The Angels Worship: And We Should Too!

11/26/11

Scripture:

This morning in keeping with this being the first Sunday of the Season of Advent, we’re going to be reading a text that is tied into the story of the coming of Jesus.  And as the song that the band just sang for us began with a verse about angels, we’re going to look at the angels presence in this particular story in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1.  We’re introduced to an archangel (the word ‘arch’ meaning a ruling angel or an angel of power) who has the privilege of announcing the coming of Jesus and also the coming of his forerunner, John the Baptist.  So you can join with me reading along on the screen as I read verses 5-25.  I’d like you really to listen closely and think about this encounter between the angel Gabriel and Zechariah, a priest, the father of John, and it’s specifically about the things that Gabriel says about himself before we turn in our attention here this morning.  

⁵ In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth.  ⁶ And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord.  ⁷ But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.  ⁸ Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, ⁹ according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense.  ¹⁰ And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense.  ¹¹ And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.  ¹² And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him.  ¹³ But the angel said to him, "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.  ¹⁴ And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, ¹⁵ for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb.  ¹⁶ And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God,  ¹⁷ and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared."  ¹⁸ And Zechariah said to the angel, "How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years."  ¹⁹ And the angel answered him, "I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.  ²⁰ And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time."  ²¹ And the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they were wondering at his delay in the temple.  ²² And when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple. And he kept making signs to them and remained mute.  ²³ And when his time of service was ended, he went to his home.  ²⁴ After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, ²⁵ "Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people."  

Here is the word of the Lord for us this morning.

We as a church have entered into a new season.  As Jake was saying, this is the first Sunday of Advent.  It’s a time of waiting and preparing for the celebration of the coming of the Messiah, but the world in which we live has entered into a somewhat different season and it is the Christmas shopping season.   I don’t know how you folks felt over the weekend if you went out into the midst of what we call Black Friday and did some shopping, but I'm just amazed at how our culture is changing and some of these events happened in our nation.  For example, while a man was shopping in South Charleston, West Virginia, he died in a store, and the shoppers continued on with their shopping.  They didn’t stop; they didn’t give their attention to this guy.  They probably just thought, hey...one less person to get in between me and the best deal.  Kind of sad, isn’t it?  There was a woman in the San Fernando Valley in California, and she used pepper spray on the other shoppers so that she could get the upper hand.  I read that and I was just blown away.  What is worth assaulting people to get?  But, you know, she wasn't the only one.  In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, there were women who were fighting at Victoria’s Secret for yoga pants.  I don’t know what yoga pants are, but I can’t imagine the need to slug somebody to get your mitts on them. Well, how do you feel when you hear these accounts?  And these are just a few, there are many more out there.  All across this nation there’s kind of a driving mania when it comes to the Christmas shopping season.  How do you feel when you see that?  Me personally, I look at that and I think what are we becoming as a society?  

I think our popular culture has gotten so far off track regarding Christmas that we now think it’s about shopping, about deals and it’s about songs like “Frosty the Snowman” and it’s about family get togethers, and we have forgotten that Christmas is not about shopping, it’s about the celebration of the Savior.  So you and I, not only can we just lament about what’s happening with people pepper spraying folks in stores, we need to do something about it and that is that we can be faithful to Advent.  Advent is about waiting.  We can model waiting for God during the interact not only when we’re shopping but in the way we deal with life when we deal with challenges as we can we demonstrate what it means to wait upon the Lord.  So I want to talk to you about that today.  During this Advent Season, what is our proper response?  Should we not shop?  No, I'm not saying that.  Should we not celebrate Christmas with family?  No, I'm not saying that.  But, we’ve got to keep our focus on what’s truly important.  So what is truly important?  What should be our proper response this Advent Season?   

Well, if it were up to James Montgomery...he’s the author of the hymn, “Angels From the Realms of Glory,” that the band just played for us...the refrain in his hymn would be our focus.  That is, “Come and worship, come and worship, worship Christ the newborn King.”  Pastor Mike and I are going to be building our series around this hymn, around this refrain to come and worship.  Let me give you a little brief introduction about this gentleman, James Montgomery.  

