Message Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund looks through Romans and several other examples in the Bible to find the importance of public worship and what God intends for us.

Message Notes & Study Guide - PDF

Message Transcript

Good morning. Welcome. It's great to be together here in Wexford, the strip district, Butler County. Just before we jump into what we're doing today, I want to just highlight something that's happening. We have a great kids and student ministry here every week. Hundreds of kids and students are impacted in significant ways in terms of the kingdom of God, what being a Christian means. And next week we have a group of high school students from Wexford going to Peru to have Kids Fest Peru. Now if you've been around here, you might say Kids Fest Peru, that's new. We've done Kids Fest Haiti. Well, this year we decided not to send the kids to Haiti due to the political turmoil and unrest that's there. And what's really fun is that our Kids Fest Haiti is going to continue, we're still going to fund it, but the team that's there that we've worked with of Haitians is going to actually run that entirely without our help or support.

And we chose Peru because Jeanette Klein, who's part of our student ministry staff had served as a missionary in Peru for several years and had the network in order to help make KidsFest Peru a reality. So kind of fun this year that there'll be KidsFest Haiti, KidsFest Peru, and then obviously KidsFest Butler County, Strip District, and Wexford all this year.

And then next month we have students from multiple campuses going to Chicago on a trip as well. Just an immersion in some issues of the city. So we just wanted to take a moment and just pray for our students and then we'll jump into what we have today. Father, thank you for just a place where we can impact and be a part of the lives of students and kids. And Lord, we know a lot of these students will end up moving away, maybe never plugging back into Orchard Hill, but God, we know that you can use the time they've had here with a huge ripple effect throughout really the whole world.

And God, we pray that as they go on these trips that you would use them to shape the students, that they would bring your hope to people in Peru, in Chicago, but also just that you would use it to shape them. And father, as we are gathered today in the strip district in Butler County, in Wexford, in the chapel. I pray that you would speak to each of us. Father, I pray that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen. So if I were to ask you what you thought of church, church in general, not necessarily this church, what would you say? Now, my guess is many of us in the gatherings that we have at Orchard Hill today would say, well, I feel somewhat positive because you're at a gathering.

But if you ask that question more broadly, you ask it in the world, the response would usually be something like, well, church is somewhat inane. It's unnecessary, it's outdated. Some would even go so far as to not just say that it's inane or unnecessary, but that it really is negative because the things that are taught create people who are judgmental, people who are harsh, people who aren't good global citizens. And then there would be some who would say church is really significant. It's like a lifeblood and it gives me community and hope and connects me to the God of the universe. And so there are a lot of different reactions. Today, we have a little break between our series. We've finished our better series last weekend and today we are going to be in between when we start next weekend, finishing the gospel of John as we'll look at the narratives leading up to Christ death.

And so I had a week where I could choose something to talk about and with all that's happening at Orchard Hill, what I wanted to look at is this passage that we read in Romans that really points to something and that is what God desires from people. Because a lot of times we tend to think of churches, maybe a punch list or a social obligation or one of the other ways that I've described it, but what God wants is a gathering of people who are authentic worshipers and people who are authentic witnesses. And I think that's what we see in this passage in Romans. And so we're going to begin just by addressing this idea of God wanting a group of people together who are authentic worshipers. And the reason I say this is because in verses 9 through 13 of Romans 10, what we see is what God does for people, not what people do for God.

In other words, God's desire isn't to say, I want you to become my workers. I want you to become my worshipers. Now, that doesn't mean that there's never work to do or anything like that, but here's what we see. Verse nine, it says, "If you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." So he says, "Here's what is at the core." This is the apostle Paul writing. he says, "Here's what's at the core. If you confess with your mouth, believe in your heart, you can have salvation. You can have eternal life. You can have the rescue from the power of sin in your life." That's what he says. Verse 10, "First with your heart that you believe and are justified," meaning you're declared right, legally right before God. It's in your heart and then it's with your mouth that you profess your faith and you are saved.

As scripture says, anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame for there's no difference between the Jew and the Gentile. The same Lord is the Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him. And what this is, this is a picture of the kingdom of God saying, here's what I want. I want people from every race, every background, people who've been religiously fastidious and people who have not been to call on my name and to come together and say that the Lord is their Lord. In other words, it's a picture of beautiful all-encompassing corporate worship and here's why this is significant. A lot of times what happens is people gather and they think that what they're doing is they are somehow hitting a list of requirements. One author put it like this, I love this quote.

