Becoming Doxological
1 Amens
Welcome- Sarah
Song
Psalm 115:1-13
Song
As we start today. I want you to think about something you are trying to change in your life… Now let me ask- Why is change so hard? Why can’t we just decide to change something and having decided… Change?
I’m going to do my best to keep this short this morning- in fact, in general, I want to make more room for our time at the end when we can open it up to questions, comments and perhaps even directions that I don’t anticipate in this part of the discussion time… with that in mind, though- let’s get to work.
We’re in week two of a series we’re going to be spending the Fall on, How the Gospel Shapes our Community- and last week, as we started off, we read through most of 1st Peter 1, and we saw that the Gospel is based on something that’s already been done, already happened- the resurrection of Jesus- that makes it good news- not just good advice. The good advice of religion is what you have to do if you want to save yourself. The Good News of the Gospel is what God has already taken the initiative to do for us- namely, the work of Christ on our behalf. And because the Gospel is good news, not good advice, it does two things for us- it lets us live in hope and expectation of what God has done, is doing and will surely do in saving us, and it requires that we actually speak… that we say something- not that we shouldn’t also model it, because its news and not advice, modeling may be necessary- but it’s not sufficient. There’s actual content that needs to be communicated… So we need to do good, and then we need to connect that good that people see in our lives to the name of Jesus, and to the Gospel.
This week- we’re going to hit 1 Peter again, and again, just deal with a really tiny section of this passage.
Let’s read 1 Peter 1:3-16
Now… a couple of things. First, notice the flow- Peter starts with this statement- all Praise to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He then moves into a discussion of God saving us, about how we can take heart even in the midst of some really crappy times because we know that God has not forgotten or abandoned us. He talks about the fact that when the prophets spoke and wrote the Old Testament, they were talking about Jesus, even if they didn’t quite realize it- that everything in here points to Christ and the Gospel. And finally- he begins to talk about the “so what”- so think clearly, exercise self-control, don’t slip back into old ways of living, etc.
The purpose of the Gospel isn’t just to keep you out of hell and get you into heaven… it’s to remake you- to change you from the inside out and the bottom up into someone that looks like, lives like Jesus- That’s where he ends up. But as a step in getting us there, I want us to think about where he starts.
VS 3
That’s an interesting way to start off a whole discussion like that, isn’t it? “All praise to God…”
We talked about this a little on the forum this week in anticipation of this morning, like we do every week, and Dustin made the excellent point that grammatically, the way Peter structures this, everything from verse 3 to verse 12 is ONE sentence. These guys knew how to write some serious run-on sentences…
It is all one sentence made up of a single main clause and a whole string of dependent clauses… The main idea out of all those verses is: All praise to God, because He had mercy on us, because Jesus is raised, because He saved us, in order that we can be glad, etc.
In other words- everything that follows rests on the idea of “all praise to God.”
I think Peter is making a point here, not just by what he says, but by how he says it, and that point is this: Worship is the basis of the entire Christian life. It’s what flows out of everything (because this is true, all praise to God…) and it precedes and forms a foundation for much of what we want to see happen in our lives.
I mentioned this a few weeks ago- there’s a reason why the first commandment is the first commandment. It’s because you can’t break any of the others without first breaking that one.
The first commandment says: You will have no other gods before me. And when I have broken commandments 2-10, it’s only first because I have broken the first- because something else has become a god to me.
For instance- if I lie- it’s because I’ve made a little god out of someone’s approval. I care more about what you think of me than what God thinks of me- and so I bend the truth. If I steal, it’s because something has held out to me the promise of happiness and I want it. So I take it- caring more about my desires or that material thing than about God.
We can even take this a step further: Underneath every sin is idolatry in general- and underneath it all, always is some form of self-salvation project. Whenever I make something more important than God, I am, in a sense, making that thing my functional savior- I’m wanting and depending on something so much- it is to me like a savior. My own personal Jesus.
And you want to get into this even more? That’s the first commandment- what’s the last one? Yes- Don’t covet. Now- that seems like kind of lame on to end on, right? I mean you’ve got lying, murder, adultery… seems like you’d want to end on one of those and go out with a bang, right? Seems kind of anti-climactic to end on “don’t covet.” Not at all, because the last commandment is really the saying the same thing as the first and in fact sums up the other 9 very well- and so it’s a great, full-circle place to end.
So, all of this is what led Martin Luther, a church leader in the 1500s to say that obeying the first commandment and believing the Gospel were the very same thing.
In other words- whether I call it believing the Good News that God Himself has come to rescue and renew me through the work of Jesus on my behalf and that that God alone can and does save me… or I call it having no other gods before GOD, it’s the same thing.
The first commandment and the Gospel tell me the same thing- we can’t save ourselves, and nothing but God can save us.