He wrote the lyrics for “Angels from the Realms of Glory” on Christmas Eve 1816.  He worked at a newspaper that he owned called the Sheffield Iris over in England.  So he ran it in the newspaper on Christmas Eve in 1816.  That’s where this text first was introduced to the world, and then he put it to song not very many years later.  He was 47 when he wrote this text.  He was born on November 4, 1771, as a Moravian in England.  His father was John, a Moravian pastor.  His mother, whose name I don’t have, was a pastor’s wife, and so he grew up in a Christian environment and not surprisingly he wrote the lyrics to this song, “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” and many others.  But what I want to do today is to look at this song and to really let the first verse speak to us.  It’s about angels. 

“Angels from the realms of glory,

Wing your flight o’er all the earth,

You who sang creation’s story,

Now proclaim the Messiah’s birth.”

And then the refrain is:  

“Come and worship, come and worship, Worship Christ the newborn King!”

Montgomery uses and references angels in this first verse, and so I would like angels to be the focus of our attention today.  

Angels play a major role in the Christmas story.  In fact, the text I read to you today is one of many where angels are mentioned.  Today the archangel Gabriel, the ruling angel from heaven, has appeared to Zechariah, a priest, to announce to him to let him know that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to give birth to a son named John who’s going to be the forerunner for the Messiah.  This same Gabriel also appears later in Luke’s gospel to Mary, the mother of Jesus, to give her the announcement that she is going to be the mother of the Son of God.  And while the angels aren’t named who spoke to Joseph, the father of Jesus, or to the shepherds, or to the wise men in their dreams, it could have been this archangel Gabriel.  Now Mike wanted me to mention that there’s another archangel that’s worth noting, and his name is Michael.  And yes, I know, Michael, but you have to realize he doesn’t get to see.  Only Gabriel gets to see the Messiah so there are two of these major angels.  But I want you to realize, not only in the text of the story of Christmas are angels present, they are present in many of the carols that we reference today.  

I went through some of the Christmas carols this week just to read the lyrics of the different verses.  I was amazed at how many made reference to angels.  “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” What Child is This?” and, of course, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” has got angels in the title—that’s a no brainer.  And then you have, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,”  “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and so on.  These angels are a part of the music that we sing about Christmas, and we decorate our trees with angels, too.  So who are they?  What role can we learn from them about worship?  What can they teach us about this refrain to “Come and worship, come and worship, Worship Christ the newborn King!”

I know that some of you kids today talked about angels in your Sunday School class, and I want to ask you...I need to know...do the angels, do they earn their wings?  Do they?  Yes or no.  I see Alicia shaking her head no, but I thought that’s what it was in “A Wonderful Life.”  Didn’t the angel earn his wings?  Every time you hear a bell an angel gets his wings.  Well, that’s Hollywood.  That’s not biblical.  In fact, in many of the appearances of angelic beings there is no reference to them having wings that are visible.  I'm not saying they don’t have wings, I'm saying no reference is made to them.  So, who are they?

Angels are not the spirits of dead people.  No matter what you see in a movie, whatever you hear in country music songs or whatever, angels are not people that have died and they’re now serving God as disembodied spirits.  That is not what the Bible teaches.  When people die, they are gone, and they are not able to come and communicate with us and to do business for the Lord.  They have other work to do on the other side.  But it’s the angels, who are not dead people, they are created spiritual beings who have a job and that job is to serve God in heaven and to serve God from time to time on earth.  

Angels are a significant part of the worship that takes place in heaven, and even on earth.  In the Christmas story, we know when the shepherds were visited by the angel announcing the birth of Jesus that we’re told a multitude of the heavenly host broke forth and they sang and they worshiped.  And they sang, “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!" (Luke 2:14)  Even in the lyrics, Mr. Montgomery, James Montgomery’s hymn, notice what he says about angels.  “You who sang creation’s story now proclaim Messiah’s birth.”  Where do you think he got that idea that angels sang creation’s story?  He got it from the Bible.  He understood that angels are created beings.  They were made somewhere in the first chapter of Genesis and they’ve been around to praise and glorify God from the beginning, to celebrate who God is and what God’s done.  In fact, Psalm 23, verse 20 says:  Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word!   

