What do Worshipers Look Like?

12/31/11

Scripture:

The scripture is going to be up on the screen for you to read along.  Today is our last sermon in our series Come and Worship.   We built this series around the Christmas carol...it’s not Christmas anymore, but technically it is the seventh day of Christmas.  You know the song the “The Twelve Days of Christmas”...I always wonder what do you mean 12 days?  But in the church calendar there are 12 days of Christmas and then the 13^th day is a new holy day.  Who knows what it is, anybody?  Bill, I know you know, right?  It’s epiphany, right?  So in the calendar year there’s this season of thinking about certain parts of the life of Christ.  So since we’re still in Christmas, I wanted us today to think about that Christmas carol, “Angels from the Realm of Glory” and the refrain ‘come and worship, come and worship, worship Christ the newborn King.’  And so today we’re continuing to look at worship and worshipers.  We are in Luke’s gospel, chapter 2, and we’ll start in verse 22, not verse 2 as the bulletin says.  That’s a misprint, so don’t worry, I’m not reading for 15 minutes out of the Bible.  Even I would get overwhelmed at that.  So I'm going to start verse 22 and finish at verse 38.  

Let me set the context for you.  Luke 2 is the story of the shepherds.  So it’s the birth of Jesus, the arrival of the shepherds and then their departure, and then what?  What happens to Jesus and Mary and Joseph?  Well, if you piece together Matthew’s gospel and Luke’s gospel, we get a certain chronology that they stayed in Bethlehem for a time, they fled to Egypt, and then they returned to Nazareth in Galilee.  And so we’re in the time when Mary and Joseph and the newborn baby are in Bethlehem.  They stayed there not just one night but weeks, at least 40 days, and maybe up to two years—we’re not exactly certain.  But what they did there was they lived life the way you do, a day at a time seeking to do what you know is the right thing.  So our story begins with a story of Mary and Joseph making the trip from Bethlehem up to the city of Jerusalem, up to the temple as part of their worship.  

Luke 2:22-38   ²² And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord ²³ (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, "Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord") ²⁴ and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons."  ²⁵ Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.  ²⁶ And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ.  ²⁷ And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law,  ²⁸ he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said,  ²⁹ "Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word;  ³⁰ for my eyes have seen your salvation  ³¹ that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,  ³² a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel."  ³³ And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him.  ³⁴ And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, "Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed ³⁵ (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed."  ³⁶ And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years, having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin,  ³⁷ and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.  She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.  ³⁸ And coming up at that very hour she began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.  

Now that’s the end of their time in Jerusalem.  Luke would continue to tell us that after they performed everything that the Law of the Lord required they returned to Galilee to the town of Nazareth. 

So today I want to ask you to think with me as we talk about ‘come and worship’ what it means to be a worshiper.  What do worshippers look like?  What do people who worship...what do they do, how do they act?  What do we see in them that we might observe and think about our self—hey, do I do that?  Am I a worshiper?  So this morning I want to begin with two images.  I hope you can see the first, it’s kind of small on the screen.  Some of you that are up front, it’s a picture of a place and there’s a bunch of people outside with their hands held high.  Who can recognize the place?  In the back, Grant.  Stonehenge, good, you’ve got good eyesight.  That’s awesome!  So the issue here is these are people at Stonehenge.  You know what Stonehenge is, right?  The big stone circle thing that’s over in England.  This is people worshiping the sun.  The place of Stonehenge was used to worship.  It’s a big way to track the sun as it moves through the sky as the seasons change, and it’s a place where people are worshiping.  I'm not sure if everybody there really is worshiping the sun as some object of their worship, but it was built as a place for worship.  And here these people are raising their hands and shouting and celebrating because of worship.  So we could look to a place like Stonehenge and say what can we learn from these folks?  Here’s another picture.  It’s an inside place, not an outside place, and there are people there, and they’re doing what?  Praying!  How do you know they’re praying?  How do you know they didn’t drop and lose their contact?  They’re praying how?  With their body, correct.  They’re using their body and they’re laying on the floor and they’re praying, and these are Muslim people practicing their faith.  One of their tenants is to pray five times a day, and when they pray they do that.  They kneel and they face toward the holy city of Mecca.  That’s why they’re all facing in the same direction and they seek to pray.  They’re worshiping their God. 

