Based on John 4:19-26
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When you were born you came into the world with certain inbuilt desires…
- The need to feed… parents love this!
- The passion to communicate… parents love this too!
- An ambition to explore… parents love it, but it is scary.
As well as these three, there is a fourth inbuilt need. You see it in every culture and in every ethnic group; it is the desire to worship.
Has it ever struck you how rare atheism is? Hardly anyone is a full blown atheist. In the worlds last remaining atheist state, North Korea, they are proud to proclaim that they do not worship God. This may be true, but they still cannot repress the desire to worship. This is from a report on a visit to North Korea last year.
“ The van finally pulled up at the foot of a paved hill called Man-Su-Dae, on top of which stood the sixty-five-foot-high bronze statue of Kim Il Sung. Everyone is supposed to pay his or her respects to the Eternal Great Leader upon arrival in Pyongyang, and we were told to bow while Yoo placed a bouquet on the ground below.”
Source - New York Review of Books
North Koreans worship their leader, Kim il Sung. Western Europeans think they live in a secular society… but without realising it, we worship passionately.
“Music is worship; whether it's worship of women or their designer, the world or it's destroyer, whether it comes from that ancient place we call the soul or simply the cerebral cortex, whether the prayers are on fire with a dumb rage or dove-like desire…for God or something you replace God with... usually yourself.”
Bono – Introduction to the Psalms
Every human being worships something. It is impossible not to worship… you worship the God who created you or some cheap substitute, that may even be yourself.
In English, the word “Worship” originally meant to recognise the worth of something. This kind of ‘worship language’ bleeds over into our culture, too. Think of the adverts for L’Oreal cosmetics, remember the phrase, ‘Because I’m worth it’? It is a little hint of the self-worship at the heart of our culture.
The history of worship
We must worship something – we were built that way. Let’s trace this idea through the Bible.
Adam – was created to enjoy a relationship with God, and told how he could maintain that relationship (Genesis 2:15-17). Worship was built into us at creation. It involves relationship and obedience.
Cain and Abel – (Genesis 4:1-7) not all worship is acceptable. In our culture, we encourage people to do their own thing. But we need to learn to worship God in a way that he accepts. Cain’s problems began when he would not learn.
Moses – With Israel locked in Egypt, working as slaves for pharaoh, God’s challenge was, “Let my son (Israel) go so that he can worship me” (Exodus 4:22-23) – the purpose of salvation is to create a community that will worship God.
The Law – You remember the Hokey-Kokey song? “You put your left leg in, your left leg out…” That pretty much describes Old Testament worship; rigid form but not much freedom of expression
The Prophets – ruthlessly probed the weakness of Old Testament worship:
“Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease? … You are always on their lips but never in their hearts”
Jeremiah 12:1-2
Jeremiah and the other prophets describe a very religious people who could perform all the rituals in the temple and still be ‘faithless’ and ‘wicked’! The problem was that people were observing ritual without any genuine spiritual engagement. This is the world Jesus was born into – rigorously formal worship regulated from the temple in Jerusalem, and a spiritually clueless population just going through the motions. God was always on their lips but never in their hearts.
The day everything changed…
There came a moment in the history of worship when everything changed. Strangely, this did not happen in a big conference or an international meeting. The announcement was made in an apparently casual conversation in Samaria.
John 4:19-26
What Jesus is saying was revolutionary:
First, there are no holy places – (verses 20-21). The first Christians worshipped in the Temple, in the synagogues, at least one lecture theatre and down by a riverside near Philippi. There is a Christian meeting place under the grandstand of the ruined Roman arena in a town called Durres in Albania. When it was in use, men were fighting to the death in the arena, and Christians were worshipping Christ as Lord under the grandstand. Our Church meets in a football stadium.
My first experience of this came in 1974, on a ledge overlooking the Mer de Glace, a huge glacier in France, watching blocks of ice the size of battleships sliding casually over the icefall from the Valeé Blanche. That for me became a place of worship, probably the first one in my life.
Second, what matters is what goes on in your heart not what you do with your body, (verse 23 – we will look at this in greater detail next week). Just let that sink in for a bit… think of the immense freedom this gives you: Think of the choice of coffee you get in Starbucks!
How do you like your worship?
- Modern or traditional?
- Set liturgy or totally free-form?
- Charismatic or sacramental?
- Dynamic, static or ecstatic?
- One sugar or two… oops we are back to Starbucks!
But this freedom can lead to confusion. I was once in a worship meeting at Keele university in1980. Everyone else was from a charismatic church and noticed that I was not doing the things they were doing. Afterwards I was challenged by the leadership because they thought there was something wrong with me!
Worship wars can separate Christians, isolate them from one-another. We must be careful to affirm one another and not expect uniformity. Let’s encourage diversity!
Third … Jesus speaks of a moment in history which will make this possible (verse 21 & 23 – Jesus’ literally speaks of ‘an hour’ which is yet to come. Yet this hour is not long after Jesus speaks, in verse 23 he says, ‘it now has come’) he is referring to his own death. None of this would be possible without the cross.
(There is a powerful passage about this in Hebrews 10:11-14 – the rituals have been abandoned, the reality is now in place)
Worship – it’s what your right arm’s for!
When you were born, you came into the world with an inbuilt desire to worship. As we grow up, we learn to worship other things… another man or woman, a game of football, a job, ourselves…
God is seeking people (verse 23) who will fulfil their destiny by learning to worship the only being in the universe who is worthy of it. Imagine him scanning this room… who will commit themselves to worship God in the way he chooses?
Like a parent, who is delighted when their child starts to eat, to explore or to communicate… when we start to worship, God is delighted!