So angels...the word literally means ‘a messenger.’  Angels are messengers.  They’re serving God and fulfilling a purpose, and so today in our text we’re introduced to a specific angel who has a name—it’s Gabriel.  And notice what he says to Zechariah as he describes to him...Zechariah’s having this existential crisis of wait a minute—I’m too old, I’m too old.  There’s no way that we can have a baby, not thinking wait a minute—with God anything’s possible.  And he says, “How am I going to know this is going to be?” And the angel answered him and said, “I am Gabriel.”  Now what’s interesting here is he shares his name, and if you knew the Bible—and Zechariah knew the Bible—this is the same Gabriel that spoke to the prophet Daniel in the Book of Daniel centuries earlier when he was in Babylon.  And so that right answer there would have told Zechariah I'm dealing with a very important person, which is Gabriel.   And notice how Gabriel went on to say “I stand in the presence of God.”  Why make reference to that?  “I stand in the presence of God.”   That got me thinking as I meditated on this.  

What would it be like to be in the presence of God?  We talk about that.  When we come to the death of our beloved family members and friends like Ruth Keller, we talk about how they’re now with Jesus and they’re in a better place.  What would it be like to be there?  What if you and I could stand in the presence of God and see what happens in heaven in regards to the way he is honored and praised and worshiped.  In other words, what could the angels from heaven teach you and me about worship?  We pray the Lord’s Prayer here almost every Sunday and one of the things that we pray is ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’  The question would be what would worship look like here among us if it truly was like the worship God receives in heaven?  So as we talk about worship this morning, I want to briefly talk to you about what we can learn from angels regarding worship.  

First of all, before I advance to our next text and speak to you about worship, I want to teach you about the word itself.  Worship—the word in the Greek language that gets translated to worship is a word called proskyneo.  Pros is the prefix meaning ‘to or for’ and kyneo means ‘to kiss’.  And the idea, I think, is meant of bowing the knee towards someone that’s an authority.  You know, taking their hand and kissing it gives an idea of showing respect.  We need to model that or give you a sense of that.  The word literally means like the dog licking the master’s hand.  So let me tell you about my dog, Shotzie, who’s a dachshund who is currently at our house.  He worships my wife, and he’s really good about that because wherever she goes in the house he’s there.  And she sits down on the couch yesterday and he hops up on the couch and scuffs up right next to her and lays there.  Wherever my wife is, Shotzie is.  He is absolutely devoted to her.    Some of you...I’m trying to think who was in our house here in this room just recently and my wife wasn't there, and he sat there in the room and howled because my wife wasn't around.  And I went, “I’m right here, you’re not alone.”  More howling.   So I want you to think about this when you think about worship.  It’s being so devoted, it’s like the dog toward the master.  

Now we’re going to look at a text about worship and then from all places we’re going to go to heaven and look at it there.  I wish I could just kind of lift a curtain and give you real visual effects of heaven, but we’ll do the next text and then we’re going to actually look at what an eye witness said about heaven and worship there.  Our text is from the Book of Revelation, written by a man named John, one of the followers of Jesus.  He has been exiled on the isle of Patmos for being a Christian and many of his fellow Christians were being tortured, imprisoned, killed, and so this letter is really about John’s vision in heaven.  It’s about God fulfilling his plan, his purpose for the world, and bringing redemption to victory.  And so here in chapter 19 John begins to look at his vision in heaven and this is what he says:   ⁶ Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, "Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.  ⁷ Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready;  ⁸ it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure" - for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.  ⁹ And the angel said to me, "Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." And he said to me, "These are the true words of God."  ¹⁰ Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, (John’s now bowing before the angel) but he said to me, "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God," (Revelation 19:6-10), what lives there of worship.  And here this angel, as he’s instructing John about worshiping God, has something to teach you and me.  And so, if you think about this hymn, “Angels From the Realms of Glory” and the refrain, “Come and worship, worship Christ the newborn king,” I want you to think about the things that we can learn from this particular text about worship.  

First of all, worship begins with self awareness.  Notice verse 10:  Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God.  What an interesting thing here.  Here’s this majestic powerful being that John feels spontaneously moved to bow before him, and he says don’t do that and then he says who he is—“I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God.”  What he’s saying there is I have the same relationship to God as you do, I’m a servant.  It would be like the cook in the house bowing before butler instead of bowing to the master.  He says don’t do that, I'm a fellow servant.  I want you to realize here that word doesn’t do justice in English.  The word is a slave.  