And everything from materialism to eating disorders to racism and sexual abuse has at it’s root- some kind of self-salvation project, some kind of idolatry, some failure to believe the Gospel.
You’ve made an idol of possessions- stuff = happiness, or you’ve made an idol of thinness- if I just had that body then everything would be okay, or an idol of your race- I feel better about myself because I fell better than those people.
Now listen to this: if all this is true (and here’s why Peter puts this first) then it doesn’t matter what we say we worship- what we actually worship is what really matters. Your heart is captured by something- money, a particular self-image, whatever- it owns you, and you dwell on it, and meditate on it, and adore it more than God… if all of that is true, then the ONLY way anyone ever really changes (at least for the better) is through worship.
Let me explain…
If I say that I understand the Gospel and love God, and yet my heart is captured consistently by other things, I’m not, at least to that extent, really believing the Gospel. Your god, your savior is whatever has captured your heart- whatever you are looking to to make you happy- and I’m sad to say that my idols have been everything from women and marriage to cars to iPods and computers. There’s an old hymn that says “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, Lord- take and seal it…”
Our problem, is that we try to get our hearts off one thing that’s toxic to our lives and fail to set that heart on God, and so find that it just seeks out another idol.
For instance, it does no good to stop serving the idol of self through laziness if I just begin to serve the idol of self through workaholism to feed my pride, or materialism to feed my lust for things… I may cure myself of laziness, but become twice as enslaved to something else.
So here’s what it comes down to- real change only happens when we begin to more fully obey that first commandment. You can phrase it negatively as “when we stop pursuing, falling down to, worshiping idols.” Or you could put it positively: When we start worshiping God.”
Can I just say two things about this- first on an individual level and then a corporate one…
First- I need, and you probably need as well, to worship God better. To recognize that when I sin, it’s not just a failure of will, it’s a failure of worship. My heart has gotten attached to something else, and the only way to unattach it from those things is to attach it to God, and to the extent that I fail to attach it to God, I will be unable to kick whatever sins are really hanging on in my life- or I will simply trade them for other sins- maybe less blatant or more societally acceptable ones, but sin, nonetheless…
When I struggle, the answer is not “try harder.” It’s “believe the Gospel- believe that nothing but Jesus can really, ultimately save me. Figure out- “What is my idol here?” turn away from it and … really, truly worship God.“
Secondly- as a community, Evergreen, can you begin to see why worship matters? Why what we bring to not only our individual time spent with God but our corporate time as well is vital? We can really say that in worshiping, we are believing the Gospel and when our worship is half-hearted, there are deeper things going on than simply “I don’t feel like singing today” or “the discussion doesn’t really grab me.” Or “spending time with God is kind of hard.”
If I fail to be generous with my money- it’s not because I just have better, more interesting things to do with my cash- it’s because I haven’t really understood how God in His riches has given to us in our poverty in Jesus and I haven’t responded in thankfulness to and belief to the Gospel. My money is my idol.
If I fail to forgive someone in my life, it’s because I have failed to understand the Gospel- that God offers me forgiveness time and again, freely, because of Jesus and what He did for me. If I can’t see that, and respond thankfully by forgiving others, then I really don’t understand the Gospel. My pride and need to be right are my idol.
And if I fail to worship- it’s not a failure of the band to pick songs I like. It’s not a failure of my alarm to get me up early enough to spend some time with God. At it’s root- a failure to worship is… a problem not of styles and time and whatever else we try to pin it on. It’s not a failure willpower- it’s a failure of belief- and it’s one of the reasons why we continue to struggle with the same things over and over…
So- to everyone here- whether you claim to be a follower of Jesus or not- whether you are concerned about personal change or about corporate change… without the worship of God, nothing really changes. You may turn your heart from one idol, but unless you rest it on God Himself, it will simply find another idol- maybe a more socially acceptable or less-controversial or trouble-causing one, but still an idol.
It’s only in turning out hearts to God in worship- in the obeying of that first command, that we are finally free to change, to grow, to become more fully human, which is to say- like Jesus.
The Gospel’s first task- before all else, is to push us back to that first command, to push us to lay down all our idols and worship the God who is. In the hearing of the Good News that God Himself has come to rescue and renew us through the work of Jesus on our behalf, we are pointed to our true Savior. And in pointing us to our true savior, what the Gospel also does is point out all our false saviors, all those functional messiahs that we look to when things get really tough- I am secure because I have money, a job, my good looks, rather than- I am secure because Jesus has done for me what I could never, ever do for myself.
The Gospel not only shapes us into a community that speaks through its words and its works, it shapes us into a worshipping community.
The way Peter phrases it is this: ALL praise to God. To Him belongs all our praise, all our allegiance, all our hearts, all our worship. Let’s pray, and then let’s sing.
