Tag: liturgy

 

Last week we started with a new series on Liturgy and we looked at Sacrifice – The Act of worship.

We read through the book of Romans chapter 12 where Paul is appealing to the church in Rome by the mercies of God to offer themselves as a living Sacrifice.

Sacrifice in the new testament is the act of worship where we offer ourselves, our bodies our minds into total submission to God and to one another not because we have to but because we want to.

In Romans 5:8 Paul writes “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”

Romans 3:25
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood.

Hebrews 10:10
And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

We firstly gather around the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And our response to that Sacrifice is our offerings in the form of Singing, confession and giving.

We don’t sing, confess and give out of religious duty.

Very often it is possible for us to look at these offerings as some kind of favor we do to God or as an obligation.

Remember the rich young ruler who came to Jesus and asked what he should do to inherit eternal life. From the outside he seemed to be a great guy, was obedient to the scriptures, lived a righteous life, had a good reputation in the society, but Jesus reveals the condition of his heart, his heart was set on the worldly treasures.

Yes, Is it possible for a Christian to do all the rights things and bring the right offerings to God and yet have his heart set on the world and the things of this world?

The rich man’s acts of righteousness was done as a duty. In fact, His treasures and possessions were the center of his life. He just couldn’t imagine a life without his wealth and possessions and walked way depressed. He failed to recognize that everything belonged to God, that everything comes from God.

In Acts 17:24-25 the author writes
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

First and foremost we have to recognize that it is because of His mercies that we are what we are, it is because of His mercies we have what we have. Everything in our life works for good because we love him and treasure him more than anything else.

Therefore, our singing, confession and giving is a response to his great love and mercy.

Now, some may ask if everything belongs to God than what does he need from us.

The answer can be found in
Psalms 50:7-15

v14 – offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving
v15 – call upon me in the day of trouble

The 3 things God desires from us is

1. Humility
2. Gratitude
3. Dependence on Him

Without these 3 our singing is meaningless, our confession is waste of time and our giving is worthless.

So, let’s fix our hearts in the right place as we now look into each of these elements in Liturgy.

SINGING

Why do we sing?

We sing because the scripture says so

Colossians 3:15-17
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Paul tells us that worshiping God together in song is meant to deepen the relationships we enjoy through the gospel. This happens in 3 ways.

1. Singing helps us remember Gods word.

Paul says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in your richly…singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”

Last week in our community group we talked about how we can find ways to get rid of guilt when we sin and learn to live as the adopted children of God. One of the ways we talked about was to constantly remind ourselves the word of God.

Singing, especially is an excellent way to remind ourselves of truths from Gods word.

I remember a few months I kept playing and singing a song called “Father, you are my father” the whole day because I was low and discouraged with something that happened, reminding myself of the Father’s love for me. It took away my sorrow and filled my heart with joy and hope.

That’s what happens and should happen even when we gather on a Sunday morning to sing and celebrate. Reminding ourselves the word of God.

2. Singing helps us respond to Gods grace

We’re also told to sing with “thankfulness in your hearts to God.”

Our wholehearted singing demands a response.

God gave us singing to combine objective truth with thankfulness, doctrine with devotion, and intellect with emotion.

3. Singing helps us reflect on Gods glory

Doing “everything in the name of the Lord Jesus,” implies bringing God glory.

Worshiping God together in song glorifies God. It expresses the unity Christ died to bring us.

It anticipates the song of heaven when we’ll have unlimited time to sing, clearer minds to perceive God’s perfections, and glorified bodies that don’t grow weary.

Singing is not about giving preferences to particular kind of music or a particular worship band. It is about glorifying God.

CONFESSION

In our community group one other solution we talked about in dealing with guilt was to be able to confess our sins to one another.

Most of the time when we fall into sin we often think we can deal with it on our own without telling anybody, which is very dangerous place to be in. We allow the guilt to ruin our days and weeks until we find a solution on our own by sometimes moving to a quieter place, until we hear a preacher on the television who speaks words of encouragement etc.

Dealing with sin and guilt on our own is a very unhealthy and dangerous practise. Many have ruined their lives.

