Worship over Watching--Luke 2:8-20

There’s a difference between those who sit on the sidelines, and those who play in the game. Some people get involved in things, and others do not. I remember growing up I was on a football team. This was 5th grade midgets football, and they had a weight limit—you had to be under 100 lbs to play on the team. They didn’t want any bigger kids hurting the younger kids. But I was just over 100 lbs and I remember having to sit on the bench for the first few games and working towards getting to the right weight so I could play in the game. It was hard work! I remember there was another guy, who was a few lbs heavier than me. He was always sitting on the bench. He rarely got to play because he really didn’t want to put in the effort to run a few extra laps or work hard so he could make weight; he sat on the bench most of the season. Sometimes, after sitting on the bench, you get comfortable there. You enjoy the perks of saying you’re part of the team, but you don’t really have to put in the work to play. You get the recognition for the wins of the team but you don’t really have to work hard to make them happen; it’s kind of the best of both worlds. ‌‌ The same is true in the spiritual realm as well. Sometimes there are those who sit on the sidelines and watch, when they could be getting involved. When everyone else is doing something, they are warming the bench. This tendency can show up in many different ways. It could be something like not making much effort in our spiritual lives. We want to sit on the bench so to speak by not getting involved very much in our own spiritual lives, and so we do minimal Bible reading or prayer or spiritual disciplines—we’re not really pursuing God in our spiritual lives, we’re just maintaining. Maybe it’s something like making other things a priority over God. We have all this other stuff in life and so when we should be serving, or should be getting involved, we don’t. Maybe it’s in the area of witnessing. You know God wants us to share the message about Jesus, but you just struggle doing it; you aren’t building relationships with unbelievers and aren’t having a testimony with unbelievers. Maybe for you it’s something like just not enjoying the salvation you have and savoring a relationship with God. We all have a tendency in some way, shape, or form, to be a bench warming Christian. We all have the tendency to sit on the sidelines when God wants us to get in the middle of the action. God doesn’t want us to just be a sidelines watcher when it comes to our spiritual lives. God doesn’t want us to just sit around on our padded seat cushion; he wants is to get busy! And as we come to our passage for this morning, we see that God wants us to choose worship over watching from the sidelines. He wants us to choose serving over sitting. God doesn’t just want us to sit on the sidelines in our spiritual lives and watch, he wants us to get busy, and he wants us to get busy worshiping and praising him with our lives. And in our passage this morning, we are given the example of some individuals who experienced the truth about Jesus in the most remarkable way, and they had to decide: were they just going to sit on the sidelines and watch, or were they going to get to work and worship. So today we’re going to look at the shepherds in Luke 2, and we’re going to learn from their example how we can be active in pursuing and worshipping God. So from our text, I want you to remember our big idea for today: God wants us to choose worship over watching