Preached · October 19, 2014
Text · Romans 12
Bibles — I invite you to turn them on or flip them open — and we're going to head back to the book of Romans, chapter 12, and a couple of verses before that, actually.
We took a look at Romans chapter 12 last week, and we were exploring the topic of liturgy, and this idea that liturgy is what forms our practices, forms our desires. So liturgy is not just this dirty word, not just a word that deals with boring routine. By liturgy, what we're talking about is any sort of formative practice in our lives — habits or routines kind of clumped together that form us or shape us to have certain kinds of desires. And our lives, our culture, our families, our churches — we all have liturgies that are shaping us, forming us, transforming us to have certain kinds of desires and practices and wants and loves.
Now, the goal of Christian community, as we saw in Romans 12, verse 2, is that we don't want to conform, but to be transformed. We don't want to be conformed to the world's desires — and by the world we mean that which is not with God, that which is not in line with God's will, the culture which is not lined up with what God desires us to be. We don't want to be conformed to that, but we want to be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit working in our lives, our community, our churches. And this is the concept of active submission. Submission — yes, realizing that we can't clean ourselves up, we can't transform ourselves, but we can put ourselves in a place of obedience, a posture of our heart, which allows God's Spirit to work in and through us. So this is the idea of being against the world, against the world's way of doing things, for the sake of the world, for the sake of loving God's creation and his people well.
The Gospel-Shaped Life
So the question that we're left with after last week is: if our liturgies are shaping and forming us, what should our liturgies look like? What should their shape be, if they are shaping us? And that's the topic that we want to explore today.
Now, what this basically boils down to is: what I want to do today is kind of explain what the worship team — what I, the worship director, my fellow worship leaders, the team as a whole — is endeavoring to do whenever we lead a Sunday morning service. And, as well as that, we want what happens on a Sunday morning to be a microcosm, a small, condensed example of what the entirety of our lives and our community's life should look like. And so, in a phrase, it is the gospel-shaped life.
The hope is that our weekly liturgies are a culmination of our daily practices, our daily routines, our daily liturgies, that are shaped like the gospel, shaped like the good news that God offers through Jesus. And so this means that they are grace-centered. They're not about what I can do. They're not about what I can accomplish, because, let's face it, we're fairly depraved people — we're actually absolutely depraved people. So it has to be grace-centered. This is God's action toward us. It has to be cross-centered. It has to find its focal point in what Jesus accomplished in the crucifixion, this act of perfect love — which means it has to be Christ-centered.
So our liturgies of good news are patterned in this way: adoration and confession, assurance and thanksgiving, instruction and response. Worship is always patterned in revelation — God, by his mercy, showing us who he is — and response — how we will respond to God's revelation. Worship is always patterned in revelation and response. And so we see that in these three pairs. And that's what we're going to explore.
Adoration and Confession
So, first of all, adoration and confession. This is the recognition of who God is, and, in light of God's character, who I am. Adoration is what we do as a community and what we do in our lives when we stop, we cease for a moment, and we recognize who God is in his very essence, his character — and, in light of that character, who we are.
So we see this in Romans chapter 11, verse 33. And this is from The Message. He puts it this way:
Have you ever come upon anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God? This deep, deep wisdom? It's way over our heads. We'll never figure it out. […] Therefore, in light of God's mercy…
And Paul continues on. And so in this verse, we see Paul stopping for a second in this moment of adoration. Have you ever come upon anything like God? Like God's love? Like God's mercy? Have you ever seen or experienced anything like it? This is adoration.
And so adoration in our services looks like this. It's when we stop and do a call to worship, like John led us in at the top of the hour from Ephesians 2. It's our opening songs. It's that invocation, that opening prayer. It's us gathering together, kind of leaving the world behind for a moment, gathering together as a community for the purpose of worship. And this means showing up early.