He said, "Church is not where good people gather. It's a place where the guilty gather to be reminded that because of what Jesus Christ has done, we are saved from the judgment we deserve and unconditionally loved by God the father. We gather to celebrate." And so often what happens is we forget when we come together that part of what God is doing in inviting people to come together saying, I want you to celebrate what has been done for you. And instead we turn it into what we need to do for God. And then we wonder why sometimes church becomes something that feels laborious rather than celebratory. And we miss maybe the whole idea of what corporate public worship is about. Now, worship is certainly something that you can look at and you can say, well, worship is a posture. In other words, it's something where we have wonder and deference. It's also an activity.

But today I want to just talk about a third aspect of that for a little bit. And this is the public gathering. Maybe you've heard somebody say, well, I don't need church to be spiritual. I don't need church to be a Christian. And there's certainly some truth to that. You can be a person of individual faith apart from the church. But I want to just show you some scriptures that indicate the significance of public gathering. And here's the first that I would just say. And that is we gather for public worship because the Bible instructs us to. And Exodus 20 verse 8, which is part of the 10 commandments, we're told to set the Sabbath day apart to the Lord to make it Holy.

Now, in the new Testament, we believe that that the idea of Sabbath has transitioned to the first day of the week because of the resurrection. That's what the early church did. But the principle of saying take a day, not just for rest, not just for relaxation, not just to catch up on everything else that you do, but to prioritize public worship is something that is embedded in the commands of God to the people of this earth. And not only that, in Romans chapter 10, we see this. It says this, "Not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encourage one another all the more as you see the day approaching." And so what we see here is this idea of just simply saying that gathering together is something that God commands people to do. He instructs people to do so. This is something I want for you to be a part of public worship, gatherings on a regular basis. Now you may say, well, then what happens when somebody is part of it and they're no longer part of it?

Well, in first John chapter two we read this, verse 19 says, "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us, but their going out showed that none of them belong to us." What that says is that there is a category of people who start down the path of church and then at some point what they do is they say, I don't want to stay engaged in church because if I stay engaged in church, it doesn't feel good to me. And for some of those people, the reason that they don't come any longer is because they don't actually believe. And then there's probably another group that just simply says, I still believe, but I don't want to be reminded because right now I want to go my own way.

I want to do my own thing. And then there's probably some who just simply get out of the habit and it ceases to become a priority. And the reality is it just isn't a thing. And here's what I'm trying to drive at. If your life doesn't have church as part of it, it indicates at least a spiritual problem of some measure. It means that what you're doing is you're saying, I want to choose what part of Christianity I want, but I don't want this part because it annoys me a little bit or it's hard for me. Seeing this credited to several ancient church writers, but some say it's. Augustine who said that you can't have God as your father if you don't have the church as your mother. Now, I'm going to just take a moment here to just press into this and I'm going to tell you, this is probably a little unfair the way I'm going to characterize this, I'll tell you that at first.

So here's the church, kind of the idea. Here we are. We are getting ready to go to church. People, whether you go alone, whether you're a family, a couple, however it is, you're getting ready to go to church and here's what happens. For many of us is we say, well, I basically make church a priority in my life. And then if we actually take the weekends that we don't make church, here's what starts to happen. All of a sudden we say, well, I'm going to go on vacation, and so I have at least three weekends that I'm gone for family vacation, you know, different things. That seems reasonable. Then we have long weekends. And long weekends, let's just say that we have maybe four different times that the holiday falls on a Friday, a Monday or something, or we just take a weekend and we're away. And then we have kid's sports.

I'm going to put four. That's actually a conservative number for that, but this is, you know, you've got the soccer game, you've got hockey, you've got basketball, you've got softball, baseball, you've got something going on that that takes this. Then we have a couple of weekends where we have company, people come in from out of town. We have to entertain, we have to take care of them. Then we have a few weekends where we do house projects. This is it's time to mulch. It's time to take care of things in the spring. It's some good things. Then we have days where either we're sick or the kids are sick, and so we miss three weekends for that. Then we have weekends where there's bad weather, we miss a few. Then we have weekends where there's good weather, so we miss a few. Then we choose to go golfing or to the beach a couple times, and that's another two.