4 Songs
Discussion and Wrap-up- Bob
Final announcements- Sarah
Blessing- Bob
Read MoreSong
Psalm 115:1-13
Song
As we start today. I want you to think about something you are trying to change in your life… Now let me ask- Why is change so hard? Why can’t we just decide to change something and having decided… Change?
I’m going to do my best to keep this short this morning- in fact, in general, I want to make more room for our time at the end when we can open it up to questions, comments and perhaps even directions that I don’t anticipate in this part of the discussion time… with that in mind, though- let’s get to work.
We’re in week two of a series we’re going to be spending the Fall on, How the Gospel Shapes our Community- and last week, as we started off, we read through most of 1st Peter 1, and we saw that the Gospel is based on something that’s already been done, already happened- the resurrection of Jesus- that makes it good news- not just good advice. The good advice of religion is what you have to do if you want to save yourself. The Good News of the Gospel is what God has already taken the initiative to do for us- namely, the work of Christ on our behalf. And because the Gospel is good news, not good advice, it does two things for us- it lets us live in hope and expectation of what God has done, is doing and will surely do in saving us, and it requires that we actually speak… that we say something- not that we shouldn’t also model it, because its news and not advice, modeling may be necessary- but it’s not sufficient. There’s actual content that needs to be communicated… So we need to do good, and then we need to connect that good that people see in our lives to the name of Jesus, and to the Gospel.
This week- we’re going to hit 1 Peter again, and again, just deal with a really tiny section of this passage.
Let’s read 1 Peter 1:3-16
Now… a couple of things. First, notice the flow- Peter starts with this statement- all Praise to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He then moves into a discussion of God saving us, about how we can take heart even in the midst of some really crappy times because we know that God has not forgotten or abandoned us. He talks about the fact that when the prophets spoke and wrote the Old Testament, they were talking about Jesus, even if they didn’t quite realize it- that everything in here points to Christ and the Gospel. And finally- he begins to talk about the “so what”- so think clearly, exercise self-control, don’t slip back into old ways of living, etc.
The purpose of the Gospel isn’t just to keep you out of hell and get you into heaven… it’s to remake you- to change you from the inside out and the bottom up into someone that looks like, lives like Jesus- That’s where he ends up. But as a step in getting us there, I want us to think about where he starts.
VS 3
That’s an interesting way to start off a whole discussion like that, isn’t it? “All praise to God…”
We talked about this a little on the forum this week in anticipation of this morning, like we do every week, and Dustin made the excellent point that grammatically, the way Peter structures this, everything from verse 3 to verse 12 is ONE sentence. These guys knew how to write some serious run-on sentences…
It is all one sentence made up of a single main clause and a whole string of dependent clauses… The main idea out of all those verses is: All praise to God, because He had mercy on us, because Jesus is raised, because He saved us, in order that we can be glad, etc.
In other words- everything that follows rests on the idea of “all praise to God.”
I think Peter is making a point here, not just by what he says, but by how he says it, and that point is this: Worship is the basis of the entire Christian life. It’s what flows out of everything (because this is true, all praise to God…) and it precedes and forms a foundation for much of what we want to see happen in our lives.
I mentioned this a few weeks ago- there’s a reason why the first commandment is the first commandment. It’s because you can’t break any of the others without first breaking that one.
The first commandment says: You will have no other gods before me. And when I have broken commandments 2-10, it’s only first because I have broken the first- because something else has become a god to me.
For instance- if I lie- it’s because I’ve made a little god out of someone’s approval. I care more about what you think of me than what God thinks of me- and so I bend the truth. If I steal, it’s because something has held out to me the promise of happiness and I want it. So I take it- caring more about my desires or that material thing than about God.
We can even take this a step further: Underneath every sin is idolatry in general- and underneath it all, always is some form of self-salvation project. Whenever I make something more important than God, I am, in a sense, making that thing my functional savior- I’m wanting and depending on something so much- it is to me like a savior. My own personal Jesus.
And you want to get into this even more? That’s the first commandment- what’s the last one? Yes- Don’t covet. Now- that seems like kind of lame on to end on, right? I mean you’ve got lying, murder, adultery… seems like you’d want to end on one of those and go out with a bang, right? Seems kind of anti-climactic to end on “don’t covet.” Not at all, because the last commandment is really the saying the same thing as the first and in fact sums up the other 9 very well- and so it’s a great, full-circle place to end.
So, all of this is what led Martin Luther, a church leader in the 1500s to say that obeying the first commandment and believing the Gospel were the very same thing.
In other words- whether I call it believing the Good News that God Himself has come to rescue and renew me through the work of Jesus on my behalf and that that God alone can and does save me… or I call it having no other gods before GOD, it’s the same thing.
The first commandment and the Gospel tell me the same thing- we can’t save ourselves, and nothing but God can save us.
