So our first reading is from Psalm 95 verses 1-7, Psalm 95. Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord, let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song. For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods.
In His hand are the depths of the earth and the mountain peaks belong to Him. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down in worship. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker.
For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the flock under His care. Second reading is from John chapter four, verse 19 to 26. Sir, the woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.
Woman, Jesus replied, believe me, a time is coming where you will worship the Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know. The salvation is from the Jews.
Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the spirit and in truth. For they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in the spirit and in truth. The woman said, I know that Messiah, called Christ, is coming.
When He comes, He will explain everything to us. Then Jesus declared, I, the one speaking to you, I am He. This is the word of the one. Well, today we're gonna be continuing our series called Being God's Church.
Seven weeks I was thinking about some various elements about what we do at church, why we do them, why they're important, and how we can think about them in a helpful way, driven by Scripture. In the first week we thought about welcoming as God's family. In the second week we thought about what it means for us to be an intergenerational gathering of people. In the third week last week Leo spoke to us about growing through discipleship, and this week we are thinking about worshiping in spirit and truth.
One of the challenges we will always face as a church is that it is so easy to fall into a pattern of going through the motions when we gather together each week. We follow rhythms and patterns which themselves are helpful for us, although we should constantly be thinking about them. But because of human nature we tend to fall into acts that we just always do, right? Oh, we just do that because that's what we've always done.
Today we're gonna try and get behind that. We're gonna think about our hearts, what should sit at the center of how we think about worship. We'll start by looking at how Jesus reshapes worship in John 4. We're gonna look at how Paul develops, then applies this in Romans 12, and then I'm gonna jump backwards into Psalm 95 for some encouragement in how we do this.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for your word. We thank you for an opportunity to worship you, and we pray as we hear that by your spirit, you would change our hearts, you would help us to know you more, and make us more like the Lord Jesus. In his name I pray.
Amen. I think it's neither controversial nor secret for me to say that there is quite a broad spectrum of worship styles amongst different Christian churches even in Sydney, right? We often talk about the hand raisers and those who do not. I think one of the great things about our gatherings that we are a mix of those people.
Anglicans are born with heavy wrists, so it's just kind of a difficult thing for us to do. I've been to churches before where people are waving flags doing worship, I've been to churches before where people are painting up the front during worship songs, and I've been to plenty of churches that don't play any music at all. But everyone only sings using their voices. There's a huge range of ways that we can go about worshiping God as a group.
Now what I want to do today is not directly talk about those different things, but rather to kind of honor and affirm those things and say, so what are the hearts behind what we're doing and what value is that actually, what adds to our understanding of worship? The Samaritan woman questions Jesus about the correct place of worship in John chapter four. Mount Gerasim is the mountain she's talking about, which is the Samaritan tradition, or Jerusalem, the Jewish tradition. Jesus responds that the time has come when true worshipers will not be bound by location, but will worship the Father in spirit and truth.
As God is spirit and seeks such worshipers, he declares that salvation comes from the Jews, yet the new era of worship is here, and reveals himself as the Messiah that she awaits. For a long time, worship of God was tied to a place, to a location. God had given his people the temple as a place to come to carry out physical acts such as sacrifices that revealed and developed a spiritual experience. It was tied to a people, a national identity.
But Jesus is bringing in a new era of worship. He's transforming what it looks like. Now that he, the Messiah has come, it is moving from being found in a place where people go to relate to their God, and instead found directly in the person of God himself. Now he chooses to give this teaching at a really interesting moment, at the moment when he meets and is speaking with the Samaritan woman, a woman who he, as a Jewish teacher should not really be speaking to, a woman who due to her own life was experiencing separation and disownment from her own place of worship, and therefore was restricted in her experience of it.
Jesus is saying that the time where that is the case is over, but now worship of God is founded himself through spirit and truth. Now as we seek to kind of define worship, I have a couple of people that I think help us a bit. One is a guy called Charles Spurgeon, who Leo referred to last week, and he says, this is kind of, I kind of synthesized this, he says that worship is a spiritual and heart-centered act of the soul, unbound by outward rituals, encompassing thanksgiving, obedience, calling on God in trouble, and heartfelt praise that glorifies him through Jesus Christ with a contrite heart. For some reason, it's the Baptists that have a lot of good definitions and things to say on this, and so the other definition I want to think about today comes from John Piper.
