The Worship Driven Life

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

The greatest impulse of the human spirit is to worship GK Chesterton observed when we cease to worship God we do not worship nothing We worship anything the very first commandment God gave the people of Israel was a prohibition Against Ron worship you shall have no other gods before me This commandment implies an either or proposition you will worship God Or you will worship something else. The seeds of worship we sow determine the fruit of our life. Worship is not a part of life. It is the driver of our life. This is true of every single human being and hard-hearted failure to obey God’s command to worship him will result in a life that is ultimately futile.

Paul wrote in Ephesians 4, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their heart. So as we gather this morning to worship, let’s humbly ask God to remove any hard-heartedness that’s in us, lest we end up walking in the futility of our mind. And as we do, remember that our help is in the name of the Lord. Praise the Lord. For it is good to sing praises to our God, for it is pleasant and a song of praise is fitting. The Lord builds up Jerusalem. He gathers the outcasts of Israel.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars He gives to all of them their names. Great is our Lord and abundant in power. His understanding is beyond measure. The Lord lifts up the humble. He casts the wicked to the ground. Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving. make melody to our God on the lyre. He covers the heavens with clouds. He prepares rain for the earth. He makes grass grow on the hills. He gives to the beasts their food and to the young ravens that cry. His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man. But the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him and those who hope in his steadfast love.

Let’s pray.

Father, we humble ourselves in your presence this morning as we gather. We acknowledge that you are the only one worthy of all praise and honor. We ask that you lift us up even as we lift you up with hearts filled with worship. We do not calm boasting of anything other than your greatness. We acknowledge we are weak but you are strong. Thank you that your strength is made perfect in our weakness and that we can do all things to him who strengthens us. Help us this morning to add to the chorus of praise that is do your name and when the final Amen is said may we may you find the quality of our worship pleasing in your sight amen amo purple neat save deus disbelief excuse my Latin in case you don’t understand what I said and I apologize to mr. Higgins ECS Latin class what I said or tried to say I don’t know what I really said but I tried to say was man proposes, but God disposes. This well-known saying comes from the imitation of Christ by Thomas A. Kempis. In chapter 19 of book 1 he wrote, For the resolutions of the just depend rather on the grace of God than on their

own wisdom, and in him they always put their trust whatever they take in hand.

The Bible states the same principle this way, Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.” For those of us who believe in the sovereignty of God, we sometimes fall into the sin of proposing our own plans and forgetting that it’s God who disposes them. James chapter 4 warns against this sin, “‘Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow, we shall go into such and such a town and spend a year there in trade and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. There is no practical difference between a believer who does not acknowledge God in the details and the unbeliever who will not. Trusting in our own plan-making wisdom is a sin and it usually breeds more sin when our plans go awry. The antidote to this sin is to trust in the Lord with all of your heart, not leaning

on your own understanding, but rather acknowledge him in all of your plans and then he will make your path straight. If you’ve been guilty of this sin or if any other sin comes to mind, now then is the time to confess that sin. And as we do, you are invited, if you’re able to and desire to, to kneel now as you take some time to confess your sin. Let’s take that moment right now. Father, we confess that we who would vigorously defend the doctrine of the sovereignty of God far too often respond as though you were far off or gone on vacation. We say you’re in control and then we rail when things don’t go according to our plans. Forgive us for our negligence in acknowledging your hand in all things and for being thankful for all things for not being thankful.

May we learn to count it all joy when various trials come our way knowing that the testing of our faith builds endurance and in time that endurance will make us more complete and mature in Christ. Thank you for your loving patience that is so long suffering when we do not trust as we ought and thank you for the forgiveness that is ours because what of what the Son did for us on the cross. We pray this the name of the one who died on our behalf so that we might live in newness of life, Jesus Christ. Amen. You invited to stand. Our assurance of forgiveness this morning is found in Hebrews 10 14 through 17. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified and the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us for after saying This is the covenant that I will make with him after those days declares the Lord I will put my laws on their heart and write them in their minds then he adds I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more That gives us some reason to sing and to continue to worship this morning today’s scripture reading is Galatians 5

16 through 24 Galatians 5 16 through 24 But I say, walk in the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing these things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident. immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, and divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control against such things. There is no law and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

Let’s pray. Father, we come to you as a congregation to pray for our nation and the people that are in authority over us. And we know that you have put believers in positions all over our government. Help them to be strong in their faith and to be those lights in some of those dark places where they may serve. And we ask a special blessing on those people today to move our country more into the light. We thank you for the men in our congregation that serve in our military. We thank Jubal Marlat and Hack Barth and Dad and Wimmermeyer all serving in the Navy. And we thank the Fujianaka family that Ian is going to go off to West Point next year and Anna’s already there and they have an older brother who’s already gone through it.

