Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Romans 8:35-39
35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written,
"For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered."
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
'Great is Thy Faithfulness’ is my ticket to worship, if there is such a thing. I remember singing it in Spanish as much as I do in English. The words speak to a place inside me that is always raw, vulnerable, and ready to recognize my shortfall and God’s overallness.
You probably won’t find that word in any dictionary, but I think I can define it for you. There is a Psalm that will echo what I am going to say, Psalm 139. When I can’t, God can. When I won’t, God will. When I fall, God picks me up and we keep walking alongside each other. When I am, in the words of the Psalmist, in Sheol, God is there. When I am on the mountain peak of spiritual experiences, God is there … you get the general idea. That is where ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ takes me. But there are other songs that speak as powerfully to me.
I remember the exact moment when the hymn “When I survey the Wondrous Cross” joined the ‘short list’. I was in college, it was my junior year, and Billy Orton was the Minister of Music at First Baptist Church, Bowling Green, KY.
The service was going along as usual. I had always liked the hymn, but it didn’t stand out any more than any other. Then we started singing it. there was an ensemble that played accompaniment when we sang hymns at First Baptist. First Baptist was, as is fairly common in that part of Kentucky, the biggest show in town. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It just happened to be the biggest church around. It had and continues to have, I hope, a dynamic, multifaceted ministry, fueled by a large, energetic congregation that is focused on being a part of the breaking in of the Kingdom of God. It is one of the leading churches in Kentucky, both in size and actual leadership.
But back to the service: it wasn’t a huge thing, there were no crashing drums or clanging cymbals, there was no flash of lighting, just a bridge and a key change before the last verse. Billy Orton, who went on to become the Minister of Music at Columbia Baptist, up in Arlington, turned to the congregation, and through his cues, the congregation knew that something was coming. When we finished singing the 3rd verse, he turned to the ensemble and they went into the bridge, and the key change, and the organ swelled to a … majestic tone … and we started singing …
Were the whole realm of Nature mine
That were a present far too small
Love so amazing so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
That was back in 1984.
That was in the still relatively early days of contemporary Christian music. Michael W. Smith was synthesizing the airwaves, and Amy Grant was bigger than anyone ever dreamed a contemporary Christian artist could be. Petra and Stryper were about as wild as you could get. There were a couple of songs that stood out, Michael W. Smith’s ‘Great is the Lord’, Amy Grant’s ‘Sing Your Praise to the Lord’, and her version of Michael Card’s ‘El Shaddai’ became the most popular praise songs on contemporary Christian radio… and were pretty popular in church services as well.
This isn’t a review of the contemporary Christian music of the early 80’s. The point in mentioning those songs and those singers is that somehow they touched a chord in the heart of a vast number of folks who went to church. I say ‘that went to church’ only because I don’t know that the songs did a lot of ‘chart hopping’. They pretty much stayed on the Contemporary Christian side of the music world. The words expressed, in contemporary language, a joyous, almost overwhelming sense of love, honor and worship that spoke from our hearts to God. El Shaddai was a more reflective song, but it still brought home the uniqueness of how God has provided for us through Jesus Christ.
Lets jump forward again to today. There’s a group out there called ‘Mercyme’. They are also a group that plays contemporary Christian music. They have a song that’s been out a couple of years called ‘I Can Only Imagine’ … the background to the song is that the lead singer, if I’m not mistaken, lost his father to cancer at the age of 18. And this song is him trying to come to terms with that loss. The chorus is a cry directed towards God -
Surrounded by your Glory, what will my heart feel? Will I dance for you Jesus, or in awe of you be still,
Will I stand in Your presence, or to my knees will I fall?
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all?
I can only imagine, I can only imagine …
What has become a phenomenon is that the song has crossed over. It is not only playing on Christian radio stations, but it is playing on mainstream stations as well. It seems the song touches that place inside each of us who has experienced the passing on of someone close to them. It raises the question of what things will be like when we are in the presence of the almighty. What exactly will that be like?
In the two chapters preceding this morning’s text, Paul has been talking about what the Christian life is like. Chapter 7 seems to be focusing on the hardship confronting new Christians. He goes into a sometimes dizzying litany of doing what he doesn’t want to do while not doing what he wants to do. The whole tone of the chapter is one of some confusion and disheartened struggle. It is made that much more poignant by Paul’s using the first person singular – he is talking about himself. This pillar of the church, the great missionary to the gentiles, is essentially confessing that he is what he spent the first 3 chapters of the letter laying out the members of the church in Rome as being: sinners, and here he joins them, he fully identifies himself with anyone that they might bring to him. He culminates this self-immolation with the cry, ‘What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ … then comes the worship: ‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
It is in those moments when we are most aware of our greatest need that we are most able to worship in the purest sense of the word. It is when we recognize that all we CAN do IS worship that we are able to then begin TO worship.
Not only these songs, the more recent ones, but the sometimes centuries-old hymns we know by heart, carry the same impetus – ‘my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride’ – from ‘when I survey the wondrous cross’ – doesn’t that sound a lot like ‘what a wretched man I am’?
That hymn was written by Isaac Watts at the end of the 17th century and it still speaks to us today.
The act of worship and the form of worship are not the same thing. The act of worship has been going on for almost 2000 years. The form of worship has been changing constantly. At the risk of stating the obvious, while it is not limited to the music of a service, there are differences even within contemporary American culture that can be found in how we go about worship. Just compare a regular Sunday morning service at Mulberry Baptist Church down the road with our own services … or Rappahannock Church of Christ with St. John’s Episcopal.
We have a couple of friends, Kathy & David Arnold, who were Baptist at one time but several years ago joined the Greek Orthodox Church. Kathy has said that what stands out in that tradition for them is that the service, the litany of worship is exactly the same every single Sunday. What changes, what is changed, is what they as individuals bring to that service. It is a direct reflection on the unchanging nature of God – God’s faithfulness, in our lives.
The point is this: worship is not found in the form at all. It is found in the act and in the heart. It is a direct reflection of the richness of God’s grace that there are so many different ways in which we can find a place to worship. Even within a lifetime, different forms speak to different ages. What I found moved me into the presence of God 25 years ago doesn’t take me there today, and what I found repetitive and flat I now find to be a reflection of God’s constancy.
What does this mean for Jerusalem church?
In the words of the Psalmist, “God inhabits the praise of his people’. God is present in our worship, but we are changed through worship. We are made more aware of who we are, who God is, and WHOSE we are.
Why worship? Because when we find ourselves in the presence of God, it is our only response.
Let’s pray.
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