Every now and then our elders have a moment of weakness and allow me to preach on Sunday. It truly is an honor and I am always grateful for the opportunity, mostly because I always learn something in the process. This last Sunday was no different - actually I should say the weeks leading up to Sunday were no different.
For several months I had been wrestling with the whole idea of worship. I talked a little about some of those struggles in an earlier blog - Music is not a Synonym for Worship -but there was still much more to worship that was spinning around in my head. Much of my struggle centered on how quickly some people tend to turn worship on and off, or more to the point, how things around them seem to turn their worship on and off for them, as if they have no control over it. Of course most of this still centers around music, but it goes beyond that. I began asking (and am still asking) what does it mean to worship? If worship is more than music, what exactly is it?
One of my conclusions was more about what it is not - it is not an emotion. The power of music in worship is that music evokes powerful emotions and I am seeing that those emotions are often confused with worship. The more emotional we are, the more meaningful and deeper we tend to believe our worship is. But that is exactly why worship can seem to come and go so quickly. When the emotion of the music or the passionate prayer or the enthusiastic sermon stops, our worship seems to stop, because we equate the emotional feeling to worship.
But our misconceptions about worship are much like misconceptions about love. The world thinks that real love is all about feeling warm and fuzzy inside and the stronger the emotions that are produced, the stronger love must be. But Christians have, for quite sometime, recognized that as nonsense. Yet, we do not always recognize the same thing when it applies to worship. The very criticisms that we have about the world when it comes to love, could be applied to ourselves when we talk about worship. The same response applies to both as well - love and worship are not about emotions, they are about making a choice.
So how do I choose to worship?
I didn’t find all the answers in preparing my sermon, but I did make some unexpected connections. Before I made those connections, though, it seems that God had something else in mind that he needed to teach me first...
During this whole process, much of what I was trying to learn was not so much a genuine thirst for learning about worship, it was a hunger for finding the right passages and the right words so I could really deliver a convicting message to those that I really thought needed to hear words of wisdom (my words of wisdom) about worship. See, if I am totally honest, much of my struggle was not so much my own struggle with worship, as it was my perception that so many other people didn’t understand worship correctly. When I started writing my sermon, my motivation wasn’t to glorify God (hey, that sounds like worship), but rather point out the erroneous actions of “those other Christians.”
Three weeks out from when I was scheduled to preach, I was thinking about all of this worship stuff. I had a general idea in mind of the shape the sermon should take and I had a vision for what I wanted to accomplish, but the words just refused to form themselves on paper (actually the computer screen, but words on paper sounds so much better). I didn’t worry too much about it, though, because I still had plenty of time (I write better with a more eminent deadline). But three weeks turned into two, and two into one and soon I wasn’t talking about weeks anymore, I was talking about days. Thursday evening before my sermon I had some things written, but it might as well have been a blank page, because nothing sounded right. I simply could not find the sentences that would convict the hearts of those other people that needed to hear this message. I went to bed feeling a bit panicked, but continued to pray that God would give me words - not my words, but his words - only this time I actually meant it.
At work on Friday I thought about my sermon (it is a good thing I have a day job, because I couldn’t go through this every week) and the more I thought about it the more I prayed that God’s words would somehow come out of my mess of thoughts. Friday evening I started over. This time I started writing what I was learning and about where I had been learning it. I started trying to put pieces together that led me to the point I am right now - the pieces that have led me to what I believe about worship today. Through the process I stopped worrying about who I was trying to preach to and instead I tried to reconstruct the fragmented parts from the last months and even years that had led me to think differently about worship. When I started doing that, an amazing thing happened. A sermon started showing itself on the blank page, only the sermon wasn’t directed so much at everyone else, like I originally intended, it was directed at me - a reminder of what I had come to believe and why.
Funny how that works...
As an added bonus, I saw a connection that I hadn’t really made before. I mean, I knew about it, but sometimes knowing about something and actually understanding the connection are two totally different things. In this case I saw the connection between obedience and worship like I had not understood before and it took shape in the midst of my writing. It was like I knew it all along, but I just hadn’t connected all the dots until I started writing it. It was weird and really cool at the same time.
By noon on Saturday I felt I had a sermon. It wasn’t what I expected, it was better. I say that cautiously. I say it was better not because of my ability - it was better because I finally listened and let God work through my fingers on the keyboard. I stopped trying to impose my will on the words and instead let the words speak for themselves. I know I didn’t remove all of me from the sermon and it seems pious to think that my sermon was specially ordained from God, but I know there was much less of me and more of Him on Friday night and Saturday morning then there was the three weeks before.
So, I know I took a big u-turn right when I asked the question, “How do I choose to worship.” But the detour is part of the answer, at least the part of the answer I learned while writing the sermon.
I choose to worship by choosing to be obedient.
I know, you’re saying, “that’s it?”
Ya, that’s it. Nothing magical, nothing incredibly profound, just obedience. To obey is greater than sacrifice. Sacrifice was a form of worship. But obedience is a greater form of worship - maybe the greatest form of worship.
And that became my sermon. A long convoluted path of ignoring God first, before discovering a simple truth, then finding unexpected freedom and relief in simple obedience. Something so simple and yet so difficult - so obvious that it was hard to see, especially since it applied to me as much as everyone else.
I know, it seems like it should be a shorter story, doesn’t it?