So we thank you for the Fujinaka family, and who knows, we may not even need a military if they keep sending people there. So we thank you for that. We pray especially for our fathers in our congregation and the elders and deacons in our congregation that we would be those men and properly leading our families and our congregation, that each one of us has those duties in their unit as a home, in their unit as part of the church, and in their unit and society. And if they do those properly, then the wives and the children will all have those models and we will be coming together as families for you in our world. We thank you for that.

We think of the people that need personal prayer in our congregation today. Debbie Wold first comes to mind in her battle with cancer. She had a new appointment this week, and the two spots on her liver have shrunk for the second time, we praise you for that, and that the spots on her spine and hip have remained the same, and the tumor in her kidney remains the same. So it seems that you’ve at least stalled the progress and actually shrunk some of the others. We do ask you for complete healing for Debbie, and that if that requires medicine and all the stuff that she’s going through now. They’ve chosen not to do, have a two week break from chemo and Debbie and Dave are gonna be able to go off and have some time together and we pray that you would bless that and bring Debbie up strongly and again, we ask for full recovery for her.

We think of Steve Snyder and Mary Kaye. We’re glad to see Mary Kaye here today after her fall And we pray that Steve would continue to recover and go through his therapy to fix up his hip and knees and all the things that he had going on and that he is recovering incrementally. Incrementally. We think of Rhonda Luce, friend of our congregation, that as she goes through the ongoing chemotherapy that she would learn how to adapt and be as comfortable as possible. And we do pray for her healing also. He’s a great friend of our congregation. We think of Carmen Nielsen and her continued recovery from her brain surgery.

She seems to be doing better and we ask that she would go slow and not try to do too much, but that she would continue to bring her back to her full recovery. We thank you that Sean’s operation went smoothly and seemingly it is improving his condition and his leg is less numb and things do seem to be getting better, just like the doctor said they would, so we pray that he would have a complete recovery also.

We think of people that are just having a hard time out there and we think specifically of Alicia Kulishov’s sister Emma and we pray that she would be strengthened by your spirit and understand her place and have her fully engaged. And a lot of people get down and we think of them and we ask that you would lift them up. And those of us that know those people help us to be those people that can come alongside them also. Then we have our great crew of expectant mothers in our congregation. How exciting it is that all this new life is coming in. And we think of it looking from my generation and then a middle generation and then the ones that are having the babies right now and how you’re blessing us with all those new births.

And yet those bring upon all kinds of decisions and worries and all that kind of stuff. I would ask that you would give a supernatural calmness to everybody as they approach this and go through their pregnancies. So we thank you for that. We thank you for our outreach with our school, the Children’s Law Center, Good Shepherd’s Home, all of those things that we see as direct influence in the societies that they’re in and where those people disciple those people to be stronger people for you. We thank you for the local churches that preach the gospel here in our community and all over the world and we pray for those people that are being persecuted at this very moment in some of those places.

We don’t even know what that’s like. We think persecution is having people talk bad about Christians and what squares they are where those people are facing martyrdom. So we pray for all of us to recognize the blessings you give us and to be that light. So we thank you for all of these things and we thank you of course most of all for your son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen. Amen. Father, we have just sung a song that is packed with worshipful expressions. May it be true of us that we would rather have you than anything else this world has to offer. As we’ve already talked about this morning, it does come down to an either or proposition.

You or what this world has to offer. As we look at this morning at the topic of worship and how that is the driver to life, we pray that you would really shake us, challenge us, confront us in our hearts where those words we’re just saying aren’t quite true, but that they would slowly but steadily become more and more true as we walk with you daily. We just pray this now in your son Jesus’ name. Amen. This message will sound a little familiar to some of you who have been around for I think I preached a version of this back in 2012, but it really fit well into what Dave and I wanted to cover these two weeks. So if you’ll allow me, and for many of you, you’re new, so you haven’t heard these thoughts expressed before.

If you’ve attended Trinity Evangel Church for very long, you’ve probably picked up on various words or phrases that we like to use a lot. Words like affection, joy flag, image bearer, laughter is war, the mess, boom, dualism, sovereignty, liturgy, Kyperian worship. That’s a lot of jargon floating around and it creates its own kind of mess in your mind as you try to reflect on what is the essence of what we have been teaching and what we try to live here at Trinity. How would you distill into a few sentences what is the core characteristic of Trinity? Now Now that question alone should make you a bit uncomfortable.

After all, aren’t we but one physical manifestation of the universal body of Christ? Is it okay for a local body of believers to consider their own uniqueness within the universal body of believers, or is it bordering on man’s centeredness to consider our own identity? As Dave and I talked about what we wanted to teach on for these two weeks that we’re filling in, we thought it would be good to reflect on where TEC is and consider how we can be an even better church. We also wanted to reflect on what makes TEC the special place that it is. Now our intent is not to pat ourselves on the back, but rather to warn ourselves not to lose what we have and to excel still more.