Now the reason I'm showing these pictures to you today is not because I want to get into a discussion about sun worship or Islam or anything about that.  It’s not that I am not interested in discussing those.  In fact, here’s a shameless plug for you.  When the 9:15 service ends, I will begin a Sunday school class where we will look at the other religions.  We’ll talk about what do Muslims believe, what do people that practice the New Age faith believe, what to Jehovah’s Witnesses believe, and we’ll look at how they’ve arrived at their understandings of who God is and why they worship the way that they do.   But my point today in having these pictures is to show you that there are things similar that we might consider as practices of worship.  There are churches that have benches that they put down and you can kneel into for worship to God.  There are people in Christian churches who raise their hands when they’re singing in worship to God.  It doesn’t always happen here at Eden, but it happens on occasion and we don’t discourage that.  If you feel like you want to put your hand up while you’re singing, that’s certainly fine.  There are biblical grounds for that.  But my point in bringing all these up is to say we can look around and see people worshiping and learn from them.  And what we want to do today is we want to look into the story of our Bible because Luke takes some time in telling the story of Jesus to introduce us to some worshipers gathered in the temple, and you and I can look at them today and we can say, hey, how can my worship be a lot like theirs.  So come with me.  Let’s go into the story.  Let’s picture that we’re not sitting in—I don’t know how it is for you but to me—a very warm fellowship hall.  Anybody else warm or just me?  Is that air conditioner on in the back?   Can you open the back door Grant or David for like 30 seconds just to let some air in?  I know I'm hot but I've been kind of puny.  Anyway, let’s transport ourselves.  Let’s leave a hot fellowship hall and let’s go to the hot city of Jerusalem and there we are in the city and we’re making our way into this massive structure called the temple.  We’re going there with hundreds of other people to worship.  So let’s look around, let’s be a part of the story, and let’s learn what worshipers look like. 

Worshipers are Bible-Centered People 

First of all, let’s look at the happy couple with their newborn baby, Mary and Joseph.  I want you to notice as we look at what Luke tells about them that worshipers are Bible-centered people.  They’re Bible centered.  Now what do I mean?  Let’s look at the description.  When the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses—now the law of Moses, the Old Testament, has concerns about their purification—they brought him, that’s Jesus, up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, "Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord") and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons."   

Okay, there’s our story, so right away I want you to notice something here, that Mary and Joseph as worshipers of God are text-centered, Bible-centered people.   They’re seeking to be faithful to the Law of Moses, specifically the Book of Leviticus, the twelfth chapter, which has instructions for what do you do when a woman gives birth to a child.  It’s interesting.  The commandments there are about purification.  I don’t know if you remember seeing that.  When the time came for their purification—that being Jesus’ and Mary’s—now what does that mean?  Did they do something wrong?  No.  What it means is that when you have a baby, the first baby out of the womb, the firstborn belongs to God and so there’s a requirement of an offering to the Lord as a way of saying God, this child, all children come from you.  And then the woman is considered unclean until the time of her purification ends and then.  Now let me explain this to you.  

This has to do with when a woman gives birth to a baby a woman continues to have discharging.  You folks that have had babies, you know that.  It’s similar to your menstrual cycle that you continue to have a discharge after you have a baby.  Your body is adjusting to the life of the newborn is no longer inside of you and it takes weeks for that to come to an end.  During that time, because you are having a flow of blood, you’re considered an unclean person in the life of the community in the way of kind of quarantining people who could pose a risk to the wider community.  They would consider people unclean and it meant you couldn't go to community places like the synagogue to worship until that ended and you were considered purified again.  And so you had a practice of waiting so many days and then the woman and the child would be taken up into the temple and a sacrifice be offered to show that everything is all well and good now that the body has completely kind of completed this purification process and now they can re-enter public society and all is good in the world.  

Now these are the commands in the Book of Leviticus and Joseph and Mary are seeking to follow them.  So question, where would they have learned these commands?  In their community of worship.  They would have attended worship weekly like you do.  They would have had a teacher, a rabbi similar to your pastor, giving you instructions from the word and they would have learned and began to apply them in their life.  And they did that because they wanted to be faithful to God.  They wanted to worship God, and so Mary and Joseph are the first characters of our story seeking to worship God by being faithful to his word, his law, and bringing the appropriate sacrifice for the birth of their son Jesus.  

