TOTAL LIFE WORSHIP, PART 4: LOST SHEEP WELCOME

Isaiah 6:1-7; 1 Corinthians 14:23-26; Luke 15:1-7 (NASB)
David Bruce Linn, Pastor-Teacher
17 November, 2002
All Rights Reserved

I. CHRISTINE’S AIR SUPPLY

Christine sank into the plush velvet armchair in her sumptuously decorated drawing room, clutching a scrap of paper, and wishing she could just keep sinking down into oblivion. She had been standing in the wings at her husband Mick’s sound check for his rock band’s latest sold-out concert at Covent Garden in London. As usual, she was chatting people up and enjoying the bright glow of being married to a star. It was intoxicating for a girl who came from nothing. Christine got a lot of “Yes, ma’am” and “Would you like some tea, ma’am?” and “Can I get you a chair, ma’am?”

It was just such a chat with a stage hand which had blown her world apart. “Wouldn’t like to say, ma’am, but you know yer Mick’s not doin’ right by ya. I got no reason to say--nuthin’ to gain, mind you--but you got to protect yourself. He’s doin’ you wrong...had a different woman at every stop on the tour...sorry to say, ma’am.”

The words burned like acid through Christine’s heart, all the more devastating because she already knew they were true. She didn’t even have to ask Mick. She had seen it all--the hinky behavior, the half-answers to questions about where he had been and with whom, and the smell of other women on his clothes. All her growing fears had burst out in a rage. She had confronted Mick in front of the whole band and crew, screaming in his face and beating her petite hands against his tattooed chest. Then she had taken their son, Justin, and run out. A friend of the band, an actress, had caught her at the door. “Take this,” she had said, and pressed a scrap of paper into Christine’s hand.

Colored light filtered through a stained-glass window and played on the berber carpet. As Christine sat drained of all desire to go on living amidst the finest possessions money could buy, she could not explain why her heart had been brought so low. Of course she had a right to feel betrayed, deflated, angry, and grieved all at the same time. But she was lower even than that. It was as if the core of her being--her very personhood--had been gutted like an animal being prepared for butchering.

She had gone too far with Mick. Not just the sex they had before marriage and the wild partying which was a staple of their relationship. Christine had hung her whole reality on Mick. It was so easy to do! She had grown up in a working class family with a mother who kept saying Christine was a “mistake” and a father who was more married to his cigarettes and whisky than her mother. Then Mick had come along with his swagger and his confidence. It was as if she had been absorbed into him--and it had felt like the best thing that ever happened to her! The attention and what seemed like love at the time became the very air she breathed, her very source of life. That’s why she had hung on so long in spite of the evidence she could not deny--Mick’s love was mostly for himself, and Christine was a human accessory to his insatiable hunger for self-gratification.

She fingered the scrap of paper from Susan. While the two women were not close, Christine knew she and Susan had come from the same kind of background. But something had happened to Susan which could be seen even from a distance. The hungry look had gone from Susan’s eyes. She seemed to be standing on her own two feet instead of hanging on one boyfriend after another. “It’s a God thing,” Susan had said, which meant nothing at the time.

But now things were different. Mick was gone and with his departure Christine’s air supply had been cut off. “Never again!” Christine screamed in the quiet of her shattered home. Never again would she allow herself to be absorbed into someone else, never again would she allow the hope of her life to rest on an unshaven face, a gentle touch, and a softly spoken word.

Christine looked at the scrap of paper which had been torn from the stage manager’s production book. The words, hastily written, were too blurry to be read through her tear-filled eyes. Why had she hung on to it? Christine had kept it in her hand on the drive all the way back to Richmond.

Though all the windows were shut fast against the damp English air, Christine suddenly felt a soft breeze across her skin. She took a breath and was surprised by the fresh scent of a garden in spring with leaves budding, grass greening, and crocuses popping their heads above the damp earth. She felt strangely invigorated by this impossible breath of fresh air. Her eyes cleared and the writing on the scrap of paper came into focus: “Breakfast meeting sponsored by Genesis Arts Trust with speaker Nigel Goodwin on the subject Jesus Christ, Patron of the Arts and Your Best Friend. Come with me! --Susan.” Christine felt an inner compulsion which was as sweet as it was powerful. “I’m coming!” she said to no one in particular.

