worship

Worship and Worldview: the Intersection of Church and Culture

Our summer sermon series is titled “Worship and Worldview: the Intersection of Church and Culture.” Like you, I’ve watched with concern the speed and trajectory of our current cultural values and morals. What was presented politically and societally just a few years ago in terms equality and acceptance has become a demand from cultural progressives. Increasingly, the Christian worldview and its accompanying values are becoming marginalized in our nation. As Christians, we grieve the trajectory of our nation’s morality. We grieve the loss of values and morality that we held dear. But what do we do about it? How do we as Christians live in a spiritually foreign land? How do we prepare our children and grandchildren to not only live with biblical values, but uphold them against the torrent of progressive ideology? 

I’m going to try to address these questions and others from the Bible during this summer sermon series. 

In recent years, I’ve read a variety of books around these themes:The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher, Pagans and Christians in the City by Stephen D. Smith, The Gathering Storm by Albert Mohler, Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman, and Desiring the Kingdom by James K. A. Smith. I’m currently working through several other books in preparation for this series: Soul Searching by Christian Smith, We Will Not Be Silenced by Erwin Lutzer, The Gospel of the Kingdom by George Eldon Ladd, Prepared to Give an Answer by Timothy Sanders, Letter to the American Church by Eric Metaxas, Handing Down the Faith by Christian Smith and Amy Adamcyk, and You Are What You Love by James K. A. Smith (among others). Desiring the Kingdom is one of my more interesting reads this year and provided some terminology that has been helpful in developing this sermon series. If you would like to join me in workin through these issues, I would encourage you to read one or more of these books this summer. 

We are living in a pivotal time as Christ-followers. The Bible offers us guidance, understanding, and help as we navigate these tension-filled issues because we are not the first generation of God’s people facing marginalization and challenge to our worldview and worship. We need a biblical framework to help us address contemporary challenges and practices. What the Bible says about these topics is important, and we need to faithfully understand (worldview) and practice (worship) what the Bible teaches. 

I invite you to join us for these topics. Plan to attend whenever you are in town. Watch/listen online when you are not able to join in person. Moms and dads, please note the subject material for the July 23 sermon from Leviticus 18 on “A Biblical Worldivew in a Culture of Pagan Sexuality.” This sermon will not be explicit, but it will deal with subject material that is aimed at explaining pagan sexuality in contrast with God’s expectations for his people. 

If you’d like to follow along with our sermons, you can join us in person at Wilkesboro Baptist on Sundays 8:00 AM, 9:30 AM or 11:00 AM. If you can’t make it in person, you can follow along for videos of our worship services on Vimeo, YouTube, or FaceBook. Wilkesboro Baptist also has a podcast channel where you can catch our sermons each week. You can find them here or subscribe to Wilkesboro Baptist Church on iTunes.

  • June 25 Text: Daniel 1. Title: “What it Means to be Christian in a Spiritually Foreign Land.”Theme: Daniel models what it means to think and live biblically in a pagan and wicked culture.
  • July 2  Mission Trip Report from our student trip to New York City. 
  • July 9 Text: Daniel 2:31-49. Title: “Developing a Kingdom Mindset in a Society of Ungodly Leaders.” Theme: Daniel and his three friends develop a heavenly, kingdom-oriented perspective in a pagan land. 
  • July 16 Text: Daniel 12:1-4. Title:  “Technology and a Christian Worldview.” Theme: Daniel prophesies about the increase of knowledge in the time of the Gentiles. 
  • July 23 Text: Leviticus 18 . Title: “A Biblical Worldview in a Culture of Pagan Sexuality.” Theme: Applying a Christian worldview in a society of contemporary sexual immorality requires understanding holiness and sexuality from God’s perspective. 
  • July 30 Text: Ecclesiastes 12:13-14. Title: “Vanity and The Best a Man Can Do.” Theme: Since we live in a society full of vanity, how do we manage to think and live biblically? 
  • Aug 6 Associate Pastor Tad Craig 
  • Aug 13 Text: Philippians 4:4-9. Title: “Memorization, Mind, Community and Christian Thinking.” Theme: Christians have the privilege and resource of the inner life and their mind under the direction of God. 
  • Aug 20 Text: Acts 17:22-34. Title: “Gospel, Apologetics, and a Pluralistic Culture.” Theme: Learning to discern religious, cultural, and philosophical patterns aids Christian thinking and witness. 
  • Aug 27 Text: Psalm 67. Title: “Christian Worldview and Mission.” Theme:Ultimately, Christian thinking recognizes and lives by God’s purpose in the world: fear, worship, and salvation through us to the nations. 

