“I Will Worship With Others” – Acts 2:44-46

Sermon script from Pastor Jim from Sunday worship at Zion Baptist Church:

• How many of you have seen the movie Shrek? Actually, there’s a series of Shrek movies, along with a musical, which Peoria Players put on about a year and a half ago. It’s a story about a giant green ogre who falls in love with a princess, only to find out that she’s also secretly an ogre.
• Shrek the ogre lives in a smelly swamp where no one else in their right mind wants to live. And he likes it that way. He doesn’t really want neighbors. He just wants to be alone. “Just me and my swamp” he keeps saying.
• But Shrek finds out, as many of us do, that when you get married, you can’t have things exactly the way you want them anymore. You have to share your life with other people. Shrek marries the princess at the end of the first movie. Then they go on their honeymoon.
• The second movie starts with them deeply in love, dancing through fields of flowers, in this idyllic scene of passion. Everything is right in the world. They return to the swamp and find out that the donkey has taken pretty good care of the place while they were gone.
• They spend the next few weeks just reveling in their love for one another. Life is completely perfect. Just Shrek and Princess Fiona. But then they get a visit from a royal messenger who tells them that they have been summoned by Fiona’s parents, the king and queen, to the palace.
• It’s Shrek’s turn to meet the new in-laws. And the funniest part is that no one has told them that their new son-in-law is an ogre. So you can just imagine their reaction when their precious daughter Fiona introduces them to this giant green ogre who smells and has bad manners, and she tells them that he’s the newest member of the royal family.
• Everyone knows that visit isn’t going to go over well. But in the course of the story, Shrek finds out that he can’t just isolate himself in the swamp. He actually needs other people. He’s part of something much bigger than himself.
• He’s not just a lone ranger who can take care of all of his own needs. Falling in love with Fiona has shown him that he needs to learn to live in community with other people. Life is to be lived in community with other people.
• I would add that in the same way our faith is to be experienced in community with other people. Now you might think that’s pretty obvious. Of course faith is supposed to be experienced in relationship with other people. The church has been teaching that forever.
• But ever since we starting talking in church about each of us needing to have a personal relationship with God, ever since we made our faith an individual thing where each of us stands as a unique entity before God and is held accountable for our own actions, people have been starting to say, “Well if that’s the way faith works, then isn’t the church optional at this point? If I’m saved because I personally believe in Jesus, then why do I really need the church?”
• I can just read the bible myself and believe in Jesus and things are great between God and me. I don’t need a pastor to tell me right from wrong. I can figure that out from reading the Bible.
• I don’t need people at church judging me. No one but God really gets to judge me. So why would I need to go to church and have people make judgments about whether or not I’m being a good Christian? It’s none of their business.”
• That point of view is becoming more and more prominent, especially among younger folks. They see faith like they see lots of other do-it-yourself projects. You want to be closer to God? You want to get right with the creator?
• Google it. Watch a YouTube video on it. Make of it whatever you want. Decide what’s right for you. There’s no right or wrong, and your own opinion is the only one that really matters.
• But I want to make the case to you today that the Bible presents us with a different image when it comes to faith. The images in the New Testament of Jesus’ earliest followers would be completely foreign to folks who look at faith the way I just described.
• The way the story is told in Acts 2, Jesus’ followers are in Jerusalem for seven weeks after Jesus’ death waiting for God to anoint them with power, just as Jesus told them to do before he returned to heaven.
• Keep in mind that Jesus was killed during the Passover feast, a celebration of God liberating the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. In the Old Testament God commanded them to observe another holiday seven weeks after Passover.
• That holiday is called Pentecost, which comes from the word 50 because seven weeks is fifty days. God commanded the Jews to celebrate Pentecost by traveling to Jerusalem, going up to the temple and offering sacrifices to celebrate the fact that God gave the Old Testament law to Moses.
• Jesus’ followers had stayed in Jerusalem those seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost. When Pentecost rolled around, Jewish pilgrims from all over the Roman Empire traveled again to Jerusalem to celebrate. So you had a town full of people from all over the known world staying in hotels and inns and staying with family or friends.
• On the day they were supposed to celebrate God giving the law to Moses, God gives something even greater to Jesus’ disciples: he sends the Holy Spirit upon them. The Spirit’s power enables this ordinary group of people to do incredible things.
• One of the things the Spirit empowers them to do is speak in foreign languages that they hadn’t studied. So imagine the scene. You have all these people in Jerusalem from out of town, people who speak foreign languages because they were Jews who lived in other countries.
• And they’re shocked to hear Jesus’ disciples talking in their own language. No one else in Jerusalem spoke these foreign languages, but Jesus’ followers did. And they spoke about how Jesus died, how he was going to return, and how they could be saved from their lives of sin.
• Well you can just imagine how people reacted to a scene like that. Thousands of people came to believe that God had done something as great or greater than anything else God had done in the history of the world, through the life and death of Jesus. And if God had done that, then they wanted to be a part of it.
• Acts 2 says that 3000 people joined Jesus’ followers that day. 3000! And the passage we read for today says that every day someone else was joining the church. It’s hard to imagine the church drawing so much interest these days.
• But the people weren’t just there to see a magic show. Luke describes this early community of believers as a group who lived in community with one another. They shared their possessions. They took care of people who were in need.
• They ate together. They listened to one another’s hurts and disappointments and fears. Can you see how different this version of faith is from the kind of lone ranger faith that people seem to think they can have today?
• These people in Acts 2 had understood faith as a set of rules that you had to follow in order to make God happy. What they missed, what many people miss, is that worshipping with others is an indispensable part of our faith.