Then we have brunch somewhere. There was a great brunch that was happening or somebody invited us. Then we're going to do a Tough Mudder or run the marathon or the great race or something and we miss another two. Then we decide that we're going to go to a Steeler game, a Penguins game, a Pirates game, so we're just going to put sports again here. This is pro sports this time as spectator. We'll hit a few of those. And then maybe just for lack of anything else, we'll just say that there's some kind of club or activity that has something that hits.

And if you add all of these up, if I've done my math right, that's 34 weekends. Now, I said this isn't entirely fair, but here's why I do this, because it's really easy to say churches are a priority, public worship, we're all about it. But none of these things are that unreasonable. In fact, when I went down this list, I purposely made it in such a way that you could go, well, yeah, we're gone a few for vacation, a few for long weekends, a few kids sports, a few company, a few... You do that. And here's the upshot of this. If there's 52 weekends in a year and you miss 34, you're only here about one in three weekends. And what that means is it's hard to say that this is a priority.

Now, I said, I realized that that's a little unfair. We have a lot of people who say, well, you know, I'm just at a season, I'm at a stage of life. I get it. And we have the online option. And a lot of times people will be driving back from somewhere and they'll watch online. That's a good thing. But here's what can also happen and that is we can get to a point where we start to say, you know what? Public worship is always the thing that gets dropped off of our agenda in the weekend. And when that happens, I think what it shows is a lack of understanding the priority that God's word gives to it and the significance that it should have in our own lives. And here's when it really gets maybe damaging. And that is when we start to say, I'm choosing to stay in my pajamas and eat waffles over public worship.

I'm meddling. I know, but without this priority, there's at least something in our lives where we can say, you know what? I am missing part of what God has called us to do. Now maybe you say, well, look, I'm not even sure I'm a Christian. I'm just checking out Christianity and you're telling me I need to give up every Sunday to be part of worship. Worship is the celebration of the people who come together to say there's a God who's done for us what we can never do, and it's where we get the fuel to live the lives that God calls us to live. But here's another reason. Not only are we instructed to gather, but Jesus did. In Luke chapter four verse 16 it says, "As was his custom, he went to the synagogue." Now, think about that. Here's Jesus, God's son, God in the flesh who knows everything.

I mean, if you think you come to church and go I know that. I've already heard that. Jesus really could say that. There's no podcast Jesus is going to listen to that he goes, oh, that's good. I hadn't thought of that. And Jesus put himself in a place where he went to public worship. It was his custom. It was part of what he did. And then there's another reason, and this is because I believe that worshiping publicly honors God. Psalm 34 verse three says, "Glorify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together and the corporateness of this, of let us do this together. Let's join together," but there's something else that's part of this. And that is when we join with other people and honor God, what we're doing is we're honoring God in a way in which we're saying I am part of a community of people who are honoring God.

In the Bible, one of the ways that the church is spoken of is being the bride of Christ and what that is spoken of is in Revelation where we're given a picture of the bride that the church coming to this great wedding banquet, certainly that's symbolic. Ephesians 5 talks about it. You get the imagery in the Old Testament of the people of God being the bride of Christ and the idea of this is that God loves the church like a bribe. But let me just push on this again for a moment and this is again just this idea of saying, if you say, look, I can be spiritual without church engagement, without public worship, all of that. I think you're missing something and here's why on this point. I want to talk about the bride of Christ. I've been married to my wife for over 20 years now and we're actually closing in on the next decade here before too long.

And here's what's true. If you said, look, Kurt, I really like you, I'd like to hang out with you. I'd like to go out to dinner with you, but I don't like your wife. I don't want to hang out with your wife at all. In fact, I don't like your wife. She annoys me. Your wife was kind of annoying to me. You want to go out to dinner, just you? Keep your wife out of it? What would happen? I would say no, of course not. I like my wife. You want to go out to dinner with me? You invite my wife. It's how it works and what some of us want to do is we want to say, I want God, I want all the good of God, but I don't want the bride of Jesus.

And again, my point here is just even if you say verbally, hey, I commit to this, I'm all about this, but our schedule dictates that we only show up one out of three weekends, then it can't be our priority. No, don't get me wrong. If you're on the beginning phases of coming and one out of three is the best you can do, we're thrilled you're here. But if you've come all the way through into your spiritual life where you've trusted Jesus as your savior, you're committed to following him, and your life can't have any arrangement to make a bigger priority out of the bride of Christ, you at least need to ask the question, am I honoring God with this part of my life?