What makes for a good church? By good I mean one that is faithfully living out the gospel of Jesus Christ. How would you define a good church that is meeting that objective? What is the key ingredient to making a good church? What’s the recipe if there is one? Several years ago, Sean and I had a conversation during a layover at Denver International Airport on our way to the T4G conference in Louisville, Kentucky. We were discussing what one thing we hoped that members of TEC would have begun to get. I think that conversation when we had it, we were about two years old as a church at the time. I love the answer that Shawn gave.

He said he hoped that we had come closer to understanding just how glad God is with us in Christ and that we in turn would be models of that gladness to others. That sounds pretty good to me. After all, we do have good news. If it really is good news, shouldn’t that produce some measure of gladness in us? Wouldn’t true gladness manifest itself outwardly and make people want to ask what is the reason for the hope that’s in us? Wouldn’t true gladness be a bright light in a dark world and force others to take notice and see the reality of God in our lives? True gladness produce an attractive aroma that appeals to those who are being saved as 2 Corinthians 2.15 tells us.

The answer to these rhetorical questions is yes. True gladness would have all these effects and more. Now a synonym we could use for gladness is joy. Jesus’ desire for us is that we would have true gladness or joy. John 15.11, these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. We tend to gloss over that verse. Jesus’ goal, his purpose, his desire, is that his joy be in us. Just imagine joy immeasurable in quantity and quality. What would it look like to have the fullness of Jesus’ joy in us? The thought occurred to me that if this kind of joy was as prevalent as Jesus intended for it to be, we wouldn’t need so many sermons on what the joy-filled life looks like. Perhaps we spend so much time talking about joy because so if you experience it in the fullness that Jesus prayed for it. Think about it.

From your experience or observation which of the following describes more Christians? Those whose lives are typically and obviously full of joy with occasional off days or those whose lives seem humdrum or worse negative with only occasional spikes of evidential joy. How much of our joy is dependent on our circumstances? Here’s another way to think about what I am getting at. Our salvation, as you know, can be broken down into three distinct phases. Justification, sanctification, and glorification. Many Christians in our camp have their doctrine wired when it comes to justification and glorification, the beginning and the end.

They are glad to be saved from the penalty and the power of sin, and they look forward to being removed from the presence of sin. What about the in-between part? The sanctification phase. Do we realize that God is just as glad about this phase as he is with all the others? He doesn’t see the space between our justification and our glorification as wasted or idle time. This messy, sometimes painful, often irritating middle space between justification and glorification is part of his plan. He deems it good. Perhaps you’ve heard preachers ask the question, why has God left us here on earth? Their conclusion is that the only reason God’s left us here is so that we can lead more people to Christ.

Now evangelism is certainly a high priority for the church, but is that all this in-between time is for? We are called to make disciples, but does that mean we should view the world as an evil place to avoid, except when we send out fishing parties on Tuesday night to capture fish for Jesus and drag them back to our stained glass aquariums. So many Christians live like the prisoner who’s told that he’s been paroled, but the release date is 50 years from now. The net effect is that they slog through life thankful at some level for their salvation, but largely living with a joyless prisoner-like mindset. If you don’t like having to hang around this planet after salvation, you have Jesus to thank for it.

In his high priestly prayer recorded in John 17, he prays to the Father concerning us. Verse 15, he prays, I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. Why would Jesus specifically pray that we not be taken out of the world? The reason is given a few verses later, starting in verse 20.

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their world and that they may all be one just as you father are in me and I in you that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me the glory that you have given me I have given to them that they may be one even as we are one I in them and you in me that they may become one become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Jesus prays to the Father that the church may be one even as he and the Father are one. Why? So that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son and that the Father loves us. Everything about how we live our lives is supposed to present compelling evidence to the world that God has sent his Son and that God is love. This will result then in God getting more glory.

Matthew 5 16 let your light shine before others so they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven. The essential characteristic traits of the Christian life joy love unity are exactly what the world so desperately wants but so completely lacks. At some level a godly testimony can cause even unbelievers to give glory to God. If we are going to have Jesus intended effect on the world, then we need to have a proper perspective on two things. One, we need to view the messy phase of our salvation we call sanctification as something good and from God and be glad in it. And then two, we need to view the world not as an inherently evil place to be criticized and avoided. It is God’s creation and as such it is good even though though it is now being corrupted by sin.