Worship begins with the right awareness that you are a servant to God.  You are a slave of the Lord.  He’s done everything for you...you’ve done nothing for Him.   You’re simply here to serve his good pleasure.  That literally, friends, is what worship is.  It’s not having a great voice that can harmonize well.  It’s not having the talent and skill to make music, though that’s crucial and vital as part of worship.  Worship begins with a heart of submission to the authority of God.  The angel knew this and identified himself as a fellow servant and slave “with you and your brothers.”  And so did our hymn writer, James Montgomery.  He understood that.  

I want you to realize something about this man.   He had a father that was a pastor, a mother that was a pastor’s wife, Moravians, and his father had a burden for world evangelism.  He wanted to get the word out to people about Jesus dying for their sins and giving them forgiveness and eternal life.  Now where would his father get such a notion?  Right here it says to, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” preach the gospel.  You know, the whole mission of the church is to advance the word of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.  And so John and his bride were so convinced of that that when James, their son, was six, they tearfully placed him into the Gracehill Moravian settlement and they left for Barbados as missionaries.  Now think about that, folks, a six-year-old.  Would you will to take a six-year-old and leave your child with someone else and go because you want to be obedient to the Lord?  I want you to understand that John and his wife both died on the mission field.  They did it because they understood that they were servants of God and that everything they had was not for their pleasure and their benefit, but it was so that they could extend themselves for the service of their king.  That is where worship begins, and that’s what I think the angels would teach us today.  If you really want to worship God it starts with a heart of being a servant.   

Secondly it starts with God awareness.  Listen to the text of what is sung in heaven:     “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.  Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready.”   This celebration is a reference to several things...one, to believe in God's sovereignty.  God is reigning.  He’s ruling over the world.  He’s ruling over the calamities of the world and he’s bringing his perfect plans to their completion.  That’s why we should worship God.  God is sovereign over our life whether we have cancer or whether we have great health, whether we’re happily married or our marriage absolutely stinks, the Lord God reigns.  He is fulfilling His purpose in our life and He’s worthy of our praise.  

Joseph from the Old Testament Book of Genesis is a classic example of that.  I don’t know how much hardship he had to go through.  He was hated by his brothers.  They wanted to kill him but instead they sold him into slavery.  He ended up in the house of a man whose wife accused him falsely of rape.  He ends up in prison.  He ends up for I think it was 13 years literally at rock bottom until finally he becomes the right hand of the King of Egypt and helps prepare the nation for famine.  It’s a story not about Joseph but about God—God working out through all of the evil and all of the bad that’s happened to Joseph for God’s holy purpose.  

And you know, the Book of Revelation is exactly the same thing.  I cannot explain everything about it, but I’ll tell you this.  All the way through it God's in charge.  Even when God's people are suffering and in the hands of the antichrist, God is ruling, and for that he should be celebrated.  But also, God has a purpose for everything.  It has to do with the marriage of the Lamb and the bride being made ready.  This is a reference to Jesus and the church and their union together at the end of human despair.  That’s where history is going, friends.  I want you to be mindful of that—whether you’re watching the events of the world or not, God's plan is moving forward.  Jesus is coming again to gather his people together, and like the Montgomery’s, you and I have a place and purpose in that plan.  If we belong to Jesus, we are here to fill that redemptive purpose and someday be ready for the Lamb to come.  Jesus will return.  It’s all about serving Jesus and His plans and His purposes for our life and our world.  I want to invite you as we come into the season, to come and worship, not simply with your voices but with your hearts fully surrendered to the God’s will for you.   

Let us pray.  Heavenly Father, we look at people like John Montgomery and we are amazed at the sacrifice that they made.  God, you call all of us to do that.  You call us to deny ourselves, pick up the cross and follow you, but you don’t make it easy.  You don’t tell us that it’s going to be fun, but you do tell us that when we’re faithful to you it’s in our best interest and it’s in the interest of bringing forward to you.  That’s what we want to do.  We want to here at Eden church to come and worship, not just with our voices, but with our very lives to celebrate the birth of Christ, the newborn King.  May he rule our lives as the King of our hearts, of our homes, of this church today until he comes again.  For we ask this prayer in His name.  Amen.