II. FIRST AND SECOND THINGS

Christine had not yet learned it, but God was on the hunt for her. He is on the hunt all over the world through all time for those who will worship him in spirit and truth. If Christine were to follow her inward compulsion all the way though to visiting our church, what would she find? Would it seem obvious to her by our manner of worship that she had come to a place where people actually know the majestic, all-holy, Maker of heaven and earth?

C. S. Lewis wrote in an essay entitled First and Second Things: “The woman who makes a dog the center of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping.” In other words, the pleasure of having a pet is a secondary matter in the grand scheme of things. Any time we elevate a secondary thing above its place it becomes warped and its very purpose can be lost.

This is an ever present danger with our pattern and methods of worship in the regular services of the church. The styles and habits of regular worship are always in danger of being shoved to the top of our attentions when they should always be subordinated to the preeminence of God himself. It sounds odd to say, but our religion is the greatest competitor to a focus on God because our religion is really about us--how we like to approach him. We often end up interacting with our forms of religious expression rather than God himself--the second things rather than the first things. When that happens we experience the loss of the “usefulness and dignity,” not to mention the pleasure, of worship in the church. It becomes petty and we wonder why it does not satisfy our spiritual needs.

Isaiah had an encounter with God which defines what happens when we truly face God himself: “In the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, /The whole earth is full of His glory.” And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined! /Because I am a man of unclean lips, /And I live among a people of unclean lips; /For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.’ Then one of the seraphim flew to me, with a burning coal in his hand which he had taken from the altar with tongs. And he touched my mouth with it and said, ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is forgiven’” (Isaiah 6:1-7).

Isaiah had no thought of the religious forms of Israelite worship at this moment! There was no thought of anything human at all, other than the crushing awareness of his sin and helplessness in the face of the one true God. Suddenly worship took on its true focus for him: all of God, nothing of him. Regular worship in church would be revolutionized if we each determined to do four simple things on the pattern of Isaiah: let every thought be of our great God, confess our sins in the face of his holiness, receive the flood of cleansing he gives as a gift, and then give God the greatest gift of worship we can muster. Isaiah began with a vision of God, was devastated by the awareness of his sin as a result, was cleansed by an angel burning his sin out of him with a hot coal from the altar of God, and then he ended up moving into worshipful ministry as a result.

Such a focus on the supremacy and majesty of God drives all human issues into secondary position as they ought to be. Isaiah had the issues of his humanity overwhelmed by the greatness of God, and the same thing will happen to us when our attention is riveted by God. There will be no thought of how we are feeling physically or emotionally, because it will all be about God. We will no longer sit and think about attributes of the people around us which we like or dislike. We will not read the bulletin and decide in advance if we like the subject matter of the sermon. We will not be thinking about our opinion of how the worship service should be run--we’ll just take whatever God’s appointed leaders offer and run with it to the throne of God! All thoughts of human issues will fade when we make God our supreme focus. If Christine visited us and did not see God in a worship service like that, at least she would see us seeing God!

III. MANAGING THE FORMS OF WORSHIP

This is not to say that the secondary things of worship do not matter. They matter in a way appropriate to secondary things. God has appointed elders in every church to manage our forms of expression in worship. The only way to know how to handle such controversial issues is to know what the great purposes of God are for worship. We must remember that worship is not merely another function of believing people--it is their identity. If people who make professions of faith in Christ do not become worshipers then they are not saved. Paul the Apostle wrote of the necessity for the elders of the church to make the hard decisions about worship forms based on the need to lead new people into worship: “So then tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe, but to unbelievers; but prophecy is for a sign, not to unbelievers, but to those who believe. If therefore the whole church should assemble together and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad? But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an ungifted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all; the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you” (1 Corinthians 14:22-25).