And everything from materialism to eating disorders to racism and sexual abuse has at it’s root- some kind of self-salvation project, some kind of idolatry, some failure to believe the Gospel.
You’ve made an idol of possessions- stuff = happiness, or you’ve made an idol of thinness- if I just had that body then everything would be okay, or an idol of your race- I feel better about myself because I fell better than those people.
Now listen to this: if all this is true (and here’s why Peter puts this first) then it doesn’t matter what we say we worship- what we actually worship is what really matters. Your heart is captured by something- money, a particular self-image, whatever- it owns you, and you dwell on it, and meditate on it, and adore it more than God… if all of that is true, then the ONLY way anyone ever really changes (at least for the better) is through worship.
Let me explain…
If I say that I understand the Gospel and love God, and yet my heart is captured consistently by other things, I’m not, at least to that extent, really believing the Gospel. Your god, your savior is whatever has captured your heart- whatever you are looking to to make you happy- and I’m sad to say that my idols have been everything from women and marriage to cars to iPods and computers. There’s an old hymn that says “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, Lord- take and seal it…”
Our problem, is that we try to get our hearts off one thing that’s toxic to our lives and fail to set that heart on God, and so find that it just seeks out another idol.
For instance, it does no good to stop serving the idol of self through laziness if I just begin to serve the idol of self through workaholism to feed my pride, or materialism to feed my lust for things… I may cure myself of laziness, but become twice as enslaved to something else.
So here’s what it comes down to- real change only happens when we begin to more fully obey that first commandment. You can phrase it negatively as “when we stop pursuing, falling down to, worshiping idols.” Or you could put it positively: When we start worshiping God.”
Can I just say two things about this- first on an individual level and then a corporate one…
First- I need, and you probably need as well, to worship God better. To recognize that when I sin, it’s not just a failure of will, it’s a failure of worship. My heart has gotten attached to something else, and the only way to unattach it from those things is to attach it to God, and to the extent that I fail to attach it to God, I will be unable to kick whatever sins are really hanging on in my life- or I will simply trade them for other sins- maybe less blatant or more societally acceptable ones, but sin, nonetheless…
When I struggle, the answer is not “try harder.” It’s “believe the Gospel- believe that nothing but Jesus can really, ultimately save me. Figure out- “What is my idol here?” turn away from it and … really, truly worship God.“
Secondly- as a community, Evergreen, can you begin to see why worship matters? Why what we bring to not only our individual time spent with God but our corporate time as well is vital? We can really say that in worshiping, we are believing the Gospel and when our worship is half-hearted, there are deeper things going on than simply “I don’t feel like singing today” or “the discussion doesn’t really grab me.” Or “spending time with God is kind of hard.”
If I fail to be generous with my money- it’s not because I just have better, more interesting things to do with my cash- it’s because I haven’t really understood how God in His riches has given to us in our poverty in Jesus and I haven’t responded in thankfulness to and belief to the Gospel. My money is my idol.
If I fail to forgive someone in my life, it’s because I have failed to understand the Gospel- that God offers me forgiveness time and again, freely, because of Jesus and what He did for me. If I can’t see that, and respond thankfully by forgiving others, then I really don’t understand the Gospel. My pride and need to be right are my idol.
And if I fail to worship- it’s not a failure of the band to pick songs I like. It’s not a failure of my alarm to get me up early enough to spend some time with God. At it’s root- a failure to worship is… a problem not of styles and time and whatever else we try to pin it on. It’s not a failure willpower- it’s a failure of belief- and it’s one of the reasons why we continue to struggle with the same things over and over…
So- to everyone here- whether you claim to be a follower of Jesus or not- whether you are concerned about personal change or about corporate change… without the worship of God, nothing really changes. You may turn your heart from one idol, but unless you rest it on God Himself, it will simply find another idol- maybe a more socially acceptable or less-controversial or trouble-causing one, but still an idol.
It’s only in turning out hearts to God in worship- in the obeying of that first command, that we are finally free to change, to grow, to become more fully human, which is to say- like Jesus.
The Gospel’s first task- before all else, is to push us back to that first command, to push us to lay down all our idols and worship the God who is. In the hearing of the Good News that God Himself has come to rescue and renew us through the work of Jesus on our behalf, we are pointed to our true Savior. And in pointing us to our true savior, what the Gospel also does is point out all our false saviors, all those functional messiahs that we look to when things get really tough- I am secure because I have money, a job, my good looks, rather than- I am secure because Jesus has done for me what I could never, ever do for myself.
The Gospel not only shapes us into a community that speaks through its words and its works, it shapes us into a worshipping community.
The way Peter phrases it is this: ALL praise to God. To Him belongs all our praise, all our allegiance, all our hearts, all our worship. Let’s pray, and then let’s sing.
4 Songs
Discussion and Wrap-up- Bob
Final announcements- Sarah
Blessing- Bob
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