There's another reason to gather for corporate worship, and I would just say that it's because often it's in the settings of public worship where God speaks most clearly to us. In Acts 17 we see this. It says, "When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered and others said, we want to hear you again on this subject. At that Paul left the council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believe." Now this was when Paul spoke a message and the reason I say sometimes God speaks in just significant ways in the context of public worship is because what happens if you put yourself in a place of worship in a routine basis is there will be some times when you won't even know ahead of time what you needed or how you needed to hear from God and all of a sudden there will be something that's said in the context of the service and you'll say that was exactly the word that I needed from the spirit of God today in my life.

I was sitting over here a few months ago where I normally sit during the service and participate. We have eight services that make up Orchard Hill every weekend, but I am usually physically present in three that are in this space. And I was sitting over here and it was the third time through. And if you ever sit through a service three times, you hear the same songs, you hear the same stuff, and so it's a tendency to want to zone out. And it was the third time that I was in the service and we started to sing a song that Susan Randall had written, who's part of our Butler campus about there's no sin that's so deep that he can't forgive. We haven't gone too far. And what I realized is that I had been holding onto something because I had a friend who had done some things that were hurtful to people that were close to him, things that were hard to believe. And I didn't want to be gracious or forgiving. I wanted to see this man pay.

And all of a sudden I'm singing this song. I'm just doing the rote words and I realize I want God to give me grace, but I don't want God to give him grace. And it was like the spirit of God just convicted me in that moment to say, if you want to experience grace, then you need to extend grace. I didn't even know I needed. I didn't know I needed it the first service or the second service that I was at, it took three that weekend for me to get it. Now I'm not advocating you come to three, but what I'm saying is sometimes we don't know and I know some of you will go, well, it's been a long time since I've had a moment like that. Maybe I'm just not ever getting moments like that. But here's what happens when we put ourselves in a place where we can receive spiritually, and that is, it's a lot like eating. If I were to say to you, what did you have to eat on March 8th last year? Now, unless you had a birthday that you were celebrating or an anniversary or some kind of a special day, chances are you have no recollection what you ate on March 8th last year.

But yet that meal was important for your nutrition, for your health, for your well-being. And what happens when we feed ourselves spiritually through public worship, through the listening and taking in of the word of God. What happens is all of a sudden we start to encounter the transformation and sometimes we won't even know where it takes us. So the Bible calls us to be authentic worshipers, not just in our posture and in our personal activity, but in public gatherings. And then I would just say this, and this is part of this Romans passage as well, and that is God desires that we're authentic witnesses. Verses 14 and I'll start at 13. It says, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then can they call on the one in whom they have not believed and how can they believe in the one in whom they have not heard and how can they hear without someone preaching to them? How can they preach unless they're sent and it is written as it is written? How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news."

And what that section points to is this idea that people are God's instrument to help draw other people. In fact, in Hebrews 10 that I read earlier, it says encourage one another, as long as it's called today. Your very presence encourage and inspires others to say there's something to this that's significant. And not only that, it's in your presence and in your participation week in and week out that you can then invite other people to say, I want you to encounter what I encounter here week in, week out in terms of who God is. See, part of living in mission isn't saying I'm going to found some great nonprofit, although that's a wonderful thing if that's how God leads you, but sometimes it's simply gathering with other people and saying we worship this God and we invite anyone and everyone to be a part of this.

In fact, there's a huge difference between just simply showing up and participating between being a consumer and being a full participant. And what I mean when I say that is it's really easy in church to become a consumer. And what a consumer does is they come in and they say, well, do I like the songs they're singing? Do I like how they sang it? Do I like the topic today? And if I like it, maybe I'll give this a little more time. And if I don't, then I won't. Rather than saying I am here, not so much for me as I am to give praise to God and to give deference to the God of the universe. See, sometimes we mistakenly think that we're the audience. And when we're the audience, then we can sit as critics and say that was a little pitchy or that song didn't have a cool enough guitar riff or whatever it is that we think, instead of saying God is the audience and we're the participants.