Here are a few overarching interpretive observations that should help us navigate this series and these topics: 

  • The United States is not Israel, nor does the United States represent people of God today. The United States would be more accurately described as Babylon or Rome in terms of values and morality. We should keep this in mind as we reflect on what it means to live in a sinful society as the people of God. 
  • Christ-followers are the people of God. The people of God make up the kingdom of Christ. The kingdom of God is an overarching theme in this series and helpful for how we see our role as the church in the culture today. 
  • We need both worldview (thinking) and worship (liturgies) to shape us cognitively and formatively as God’s people. Our orthodoxy (what we believe) and orthopraxy (what we do) must be informed and formed by Scripture. It will not be enough to think rightly about these issues. We need to be formed by biblical liturgies and spiritual disciplines to live faithfully as God’s people today. 
  • We must be active and intentional to know and articulate our worldview and practice Christian worship (liturgies). If we remain passive regarding the biblical worldview and worship, the secular and pagan liturgies driven by media, politics, education, entertainment, and social media will form us and our children/grandchildren to the prevailing values around us. Our recourse must be a commitment to thinking biblically and worshiping faithfully. 
  • The church must function as a place where the people of God can be rooted and fruitful. We must pray for sinners, share the gospel, speak up on these issues, vote, and engage society with our voices and actions. But we need to be aware that we may not be able to bring our values back from the immoral brink we’ve already crossed. We are watching the collision between unfettered sexual freedom and religions freedom. Whether or not we are able to affect change in our society, the church must remain a community of the King: Christ followers and Jesus worshipers. 
  • As the people of the Kingdom of Christ, we should have courage and confidence. The angel in Revelation 15 announces: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). We should be courageous for our King is the King. We should have confidence because no matter what happens in our culture and in our world, the kingdom of this world will become the Kingdom of our Lord. 

Join us in prayer and participation during this summer sermon series. May we remain faithful as the people of God in the Kingdom of Christ.

Worship is Sacrificial

In some sense, this worship value is pretty obvious. In the Old Testament in particular, the sacrificial system was how Israel worshiped God. They brought sacrifices to God as a reflection of faith and obedience. Their worship flowed out of their sacrifice.

Here are just a few examples:

The Passover lambs were sacrifices from the congregation of Israel.

3 Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household. 4 And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb.5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 6 and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.

Exodus 12:3-6

David refused to make a sacrifice or build an altar that cost him nothing.

18 And Gad came that day to David and said to him, “Go up, raise an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” 19 So David went up at Gad’s word, as the Lord commanded. 20 And when Araunah looked down, he saw the king and his servants coming on toward him. And Araunah went out and paid homage to the king with his face to the ground. 21 And Araunah said, “Why has my lord the king come to his servant?” David said, “To buy the threshing floor from you, in order to build an altar to the Lord, that the plague may be averted from the people.” 22 Then Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him. Here are the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. 23 All this, O king, Araunah gives to the king.” And Araunah said to the king, “May the Lord your God accept you.” 24 But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. 25 And David built there an altar to the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the Lord responded to the plea for the land, and the plague was averted from Israel.

2 Samuel 24:18-25

In another place David testified in confession:

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Psalm 51:17

It should go without saying that our worship is sacrificial. But note why and how our worship is sacrificial. We do not initiate the sacrifice of worship. God did and God does.

In Genesis 3, God sacrificed the first animal to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness (Genesis 3:21). In Genesis 22, God commanded Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. While God stayed Abraham’s hand, the even foreshadowed the ultimate sacrifice God would make on behalf of sinners. The writer of Hebrews picks up on this theme when he describes Jesus’ death in sacrificial and atonement terminology.

11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. 13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.15 Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. 16 For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. 17 For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. 18 Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. 19 For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, 20 saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” 21 And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship.22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. 23 Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 25 Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own,26 for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. 

Hebrews 9:11-26

In the book of Romans, Paul highlights worship as a response to the gospel of Jesus Christ when he describes the kind of worship that God accepts.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:1-2

Bryan Chapell offers a helpful insight about the kind of worship Paul describes in Romans 12.

He does not say that we should offer our bodies to God so that we will become acceptable ‘living sacrifices.’ Paul says that we should offer our ‘bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God’ (12:1). ‘Holy and pleasing’ are not descriptions of what we will become; they are declarations of what we are. Before we have performed our religious duties, God makes us holy and pleasing to himself. 

Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Worship, 109. 

Here are a few important applications from this worship value.

First, worship is sacrificial because Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for us makes worship possible. It is not our sacrifices to God that make our worship acceptable; it is Christ’s sacrifice for us that makes us acceptable.

Second, when we worship sacrificially, it means that we present ourselves as living sacrifices. The imagery in Romans 12 is that we offer our bodies, not in death, but in life to Christ. This is the goal of Christian living which springs from the glories of God and his gospel represented by the “therefore” of Romans 12:1 that Paul has been describing in the first eleven chapters.

Third, sacrificial worship at the very least requires our time, attention, offerings, and song.

  • Gathered congregational worship requires invested time with God’s people (see Hebrews 10:24-25). Personal, individual worship requires time with God (see Psalm 119:105).
  • When we worship personally (our quiet times) and corporately (with the congregation), our worship must be in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). At the very least, this means that our worship must be attentive or engaged. Instead of daydreaming, sacrificial worshipers are engaged internally (minds and souls) and externally (bodies and activities).
  • Sacrificial worship offers gifts back to God. God invites generous and cheerful giving (2 Corinthians 9:6-7). Part of the way that we worship is to give back to God out of thanks and gratitude for his sacrifice that brings us salvation.
  • One of the most regular commands of the Bible (especially in the Psalms) is the command to sing. Our songs to God are praises, testimonies, and affirmations about God and for God’s people. In this sense, they are elements of sacrifice in worship.

So, I ask you this week. Will you thank God that his sacrifice makes your worship possible? Will you worship God sacrificially out of thanksgiving and praise?

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash