Worship

Our scripture reading for today is from Psalm 51 verses 15 to 19. Let us hear together from God's word. Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, God, you will not despise. May it please you to proper Zion to build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in the sacrifice of the righteous and burnt offerings offered whole. Then bulls will be offered on your altar. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Well, good morning, church. I'm thankful to be able to worship God with you today. We're in week two of our camp meetings sermon series. If you weren't here last week, we talked a little bit about what camp meetings were. If you missed it, it's kind of in that Wesleyan holiness tradition that goes way back to the field preaching, where thousands of people would come into a field to hear fiery preaching from persons like George Whitfield or Francis Asbury or John Wesley to grow in their faith. Over time, it went where people would set up camps in these fields every year. The same week and would get together. And then over time, these fields, they became cabins and buildings and auditoriums where they still happen around the country today, where people will take off work and go with their family and have a week away as their vacation time with other families, where they would have lots of fun things. They might have ice cream churn offs that we do or potluck dinners or a lot of hymn scenes that we're going to have.

We scheduled a lot of these things over the month of August to kind of go with our camp meeting theme that we're going to be doing. But at the cornerstone of all of this, beyond the fun and the food and the fellowship and the time with family and friends, the cornerstone of camp meetings is worship. Passionate singing and fiery preaching, one of the things that you may have begun to notice, and if you haven't, let me tell you so that you'll see it for the rest of the month, is that we've slated the songs that we're going to sing in worship to be some of our favorites, either in the more contemporary context for this service or in the more traditional context at 11 o'clock service, because camp meetings wasn't a time to try out new songs. It was those songs that we know, those songs that have been meaningful in our lives to sing them out passionately and with meaning reminding us of their meaning in our lives. So as we sing these songs over the month of August, be sure you're singing them passionately as well. But at the core of that, there would be the fiery preaching.

And in camp meeting still today, the organizers of it, there'd be kind of a little lead team that'll take lead on it, and they'll go out and find some of the best preachers of the day and get them to come and preach the whole week, kind of like a revival, and they'll schedule them a year, two, three years out to make sure that they can have them come and bring a word to them every day of camp meeting. My preaching professor at Asbury Seminary was one of those that was oftentimes in those rotations. His name was Ellsworth Callis. He was considered one of the great preachers of the 20th century of any denomination, of any tilt, but he was Methodist and pastor some of the biggest Methodist churches in the nation over his career in life. If you've ever taken disciple Bible study and used the original videos, he was a presenter in a lot of them. Of course, our Sunday school classes have used them. We have those books in the library, but he was always on rotation at these camp meetings. I want to pause just because I can't just mention Ellsworth Callis. He's so meaningful in my life. Not only was he my preaching professor, he was a mentor to me, and we had a relationship until he passed away. And I want to share just a quick story about it because there was a time when I was at Asbury Seminary and I was graduating, and just like in camp meetings, Asbury Seminary had a rich tradition of chapel services. They'd have multiple chapel services a week. Chapel was important to the life of Asbury, and every chapel service, they had a big chapel, and it was just packed. And as part of that chapel service, it was important to the faculty of the seminary as well, and at the end of the semester that I was graduating, they had a graduate's chapel, and I was elected by my fellow graduates to preach graduate's chapel. Now you can imagine how intimidating that would be for a student to not only preach to their peers, but to preach to all of their professors who are sitting right there watching them, worried that you might be getting critiqued by them, by your exegesis or your proclamation or how you delivered it, all those things, and that stress was there. But I found comfort in the fact that Ellsworth Callis was on sabbatical that semester. And if you're on sabbatical, you're not supposed to be seen on campus. You're not supposed to be there, and I thought, well, at least he won't be there. But as I was about to stand to deliver the message at chapel at Asbury Seminary, on the back row of the balcony, he slipped in, and I was like, oh, boy. And so I preached, and I did the best that I could and didn't hear anything else. And then a couple of weeks later, I went to my post office box there at the seminary, and I had a note from Dr. Callis in it, and the note simply said, Ryan, I really enjoyed your sermon in chapel, period. Don't ever let the congregation see the soles of your feet, period. Blessings, Ellsworth Callis. And I'm like, what? What does that mean? And I never had the courage to ask him.

It was several years later, several years later, we were in a nonprofit board meeting together, and we had a little downtime, and I said, Dr. Callis, I said, do you remember when I preached graduate chapel at Asbury? He said, I do. And I said, do you remember the note you wrote me? He smiled and said, I do. And I said, what in the world did you mean? Don't let them see the soles of your feet. He said, Ryan, you did a good job. You knew that. I knew that. You didn't need me to tell you that you did well. It's my job to help you get better. And while you were up there on the platform, you had your legs crossed. In fact, I caught myself crossing my legs over here this morning and thought of him. He said, you need to keep your feet flat on the floor. That's the professional way of doing it. I'll never forget that he was always trying to teach. Today, I want to reflect on what worship is, because worship was an important part, an integral part of camp meetings, and truthfully, it should be an integral and important part of our lives as well. Now, there's a lot of things that we could say as to what worship is. If I were to poll you right now, I'd probably get dozens of responses about what is worship? What's the most important part of worship? What do we need to make sure happens in worship? But I'll tell you this. Worship at its very core should be active. It is us bringing and giving to God actively what God and only God deserves.

If you remember that Palm Sunday story, that triumphal entry into Jerusalem when Jesus is coming with his disciples as people are lining the paths that he's coming in on with palm branches and even taking their coats off and laying it down, and then they're shouting praises, hosanna to God. That's worship. And in the midst of that, is there worshiping Jesus as he enters Jerusalem? The Pharisees cry, blasphemy. You shouldn't be worshiping this man. And truthfully, if this were anybody else but Jesus, it would be blasphemy. But what they saw that the Pharisees failed to see was that Jesus is God. And so they were giving the praise that God and God alone deserves because they saw God in the flesh with them. And as the Pharisees came to Jesus and they said, you need to tell them to stop. If you think you come from God, then you would know this is blasphemous. And he said, oh, I'm not stopping them. Jesus said, if they don't worship God, then the rocks that are lining this pathway will cry out and worship to God because God deserves worship and all of creation will cry out and worship to God. I'll be honest, church, as we think about worship, what's going on right at this moment has the potential to be the least worshipful part of our worship service today, the sermon. It's not that a sermon can't be worshipful, but I think that what happens is we tend to make this a passive moment where we sit back and allow the pastor, allow the preacher to do the heavy lifting. Think about this for a minute. Have you ever heard someone say, you know, I left that church because I wasn't getting fed? Have you heard that? I have.

And if you think about it, getting fed is a very passive thing. It's not, I wasn't eating there. I wasn't able to find something to eat. It's, I wasn't getting fed a very passive moment. It's letting someone else do the work for you. For what's going on now to be worshiped, it should be active. That we should be thinking about what's being said. We should be considering the words that are being spoken and how it relates to God's word and how it applies to our life so that we can grow in who we are in Christ, that it can be applied in our life for the good and glory of God. And so if that's the case, then I think there's a burden there that applies equally to the preacher and to the hearer because together we worship God.

Our text for today that Pastor Steve read to us from the Psalms comes from King David. It is a Psalm of David. It's one of the more famous Psalms. It's probably one of the more painful Psalms to read because it's a Psalm of David lamenting. Specifically, he's lamenting his own sins, his own brokenness, his own disobedience to God, specifically as it relates to his relationship with Bathsheba. And he's been thoroughly convicted of what he's done. He's been thoroughly convicted of how he went wrong. And at this point, he's a broken man. Even though he's the most powerful man in the land, no one can tell him it's right or wrong because he said what's right or wrong. And yet in the midst of this, he realized that he was wrong. And let me pause to say that this Psalm and his brokenness crying out to God is worship. Conviction of sin and repentance are powerful acts of worship. And in this Psalm, he's lamenting his sin, his failures, how broken he is, what he has become, and he is begging for God to have mercy upon him. Have mercy on me, O God, for I am a sinner. Please do not turn your back on me. I deserve it, but please don't do it. That's powerful worship, powerful, powerful worship. Then as he builds, hear again our text from today.

Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in a sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise. David's referring to the practice of sacrificing animals to God. Either by killing them and sacrificing them or burnt offerings, burning them is a sacrifice to God. And when he says you do not delight in that or I would bring it, what I think he's saying, actually I feel quite certain what he's saying, is that I don't think you get pleasure, God, when people say this is an offering, this is a sacrifice, I slaughter this animal to cover my sin. And then they kill it, and they think that they're even with God, that they've been made right by God, and then they continue on with the life that they had been doing, doing the sin that they had committed, that they hadn't changed their ways at all. He said, I don't think you get pleasure whenever we offer the sacrificial lamb to cover our sins and yet we continue living however we want to do, you want something different from us.

Because if that's the case, I'll just keep doing that. I think David is speaking from experience, I think he realizes he's been there. He's offered those burnt offerings, those sacrifices to God and then kept on doing whatever it was that he wanted. But today he came to a different understanding. When he wrote this text, he came to a different understanding. The sacrifices of God, the sacrifices that God wants are a broken and contrite heart. A broken and contrite heart. It's not that God wants us broken, hear that. That's not what David's saying. What God wants is for us to be real with him. God wants us to be open with him even when it's painful, even when it's embarrassing. And I think as you think about the sacrifices that God wants, we could take out the word sacrifices and put in offerings and it loses none of the meaning, none of the intent of what the text is offering us because sacrifices were meant as offerings to God.

You are offering something that you could have sold at market and got money from and yet you're allowing it to be sacrificed for your sins. And David is saying that the offering that God wants most, more than your money, more than your assets, God wants you to come to him. In full transparency, to be open and honest and raw with him. And so that means that when we come to God and things are great, then we can sing with passion and fervor. It is well with my soul. But when we're broken, when we failed, when we're ashamed of what we've become, then we come screaming, have mercy on me, according to your steadfast love for my sins are ever before me. And when we're broken by life, when we're broken by the circumstances that we're facing, then we cry out, I bring you a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. Oh, God. If I were trying to simplify worship down to the most basic thing that I could, and that's a big thing because we've made worship so complex, so complicated, where you have to make sure you do all of these things and it's not. So to tear all of that away, to break all of that away and take it down to the most basic element, I would sum it up that worship is coming to God, one, with everything that we have and all that we are and offering to God whatever it is that we have that day. There may be some times when we have a lot. And we have a lot.

God expects us to offer a lot. We need to bring that to God. But there may be other times. There have been other times in my life where I feel like I have nothing, where I feel like all that I can do, and even then, it's a stretch, is to crawl and scrape and just drag myself here. And when we have nothing but ourselves, then we bring nothing but ourselves and we offer nothing but ourselves. There may be times when we have the shame and the brokenness of some of the things that we've done that we're carrying with us.

And just like David, what we need to do in the midst of worship is to bring it to God and trust God with it in our lives because it's in coming to God that worship happens. That's what it is, the efforts we make to be in the presence of God, to bring God what it is that we have, our voices and our hearts and our minds and our lives and our failures and our shortcomings and our gifts and our talents. When we bring those things to God and make that intentional effort and turn to God, then we will never leave disappointed. Never. I'll tell you something that I've had the realization of, and it's a really freeing thing about what happens when we engage in worship with God, when we bring ourselves to God. Worship reminds me on a regular basis, every time I engage with it, that there is a God, that's why we're here, right, to worship God. And I'm not it. I am not God. And you know what, we need to be reminded of that because sometimes we lift ourselves up on those pedestals and we think that we can do it all on our own. And worship reminds us there is a God. And you aren't it. And how freeing that is, when we can come to God and be reminded of that on a regular weekly basis, that there's a God who can be trusted in your life, who is worthy of our praise, the only one who is, that we can bring everything to no matter where we've been, no matter what we've done, no matter the shame that we carry, who in return offers us grace and mercy and love every single time.

It's a very freeing thing. And worship is so important because it's that weekly reminder that we have of God's faithfulness, no matter what we've done. God can be trusted and God will be faithful.

And God is worthy of our worship. Thanks be to God. Amen.