"worship" Tagged Sermons (Page 2)
‘This is the day the Lord has made’ in verse 24 gets its full meaning from Malachi 4:3’s day of the Lord, not from a generic call to daily gratitude. Religion here is treated as event before it is idea, something that happened rather than something merely believed. Israel’s own deliverance becomes the pattern for reading our own.
‘The LORD of Hosts’ and ‘temple’ both appear in Scripture for the first time here, marking the start of something genuinely new. God gives himself, in effect, a new identity in these titles. The temple named in verse 9 is already present and not yet complete, pointing past Shiloh to a temple not made with hands.
The abduction of the dancing virgins that closes Judges gives way, just a few verses later, to Hannah’s quiet prayer at Shiloh, the same place, a very different kind of scene. Hannah’s worship and faith stand as the real answer to the chaos just described. The idea that Christians are called to change the world on their own terms does not survive the comparison.
The resurrection itself creates a new pattern of worship, John’s Gospel argues through its own characteristic double language of physical and spiritual meaning layered together. To miss that worship, on this reading, is finally to miss Christ himself, not merely to skip a religious observance. True faith, the sermon insists, is something only Christ himself can give.
Without the resurrection there is no Christianity at all, a claim this sermon takes with full seriousness rather than as rhetorical flourish. The darkness of John 20:1 is answered by the power Paul describes in Ephesians 3:20-21, power meant to shape a pattern of worship morning and evening. Mary’s own recognition, calling the risen Christ ‘Rabboni,’ is where that power first becomes personal.
Ephesus’s great temple to Diana stands behind Paul’s charge to Timothy, a city where idolatry was not abstract but architectural and everywhere. Timothy’s real troubles with idolators in the church are read against that backdrop. Against a dead goddess, the sermon insists, the church itself is called to be God’s own living glory.
The church’s own form and order in worship already take shape in Genesis 4, unpacking the phrase ‘at the end of days’ in verse 3. Both the continuities and real changes in worship across the whole history that follows get traced out.
Any supposed separation of Sabbath from worship gets challenged, reading Job 38:7 alongside Genesis 2:1 to show the two bound together from the start. Offering spiritual sacrifices of praise is already implicit in the preaching embedded in Genesis 2:2.
The modern church has largely abandoned sabbath worship and rest, a lament that works out what it truly means to keep ‘the Day of the Lord.’ Believers as a ‘royal priesthood’ carry real vows concerning how that day is kept.
Three ways the third commandment gets broken are set against the perfect glorifying of God’s name in Christ: that is the shape of this sermon. We enter into that glory purely by grace.