Now, why do I bring this up? Well, if adoration is about stopping for a moment and recognizing who God is, if it's about turning away from the distractions of life with the purpose of recognizing who God is, this takes practice. It's not something that we do at the snap of a finger, at the drop of a pen. And it takes practice to be able to say, "I'm going to stop with the distractions of life for just a little while and focus on God's character." And this becomes really, really difficult when worship and our worship services just become another rushed part of our routine, because there's not a whole lot moving us away from that distraction. And so the reason I bring up this idea of showing up early, or showing up at least on time, is that when we, as a worship team, as a staff, craft these services, these worship experiences together, we want to create a space, an environment, in which you can encounter and experience God. And we can't craft the perfect environment. There's always going to be veils. There's always going to be distractions and things going wrong with microphones and projectors. That's always going to be the case. But when we purposely craft this environment, what we can do as worshipers is take some time to take some breaths, sit down, and say, "Okay, God is in this place. I want to experience this God. What do I need to turn my attention away from so I can see God more clearly?"
Now, if we want to form habits of adoration in our services, this is going to be against what our culture is also trying to form within us. And so, while the church, while we as a worshiping community are trying to be a church of adoration, the world is trying to form within us apathy — basically an "I don't care" kind of stance. And when there are so many distractions in our lives, eventually we do get to a point where it's hard to care about anything. I think we've all felt this as we've gotten on our phones, our tablets, our laptops, and we've gotten onto Facebook. Facebook used to be this really exciting place where you saw what your friends and your family and your colleagues and your acquaintances and people that you knew 30 years ago were up to. And it was kind of this novel, exciting thing. But now, at least for me — for those of us who have been on Facebook for any amount of time — you get onto it and it's, "eh, eh, eh." Apathy, right? And we're saying "eh" to something that somebody had enough effort to bother posting online, that they thought was important — but we kind of go, "Eh, that's boring. I don't care. I'm done."
We know this experience whenever we look at a newspaper, a magazine, turn on the news. We hear devastating statistic after devastating statistic. We hear terrible news story after terrible news story. This happens in the church when we let you know about people who need prayer, about people who need food, about things that are really, really bad in this world. And our response is like, "Yeah, that's the way it is." It's just what our world is constantly forming within us — this kind of overindulgence in so much information that it's hard to care about anything.
And what Scripture, and what God, and what the Spirit is trying to move us toward is adoration — pure focus and attention on the character of God. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians chapter 3:
We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.
Contemplate. Have you ever contemplated something? It's hard to contemplate and multitask at the same time. We contemplate the Lord's glory and we are being transformed — which we remember from last week, this is the word metamorphosis — into his image with ever-increasing glory. So the idea is not that we're focusing on things to the point where we don't even care about them anymore, but that we're contemplating the character of who God is, so that it actually transforms us into the character of who God is.
So now, we've talked about what we do at a church service — we have our calls to worship, et cetera. What about some disciplines that we can engage in to add this liturgy into our life? And the first thing I thought about was just the very idea of waking up — and not just waking up, but what do we do when we wake up? I know for me, the very first thing that I do is I turn over and I grab my phone. And on my phone is my email and the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Instagrams and the Tumblrs. And so the very first thoughts that I have waking up are not of the divine. I'm not adoring who God is. I'm not appreciating the fact that I have a new day. I'm looking at distractions and going, "eh, eh, eh." Now, I don't know what the very first thing you do when you wake up is, but maybe we could create a practice when we wake up and we say, "God is in this place." Would that maybe start our days off differently? Or when we're driving to work or to school or wherever we're off to first thing in the morning — maybe instead of the distractions of talk radio or outdated music or whatever we're listening to, maybe turning that off for just that first drive and saying, "God is in this place. How can I become more like him?" Adoration is about exploring the character of God, and so maybe we need to take up practices of memorizing some Scripture about who God is, about his character, about the fact that he is gracious and kind and loving and compassionate, that he is holy. Maybe we need to spend some time in some silence and some solitude, recognizing, "I've got enough distractions — what would it be like just to sit and recognize God is in this place?"
Confession
So adoration should lead to confession. James 5 says, "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed." If our contemplation of God's glory, if our time together as a congregation and as individuals and families, if our time of adoration does not lead to confessing, we're worshiping the wrong God. If our gaze, our contemplating about God's character, does not lead us to a place where we recognize our own depraved nature, we're probably adoring the wrong thing.