Paul wanted the Corinthians to understand that wise decisions must be made about which valid things are practiced in worship. Specifically, he says that since the sign function of tongues was designed for the benefit of unbelievers, it would be better to do little of that in church worship and focus on the gift of prophecy which directly strengthens believers in the word of God and helps seekers to find God. This is a radical concept for the Western church! We have become so accustomed to thinking that what we experience is all that matters that we have nearly deleted from the church the mission of Jesus to lead young lambs into true worship.

For example, traditional worship forms are fine--but they are about the traditional “us.” Blended and contemporary worship are fine, but our definitions of these are also about broad and narrow ideas of what is good for us. Worship forms which follow the mission of Jesus to seek and to save those who are lost should function for all who attend but be specifically crafted to benefit the weak Christian (“the ungifted”), the new Christian, and those who are still in the process of seeking God. It will make us uncomfortable but the more mature believers in every church are supposed to be on mission with Jesus and able to overcome the small discomforts to focus on God effectively. The alternative is quite familiar to us--that is, to construct worship services which please us and repel the most vulnerable people from the worship of Christ.

Jesus said: “And whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had been cast into the sea” (Mark 9:42). The “little ones” are not merely young children, but young believers--God’s children! “Stumbling” is a reference to falling down in faith, even to the point of giving up. Woe unto us if our worship services drive the young, the unchurchy, and post-modern people away because we like mature forms, churchiness, and modern things. Eighty- to ninety-percent of people come to faith in Christ before they are twenty years of age. If they believe, look at the worship of church and say, “This is not for me,” then we have grieved the heart of the Father who is on a mission to include those very people in the flock of God; “And He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!' I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance’” (Luke 15:4-7).

CONCLUSION

Our entire worship pattern needs to shift. We have done blended and multiple service formats, and the one thing we have never done is to manage the forms of our main worship services so that the vulnerable, broken Christines of the world can enter and find the grace and truth of God. We need to repent of focusing on the secondary things and arguing about our preferences while we make little or no provision for the lost sheep for whom Christ died.

It’s as if we are all victims of a sinking ship floating in the waters of a stormy sea. Someone on a rocky outcropping throws us a life preserver in the form of the gospel, we take it, are saved, and pulled up on the rock. At first we are concerned with those still drowning, but pretty soon our sense of urgency fades. We begin thinking more about our fellowship on the rock with all the neat people who have been saved with us, and we forget to throw the life preservers to others.

Once in a while we remember to throw a life preserver and someone gets saved. But society on the rock has become shaped around the needs of those who are already on the rock. It is hard for the new ones to climb all the way up to safety. In fact, we virtually tell them: “Good, you’re saved! Now stand here on this slippery rock at the water line and if you survive your shivering in the cold and don’t fall back in, you may eventually become one of us.” In this way, lots of young believers grow weary and perplexed, slip off the rock, and are never seen again. Our tendency is to blame them: “They didn’t try hard enough to fit in!” And Jesus says, “Woe unto you who let the little ones fall back into the water! It would be better for you if you had not been born.”

I invite you to go on a spiritual journey back to where we are supposed to be in our worship where God is everything and we are nothing. I invite you to bleed with me for the lost sheep for whom Christ died. I invite you to offend the society on the rock who will scream bloody murder when we reorganize the secondary things for the sake of the first things. I invite you to get cut on the sharp rocks by the side of the stormy water, to get cold, wet, and coated with smelly seaweed. I invite you to do it wrong with me until we get it right because it can’t get any worse than failing the mission for which Jesus sent us. I invite you to surprise all of those around you the same way Jesus did when he violated social convention as a young man and gave as his reason: “I must be about my Father’s business” (Luke 2:49 -- KJV).

The Christines of this world are not yet safe on the Rock of Ages. He is drawing them, and we are his instruments to pull them in. There is no plan “B.” True worship of the Shepherd of Souls will always shout: “Lost sheep welcome!”