The healthy way to deal with it is to use the provision God has given us and that is to confess with one another.

James chapter 5:16 says

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

When we confess to one another we allow others to speak and remind us of Gods word, his love, our identity and lead us into devotion completely setting us free from guilt and shame and enable us to live a life of freedom and joy.

You don’t have to ruin even a single day with a guilt ridden, unproductive and unhappy mentality.

For Christians, confession of sin, ultimately, is application of the gospel.

James chapter 5 calls Gods people to a corporate confession.

Confession of sin in the presence of others is applying and celebrating the gospel, together.

Confession is part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. And that is why we Confess.

GIVING

We give because Jesus said so. In Matthew 6:2 he said

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

We give because the early church gave and set aside a sum of money for missions work.

1 Cor 16:2
On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made.

Proverbs 3:9 ‘Honour the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops’.

Proverbs 14:31 ‘Whoever is kind to the needy honours God’

Motives For Giving

1) TO BLESS GOD:- 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, ‘Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God’ so we primarily give to bless and bring glory to God

2) TO BLESS THOSE AROUND US :- Because Jesus said in Acts 20:32 ‘It is more blessed to give than receive’.

3) TO BE BLESSED OURSELVES :- Not for selfish reasons but to be in an even better position to give even more into the work of God. In 2 Corinthians 9:11, Paul exhorts the generous brothers at Macedonia that, ‘You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion’.

Series: Liturgy
Date: 28th March 2016

Preached by Saju Joseph

Good Morning & Welcome Everybody.

As posted on Facebook we are doing a series on Liturgy.

The dictionary definition of Liturgy means ‘a fixed set of ceremonies, words etc that are used during public worship in a religion’. In our context it simply means what we do on a Sunday gathering and that’s what we’re going to look at. The question we will answer is ‘Why do we do what we do when we gather?’

Growing up in a Christian family, I have often asked these questions to my parents and church leaders and have received answers that formed my opinions about Church.

In these series what we will do is basically answer these questions from the scriptures, we will conclude with what the Bible teaches us and therefore build our foundational beliefs around it.

We have divided the topics into four weeks and this is how it looks like.

Wk 1 – Sacrifice, as in the act of worship.
Wk 2 – Giving, Singing and Confession.
Wk 3 – Scripture and Preaching.
Wk 4 – Communion and Baptism.

Today, we will be looking at ‘Sacrifice’ as in the act of worship and the bible text that we will look at is Romans 12.

The book of Romans is a letter written by Paul to the church in Rome and in the NIV version the chapter starts with the word “Therefore”.

Imagine we pick up any letter and stumble upon a paragraph that starts with the word “Therefore”. We comprehend that whatever the writer is about to say henceforth has some connection with what he has already said and it won’t make any sense to read through it without reading through the previous chapters and understand what the writer is trying to say.

When you read through chapter 1 -11 you will see Paul talks a lot about doctrine and the verses are full of heavy theology. He talks about Righteousness, Gods judgment, Justification, Slavery to sin & Righteousness, Future Glory, God’s everlasting love, the message of salvation.

It’s heavy with theology and doctrine. And therefore when we see Paul using the word ‘Therefore’ as he begins a new paragraph, we see him moving from doctrine to practice, from theology to ethics, from foundation to application.

It’s like me teaching my children how stuffs work. For e.g. I can teach my children what an Iron box is, and how it works, how the metal gets heated when attached to an electric board, and how the hot metal when pressed on our clothes removes the creases etc. And then I conclude with a “therefore” saying how they need to be careful while they are around a hot Iron and how they need to use it carefully and stuff. Paul is doing a similar thing here where he shares the doctrine and now moves to the application part of it.

Secondly we see that Paul makes an appeal to the believers in Rome, a serious, urgent and a heartfelt request. We see him doing it quite often and uses the word ‘I urge you’, Í beg you’. I believe he is making an appeal because it seems that the people know a lot of things about God but are struggling to keep up with it in action and are failing to apply it in their Christian walk.