We are called to engage the world with joy and gladness without becoming part of the world system. Those of you who have been at TEC for more than a few months should be familiar with the name Abraham Kuyper. And only the Bohr family can pronounce that word properly, but Abraham Kuyper. For those that aren’t, he was a Dutch theologian and former prime minister of the Netherlands. Not to mention, he started a newspaper at a university in his free time. He was a pretty busy guy, well accomplished. He was also an eloquent apologist for the sovereignty of God. His influence was so great on his disciples and his community that years after his death, Adolf Hitler gave instructions that Kuyper’s disciples be sought out and killed unless their beliefs about liberty and God’s sovereignty would interfere with Hitler’s plans.

Can you imagine that? Somebody like Hitler saying, well, we got a bunch of these disciples of this guy named Kuiper running around. We got to kill him off because their worldview is going to mess up my plans. In Men to Men, we have been reading a book titled Lectures on Calvinism. The book contains six lectures that Kuiper gave in 1898 at Princeton University. In one of those lectures, he said this, The world, after the fall, is no lost planet, only destined now to afford the church a place in which to continue her combats, and humanity is no aimless mass of people which only serve the purpose of giving birth to the elect.

So if you follow that, he’s saying it’s not just a place for evangelism. On the contrary, the world now, as well as in the beginning, is the theater for the mighty works of God, and humanity remains a creation of his hand, which, apart from salvation, completes under this present dispensation here on earth a mighty process, and in its historical development, is to glorify the name of Almighty God. Now, if you’ve been a man to man, you know that all of us say we have to read those sentences like 99 times to start to understand them. What he’s saying, all of God’s creation, works and all, play a crucial role in glorifying God.

The wicked may not know it, but they too are instruments being used to bring glory to God. All of humanity plays a part in this immense drama written and produced by God Himself, in which He is the primary audience and the chief actor in it. He delights in this cosmic play because He wrote it. We believe in the doctrine of total depravity, but this does not mean that men always act as depraved as they could. All men are created in the image of God, and all enjoy common grace from God. This means that all are capable, at times, of acting consistent with the character of God, even though they have not received saving grace from God.

We see lots of evidences around us of unbelievers doing things that are totally consistent with the character of God. Doesn’t mean you’re saved, but because of their image-bearing characteristic, they can still do good things. We who have received saving grace should walk among those who have only received common grace so that all men might behold the glory of God. We are not called to avoid contact with the world. We are supposed to be engaged with the world as salt and light. Now with all of that, what I’ve said is introduction. Let me now then attempt what I set out to do this morning, which is to distill the essence of what drives our thinking here at TEC.

Here it is. What you worship shapes your worldview. Your worldview guides your daily walk. I can look at how a man walks his life, and by observing him over a long enough period of time, I can get a pretty good handle on his worldview, and thus a pretty good idea on what he worships. Worship always drives the way we walk. Stated another way, we can say our affections affect our perceptions, and our perceptions affect our actions. Let me say it again. Our affections affect our perceptions and our perceptions affect our actions. In the time remaining, I’ll show why I believe this to be an accurate way of looking at the human experience.

This view then will help us in a couple of ways. First, it will reveal the unifying theme of what has been and is being taught here at Trinity. Two, it will expose the root cause of why so many Christians have their systematic theology correct, but have a weak theology proper. In other words, it will show how a Christian can have a full truth tube and yet not be a joyful believer. It will show why so many Christians look like unbelievers in practice. Third, this worship worldview walk view, this view will serve as a spiritual diagnostic tool to help you evaluate your life, and to become more sensitive to sin and to see how sin strangles belief.

Think of this worship worldview walk, this view as a three by five card that you periodically pull out of your mental shirt pocket to review as you prepare for the next spiritual test. You do not know when the next test is coming because like pop quizzes, spiritual tests can occur at any time. This means you have to keep reviewing that three by five cards so that you’re ready when the test comes. The worship worldview walk view shows the cause and effect relationships in your life. So let’s start taking this worship worldview walk model apart and see how it really affects us. Typically around the start of a new year, our church will have a short series on worship.

In the past, some have been a little impatient with us revisiting this topic annually. They prefer that we stay in a verse-by-verse exegesis of the Word. They go, oh no, worship series again. Now there’s no disagreement on the importance of teaching the Word of God verse-by-verse. But isn’t the point of rightly dividing the Word of God so that we will be better worshippers of God? 4 23 tells us, but the hour is coming and is now here where the true worshipers will worship the father and spirit and truth for the father is seeking what such people to worship him. If the father seeking true worshipers, then it seems to me that it behooves us to understand what that means. I believe our problem is not that we talk about worship too much, but that we understand worship too little. The whole point of God’s revelation to man, both written and natural, is so that we might enter into fellowship with him and worship him.