Now Leviticus, how many of you have tried to read Leviticus?  It’s not the easiest read in the world.  It’s a hard book to get your head around.  It’s all about all these different sacrifices.  In fact, in our Men’s Bible Study a couple weeks ago we were having a conversation about what are we going to next—we’re almost done with Genesis.  And somebody goes Leviticus, Leviticus, and everybody else was like ugh.  But you know what?  It’s the word of the Lord and if we’re going to worship God, we need to know the word.  We need to be people who are Bible  centered as Mary and Joseph were.  They were obedient to the revealed scriptures that God had given the people of Israel.  Now we know why God picked them to be the mother and father of the Son of God.  They were people whose lives were oriented around worshiping and serving God and being faithful to what God says to do.  They were obedient people and they were poor.  It’s interesting because we’re told that they offered a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons, and if you look at Leviticus very closely there it says, “If a woman can’t afford it.”  If the family can’t afford the more expensive sacrifice of an animal, they could offer two turtledoves or two young pigeons.  So it’s a way of saying not only are they being faithful, they’re not well-off people.  These are families that live paycheck to paycheck.  They depend on the goodness of God to make it from week to week, but they were Bible centered.  Just want you to see that.  

Now this meshes with what Jesus teaches us later.  As an adult he’s speaking to a group of Jews in John chapter 8, and he says, “If you abide in my word, you’re truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  If you want to really worship God, you’ve got to be people of the book.  Jesus goes on to say in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  So the way we love God is we know His word and we orient our life to His word.  That is what we can learn about worshipers.  

Worshipers are Spirit-Centered People 

Now the second person we meet in the story is a man name Simeon, and I want you to see in regard to him that worshipers are connected to the Holy Spirit.  We’ll go through the text and then I’ll just briefly share some comments with you.  Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.   Notice the reference to the Holy Spirit.  And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ.  And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and of course you know the rest of the story.  He takes up the baby Jesus and he says some pretty amazing things about him.  But notice here that Luke tells us very clearly that Simeon is a man connected to the Holy Spirit.  He says the Holy Spirit was upon him.  It’s a reference to that he is a man where God's Spirit lives within his heart.  The Spirit of God is teaching him, teaching him about biblical truth but also how it applies to his personal life.  The Spirit has told him he is not going to die until he sees the promised Christ.  And it’s the Spirit that leads Simeon into the temple at the right time to see Mary and Joseph with the Messiah in their arms.  

What’s interesting if you study Simeon closely is the words that he spoke to this family about who this child was going to be were supernatural.  They were information he wouldn't know as a casual bystander.  It would be like me picking up a new baby at baptism and go you know this kid’s going to grow up to be a banker someday.  I don’t know that.  But when the Spirit of God is connected to you, that’s God by the way, then God can communicate to you what you need to know to worship him.  So I want you to see that worshipers are Bible centered, but it’s more than that, we’re Spirit-centered people like Simeon.  In fact, the Holy Spirit is essential to a person connecting to God in real worship.  

So Jesus was an adult.  He was back in Jerusalem one day and it was nighttime, and a man of the Pharisees, a ruler of the people named Nicodemus, came to him by night.  And he says, hey, I know you’re a teacher sent from God.  We see these miracles.  We know only God can give you the power to do this.  And Jesus tells him unless you’re born again you cannot see the kingdom of God.  Now Nicodemus had been taught all about the kingdom of God from the Bible, and I'm going to share more with you about that in the weeks ahead.  But here’s Jesus saying unless you’re born again you can’t see the kingdom, and Nicodemus scratches his head...I don’t understand that.  How can a man be born when he’s old?  How can he enter again into his mother’s womb and be born?  And Jesus says, “Unless you’re born of the Spirit and of water, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”   And he goes on here to elaborate that we must be born of the Spirit.  It’s the same sense here in the text as to what we’re talking about with Simeon.  It’s a connection personally between you as an individual and the Holy Spirit of God.  So if you want to be a worshiper not only do you have to be a Bible-centered person, you have to be a person in touch with the Holy Spirit.   

So my question to you, my challenge to you, is how much do you know about the Holy Spirit?  If I had a pop quiz right now and said, hey, if your life depended on it, can you name three things about the Holy Spirit that you know are in the Bible, would you have an answer?  If you don’t, I want to just encourage you, I want to challenge you—this is a back called The Forgotten God.   Some of you in the church have already studied it.  It’s a book by Francis Chan and it’s all about the Holy Spirit, and all he does is take a survey of the Bible and teach us what the Holy Spirit is about and who the Holy Spirit is in the Bible.  And so I want to encourage you.  If you want to connect to God in a very real way, it’s to become like Simeon, a person who is connected very deeply to the Holy Spirit of God.  That’s the mark of a worshiper.  Word-centered, Spirit-led and thirdly we meet Anna.  

