? Really? Must we be manipulated and cajoled and guilted into worshiping?
• that worship would be passionate, not stingy,
Gospel-centered worship would make us excessive in our praise. Gospel-centered worship doesn’t count how much or how long because it is responding to good news that is itself limitless.
• that worship would be an offering, not a consumption,
Two weeks ago we spoke of how consumerism is destroying the church in America. Nowhere is this more evident than in how we worship. The consuming worshiper comes to church and asks, “Will this please me? Will I like this? Do I like that? Does that make me happy?” And then we retire to lunch over the Baptist bird and critique what we have just consumed. I speak from experience. I have grown up among Baptist people. I is Baptist people! I know what it is to approach worship as a consumer with an eye towards critique.
But when worship becomes gospel-centered, we do not come to consume, we come to offer. Worship is no longer about what I will get, it is about what I can give to God in an offering of praise. Gospel-centered worship would help us to stop being customers and to start being worshipers.
• that worship would exalt His name, not our preferences,
Gospel-centered worship helps us to break free from the idolatry of our own preferences. What I prefer suddenly loses its luster when worship becomes Christ-saturated, for Christ came to give His life for His sheep.
I will never forget shortly after Scott came here that he played his guitar in one of the services. An elderly gentleman came up to me and said, “You know, I don’t really prefer the guitar…but somebody else might. And maybe it will help somebody else in worship.”
Wow! I could not believe it. That’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard in my life! Here is a man who is subjugating his preference to the possibility of a greater good.
When is the last time you thought of the person at the end of your pew instead of your own self? When is the last time you thought, “That’s not my preference, but then my preferences aren’t really that important are they?”
Here is a good rule for worship: if what is being done in worship is not somehow wrong or blasphemous or harmful, then be tolerant of it with the understanding that it may help somebody else. In other words, embrace Paul’s command to consider one another as more important than yourself.
• that worship would regret the conclusion, not wait for it,
Gospel-centered worship isn’t watching the clock. It isn’t waiting for the end. It doesn’t want a conclusion.
• that worship would become a lifestyle, not an event,
Gospel-centered worship cannot be reduced to a scheduled event because the gospel consumes us every day of our lives. So gospel-centered worship simply becomes a continuation of what we’re already doing and what we’ve been doing all week, just in a corporate context with other believers.
• that worship would become holy, not trivial,
Gospel-centered worship has a high view of God and His immeasurable holiness. It approaches the glory of God with trembling reverence.
Have you ever considered the overall spiritual and psychological effect of talking about Georgia football up until the very moment that the service starts, then working in some quick observations about the game during the greeting time, then immediately returning to the game when the service ends? Do you not ever want to say when you are asked immediately after the service ends about that crazy fumble in the game yesterday, “Give me a moment, man! I’ve just been burned by holy fire! I’ve just been in the presence of a holy God!”
We must allow the gospel truth of God’s holiness to infuse our worship with reverential awe.
• that worship would be celebrated, not critiqued,
Gospel-centered worship would make us tolerant of our imperfections of worship. Have you ever noticed how much we celebrate our children’s artistic offerings? Our 2-year-old child or grandchild comes up to us and offers us a drawing. You look at it. There’s one jagged, purple, crayon line on the paper. We weep with joy! We scan it and email it to all our friends! We frame it and put it up in our offices or in our homes! We celebrate the imperfect offerings of our children because we know that they come from beautiful and loving hearts and that the technical imperfections are insignificant in light of the growth and love it reveals.
Can we not celebrate worship in the same way? Can we not celebrate worship even when it is imperfect? I rather suspect that God accepts the imperfect but sincere worship of His people, mustard-seed worship if you will. I suspect that God frames our imperfect offerings because He loves us. Can we not do the same? Can we not reject a hyper-critical spirit of critique in favor of celebration?
• that worship would become contagious, not contained,
Gospel-centered worship is worship you want others to share in and experience. This means there is an evangelistic component in worship itself. Worship that is God-exalting and gospel-empowered is worship that overflows our own bounds and touches those around us. Joyful, Christ-exalting worship is contagious, and are worship-saturated hearts become the conduits through which God reaches the world.
III. The gospel is the only reality capable of sustaining worship.
Finally, let us be aware of what is at stake here: nothing less than the continuance of worship itself. If we do not return to gospel-centered worship, we will eventually abandon worship.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. We’ll maintain the motions and the machinery of worship, but without a gospel focus and gospel origin we will not be worshiping. Without the gospel living and thriving in our midst, we will simply be experimenting with group manipulation techniques and with the dynamics of the mob. Without the gospel we will eventually reduce ourselves to hyper-emotionalism so that we can try to convince ourselves that we are in the presence of God. Or perhaps we’ll lapse into a group exercise in guilt, fear, and anger in an effort to convince ourselves that we are repentant. There are churches that indulge in these and other dynamics for years. But that is not worship.
The gospel is the only reality capable of sustaining worship. This is why Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 15:1 is so important: “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand.”
We “stand” in the gospel. There is solidity there. On the gospel, our life together, our worship included, can stand. It can last. There are deep resources for living there. It is a well that will not dry up, a foundation that will not crumble. “The gospel…in which you stand.”
Worship is when we are overwhelmed by the scandalous, shocking, amazing, good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ and when we respond naturally to the glorious person and work of Jesus Christ. This kind of worship will transform this church. Gospel-centered worship is at the very heart of New Testament Christianity.
By God’s grace, it can become our heartbeat as well.