The message Sunday was on Worship.
It was a good reminder of what worship is and perhaps what it should look like, that it’s more than just Sunday morning, or just being in church.
But something that my pastor said got me thinking.
He pointed out how easy it is not to go to church yet still fulfill the elements of what most of us think as worship. We can scroll through our phones to find a preacher we want to hear. We can scroll through sermon topics to find one we think we’d be interested in. If we want to hear worship music (unfortunately often one of the most contentious issues in a lot of churches), we can pick the musicians we want to hear and, like with sermons, pick out the songs we’d like to listen to.
In other words, we can tailor our ‘worship’ experience suit what we’re in the mood for, or what we think we need to hear, or what seems to strike us as interesting or timely or maybe addresses an issue we’re currently facing.
To what we want.
But maybe not what God wants us to hear, or see, or experience.
Doing those things – listening to your choice of messages, music, whatever – are not in and of themselves bad. And certainly, it can be “worship.”
But it’s not all of it. Hebrews 10:25 says, in part, we are to “not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing…” Or the way some of us learned it in the King James, “Forsake not the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is...”
Why? What’s wrong with going off on a hillside by myself to listen to praise music or the audio of a sermon? There are fewer distractions, and I can be surrounded by nature, where Paul says in Romans that “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen …”
Again, those are valuable tools in the worship toolbox (if there is such a thing).
But it isn’t enough.
There are practical reasons to “assemble together,’’ as Paul would say, not the least of which is the rest of that verse in Hebrews, which says we should meet together, “encouraging one another…”
We’re not meant live in isolation. Some of us do it better than others, and certainly there are times when almost all of us want to get away, to be by ourselves, to leave distraction behind.
But God said it in Genesis, that it’s not good for man to be alone. Indeed, being around people tends to energize us. There’s power in a group of people comping together, participating in the same thing together.
Think of a sporting event, where thousands of otherwise strangers will stand shoulder to shoulder, celebrating the same successes (assuming they are fans of the same team) or crying over the same failures. They’ll lift their voices with people they’ve never seen before – in fact with people from across the stadium that they’ll likely never see at all – and join in singing the fight song or some form of what we used to call “Jock Rock,’’ with songs like “Sweet Caroline” or “Living on a Prayer.”
For a few hours, we forget the troubles of our lives and join together in something else. And if the game turns out good, that feeling of euphoria can carry us through the next several days. We don’t have to see those same people we sat next to or behind or sang with from across the stadium every day to remember the feeling. We just look forward to getting together and doing it again.
It’s almost an act of worship.
I go to a church of several thousand people. I don’t know all of them. While I feel confident most of us are alike – after all, we live in the same community, we’re almost all the same race, we share a basic concept of faith – I know there are differences, too.
But I don’t need to know them all to know that, when something happens, they’ll be there for me and I, hopefully, for them.
Because they have been. We’ve been through a lot as a church. We’ve been through births and deaths and disabilities and marriage and divorce and hospital waiting rooms and funeral home receiving lines and delivered meals and mowed lawns and rehabbed houses in neighborhoods devastated by disaster and dug wells for clean water in areas that didn’t have it and brought medical care to people who didn’t have access to doctors and … well, we’ve shared life.
As the hymn says, “through many dangers, toils and snares” we have already come.
Preacher and author Alistair Begg said it this way in a sermon transcript I was reading the other day:
“And you know what one of the most encouraging things is for me? It’s simply this: that since we’ve been in this building—since ’95, was it?—we came in this building and we said to one another, “You know, this’ll never really feel like anything in here at all until we’ve laughed together and till we’ve cried together.” And it’s starting to have a feel now to me. Not because of stuff that we have in it, because we don’t have any stuff in it. And that’s purposeful. ’Cause we don’t want to look at stuff, we want to look at the Word of God, and then we want to look at one another. And in seeing one another enduring the difficulties, in running to one another in the experience of loss, in receiving from one another the enjoyment of restoration, we’re discovering that our hearts are being molded together in the bonds of the gospel, and that God is doing a quite wonderful thing. Oh, we’re not perfect, we’re not even close, we’ll never be till heaven; but nevertheless, we’ve come “through many dangers, toils, and snares,” and the wonderful thing is that we’re all still here. At least I’m glad about it, and I think perhaps one of two of you are also. ….”
We live in a world where we can connect with almost anybody, anywhere in the world. Yet the more we’re connected, the more it seems we become increasingly disconnected. We find ourselves beginning to withdraw from real-world interactions. How ironic that in a time when the world is connected as never before, too many of us are feeling a real sense of isolation.
Ultimately, it’s real relationships with real people, people with skin on their faces rather than images on a screen, that can give you a sense of security, a place in this crazy world. You might make friends that, even if you disagree with them on some pretty major issues, will still be there for you – or you for them – when something goes wrong.
And its’s a lot more fun to celebrate when things go right with people who can celebrate with you, because they know you. You have shared what it took to get where you are.
Forsake not the gathering of yourselves together.
It’s an act of worship.
No comments:
Post a Comment