Worshipers are Devoted People

There was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years, having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin, and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.  She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.  Notice this...this woman, an elderly woman here, is coming into the temple.  She’s 84, still mobile, still getting around and where is she?  She’s in the temple yet again because she’s a worshiper.  It’s interesting.  We’re given a little bit of chronology.  She was married for seven years from the time she was a young virgin to her husband.  He died.  I did a little bit of math there.  If she was 20, she became a widow at 27.  If she was 15, she became a widow at 22.  Imagine that.  And then after that she lived and did another 57 years of service in the temple to God.  I'm assuming from the text that she never married again, she never had any children, and so she devoted herself to worship of the Lord.  The scripture said that she was in the temple daily and it’s important to note here that fact.  Now the Bible tells us that the temple was the place of worship.  Is the building important?  Is it important that we’re here for worship?  Couldn't we have worship out at Joe Glik park?  Absolutely.  But the building was important because this was the place where God said I am making this a holy place.  Maybe you recognize the term ‘holy place’ as a sanctuary.  That’s why we call the upstairs the sanctuary, and this is the place where my people are to come and to seek my face.  It was back then that this temple was a place where worshipers would go to bring worship to God.  And so Anna, as a worshiper, is seeking the Lord.  And notice here the scripture says she is fasting and praying night and day.  She’s practicing this discipline of prayer and she’s practicing a discipline of fasting, of not eating, because she’s devoted to seeking and worshiping and serving God.  

Let me ask you a quick question.  How much is your heart captivated by the worship of God?  How often do you fast?  How much do you pray, not just to yourself but with other people because you want to worship and seek the Lord?  My purpose in asking this is not to make you feel bad.  I don’t want to already day one...you know usually we set New Year resolutions and then a week, two weeks, we feel bad because we’re not walking anymore, we’re back to drinking soda or whatever.  I'm not wanting to kill you right away, day one...well great, I feel like a horrible person because I'm not a worshiper.  I want to just encourage you to say God, I want to love you more.  I am not devoted like I should be, but I want to be a devoted worshiper to you.  I want to be a person who connects with you through fasting and prayer.  I want to be a person who knows the word.  I don’t know Leviticus, but I want to know it because it’s your Holy Word.  (By the way, I'm not doing a sermon series on Leviticus starting next week, okay, so we’ll be safe...maybe a study down the road.)  Maybe you need to say to God, “Lord, I need your Spirit in me.  I want to be like Simeon.  I want to be led by you.  I want to be taught by you.  I want to be connected to you in a very personal way.  Give the Holy Spirit to me please.”  Again, my goal is not to make you feel bad because church isn’t for people who have it all figured out.  It’s for people who come to the table of the Lord Jesus Christ and say Lord, I'm empty, fill me up.  

So we have a privilege today.  We actually get to come to the table, come to the Lord Jesus and say Lord, you are worthy of worship.  I want to bring that to you.  So why don’t you join with me in prayer and then we’ll turn our attention to the gift of the sacrament of Holy Communion.  Let’s pray. 

Lord God, as I think about this story I'm amazed at the example that you have provided for us of Mary and Joseph, of this man Simeon and this woman, Anna, who are no more mentioned in the Bible, who are so centered in you that they really are worshiping people.  We know they’re not perfect.  We know that they had challenges and difficulties.  We know, Lord, that they are sinners just like we are.  Well, Lord, we want to be like them.  May it be said of us here that we are people of your word.  Lord, lead us into our study through Sunday school and small groups and personal study and the teaching of the word here from the pulpit to be people whose grounding of our understanding of you is in the word of God.  Lord, may we be like Simeon who’s identified as a righteous and devout person.  His character reflected a personal relationship to you.  May we be people full of your Holy Spirit and may that holiness shine through in us that we would not be stiff and rigid and plastic but real people who demonstrate the fact that we’re new in Christ.  May we be like Anna and practice prayer and fasting and may those disciplines contribute to a life of worship centered upon you.  For we ask this prayer in Jesus’ holy name.  Amen.