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Advent III: Saved to Worship
Proposition: One chief aspect of the nature of our salvation is that God delivers us to worship Him without fear, so that we can be like Him inside and out, as His children.
Introduction:
The season of Advent is significant to the life of the believer.
AS disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, advent is the time that has been set aside for us to think about and be formed by the remembrance of the birth of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.
It is an opportunity for us to keep Jesus on our hearts and minds.
This flies in the face of social convention.
Social convention: How society looks at and expects us to understand certain things.
Social convention teaches us that advent is about trinkets.
Social convention teaches us that advent is about trees.
Social convention teaches us that advent is about gifts, giving and getting.
Social convention teaches us that advent is about us
Social convention teaches us that advent is about gifts, giving and getting.
Advent, for the Church- the baptized, Spirit filled believer, is about Jesus.
And about the great salvation that we have recieved from God, through Jesus and applied to us, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Advent is the time of year where we are renewed, reformed, and transformed by the fact that God loves us so much that He is willing to save us.
Last week we started discussing the nature of our salvation.
That the nature of our salvation is that God is willing to save us from our enemies.
And that God is willing to save us from ourselves.
From our own selfishness, and sinful dispositions that keep us enslaved to pettiness and foolishness.
But that is not all that we are saved from.
We are also saved so that we can worship.
We forget that we are created to worship.
As Human beings we are going to serve somebody.
Paul tells us in (NLT)
“Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey?
You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living.”
We were created to serve and to worship.
And whatever we choose to worship is that which we will serve, and that ultimately become!
And in saving God, God has also saved us so that we can not just worship Him, but worship Him in an particular way- that is for our good!
Our salvation is not just about us, but about our worship.
I.
We are saved so that we can worship as God’s children
The first thing that we discover is that when God saves us to worship, He saves us so that we can worship with a particular relationship.
In , God swears an oath to Abraham to bless Abraham and Abraham’s children because of Abraham’s obedience.
That despite the trouble, God would be with them-not because of Abraham but because of the presence of God.
Abraham is given an oath- and we are given a promise.
Not because of Abraham’s relationship with God, but because of God’s relationship with Abraham.
It was God’s steadfast love, that provides the roots of the oath.
The oath is not simply about protection or provision, but God’s presence.
In this oath, Abraham and his children are recipients- but they are not the source of the oath.
God is.
God swears the oath by His own person.
He wraps His own person in the oath.
God has put Himself on the line!
This is important because Zechariah’s song, tells us that God has granted something to the children of Abraham.
but that grant-that gift, is God’s self.
In response to Abraham’s sacrificial worship, God has given himself, not just to Abraham but also Abraham’s children.
Abraham was willing to give His son, but God spared Isaac, but in response, God has given and not spared His own son, Jesus- and through Jesus, we become children of God.
We are saved because of Who God gives, and Who God gives empowers us to be God’s children.
We are told in the Gospel of John that Jesus, the Word and God’s gift-and loving response to Abraham’s obedience, “...came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him.
11 He came to his own people, and even they rejected him.
12 But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. 13 They are reborn—not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God.” NLT
Tyndale House Publishers.
(2013).
Holy Bible: New Living Translation ().
Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.
When we are able to worship God as God’s children, we discover that God’s promise is also a curse.
God’s promise curses those that would seek to hinder our worship, as God’s children- that includes our own selfishness.
God will move to counteract our false worship and idolatry, because what we worship is what we become.
And the problem with some of us is we are too much like ourselves and not like God!
We are saved by God through Christ, but we are saved so that we can not just have grace, but be empowered to truly worship and in true worship, become like the very Christ who saves us!
If our worship does not make us more like Jesus- it is a false worship- because to worship Jesus will move you to be like the Word made flesh!
To truly worship God, requires that we worship Him the way He desires.
When we worship God, we cannot say we are truly worshipping Him, if we are directing the worship then the worship is idolatrous.
The danger is that we assume that because we are doing the worship, we get to control the worship.
But our God has a certain expectation of worship and He expects worship to be done a certain way.
And for a certain outcome- His glory.
When we do worship His way, we cultivate a deeper relationship.
And what is amazing is that as a disciple of the Lord Jesus, our worship is more than just Sunday Morning- that is an important ingredient, but our lives should be acts of worship.
Why- when we serve/worship God without fear- we can be used as conduits of God's power and energies in the world.
We begin to reflect God's power and personality.
The point of our worship is to empower us to be more like the One we worship.
What we worship we become.
But if there is anything that short-circuits our worship, we become lopsided ikons, representations of the Triune God.
II.
We are saved so that we can worship God without phobia
But the more we are removed from worship, the more of Christ we lose! that is a shocking thought, that we can lose Christ.
But what about being preserved.
We are preserved in as much as we appropriate Christ.
And the more we walk away from Christ, the more of Christ we lose.
I’m not of the ilk that say that we cannot lose what God has given.
It is not in our power to give it.
But we participate with God to keep it!
And we participate in keeping it by our worship!
We must remember that God’s salvation is not just salvation from enemies but defense from falling back into the patterns of behavior, thinking, and being that enslaved us to begin with.
Because it was our being, thinking, and behavior that enslaves us-we do it to ourselves.
We enslave ourselves to our enemies by our fear/phobia.
Fear shorts out our worship.
Phobias are rooted in trusting how we see.
Not in what we see.
Phobias are internal.
They are connected to our idiosyncratic yet foundational understanding of the world and ourselves.
Saints, phobias are when we are blinded by how we see, not just what we see.
And when we worship, God adjusts how we see.
So that we can see from God’s vantage point.
The more we see from a human and limited perspective, the more afraid we will become.
the more we will worry, the more we will try to help God out, instead of being faithful to God’s will.
the more we will mess up, the more bad decisions we will make, the more we will seek our comfort in the wisdom of the world, and not the foolishness of God. the more we will suffer, struggle, and continue the cycle.
But when we see from God’s vantage point, we will be able to see what God is doing, what God is pulling out of us.
How God is molding us, shaping us.
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