Lecture 19: Leaders and the Importance of Worship
Course: Spiritual Life of the Leader
Lecture 19: Leaders and the Importance of Worship
If you are following Jesus, you have a role as a leader. If a spiritual leader does not understand what their task is according to scripture, then their spiritual life is not going to have the focus the Lord wants them to have. Worship is a response of the love that has been shown to us. Worship involves our all aspects of us and is enabled by God’s Spirit. We worship God because of who he is. By looking at Jesus, you see who God is.
I. Who is a Leader?
So, who is a leader? Well, anybody following Jesus is called to be a leader for his kingdom. Anyone following our Lord is going to be placed by the Lord himself. That placement is always synonymous with service in the kingdom. Six or seven years back, I felt that the Lord wanted me to invest whatever days left for me in discipleship, which isn’t being taken seriously in these days. There were others at Asbury Seminary who had the same calling; then about five years ago, I approached one of my colleagues to help me in this. Brian and I set out globally doing interviews within different denominations. We didn’t get very far into this before realizing that there was a major issue facing God’s church today. The Spiritual leaders of the church could not articulate a Biblical job description. What we were finding there was no clear understanding of what the Word of God had to say about leadership in this local congregation. There was an alarming lack of understanding of the mileposts and issues that we are to be about. This is important because if a spiritual leader doesn’t understand what their tasks is according to Scripture, then their spiritual life is not going to have the focus that Jesus wants it to have. Without that focus, spiritual leaders then tend to be like the river in northwest Texas which was the Red River. At best during leadership that river might be a stream of water; it is characterized by being spread out and very shallow. So, you don’t have that vocational clarity that I spoke about earlier. So, we have talked about Anthropology, understanding who we are: the human person. Now I want to turn to ecclesiology; this is simply, the church. What does God want his church to be about?
II. What Did Jesus Say was the Most Important thing?
This is a question that my colleagues Bryan Sims often ask different groups of people he has worked with. If you look in Matthew 22:37-40, you will read that Jesus said to them, you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and soul and mind. This is the greatest and first commandment and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the rest of the law and the prophets. This business between worshipping God and loving God or loving God as the commandment says and worshipping God starts to converge at this point. Worship our God and everything that we are and about wrap around this idea of worship.
III. What Comes to Your Mind When You Think of Worship?
So what comes to your mind when you think of worship? It is singing and declaring God’s Word. Many of the common answers include a particular style of music. Some People say that there will be certain liturgy and other particular things that we do; there will be many different things. For some, people want a high energy service and worship time, a high impact worship where they come out really charged, feeling like they have been moved. Others tie worship with going to a physical building during the week. But worship has to be something more than attending a service now and then or having a spiritual feeling. There is more involved in this than with even meeting other people, although that is important. How do you start to live the great invitation that we find throughout the Psalms and Scripture to worship God? How do we live into that? God is seeking people to worship him in Spirit and in truth in John 4:24. That Father is seeking people who will worship him in Spirit and in true. This type of worship, this invitation to worship implies that there is a dimension of reality called the Kingdom of God. There is a dimension of reality that doesn’t contain any distortion of God, whatsoever in heaven. There is no distortion or any deception regarding the good, there is no fake news in heaven, none whatsoever. The very first words of Jesus’ earthly ministry were for us to turn away from anything that was false. In Matthew 4:17 he says to repent for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. This is a kingdom that is ruled by God’s righteousness, by his peace, by God’s justice. And in the domain of heaven there is no shadow of deception, no turning of doubt, and no tarnish of falsehood whatsoever. In Luke 17:21, Jesus said that this very kingdom is among you. God’s dimension intersects with us in this dimension now. It permeates the whole world including every human life. So, it isn’t surprising that the Lord calls us to repent from anything that separates us from this kingdom. This invitation reverberates in our lives. It is deep calling to be deep here; a literal transcendent longing, the true nature of this is to worship the Lord our God.
IV Worship Does Not Start With Me?
Does worship start with me? Let me share an emphatic word here. No, it doesn’t. Worship is a response. We are responding to the love that has been shown to us through Christ. We are responding to that love; we are returning that love. In Roman 12:1, this kind of spiritual worship is a worship with all that we are, body, soul and mind and strength. It is spiritual in that it is enabled by God’s Holy Spirit. It is truth in that it is founded upon and made possible by the work of Christ. If the most important thing in life is to love the Lord with all that we are, it goes hand in hand with worshiping God and giving him glory. A key question to help us solidify our leadership is why we worship; why is it so important for leaders to understand this. We, first of all, worship because of who God is. The New Testament uses this word, Emanuel, God among us. Jesus reveals in his own-self the very divine nature of love and commitment and sacrifice and power and redemption. In the light of Christ, we behold who God is. It is to see Jesus and to see the Father. Our greatest response to all of this and to all of his magnitude is to join with his disciples in Luke 24:52. This is to worship him and love him. Our first and primary purpose as leaders in his church is to offer God praise and adoration. We are to be people of prayer and praise and adoration of worship and to lead the people of God. This is much bigger than just attending church on a Sunday morning and so it is critical to understand this. Jesus said that we are to worship the Lord your God and serve only him in Matthew 4:10. This kind of single minded focus sets our direction and orders our priorities as leaders around on object. That object is of course, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Then, the objective is loving the Lord our God with all that we are and worshipping him alone and bringing the people we shepherd into this. If you don’t do this, you will have cracks in your leadership. You start wondering and given the critical nature of our world today that we really have the luxury of not understanding primary foundational orders.