And if you're a mom or a dad, this is especially important when you bring your kids, and I know a lot of times our kids are separate, but sometimes it's great just to say we're doing two hours of church today. We're going to go in and then have you go to the kids' ministry. We'll serve somewhere, because to have your kids see you worship passionately and to open your Bible or your tablet and attend to the word of God is something that will help them as they grow to say this is something that's a priority in our family because what happens a lot of times is families will live a life where it's not essential and then they wonder why their kids look back and say, well, we can take or leave church. See, what you're passionate about, kids become passionate about often times. And so just simply saying I'm going to be a witness by participating fully is one of the ways that you and I can honor God.

Now I'm going to just talk specifically here for a few moments about some of the transitions here in Wexford. And so in the strip district, Butler County, Brady, Joel will be just talking specifically about some opportunities in those places. So in Wexford, as you are aware, we are going through a transition, meaning this is the second to last weekend in this space as it's currently constituted. Next weekend will be our last weekend. And I don't know about you, but there's an excitement for me in this and then there's some sadness for me in this. This has been a beautiful space that God has used for a long time. And so there's a little bit of sadness, but there's also a real excitement about how God will orchestrate what will take place in this place. But I want to just for a few moments, just talk about this transition period. Four, five, six months, whatever it takes to get this done well.

And so what will happen is we will be planning to have worship in the gymnasium and in the chapel during our 9:30 and 11:15 hours. We'll also add an 8:15 service, which is basically our current chapel service move to 8:15, so that's a more liturgical service, and then Saturday night. We probably need about 150 people from this service and the 1115 service to either choose to go Saturday night or to choose to go at 8:15 in order to make the numbers work, because we're moving from a really large room to two smaller rooms. They're not small, but they're smaller. And so we'll need that to make that work. So if you want to do that, you can stop by the connect desk and just say, hey, we'd be willing to do that. And that doesn't mean that you're saying we'll do that every week no matter what, but it means that you're saying we can do this to just help there be enough seats. But it also means that our comfort's going to be challenged a little.

Right now, you come into this space and many times you can sit with a seat or two between you and the next people. In these spaces, you're going to need to sit closer to one another. And so our comfort will be challenged. Our preferences will be challenged a little. There'll be smaller stages, less elaborate music in all that we do because of just being in the smaller spaces. And here's why I thought that what we talked about today is important because if you and I come to this season with a consumer mindset, I can almost guarantee you, you will be annoyed.

But if you come with a mindset that says, I'm participating in worshiping the God of the universe and I'm a witness to what it means to be a worshiper, not a consumer. Then together, I think even during this time, we can really grow as a worshiping community because worship is not ultimately about what happens on stage. It's about what happens in our hearts and the way that that happens is when we come and say, God, I am here to give you praise and to receive from you. Now during this time, what will happen? The 9:30, 11:15 hours is on the weekends that I speak. I'll go back and forth between the different spaces and there'll be a live video feed to the other room on those weekends. On the weekends when I'm away, we'll have our staff speak live in all of the venues that we have as well during that time.

And our hope is that during this time that as a congregation we really grow just in terms of our community and in terms of our ability just to authentically worship and point to who God is. Now, the passages that we read from Romans talk about calling on the name of the Lord and there are probably some of us who are here and we're saying, look, church is like the last thing on my mind. Well, can I just push into you just for a moment. The Bible gives commandments, that's what the 10 commandments are. And one of the ways to know you're a sinner is to say I haven't kept the 10 commandments. And if you haven't kept a day for the Lord, it means you haven't kept the 10 commandments. And that may sound really offensive, but this is really a simple way to think about it.

And what Jesus did is he died for those of us who haven't done what we should have done. And that's what Romans 10 is talking about. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord, whoever believes in their heart will be justified. These are the people who are saved. These are the people who have eternal life. And so this is the way that you can have eternal life. And that is by acknowledging your sin before a Holy God and saying, God, I know that I need to have Jesus do for me what I can't do. And when you cross that that line of faith, what happens is God begins to work in your heart in a way in which you'll start to say, this isn't just a half to, but this is something that I want to be a part of. I want to see how God uses this in my life.

So I'm going to pray and then we have a couple elements left today in our time together. Father, thank you for just how you've worked in so many of our lives. God, I pray that in this season ahead as a church that we would not approach it as consumers, but we'd approach it as people who really want to worship you and give a testimony just by our presence, our participation to others, and what a great God you are. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.