Over the last few weeks, we've been having conversations about the big things, about the big things that matter in our life and in our life of faith. And we've been having these conversations for a reason, not just because we need to talk about fancy things every now and then, but we've been having these conversations because of this, because the small things in our life can turn into big things. And when that happens, we need the legit big things in our life to be big enough. We want to have a larger view of who God is, a larger view of what God has done for us, of how He loves us, what He's asking us to do, or the way He's engaged in our world.
We want to have a picture of God that is bigger than our picture of the world. Because we want God to provide us the foundation that is larger than the things that life throws at us. So the first week, we talked about why the Bible matters and how God has obsessed with speaking to us. He spoke creation into existence.
He told the world to create itself. In the beginning of John, we also see, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. Jesus revealed as the Word made incarnate of us here. God, throughout time, has also called people to specifically share and write their experiences with Him and experiences that God's people have had with Him, and that those writings are sacred, those things that we can trust, those writings are inspired by God given to people, and they're the stories that God's folks have been telling for thousands of years.
And so we follow the Bible because we know that it's telling us about the call of God upon our lives and the truth that we can count on. And last week, we talked about why theology matters, which sounded like a boring idea, but we realized that the way that we think about God shows the type of God that we believe in. And when we've only ever thought about a small idea of God that we're going to have to go through the woes and the worries of life with a small God that we want to think deeply. And we trust the inspiration.
We also trust the experiences of people who've known this world for longer than us and the things that the Church has handed down throughout time that we believe to be true about God. And this week we're talking about why worship matters. And I have to tell you all, this is a little fun for me because for ages, I did not think I would be doing this. I thought that I'd be teaching, and I'd want to be a professor of Christian worship.
And so I spent years just kind of pouring into this about why we worship, how the history, all those kinds of things, but then it's infected my life in a deep way. But also it was kind of an interesting subject because we have a beginning point and ending point typically that's pretty close about worship. And I know that some of you might be pretty excited about this. Some of you might be like, OK, Chad, let's finish this series up.
Let's get on to what's next. So I'm asking we can divide this pretty quickly. OK, who really, really likes worship? Raise your hand.
OK, now who does not like to sing in front of other people? So like right there, we kind of like, I don't know, don't make me do that. See, right there, we kind of end up kind of finding this dividing point because for many of us, when we begin thinking about worship, the first and the last thing that we go to is, OK, worship is singing in public. I don't like to do that.
Nope. For some of us, I would love to do that. I'm really good at it. I'm comfortable with it.
But worship is much bigger than just us singing together. But worship is all about us being together. It's a very key piece of that story right there. Worship, like singing, the singing piece is just the first part.
And like we've done with all these other conversations the last few weeks, there's something bigger going on when we talk about worship. And today, what we're going to think about is what is exactly going on in our worship and what's exactly happening through our worship. And we're going to do that with three conversations today. The first one is this, that in worship, we are recognizing the Lord.
Worship, we recognize him. Genesis chapter four, kind of the beginning of the whole night. And today, we're going to go like Genesis. We're going to go like Psalms.
We're going to go Revelation. And so we're going to kind of the whole nine yards today, the beginning, the middle and the end. This is what says this is not an international version. Adam knew his wife again.
And she bore son and gave him the same sith for she said, God has appointed me for another offspring instead of Abel for Cain killed him. To Seth also, son was born and he called his name Eenosh. And at that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. So at the end of just kind of those boring.
So, it's how son and his name was this. I get the end of only boring, like, lineage passages. We find this verse in verse 26 and says, and at that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. We look in scripture.
This is the first instance of worship that's ever talked about. If we look in scripture, the Hebrew word for worship that shows up about 80% of the time in the Old Testament is this word. It's to call upon. To call upon someone also means that you know them, you know who they are, you know what they do, you know what they're capable of, you know what they're good.
You know this person, you recognize them, you identify them, and you know how to get their attention. Think about the people that you know like when you need something very specifically and you call that person to ask them to help you out or to do this because you know this is what this person does. Like you call me and say, hey Chad, there's an all you can eat catfish buffet. You want to shut them down.