And then I’ll try to show in a minute how much worship dictates how we respond to life events and how we choose to engage in the world. When the elders were first coming up with what our Sunday service would look like, worship was the driving factor in why we chose the elements we did. It wasn’t just a random, let’s throw a bunch of elements together and call it a worship service. We were very purposeful. Now, it isn’t to say that our service structure is the only way, but we believe it serves our body well in promoting a worshipful expression of faith. Some churches focus more on how to minimize uncomfortableness for their visitors.

The danger that comes with that focus is that people begin to think that Sunday services are about them. Now, we don’t wish to make people intentionally uncomfortable. We didn’t purposely leave the AC off. We don’t want you to be uncomfortable, but that happens. But trying to make you comfortable is not our priority. I recently came across an article titled, The Whole Christian Life Every Sunday by Tim Chalise. Chalise, some of you know, is a prolific Christian blogger who visits quite a few churches and conferences every year. In this article, he lists out what he believes are valuable and often missing components of a beneficial church service liturgy. So here’s Charlie’s opinion on what a good church service would look like. See if it sounds familiar.

He says, here’s his list. A call to worship, a time of confession, a time to provide assurance of pardon, a time of prayer, a time of scripture reading, a time of preaching, a time to give financial gifts, a time of singing, a time of communion, a time for benediction, a time of fellowship. Sound familiar? And we didn’t consult with Tim before we came up with our service. Taken all together, all these elements drive our corporate body towards worship of God, provided they are done in the right spirit and not mechanistically. Our liturgy here at TEC would be worthless if we just come in like robots and just crank the handle again and then our Sunday move through our five C’s.

Now with the time remaining, I want to show the linkages between worship, worldview, and our daily walk and how that determines, one, how we respond when life comes at us, and two, how we choose to engage the world around us. Our worship, worldview, walk, all of that, when understood.

explain why do I respond the way I do when life happens to me and it will explain how I engage the world around me. First, how does worship dictate how we respond when life comes at us? This is the aspect of life where events or circumstances outside our full control happen to us. They may be pleasant or they may be undesirable. How we respond to them says something about who or what we worship. You can’t talk about worshiping God without talking about your affections. It is impossible to worship God and at the same time have something else be the primary object of your affections. It doesn’t work. Now don’t misunderstand. We can and we do have affections for things other than God. I can have multiple affections. I can have affections for my wife, children, and grandchildren, I can have affections for my friends. It’s when those affections lead me to find God insufficient in any way that then I’m in sin. For example, I have affection for my wife, but let’s say that she begins acting in ways that I

find hurtful. What if after many attempts to resolve the conflict, she is still doing hurtful things? If my response to her hurtful actions is anger, despair, hopelessness or sullen resignation, then my affections for her is improper because I believe in my heart that God is insufficient to meet my deepest needs.

I won’t take the time to read Jeremiah chapter 2, but I refer you to 213 because it lists the two options for satisfying our soul. Option 1, drink from the fountain of abundant living water that God supplies. Or option 2, drink from broken cisterns which are leaky, shallow holes in the ground. Broken cisterns, metaphorically, can be anything. Spouse, child, job, bank account, friends, grades, reputation, popularity, beauty, anything. If I were to ask you, which is more important, God or one of those broken cisterns, you would all give me the right Sunday school answer. You’d all say God. But what does your daily walk say about which one is more important. How do you respond when your spouse disappoints you for the hundredth time? How about when the bank calls to tell you that a check bounced?

What happens in your heart when you realize that you aren’t very popular and you’re feeling isolated? Don’t your, or don’t our emotional responses to life’s disappointments reveal that we don’t really believe what we say we believe about God. We sing songs with words like, all I need is you, or nothing I have compares with you or I surrender all with a song we just saying before I came up but then when those broken cisterns go dry and they always do we respond in sinful ways what do these responses say about our beliefs in God what do they say about our worship of God they don’t make very positive statements beliefs that falters when things are hard is not belief affections for God that go sour when we’re disappointed with life is not true affections. Belief demands that we say with Job, though he slay me, yet I will trust him. There’s a story in one of the biographies on John Knox of a time when Knox was in prison for preaching and his wife went to the king to appeal for his release. The king

listened to her petition and then said he would release Knox if she could get him to stop preaching. Nock’s wife responded by holding out her apron like she was collecting fruit and said she would rather that the king put the head of her husband in her apron than ask him to stop preaching. Do you think she didn’t deeply love her husband? Of course she did. But she loved God so much more that she was willing to become an instant widow. That is what believing looks like. I said earlier when our worship, i.e. our affections for God, is what it should be, it will of necessity shape our worldview. By worldview, I simply mean the grid through which we interpret the world around us.

Our worldview determines our perceptions of life’s events. As things happen at me, I have to make a determination, what do I think about that? And our worldview is going to affect how I interpret the information coming in. For example, if my worldview says that I have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that’s the core of my worldview, then anything that impinges on that is going to make me unhappy, possibly to the point of despair. If my worldview, the core worldview, says that life should be fair, then any form of injustice is going to rock my world. All of us have some sort of mental grid we apply when interpreting events in life.