He defines worship as a inner heartfelt treasuring of God above all things, rooted in a right knowledge of his nature, that is truth, and a passionate response to his supreme worth, spirit, which overflows into external acts of praise and sacrificial love toward others. I think combining or thinking about these two definitions puts us in a good starting point, knowledge of the truth and passionate response in the spirit, and I really like that starting phrase that he uses, the heartfelt treasuring of God above all things. Paul develops what this looks like when we read the book of Romans 12. He says, therefore, I urge you brothers and sisters in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.
This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, perfect, and pleasing will. Paul is saying that worship is part of a transformed life. It is the transformed life.
The first act of worship, each of us carry out, is the moment that we recognize Jesus is Lord, and responds to that in repentance and faith. Then it is actions which are informed by the heart, as we seek to know and love this God, we change our lives, we are transformed by the spirit in response to what we heed as done, and we live our lives seeking to be more like Christ and to live his way. But then it is also a heart changed by actions. Because we're committed to this God, an amazing way that we worship him is choosing to live our life in this way, in our minds, when sometimes our hearts are struggling or they are not up to speed with our brains.
God sees that and he loves that. It also has a major benefit that we don't often realize, but as the hands carry out the commands of God, often they bring our hearts along for the journey. We become more like Jesus, our hearts are transformed as we go about his work, because we know it is what brings him glory. I'm not sure how many people here have learnt an instrument before, but it's often this kind of up and down love that people experience with an instrument.
They will love it at first, and then the idea of having to practice it becomes more frustrating and as annoying, because you can't just immediately play all the songs that you want to be able to play, that you've heard on the radio. And it's got the same interaction at play. So people learn and practice an instrument because they love it. But practicing an instrument makes people better at it, and therefore makes them love it.
Our hands and our hearts are intertwined in this experience. Sometimes our hands are driven by the light and love of the Lord, and sometimes our hands are doing the work and dragging us along with them while our heart catches up. Do you see what I mean? God brings our hearts along for the journey when we serve him using our hands.
We become more like Jesus, our hearts are transformed, and that is what brings him glory. Faith and deeds are intertwined in the worship of God. Our faith drives our deeds and our deeds drive our faith. Worship is a life driven by faith in who our God is, not through sacrifices at the temple anymore, but in a life sacrificed to obedience in Jesus.
That means that what we experience on a Sunday can be a difficult task for people to plan and put together. I don't, I very rarely envy Joel, who has a hard task in choosing what songs we're going to sing at church every week. For us to sing songs that both inspire our hearts and inform our minds, right? Powerful melodies, but also true words, I'm thankful that other people have gifts in this that I don't have.
Sometimes we sing because we feel it. Sometimes we sing because we need to feel it. Sometimes we save the creed with joy in our hearts, and sometimes we say it because we need reminding of the joy that we believe. Sometimes we thirst for God's word, and so we read it.
Sometimes we need God's word pushed into our hard hearts. The things we do every week at church are important, but they are important for different people in different ways each week. Doing things together and doing them alone, I think worship is a really big part of this. I think another thing is like practicing sport.
I really love rugby. I never do sports illustrations, right? I know it's a stereotype, but I never do it, so I'm going to do this one, and we're going to be okay with it. I really love rugby, and practicing rugby at home on my own is obviously not something that is easy for you to do.
You can't play sport, a team sport on your own, but you can practice the skills, you can practice elements of it, you can read about it, you can watch it, you can enjoy it. And then you can come together with others and play that thing as a team sport. I've said this before, Christianity, and therefore worship is a team sport, but it's something that we do together at our strongest, and we're doing it in its most full way, but it's also something that we do on our own, and that is equally important, joy-filled and valuable in the life of faith. Psalm 95 calls the community to joy for worship, singing, shouting, giving thanks to the Lord as the Rock of Salvation and great God above all.
It praises him as creator who holds the earth's debt to the mountains, the seas, and the land, and then it urges bowing and kneeling before our maker for he is God, and we are his cared for people and flock. So what does this look like for us? Well, the psalm invites communal praise while also implying personal submission. Worship is in all of life.
We do this together, and we do this alone. We gather like a family around the table every week, twice a week if you're in a community group, living out our lives of worship, enjoy, and support of each other. When we say or sing things together in church, something profound is happening. We replicate the throne room of God, and the praise is sung to him there, but we also share our experiences here on earth.