We are seeing a large amount of apathy in God’s church. This isn’t true everywhere. I have been greatly blessed in places where we have travelled to and studied. You can’t go to Tim Keller’s church in New York City and not see focus there. In talking to them, they know why they are there. There is great blessing to his life and work and there are others. Yet, in the majority of places where we have been, we find a striking sense of apathy. John Stott, a great man of the Anglican church who is now in glory with the saints now. He wrote about this and this is what he said, the church is not always conspicuous for the profound reality of its worship. He was recognizing that we have a problem. In particularly, we who call ourselves evangelical do not know how to worship. Stott wrote that evangelism is our specialty, not worship. We seem to have little sense of the greatness in glory of God. We do not kneel down before him in awe and wonder. It has taken me a long time to get these things straight in my own mind. I think it took Stott a while also. My heart in all of this is especially for you younger leaders. You don’t have to be an old man to get this thing straight. It is all going to come out in the Word.
V. Worship is Essential
God discloses his character to us in the book of his revelation where he is revealing to us who he is in his Word. The Bible shows us his nature and power in creation. All you have to do is look around and you are in awe of what he has done around us. He talks to us in our own lives. Even before becoming a Christian, the Holy Spirit is knocking on the door, taking to you. He is inviting you in and he speaks to us through the events in our lives. As a leader, let us start drilling down and dwelling in God’s Word. If we are going to understand worship, we will need to drill down and dwell in God’s Word. This will have to be above and beyond but including going to the Word for the functional purpose of preaching and teaching. It will need to go beyond that. John Wesley was very insistent that the church stayed in Scriptural Christianity. We don’t have the right to rewrite or revise the Scriptures. We don’t have the right to go in and toss out what contemporary culture doesn’t like. You lose everything by doing this, your worship and your grounding. John Wesley understood the church to consist of one body, of one Spirit, the Holy Spirit and one Lord and one faith. This is the Gospel that has been handed down to us. That is the Word that has been given to us. There is one baptism and one God and Father of all; that is the true church. He stood in agreement with the 19th article of the Church of England which stated that the visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached with the sacraments being ministered. I want to emphasize that worship is very much tied with God’s Word and it is celebrating God’s presence in our lives through Holy Communion. This is a part of who we are. We sing the psalms and pray the psalms and worship God through these prayers. We are instructed by the teaching of both the Old and New Testament.
Secondly, why do we worship God? First, we worship because he has been revealed to us in his Word. Secondly we worship because he is revealed to us in nature. There is an old hymn: This is My Father’s World, a lovely old hymn. The early church would talk about nature being the second book of God. The Bible is the first book; we should always keep that in mind. Nature is the second book that speaks to us and affirms that the Lord is good and he has created all that there is and he is bringing all there is into glory. Thirdly, we worship because God reveals his life and love in our own being. What is the crowning glory of God’s handiwork? We see this in Genesis 1:27, we are! He is our author; he is our creator and our God. He created us to reflex his goodness and his glory. This is called being made in the image of God. We affirm and we are very clear that because of the fall, that image was completely covered over. Classic historical Christianity speaks in terms of total depravity. There is no area of your life that is not impacted by the fall; but in Christ and the redemption which that offers, we become redeemed and that image comes back. Wesley said that before the fall, Adam and Eve saw everything was created as God saw it. They had knowledge and wisdom and understood the purpose of things. That was why they were able to name it; to name it is to understand the nature of it.
Their hearts had one primary object of love and adoration and they had a perfect will. They enjoyed freedom to order their lives and work as they saw best. They were happy and had joy in their lives. We affirm today that happiness and holiness always go hand in hand. All of that was lost because of sin that was introduced through an action. But God’s redeeming love is coming in order to redeem that which was lost and fallen and broken. The image of God in our lives can be fully restored in the new birth. This is what Jesus makes possible. So, we are thankful; we can worship because of how God is made known in our own lives. We sense his presence because we are near to him and close to him. We are blessed by him and then we worship God because of the arrangement of our lives. Look at the divine providence in your life. Most people that I am speaking to, have experienced a major crisis in their lives. Crisis is not so much the point, for beyond the crises you say blessed crises. You come to the point to realize that through divine providence there is nothing that keeps us away from God’s love and his purpose being fulfilled and unfolding in our lives. Thomas Oden, a great theologian, who is also with the saints in glory. He wrote if God exists in the way that classic Christianity teaches, his existence implies far more than intellectual consent. It implies befitting adoration; ceaseless praise of his incomparable being and active love of the most lovable of all beings. This is a love that manifests itself in the loving of all other beings in relation of this Supreme Being. Our duty of worship God becomes our joy and it also sets the compass of our lives. This business of worship is immense.