• By its nature Christian faith is a group activity. You can’t do it on your own. You need other people who are with you in the struggle. But we need to change our mindset in order to understand that. We need to change the way we look at our relationship to the church.
• The shift in mindset in these early Christians is the kind of shift we need to make in our own minds when it comes to being people of faith. There are three shifts in mindset that I want to raise as we reflect on this story from Acts.
• The first is a shift from begrudging participation to joyous commitment. Many folks think it’s optional to participate in church life. You can do it or you can skip it. But this example from the early church shows that being a part of the group was mandatory.
• You couldn’t just show up for the sermons and leave. These people were breaking bread with one another. They were helping the sick and the poor. They were no longer following God’s law because they were obligated to do it, though. They were excited about it.
• They couldn’t wait to get together. They met at each other’s homes when there wasn’t a church activity. Recall that when Jesus met the woman at the well in John 4, he tells this woman that God is seeking people who will worship in Spirit and in truth.
• God isn’t seeking people who will trudge through the door, sit impatiently, checking their watch throughout the entire church service, and bolt back out the door as we’re singing the last hymn. Do you know those people?
• We have to change our mindset to be one where we can’t wait to get in here, where we can’t wait to share our experiences with one another, where we are excited about participating, where we are fully committed to God’s work through the church.
• God wants people who will worship with others. The New Testament is full of examples of people who were so excited about what Jesus had done for them that they hosted church in their own homes.
• Can you imagine people doing that today? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d probably complain about having to clean my house so that people can come over. But remember the words of the Psalm: “I was glad when they said, ‘let us enter the house of the Lord together.’” God asks us to be committed participants.
• A second shift in mindset has to do with the market driven nature of our economy. We want a church that will cater to our preferences, rather than us trying to cater to God’s preferences.
• That’s what companies do now. They figure out what a certain group of people want and they give it to them. And that’s great for things like cell phones and TV shows and cars and restaurants.
• But we’ve allowed that mentality to creep into the church. And now people can say, “I don’t want to come to church because I don’t like the style of music they play.” That’s kind of like being in a car that God is driving and saying to God, “Can we change the radio station?”
• What do you mean, “Change the radio station? You’re in the car with God. The music isn’t the point. Being in the presence of God is the point. Is that really the message you have for the creator of the universe? “Yeah, I’m outta here unless they play some better tunes.”
• All I can say is “Good luck with that. I’m pretty sure God isn’t driving the car in the first place.” Other folks will stay away from church because they don’t like the pastor’s preaching. Now, you might think we pastors get offended when someone says something like that.
• But I can say, as a pastor who preaches every week, that sometimes I’m not happy with the way I preach. So join the club. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked down the aisle out the door on a Sunday morning and thought to myself, “Wow, that one really stunk. You can do better than that. You’re parishioners are going to ask for their money back.”
• But inevitably those are the times that I will have the most people come up to me and tell me how much God spoke to them through what I said. I try not to have that shocked look on my face when they do.
• Those are the times that I realize the complex way God moves in people’s hearts during worship. God can change your heart, God can change your life, God can nurture you even if you don’t like how the pastor preaches.
• If you are looking for a congregation that fits all of your preferences, you’re probably never going to be satisfied with any church. When we answer to God for our actions, God’s not going to say to us, “Now were you comfortable in church? I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
• God’s going to ask us, “Did you present yourself as a living sacrifice to me?” And it won’t matter at that point whether you like the music or the pastor. What will matter is whether or not you participated in a vital way in the body of Christ.
• The final shift I want to highlight today is a shift in mindset to being someone who will participate in worship. Throughout the series Pastor Sam has been taking you through, he has talked about saying, “I will.” God wants you change your mindset so that you say “I will” to worshipping with others. God wants you to say I will to praying before you come in here on a Sunday morning.
• God wants you to say “I will” to praying that God will change your heart through your choice to come and be a part of this congregation. Because doing that will open your heart to whatever God wants to show you.
• Instead of doing that, many people come in and approach church like a consumer. They want to judge whether or not the pastor performs well. They want to judge whether or not the musicians are worth what they put in the offering plate.
• They want to judge whether or not the other people in church are worthy of their radiant presence and approval. They want to be like those judges on “the voice.” Can you imagine people coming in here and sitting with their backs turned to the pastor or the musicians or the congregation?
• And they’re not going to turn around unless they like what they hear. Unless they like how they feel. Unless they like what they see. It’s like people have turned their backs on God and said, “It’s your job to win me over. You got 30 seconds. Start singing.”
• Can you see how ridiculous that whole scenario is? Let me reiterate again how this works. God is the one in the chair. God is the one who judges. And honestly, God has already earned our worship. God doesn’t owe us because we did him the favor of rolling out of bed on a Sunday morning and coming to church.
• We owe God because while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That’s why God wants us to be worshippers instead of judges. I’m not saying that everything that happens here is perfect. No church is. No pastor is. No musicians are perfect. No congregation is. But that isn’t the point.
• The point, what we come here to do, is worship with other people because God will change your heart. God will change your life. God will change your heart so that you’re not here begrudgingly, but in joyous response to what God has done for you.
• God will change your heart so that you understand church is not here simply to cater to your preferences. So you understand that it’s not God’s job to make sure you feel comfortable.
• And God will change your heart so that you will come here to worship with others, having an attitude of prayer, looking to grow, looking for fellowship, trusting God and the people around you that somehow God will change your heart Sunday morning.
• The next time you’re up on a Sunday morning and you’re debating whether or not to worship with other people, don’t say, “I could”; don’t say “I might”; don’t say “I should”. Tell God “I will.”