Yes, I'll be there. This person we know. This is something completely different from this generic. Hey, hey, how do you get somebody's attention that you don't know?
Hey, hey, also like inside baseball here. Everybody thinks pastors are really good at names and faces and all this. I'm not. My dad is fantastic at it.
I am not. We all kind of have like our secret like, hey, chief, what's up? I just let you all into a secret right there. I'm sorry.
But think about this. If you have a base level relationship with someone, you're going to have a base level of expectations about that person, right? If you really don't know that person, are you going to ask them to do something that's critical or important? Or do you expect that person to be willing to go outside of their ways for specific need of yours and they might just be a really nice person?
That's the thing is this base level relationship. Base level interaction is going to lead to a base level relationship. So many times in worship, what we end up doing is we end up, hey, you and God. And we're doing that not because we don't like him, we don't know his name, but our expectation and our experience with him is in a base level.
At that time, people begin to call upon the name of the Lord. There's actually a very interesting background going on here because this chapter started off with Cain and was able. You might be familiar with the story. Two brothers, one gets jealous of the other one and so one brother kills the other brother.
And then God curses Cain, the killer. And the curse that he gave him was to wander about WAND, not wonder. And the South is going to have to make this differentiation. His curse was to roam about endlessly with no center point.
And so this lineage chapter, what you see happen then is these descendants of Cain are all attached to the same curse. And they're trying to find a way to create their own center and they're never successful. You see the first cities are built to try to create their own center. Warfare is started to create its own center.
So in the middle of all of this, at the end of the story, we see at this point in time people begin to call upon the name of the Lord. So we see that the two lines of humanity, the one without a center and the one who finally realizes you know what we have a center and we might have untied the rope from it, but we need to put that back together now because we recognize fully who this God is and what he's capable of and we need to recognize him. It's a call upon the name of the word. What's also neat though is if we look in scripture, this word has a second meaning, it has a different usage meaning that whenever God calls someone to something in scripture, it's this exact same word for worship.
Isn't that interesting? That's about recognition. That's it. What God recognizes us and he knows we're capable of.
He knows what we have the ability to do. He knows our deepest joys, our deepest hurts, our deepest pains and he calls upon us. So to me and worship, the fact that I'm matter to the person that I'm here for, the reason I'm here, that's big to me. That's important.
Think about that. God has called to us so we reciprocate by calling to him in worship. We're practicing mutual recognition of the other person we come together. The second thing we do in worship is this, in worship we're speaking about the goodness of God.
We're going to go to Psalm 22 and read what this Psalm says to us. Psalm 22, 3 through 5, this is what it says. Yet you were holy and thrown on the praises of Israel. Our ancestors trusted in you and you rescued them.
They cried out to you. They called out to you. And we're saved. They trusted in you and were never disgraced.
In worship we're speaking of the greatness of God. It says here he's enthroned on the praises of Israel. God's enthroned on the praises of his people. That God dwells inside of the worship of his people.
That he makes his home in the worship of his people. That in worship what we speak to is that God being here, if you've been around founder for very long you know we kind of go through John 1, 14 constantly. The word became flesh and made his home among us. We've seen his glory to go to fathers one and only son.
In worship God provides stability in his presence through his people. And what's interesting is in this verse if you go back tonight or today later on you read Psalms 22 like it's not a nice thing. It's about crazy stuff going on. It's one of those like everything is falling down around me.
Where are you? Then right there you're kind of one see the psalmist like states his case. He starts off with you are enthroned on the praises of Israel. You have called to us and we trusted in you.
So where God's presence in worship provides stability. It's in contrast to meaningless chaos. Because that's what the rest of the psalmist is just absolute meaningless chaos. That God's presence.
This is kind of a way to think about it. How many of you we were talking about with Brian and Kim back there today about the guy who has the Benier food truck here in town. How many of you have gone and found him out before? How many of you have ever heard of a food truck before?
How many of you have shoped like a pop up shop? You know what those are? When somebody kind of shows up somewhere and we just pop up shops. See in worship we say Jesus is God is omnipresent.
He's everywhere. He's been here wrong before we were. One of our friends at St. Andrew said before about when they bought this land 20 years ago that we purchased earlier this year.
They said we bought that because we didn't know what it was yet. We were just waiting to find out what it was. They said we bought that 20 years ago to save it for y'all to buy it from us. That's why they sold it to us for the exact same price they paid for it 20 years ago.
If you know Starlington commercial real estate. Thank you Jesus. Right? Yeah.
$40,000 not $200,000 an acre. We'll take that. In worship Jesus is already here. This is his place.
But when the church worships together it's like there's a food truck or a pop up shop at the Kingdom of God establishes residents for a moment. That the truth of every single thing that's to come at the end of the glory and the beauty and the justice of the Kingdom of God when God's people come together and begin proclaiming who he is that for a moment the totality of the reign of God is present. Think about that. That's a lot bigger than singing song prayer, prayer, past above you go home.
Isn't it? That's why I'm fascinated with worship is that idea. That God's people and it's not like we sing hard enough, we pray hard enough or if we dance in one foot the right way he might show up. God's here.
Regardless of that. But when the truth of who he is is proclaimed that power reigns among us. That's a completely completely different thing. It also leads us to the last thing though.
In worship we're declaring a new story. Robert Jensen he says this. If there's no universal storyteller they can be the universe can have no story line. We're proclaiming this greatness of God.
What we were doing is we're saying we know the one who's really in charge and this is what really has been going on. This is what's going on right now and this is what we believe will happen and each one of us embody the truth of that. Because you know what where you might if you've ever felt like that you have an inadequate story about the goodness of God. If you've ever felt like you're too incomplete to tell the story.
When we're all in here together I guarantee you there's somebody in this room that can fill those gaps in for you. And that your experience and your life fills in the gaps for somebody else. The beauty of us all being together is that all of our witness to the goodness of God combined can speak to how big he is. That when we come together in worship we're telling the story of the greatness of God.
And last is this that in worship we're gathering to speak of a different world. In worship we're gathering to speak from a revelation chapter 4 verse 11. This is what it says. You're worthy of Lord our God to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and they exist because you created what you have pleased.
See these aren't just words that we have experienced. They're words for the whole world. All honor, all glory and all power is yours. We're not going to dive too much into that.
We're actually going to do seven weeks on revelation starting in July. But all honor, all glory, all power is yours. These are words for the whole world. See when we gather to speak in a different world we're not gathering to speak of just our own personal existence.
We're gathering to speak of the whole story of God. I want to tell you a story real quick that I think really kind of hits in on this because so many times we think of worship being an individual activity. I think that maybe one of the missteps that the churches may be made talking about works for the last 30 or 40 years is just talking about that individual activity. If you're a person who doesn't like to sing or is not expressive in public like I am, you begin to feel like you just don't have a place sometimes when worship is going on.
That stopped me many times. It's something I've had to struggle to work through. A friend of mine who was at a church and we were in Kentucky that was experiencing just kind of rapid growth. They were having all the same problems that Foundry has right now.
Where are we going to put all of these people? The church kind of had an interesting background and every Sunday they were having to put more and more chairs out. There was one space in the sanctuary that would not put chairs. It was about 20 by 20 because there was about 10 people that would come there and they liked to practice what's called a liturgical dance.
Like tambourines and streamers. It looks like Square dancing for Jesus. It's just dance. People really dig it.
That's cool. If that's your thing, that's your thing. There's place for everything. You had like 500 people in a room sitting on each other's laps.
Literally if you brought your kids into church on the lap and they realized in this 20 by 20 space they could get like 45 chairs in. Before they had like 60 people sitting on the floor and the last thing they had is like we can't do this. We've got to give them their space. This is what these people do.
We're going to honor this as much as long as we can at the point in time got to where they couldn't. My friend and his wife were tasked with being like the meanies to put chairs out. Wouldn't you hate that job? I'm sure if I ask you to do something like that you'd be kind of mad at me.