Now, confession is an essential part of our worship — not because we doubt our justification, but because we yearn for sanctification. In other words, we want to confess as a people not because we doubt that God has saved us in Christ — that is not what this is about — but we confess as a congregation and as individuals because we recognize that God's not done with us yet. And it's really hard to let the Holy Spirit sanctify us, make us holy, make us more like Jesus, if we're not even willing to admit that we have faults and things that don't look like Jesus in the first place.
So in our services, confession can look like a lot of different things. We can sing it in the songs that we sing: "Search me, know me, try me and see." There are lots of psalms that are confessionary psalms. We do it by prayer. We do it by litany — a litany, by the way, is when a leader says something and the congregation responds; it's that back and forth. We can do it in silence. We've done it by the practice of our baptismal bowl at the front of our sanctuary, and washing our hands as a reminder that God is continually cleansing and sanctifying us.
Now, our culture is not about confession. It's all about concealment. Our culture is all about hiding the things that we are ashamed of. And "if we don't think about them, if we don't talk about them, maybe they'll just go away." Or, "if we don't think about them, we don't talk about them, maybe I can keep on doing it and nobody will catch me."
Now, one way that our culture has kind of made concealment a thing is that they've made a particular phrase kind of a foreign language to us. And so I want us to practice some words that may come very difficult to our tongues and to our mouths. So I have a pronunciation guide under here, but we're going to practice this together. All right, on three. One, two, three: "I was wrong." Oh, did it catch in your throat? Oh, man, that was difficult. The ability to say this — to spouses, to friends, to co-workers, to our kids, to our parents — the ability to say this is the first step in a long journey of confession, of admitting that I was wrong.
The goal for our liturgies of confession is that we should have fewer things to conceal and more people to reveal to. And I'm not talking about, let's go to Facebook and put out our deepest, darkest secrets. No. I'm talking about those trusted confidants. Are there people in our lives to whom we can say, "I was wrong"? I can confess and know that this is a place where transformation is happening. And so some of the disciplines that we can engage in in our lives are admitting fault, making amends, journaling, working through our day, fasting, hand-washing. Just — you know, you get done going to the bathroom, and hopefully you're washing your hands, and if you're not, you should start that habit first off — but once you get that down, spending just those 20, 30 seconds saying, "God, I am dependent on your grace today." The practice of accountability, of having those trusted confidants.
We want to avoid practices of concealment. Forgive the term, but the Pinterest life, where everything is pretty, pretty, everything's dolled up, everything's perfect — avoid that. That's concealment. It's fake. It's not worth it. Or how about this for a practice: answering the question "How are you?" honestly. Now, don't ruin the day of your poor cashier or checkout person — but when you're with a friend or a family member, answering "How are you?" honestly. Or, I heard this practice recently: when somebody asks, "How are you?", responding with, "Well, what part of me? I am a complex person. I am more than just fine or good or bad. I've got a lot of different things going on in my mind."
Assurance and Thanksgiving
All right, so our first set of revelation and response was adoration and confession. Our next is assurance and thanksgiving — the affirmation of God's grace and our daily need for it. We see this in Romans 12, verse 1: "In light of God's mercy…" And this is Paul kind of condensing down what Romans 1 through 11 has all been about. Even though you were far away, removed from God, he moved toward us. Even though we were depraved, he offers justification and righteousness in Christ. And so we see this assurance — "in light of God's mercy" — and our act of thanksgiving, our response: "offer your bodies as a sacrifice."
And so assurance in our services looks like this: Scripture and song and litany. We are unapologetically Christ-centered in our worship. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus are the hinges by which our salvation hangs. Jesus is the revelation of God to us. He is our worship leader, giving glory to God. And so that is why we will always err on the side of worshiping Jesus too much — because without him, we're still lost.
Now, in our services, we don't confess and receive assurance, or reminders of assurance, in order to get forgiven. For those of us who are in Christ, we are already forgiven. So what happens during a Sunday service is not that we confess in order to be good for another week. But we do need continual reminders of the gospel and God's relentless grace. As the Reformers put it many, many times, "Preach the gospel to yourself daily." The act of confession is not what grants you forgiveness. Jesus does. The words of assurance in our service are not what gives you justification before God. Jesus does. Assurance, however, reminds our faulty brains that even when we are faithless, God is faithful.