For most of us, our grid is a mashup of lots of ideas that we’ve picked up along the way and I dare say that if we were to pick apart our world views we would find out there’s a lot of conflicting inconsistent pieces to our worldview. We just glom on to the ideas without really considering where did they come from, what’s behind them and we’ve gotten so good at this process of receiving information and interpreting it in our heads and our worldview. We’re not even mindful of the process anymore we’re just reacting but in that reaction if we would stop and consider and ponder we’d say oh that tells me something about my worldview. That tells me something about who my worship. Sometimes these ideas that get in our head are not very compatible with a Christian worldview.

For those of us coming from the Reformed faith tradition, our worldview has at its core the belief in the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God means he appoints the course of nature and directs all the events down to the minutest details. His decrees therefore are eternal, unchangeable, holy, wise, and good. In layman’s terms, and I think Dave’s got a t-shirt to express this, God is God and you are not. He does what he wants, how he wants, when he wants, without anyone’s counsel. So then proper worship alters our affections and shapes our perspective on life. We are not victims of chance, luck, or random acts. Some of those events will be painful, but with the right perspective, they will be tempered by the knowledge that God is good and that all things work together for good.

Worship dictates how we respond when life comes at us. Again, if you don’t like the way you’re responding to life, it’s a sinful response. You can trace it back to a problem in your worship. Next, I want to show how worship affects how we engage with the world. So if you’re following, first point was how does worship affect how I respond to life coming at me? Now, how does worship affect me engaging the world? If we worship a sovereign God, how should that shape our worldview or perspective on the world around us? Do we see it as an inherently evil place to avoid as much as possible? Or do we see it as part of God’s creation and intended by God to be enjoyed?

Quoting again Abraham Kuyper his famous quote, there is not one thumbs within the universe that the Lord Jesus Christ does not declare it is mine. Anywhere you hold your thumb up and look at the universe, Jesus says that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine. And some of us come out of a camp and says that’s evil, that’s evil, that’s evil, that’s evil, that’s evil. You see the problem? In more extreme cases, Christians try to live in near total isolation from the world. They say it’s all going to burn. And so as any kind of engagement with the world that does not have anything directly to do with the church is viewed as either a waste of time or spiritually dangerous.

An example from church history of an extreme case of this isolationist was a Christian sect known as the Shakers. The sect has pretty much died out today for obvious reasons in the moment, but I think they officially had their last known shaker person, I think, as eaters. It’s barely alive or it may have just passed away, but it’s pretty much gone. But in its heyday, it taught, among other things, that Christians should remain separate from the world, and even that sexual relations, even among married couples, was evil. That might help explain why they died out. This latter view came about because one of its leaders, and Lee had lost four children in infancy and she believes that God told her then that sex was evil. Her conclusion, her worldview told her, well, four babies died in infancy. The problem’s got to be sex.

Let’s that’s not wipe out sex. Our variations of separatism, a proper response to the world. If it’s true that Jesus Christ declared that every square inch in this is his, then isn’t the right view of the world one that sees it as Christ’s domain. Psalms are filled with statements about creation declaring the glory of God. We are told to taste and see that the Lord is good. Is that just metaphorical or are we called to actually use our senses to enjoy his creation and to give him thanks? Could it be that much of the spiritual decline in America is due to Christians being holed up in their churches, except when they go out on their weekly evangelism visits.

More often than not, those churches that do engage the community, unfortunately today, have gone apostate and preach another gospel that even has gone so far as to bless sinful behavior. Christians were once the driving force behind Western civilization, which brought about many improvements to communities, Whether it was education, science, politics, art, medicine, human rights, or other civic-minded activities, Christians were major players. Somewhere along the way, we have surrendered our involvement in those sorts of things and even disdain them for being so, quote-unquote, godless. If Christians are hanging out in their stained-glass aquariums, we shouldn’t be surprised that the rest of the community has become so godless.

Even some of our practices have been dictated by the world’s sinful excesses rather than by what God has said. The world perverts something good God gave and our response is to condemn the thing that God has given rather than condemn the sinful abuse of it. Drinking is just one example of that. Sinful man abuses wine, which the Bible calls a gift, and we respond by calling wine the devil’s juice and tell Christians to avoid it. Now I’ve wondered, and I’ve been a part of that camp for many, many years, but I’ve wondered why we never applied the same principle to sex. Doesn’t the world abuse sex? Why don’t we have a prohibition against sex?