Paul goes on and makes an appeal to the people that they offer themselves a living Sacrifice to God. Sacrifice is the act of worship where we offer ourselves to God holy and acceptable not in our minds, but in posture, in our lifestyle, in our conduct, in our behavior towards one another.

But sadly even in our generation we have people struggling with these issues where they know a lot about God, they know the bible text in and out, they have a strong theological understanding of the scriptures but completely fail to apply them in their Christian walk, fail to offer their lives as a living Sacrifice and worship him with all their heart, mind and soul.

Whenever Gods people gather together something powerful should happen but sadly that’s not what we experience. Sometimes we fail to experience joy and fulfillment when we are with our fellow believers. Maybe one of the reasons for this kind of bitter experiences is also because we have been failing to live in the light of the Gospel, our heads are full of knowledge, theology & doctrine but our actions say something else.

Here Paul is making an appeal for men to fully understand that we need to live out the life God intended us to live, not just in our minds but in our actions, in our commitment to one another.

Let’s read the verse again (verse 1,2). The next word that we see Paul uses is ‘by His mercy’. What he means ‘by His mercy’ is to see things in the light of what God has done for us, he is not saying ‘by the knowledge you now acquired ’ or ‘by the theology you just learnt’, his words are ‘by the Mercies of God’.

Look at our lives. How did we reach here today? Isn’t it because of God’s mercies? Are we here because of our righteousness or our choice? It is purely because of God’s redemptive work in our lives.

Remember the Cross chart we looked at while going through lesson one of the Gospel Centric Life. When we are saved we grow in the awareness of God’s Holiness and also grow in the awareness of our sinfulness. We learnt that the only way we can bridge that gap is when we daily appreciate Gods redemptive work on the cross by sending his Son to die for our sins. It is His mercies that saved us from our sinfulness and placed us in His holiness.

This is our identity. Our identity comes from God. Our identity is that we are children of God who are being saved by God every single day of our lives and that’s what we keep reminding ourselves.

It’s our identity that should lead us to activity. The world’s got it upside down. The people of the world says your activity decides your identity. But in Jesus it’s our identity of who we are that leads us to activity.

It is the mercy of God that leads us into Holiness and it is God’s mercy that drives us to worship.

Sacrifice is an Old testament language. Sacrifice in the Old testament is the offering of bull, dove etc. When the people came into Gods presence with these sacrifices God accepted them as a substitute from their Sin, but even when they offered sacrifice they knew that it’s not actually these sacrifice which will completely redeem them from God’s wrath. In Hebrews 10 verse 4, the writer says it’s impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. So even though they offered sacrifice, what God wanted was their heart.

We see later that Jesus Christ Himself becomes a sacrifice for us, He dies for us as a remission for our sins, He brought an end to the old testament sacrifice.

Now, when Paul is talking about sacrifice he’s not talking about the old testament sacrifice, he’s talking about something else. So, lets look at that.

Paul says, ‘offer your bodies as a living sacrifice’. The first word he uses is ‘bodies’. What Paul is trying to say is that our body matters. Even though we’re living, we’re in the flesh but it’s not just the flesh, skin and the blood but also our minds because in later verse he also mentions “be transformed by the renewal of your mind”

When I was growing up I always thought of offering myself means giving myself to serving ministry, doing things for God. Doing things on my own strength and capabilities because God needs me, he needs my intelligence.

But when read 1 Peter 2:5 it says
Offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

What we learn is that even the offering of ourselves should be done through Jesus Christ.

In this text Paul is appealing to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice through Christ Jesus not just in the looks of it but also in our motives & behaviors.

We see in the preceding verses he goes on to give practical ways of offering ourselves to the body of Christ, most of it is self explanatory but to see in the context in which Paul is presenting them to us is more important.

This is what Sacrifice means, this is what worship means. We gather every Sunday to worship God in submission and reverence as one body, not thinking more highly about ourselves, to have think with sober judgment, to serve, to teach, to exhort, to contribute to each other’s need, to lead with zeal, to show mercy, to show genuine love, to abhor evil, to live in harmony, to feed our enemies and not to overcome evil by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Let’s look to God in prayer.