Our culture, however, wants to pattern within us liturgies of striving. Consumerism and moralism and workaholism all tell us that we'll never be good enough. Commercials and ads and shopping experiences are all forming within us this pattern of feeling like we'll never be good enough or own enough or do enough. And assurance says, Jesus did it. By God's grace, you are saved. And so disciplines that we can add into our lives are offering forgiveness to others, resting, setting aside time to say, "You know what? God is so good, God is so on top of things, that I have permission to sit and rest." The spiritual discipline of saying no. The spiritual discipline of saying, "I don't need to add something else to my life in order to feel satisfied or fulfilled." The discipline of hospitality — of offering that same compassionate grace to others that maybe we wouldn't automatically welcome into our homes.
Thanksgiving
And so what's our response to assurance? It's thanksgiving. It's acknowledging our dependence on grace. And it's more than just the typical kind of definition of thanksgiving — just recognizing all that God has done for us. It's also recognizing that without God's grace, we can't go on. Thanksgiving is more than just "thanks for the past, God." It's also saying, "I rely on you for my future." And so in our services, we spend a lot of time doing this. We do it in our songs, in our Scripture readings. We do it in our prayer, our litany. The pastoral prayer is not just so some person can get up here and pontificate; it's the shared community, the gathered community, expressing thanksgiving and dependence on God's grace. Our response to assurance is in our tithes and offerings, our recognition that all we have is God's already. We do this in our petitions. We do this in times of lament: "God, help."
Our culture wants to form within us instead entitlement — the idea that we deserve things, the idea that I can do it on my own. But this is what Jesus says in John 15: "I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." And so let's cultivate disciplines that share this idea. Pastor John has mentioned many times before the idea of a gratitude journal. This is a worthwhile practice of, again, stopping in our day and saying, "What do I have to be thankful for?" The practice of a mealtime prayer is something I kind of cynically gave up in college, because I thought I was spiritual enough that I didn't need to do that anymore. But that's kind of ridiculous. Can we ever stop enough in our days and say, "Thank you, God, thank you"? This meal, this plate in front of me of food and nutrients, is a daily reminder — two to three times a day, or more if you're a snacker — that I need sustenance to go on. I can't go on by myself. Fasting is the practice that reminds us that without provision we perish, and sometimes we need that reminder. Feasting reminds us that God's creation is meant to be shared and enjoyed.
Instruction and Response
So we've had two patterns of revelation and response: adoration and confession, assurance and thanksgiving. Our final set is instruction and response — growing and living in God's grace. Instruction is God graciously giving us his word to live on, as well as our response, which is our desire to live out God's purposes for our lives.
And remember Romans 12:2: "Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may approve God's will." Now, remember what we talked about last week — "minds" is more than just intellectual assent. We're talking about desire-shaping. What do we love? What do we want? What do we desire? What do we crave? Let that be transformed by God's word. Why? So that we can approve God's will. Now, the idea is not — what we might want this to be — that God can kind of write us a memo and put it on our desk and say, "Okay, Anthony, do you approve?" That's not how God works. The idea is that God is shaping our desires, changing, transforming our desires, so that when we know what God's will is, we can say, "Yes, I want that." That's what approving God's will is all about.
And so in our services, we see this in our weekly messages and sermons, in testimonies — hearing what God has been doing in people's lives. We see instruction in communion. Now, again, you might find this surprising, because you think "mind" is about intellectual assent — but sometimes the best instruction is when we can put action to truth. This is what the sacraments are all about. When we can taste the body, drink the blood, represented in the bread and the juice, sometimes that teaches us better than any amount of words that could ever come from my mouth anyway.