I know there are some here who have a history of abusing some of these gifts, and have now chosen to abstain to avoid temptation. That is good, that is totally fine. I’m addressing the case where we carte blanche, condemn things abused by the world that God has called good. Maybe it’s time for Christians to once again engage their communities with winsomeness and sacrifice rather than just throwing pronouncements of judgment from our sanctified compounds Now let me to hasten to say that I am NOT advocating some type of social gospel that exchanges the proclamation of the gospel for soup kitchens But soup kitchens aren’t all that bad, especially when you’re starving It seems that I recall a verse somewhere about giving a cup of cold water water as evidence of one’s salvation.

The life to life leaders have recently completed a video series titled For the Life of the World. And in the series, the question is asked, what is our salvation for? The series title gives away the answer. Our salvation is for the life of the world. We are supposed to be in the world, but not of it. We are to demonstrate how to properly receive and use God’s gifts with thankfulness and to use our image-bearing creativeness to further His glory. Some will argue that we are not citizens of this world and that we should fix our attention on our future home and busy ourselves with evangelism. Don’t get entangled in the world.

This is not my home. Agreed? We are aliens in a land that seems increasingly foreign to us, but consider what God told the Jews who were exiled off into Babylonian captivity. If you know the history, because of their sin, God allowed the Jews to be defeated and humiliated by Nebuchadnezzar. Their homes were raised, their wealth pilfered, their temple destroyed, and most of their leaders have been killed off. Now the remnant is all huddled up in Babylon. If anyone had a reason to sink into isolationism and resent the culture, it was them. But then God sends an extraordinary message to the surviving elders by way of Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 29 4 through 7 we read thus says the Lord of hosts stay away from those filthy Babylonians not section I wouldn’t says thus says the Lord of hosts the God of Israel to all the exiles who whom I have sent into exile from Jews or Jerusalem to Babylon build houses and live in them plant gardens and eat their produce take wise and have sons and daughters take wise for your sons and give your daughters and marriage that they may bear sons and daughters, multiply there and do not decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. Seek the welfare of the Babylonians? Really? Pray for them? I imagine the Jews were praying all right.

They were praying every imprecatory psalm they could think of. But God tells them to seek to be a blessing to their captors, and in so doing they would find their welfare. Hmm. Maybe God doesn’t want Christians to just hang in there and wait it out until the Lord returns. Now, a side note to young couples, I’ve heard some through several generational cycles. Now I’ve heard some question if they should even have children and bring them into this evil timer in. You aren’t the first generation to wrestle with that question. When we were having babies, our friends were asking the same question. Suffice it to say that if God thought it was a good idea to have kids during the Babylonian exile, then it’s probably a good thing to bring God-fearing children into our time. Looking to the New Testament, we see that we are supposed to pray for our leaders and submit to them, which by the way was written when Nero was reigning. We are to bless those who curse us. We are created for good works assigned by God before time began. We are not to

let our light shine so that men, pagans too, can see it. Any way you slice it, Christians are supposed to be engaged in the world. Not only for the sake of our witness, but also for the sake of our worship. All that God has created represents gifts given by God for our enjoyment and his glory as we receive those gifts and direct our thanks back to them. Now get this, we do not merely have the license to enjoy the things of earth. We have the duty because in so doing properly, we give glory back to God. When we say evil, evil, evil, evil, evil, and we start pronouncing judgment and refuse to enjoy the things of earth, we are basically denying ourselves a primary avenue of directing glory and worship back to our heavenly Father.

He’s the one that gave the gifts. I use the analogy in a couple of our discussions of, what is a father’s expectation on Christmas morning when he gives this kid a bicycle? Does he want the kid to put the bicycle back in the box and jump on his lap and say, oh, daddy, I love you so much. Thank you for this bicycle. They spend the rest of the next 25 years as a kid sitting on daddy’s lap saying, thank you for that bicycle. Thank you. Thank you. The father has been waiting eagerly to see the son jump on the bike and go pedaling down the street. Yes, he wants the son to know where the bike came from and to be grateful for the bicycle, But he wants to see the kid ride the bicycle.

And as the son’s riding a bicycle and thinking, what an awesome father I have, the cycle of worship is happening. It’s supposed to happen. Everything about our life begins and ends with God, and that is why a worship-driven life is so essential. Frankly, it’s unavoidable. We will worship something. Early on, I asked, what makes TEC unique? We are a admittedly a strange duck among churches. We are happily Calvinistic, Kiberian, and dispensational. Now, Sean is going to do a series of messages drilling in on exactly what that means when he gets back. Our covenantal brothers scratch their heads and say that we can’t be Kiberian and dispensational.