You see, sometimes, because we all live in different lives, but we're singing the same song, sometimes the things we sing or say as a group aren't directly connected to how we might individually be experiencing life at that moment, but they will be connected to how someone else here feels at that particular moment. And when we sing these things together, when we say these things together, that mean things for each of us in different ways, we are connected in this spiritual empathy, standing together. And maybe as a result, maybe we need to be singing or saying more laments to make this a more rounded experience, as we understand that each of us are experiencing different points in life and different things in our Christian walk. Yet when we say a confession together, when we sing a song of joy together, we are connected to each other's experiences.
When we come together in worship, we each bring our lives with us, and we share those lives with one another, and we grow together. We're inspired by each other to keep going, but we also bring our journeys with us to be part of that inspiration. We learn together, we grow together, and that allows us to treasure God above all things together. But worship is also an individual act.
We've said about how we live out our lives and obedience to Jesus' commands, and that is a huge part of worshiping God. But also, when we take moments ourselves, prayer is key. Prayer, understood simply, is the act of recognizing who is in charge, who is King. No matter what you pray, whether joyful or desperate, that is a great act of worship.
It shows a depth of faith no matter how you are struggling. Reading the Bible is recognition of where truth comes from, even when you don't feel like it. In fact, when you don't feel like it and you read it, I think that is an especially beautiful thing. And once again, is an act that helps your heart.
Singing, we are so blessed with so much Christian music in this world. Some people would argue too much Christian music, use it. Listen intentionally on a commute, when you're at home, when you're seeking peace in your heart, dwell on the words and feel the work in you. Now in many ways, you might say, Tom, you just said that all we do in the Christian life is an act of worship.
And I say, yeah, you're kind of right. But it is the treasuring of God above all things that fuels this, and living that out in response in faith. But we need help. And that's why we gather with our amazing family at church to do some of these things together each week, to bring him glorious as people, and to give us inspiration to live out our lives in spirit and truth.
So how do we bring this home for us? But I think the first thing is, we gather. As we reflect on the communal call in Psalm 95 to come together in joyful praise, gathering with God's people is essential to experiencing worship in its fullest form. When we join in unity to hear the word proclaimed, it renews our minds with truth and stirs our spirits collectively.
Much like the early church in Acts, who devoted themselves to fellowship and breaking of bread, singing alongside one another isn't just about harmony in notes, but harmony in hearts. I thought that's pretty polite going to write that, by the way. That's not normally my style. Seeking to praise and to call upon our God as a family, where one person's passion ignites another.
And so this week, commit to attending church or your community group, with a fresh intentionality, allowing the shared experience to deepen your connection to God and others, and watch how it transforms your individual faith life. The second is to practice. Drawing from Romans 12 one to two, where Paul urges us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, in true worship, practice means actively choosing to integrate moments of devotion into your daily rhythm, even when your heart isn't fully aligned. Our actions have the power to reshape our inner world, reading scripture not out of duty, but to renew the mind or pausing in prayer to invite the spirit's passion amid our busyness.
It's in these deliberate steps that worship becomes a lifestyle and not an event, allowing God's truth to soften hardened places and to kindle genuine affection towards Him. So this week, make a conscious decision to incorporate small worship practices, like a morning Bible verse meditation or a Thanksgiving journal or a song and observe how your consistent obedience gradually aligns your heart with his supreme worth. And finally, share. Inspired by John Faugh's relational encounter where Jesus invites this American woman into truth and spirit-filled worship, sharing extend the invitation to others, turn personal devotion into communal growth, not just at church, whether it's reading the Bible together over coffee, singing worship songs during a drive, embarking on a prayer walk with someone.
This, the act of sharing mirrors the overflow that Piper described at the start, where our treasuring of God spills into sacrificial love, strengthening bonds and drawing others closer to Him. So this week, reach out to somebody else and invite them into a simple worship moment in your week. See how it not only enriches their spirit but refreshes yours in unexpected ways. Worship is our response to the incredible grace of God through the Lord Jesus.
So let's work on this together and see how God will continue to work in our wonderful family. Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much that we worship you wherever we are, but in spirit and truth and no longer by location. Father, I pray that regardless of how we go about our worship, that it would be driven by a desire to know you more and a desire to praise you.
Father, help us to treasure you above all things. We thank you for the various forms of worship, that different churches can practice and we pray that for all of them, no matter what they are, they're driven by the same thing. Lord, we thank you that you are a God who hears our prayers, you are a God who responds to us when we seek you. And so we pray Lord that you help us to praise your name and to praise you and ask you when we need help.
And Jesus name I pray. Amen.