Instead, our culture wants to form in us patterns of ignorance. Resist insulating yourself from change, new information, or new ways of thinking. You're not done yet. Our culture shapes us to be people who hear only what we already agree with, interact with worldviews that we already accept. Insulation creates ignorance. Ignorance creates fear. If you want a really quick and dirty test to figure out how insulated you are, change the channel from your favorite news station to a different one and see how instantly you get angry. That might be a really good test to find out how insulated you are. In order to learn, many times we have to be willing to unlearn. And so we need patterns and disciplines in our lives that form this within us. And so there are small groups, there's the practice of Lectio Divina — of close and quiet and slow, meditative reading of God's Scripture — of mentoring, of inviting somebody into your life to say, "Hey, I want to grow, I want to learn, can you help me?" And, again, of silence and solitude, of being willing to spend time alone with God, not with an agenda other than "Let me be with you and be transformed by you."
Response
And so our instruction, our hearing of God's word, should lead to response. The book of James chapter 1: "Don't just listen to God's word, you must do what it says, otherwise you're only fooling yourselves." So in our services we do this in a variety of ways. We offer application questions — by the way, there's a pile of them on the welcome center. We do this in our offering; sometimes we put our offering after the sermon as a way to pattern this. When we hear God's word, we shouldn't just sit there and do nothing about it, but perhaps by giving up something, we can shape or form response into our lives. We do this by our response song. You hear me say it almost every week: "Let's stand and respond together." When Pastor comes up here and gives the benediction and charge, it's more than just pretty words and poetry. It is the prayer that we, as God's people, would hear God's word and respond to it. And by the act of leaving, by the act of walking out those doors, we are symbolically saying, as the church, "Let's engage — let's engage our world in Christ's love."
Our culture instead wants to form within us indifference — a pattern of not caring, a pattern of hearing news and saying "eh." But faith is not merely a position of the heart; it's the journey of the Christ-centered life. And so the disciplines that we can put into our lives are those of accountability. Missional communities are all about putting into practice God's word and love into our world. The practice of generosity — and more than just money-giving, though that's part of it, but also time and talent giving. Are we being generous with what God has given us, or are we clenching onto it?
Conclusion
And so every week, I, the worship leaders, the worship team — this is the pattern that our service takes. And sometimes we do it subtly, sometimes we do it really, really obviously; it depends. But every week — I can't quite guarantee it, but just about — you're going to find all six of these in our service somewhere, some way, somehow. Because we believe that when we put on these practices together as a community, they will shape and form us to be certain kinds of people. When we place ourselves into active submission to God's Spirit working within us, we will be transformed and changed into people who look more like Jesus.
And so each week we discover who God is, we acknowledge our need for him, we receive the promise of forgiveness, we offer our lives as a sacrifice out of thanksgiving, we grow in grace, our desires being transformed to God's desires, and we live out lives of faithfulness to help others discover these same truths, centered in grace.
So, like I said, it was a little content-heavy this week — six kind of large ideas, each deserving a speech on their own. I wanted to give you the whole picture, so you can see what we endeavor to do each week as a community. But most importantly, I don't want you to see what happens on a Sunday as a way to kind of fuel up for the next six days, to kind of get through them spiritually. My vision and my hope for what happens as a worshiping community is that Sunday can be a culmination of what has been happening in your lives for the six days prior — that your lives of adoration and confession, of assurance and thanksgiving, your lives of instruction and response, can all be gathered together for this really special 75 to 90 minutes where we can share together what God has been actively doing in and through us. So, yeah, that's my prayer for myself, that's my prayer for you. And if you want to talk more about this, like I said, there are application questions on the back, and the opportunity to talk about it after the service.
Closing Prayer
Would you stand and pray with me? Father, we're so grateful — we're so grateful that you are a God who does not leave us where we are. You are a God that desires us to be transformed for our own good, because it's what's best for us, God. And even though it's painful, and even though sometimes it's messy, and even though sometimes it seems to be against our desires, we admit and confess that our desires need to be reshaped, re-transformed, remade. And so, Father, I pray for myself, I pray for my brothers and sisters here with me, that we would endeavor to engage in liturgies in our lives that don't destroy us, that don't form us to be more like our world, but against the world for the sake of it — that our liturgies here are good news, and that the liturgies of our lives may shape and form us to be more like you. We pray these things in the power of the Spirit, in Christ's name. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