Some on the other end of the spectrum think we’re selling out to some type of worldliness. We just smile and keep on doing what we’re doing. Going about living a fully orbed gospel, trusting in the complete sovereignty of God as we engage the culture around us and push back against sin wherever it seeks to mar the beauty of his created order. Your walk talks. If nobody wants to listen to what your talk is talking, then pull out that 3x5 index card I referred to at the start of the message and examine your worldview. Do you really believe Jesus is sovereign over your life? Also examine your affections. Do you love Jesus more than anything? If all you had were Jesus and the hope of the glory that’s to be revealed, would that be enough? If your answer is no to any of those questions, then something is messed up with your worship. What you worship shapes your worldview. Your worldview guides your daily walk. Let’s pray. Father, it’s been a lot of words expressed here in the last half hour, but if we can only remember one word, remember worship.

It begins and it ends with worship. You are seeking worshipers. You created us to be your worshipers. You have given all of the all of a creation as an expression of your goodness and your majesty and you intend for your creation to enjoy it along with you and to then direct worship back to you as we enjoy those gifts.

Forgive us for the times that we have with our minds said the right things, but really with our hearts have allowed our affections for other things to crowd in. The ways many times perhaps even this morning that we expressed a our walk reflected something other than a proper worldview, you a proper worship of you. Father, just really grab us by our chins and direct our thinking and our thoughts back towards you. Help us not walk through life like so many who do not know you, just zombies, Father, just mindlessly following their God without even aware they’re following their God. May we be more purposeful in our intentions to walk after our God and then may our worldview, may our walk look like that, may it express that made people see us and say, wow, they’re clearly Christians.

They clearly worship the true God. Father, just thank you for all of your good gifts. And again, thanks for the challenges that we find in your word that caused us to continually have to re-examine and to repent and to come back to the truth of your word. Just pray all this now in your Son, Jesus’ name, amen. You’re invited to stand. Worship team can come back up as we prepare to move on. This is the part in the service where we continue our worship in a form of presenting the gifts and offerings that we’ve gathered throughout the week. Again, don’t think of this as just the time when we collect the dough to pay the bills. This is a time when we, again, in another tangible way, express worship to our Heavenly Father. And so in that, in our singing, in our attentiveness to preaching, all of these elements of worship, we have a responsibility to put our whole heart, soul, and mind into it. So let’s do that now as we continue to sing.

Now we come to the time of communion where we now in our service where we celebrate our fellowship with Jesus Christ and with each other. And the only way we can do that is through the evangel. And our church is named Trinity Evangel Church, another purposeful choice. The gospel given to us by our Our triune God is what allows us to even have the fellowship that we’ve talked about in the scripture reading before. For in order to walk in the spirit, you have to possess the spirit. You can’t possess the spirit without you coming to the Lord for your forgiveness of your sins. And He’s the only one that can do it. So as we celebrate this, we celebrate what Christ has already done.

Now, we do want you to examine yourself to see if you’re worthy, and we do open this up to Christians. Communion is for believers in Jesus and what he’s done for you. It’s not just for the world to come down and have a snack. But the idea is that if we together believe in Christ and what he’s done for us, we then should celebrate what he’s done for us together and understand that in this supernatural process all of us together come gain strength through this and then go back out to the world to shed more and more light. The end of the cycle Jim spoke about the worship. And as long as you recognize who the one giving the gifts, whatever those gifts may be and at the time you may not see them as gifts, you then are in that proper cycle.

So when we have communion like this together, it’s just amazing to me how you see and I love the way that we do it also, we purposely made it this way where we don’t pass it out to you, you guys come and receive it and we get to see everybody come by and all the families and the whole thing that we together in union are doing this together and it’s really one of the high points I think. Another thing we’ve discussed before and I’ll say it again that the the idea that we might spoil it doing it every week I don’t think anybody thinks that that’s been here for a while. The more we do it the more we understand the onion gets peeled another layer and it’s a joy to have that happen. So as we do this today, again I said it’s an open communion. Those who have faith in the Lord are welcome to participate. We all come up, we come through the center aisle, get the bread and the wine, then circulate back around, and then we do it together. And so that’s what we will do now. So let’s have our song and let’s participate. Now’s the time where the

pastor gets to charge you to go out into our sinful world and be that bright light and to enjoy the good things God has given us. The idea to go out and be that light is foreign to some of us that have been in other fellowships and the idea of to put on our armor and be afraid and that kind of thing Jim spoke eloquently about it before but to go out as in Hubert Humphries words as a happy warrior and to bring that joy to the world is a real blessing that we can have and people will ask you why are you grinning all the time and then you can tell them why because you know in the end the good guys win so keep that in mind go out and enjoy the day your life the next week until we meet again and I And I want to leave you with this benediction, which Jim chose, and I think fits perfectly for what we’re trying to say today.

This is 1 Timothy 6, 13 through 16. I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who is his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession to keep the commandment unstained, free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He will display at the proper time. He is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.