They had to go put the chairs out. They're putting the chairs out where the turtial dancers and streamers and tambourines. It's like a bull horn one time. They did their thing at.
They're putting the chairs out and somebody showed up and this was really sad though. They looked at my friend Drew and they said how am I going to worship today? We heard the story and up when pastors together sometimes tell war stories and try to out-silly each other. This was during a war story session.
We also kind of realized that was sad because there were some folks that were affected by that decision that had to be made. The more I thought about as a person who thought about worship a lot of people I realized there's a big truth inside of there. We have to realize that in worship there's two things that can be happening. I'll let you figure out which one you think is more powerful.
We can either be a bunch of people, a bunch of individuals in a room together at the same time doing our own thing or we can be the gathered body of Christ speaking to the truth of the kingdom of God. So we got to be a bunch of people in a room at the same time in the same place doing their own thing or we can be the gathered body of Christ proclaiming the truth of his kingdom. You'll see it's two completely different things. Like for me what I've learned over years is just a bunch of folks in the room at the same time, you're just scratching a Jesus itch right there.
That's all you're doing. But the gathered body of Christ coming together to speak the truth of the kingdom or doing something much bigger, that group's talking about changing the world and they're talking about a God who's changing the world around them. It can't be a private thing. It can't be an individual thing.
It's about God's people stretched out across time doing the things that God's people do. Revelation chapter 21, possibly my favorite chapter in the entire Bible, but it says this, verse 10, so he took me in the spirit to a great high holy mountain and he showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, descending. Okay? Catch that.
Descend it. The 22, and I saw no temple in the city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of sun or moon for the glory of God illuminates the city and the Lamb is its light. And the nations will walk in that light and the kings of the world will enter the city and all their glory.
You know, our story of worship isn't a story of getting out of here. Notice I saw the holy city descending. If we talk consistently about a God who comes to our world, a God who makes his home among us, a God who's using piers and puts it, who neighborhoods among us, our story of worship is a story of God being here in our place with us while we are here. And that's a story for the beginning.
That's also a story for the end. That we as a church are not trying to escape this place. We're trying to transform and trying to change this place. God's final and ultimate calling out to his people is his is him coming to us permanently and restoring this place.
And that world will be wildly different. That will be very, very different than this right now. The whole meaningless chaos versus a firm established truth. That's really going to be fixed one day.
Like big fix. It's like not like I fix things. Like big fix. See if our world is in flux, if our world is in meaningless chaos, the church and its worship provides boundaries.
It provides walls. It provides foundations. It provides all these things of truth by the way that we create it in our practice. The way that we serve people.
The way that we love. The way that we try to fix things and handle things. The way that we go out and mission projects. But by the way that we worship.
Because our worship creates this space of the kingdom. It's brief glimpses of the truth and power and beauty of God while we are gathered together. See we've got a different story from this world. You know at the beginning we know the end of it.
And that story is a God who offers himself to us completely. And all he asks us to do is just respond to that. Worship is the best defense we have against hopelessness. Because that is most basic worship is a public decoration of hope fullness.
So we become what we worship. What we believe has the most power to rule our lives. We respond to the call of God has placed on us by declaring who he has been since time has begun. The reason we all matter in worship is because we together can tell a big story about who God is.
We can look and can dream and can work in a big world that Jesus has offered us. We can declare hope completely. And that's why worship matters to us. So Jesus help us to understand.
Help us to feel. Help us to see. Help us to love. Help us to encounter you in a way that not only changes us, but in a way that has the ability to change this whole world.
Jesus isn't about us. It's about your call. Help us to declare things well. God help us to realize the difference that we make together.
That we're better together. Help us to see the chapter that you are writing. Your story of this world here in Starlington and Monroe in North Louisiana. Help us to have eyes to see the things you desire for us to do.
Help us to have ears to hear your call and your love and your whispers and your graciousness and your dreams. Help us to see your kingdom spreading out. And thank you so much for letting us be a part of that, no matter how we come to you and what shape we are in. That you're big enough.
So you're going to be afraid.