Worship

welcome to zootown uh i usually get to say that earlier on um but uh if you don't know me my name is dan i am the worship director here at z town i don't normally do this portion of the service uh because it makes me want to puke um but uh so every two years or so uh we'll give an opportunity to come up here and talk and uh and hopefully we make it through we made it through the first service no nothing happened out here so there's no spray zone in the first row or anything like that um so mike sat in the front row just in case and we appreciate that mike but this morning i'm going to talk a little bit about uh worship because i'm the worship director and i guess that's what they want me to talk about um but uh in case you wow this is your first time in two weeks scott's gonna be back and it's gonna be great he'll bring the fire there's no church next weekend so also i don't know if we've talked about that yet but don't come here next week because we won't be here the doors will be locked you'll we'll get a good laugh at the security footage you trying to open the door but two weeks scott's gonna be back and i'll be back to my normal role feeling safe behind a guitar and uh um let's pray because i apparently need something ah god we just are so grateful for today we're thankful for what uh that your presence is here you know we're thankful that we can gather together we have these opportunities to spend time uh as a community just coming into your presence and we pray god that today i'd get out of the way and whatever it is that you want to say uh would come through me today we pray this in jesus name amen well i've been uh i've been doing worship for about 20 years doing worship that's a weird thing to say i've been playing in worship bands and leading worship for about 20 years and i know what you're thinking he's way too young to be doing that for 20 years that's impossible clearly he shaves his head for choice and not because he's going bald no i've been doing this since i was in high school uh i picked up the bass at 14 and uh two friends of mine and i were going to start the most rockingest band ever and so my friend my two friends picked up guitar and uh drums and so that left me with bass and that worked for me so we were on our way to become the greatest poc run pop rank rock pop rank pop rock trio you've never heard of but nine months later i joined the worship team and uh and i've been doing this ever since and uh so i get asked quite a bit everything well quite a bit i this is my first time in two years speaking but every time i talk they just everyone wants me to talk on worship because i tell them how nervous i am and how i want to puke and they say well let's put you in your comfort zone and have you talk about worship this is not my comfort zone doesn't matter what the topic is this is not my comfort zone and when we were talking about it between services you know maybe the comfort zone is okay i buy comfortable shoes for a reason but anyways that's beyond the point so i've like i said i've been doing this for two-thirds of my super super incredibly young life and uh as i continually remind my kids um and i've been i went to college for worship i've been to a million conferences and read books and heard sermons and listened to podcasts all about worship and so you think that that i would be well-versed enough to talk about the topic but to be perfectly honest it's something i don't particularly enjoy talking about and that's just um it's one of those things where it's come so naturally to me that i feel hesitant to actually speak on the topic when i was a teenager i fell in love with the presence of god and that doesn't mean that i was a perfect kid far from it my sister's in the room she can tell you that's not true um but uh thank you for that um but i did i just i loved i loved the presence of god and even in my most prodigal moments i was still just i felt like i was tethered to god like i could never go so far that i wouldn't come right back to his presence and um you know my theology was different back then uh i spent a good chunk of my uh teenage and then up until young adult years just believing that god was he was cold he was distant and that he was wrathful and that's part of that is um is based on the doctrine that i grew up in but honestly that's just a small portion of the things that were preached god was mostly taught to me as a loving god but it's like those it's like when you're looking at yelp and you see a one bad review on a restaurant and it just sticks with you even though there's 99 really good reviews about this is the best mashed potato place in the whole world and the one bad one is like somebody put mustard in my mashed potatoes and you're like well i'm never going there that's that's that thing that sticks with you and so as a as a kid i grew up hearing about the love of god but i also every once in a while would hear about the wrath of god and that that's the thing that stuck with me and there there's this there's this picture from uh jonathan edwards uh a sermon he he wrote called the sinners in the hands of an angry god where he compares us to a spider being dangled by a threat above a fire and that was kind of how i envisioned god but every time i went to god in worship that was not what i encountered i always encountered grace i always encountered love i always encountered mercy i never once found wrath and yet that was kind of the vision that i had of him well over the last seven or eight years i've really spent a lot of time deconstructing and i know that that's a buzzword in christian communities if you're not if you're not inside of those communities that's okay this might be the first time you've heard that word it was just i've left a lot of those belief systems behind only to find that what i encountered in god in worship was true the whole time that and my theology always finds itself catching up to my encounters and the funny thing is that uh scott actually sent the staff a excerpt from a book a week or so ago maybe a couple weeks ago and he was talking about how we we're constantly playing catch-up we talk about the goodness of god in worship before we adopt it into our doctrine we talk about the love of god and the heart of the father before we adopt it into our our doctrine there's something safe about going to god in the in the sense of worship that we're just constantly trying to find our way there in our doctrine so a couple reasons i a couple things that people talk about when they talk about worship one of the things that people always want to talk about in worship is that we were made to worship and so therefore we that that's what you're made for that's what you should do and i totally agree with that i totally agree that we are made made for worship you can just see it in just the way we interact with other things in the world the way we're just designed to give that praise and then the other thing is that if you are in need of something that you should worship if you if you need breakthrough in a particular area whether it's whether it's your finances or or relationships or or addiction or whether you need healing you should worship those are these these are these two topics that continually come up when people want to talk about worship problem with that first one is that while it's true this coercion-based side of worship where you were made for it so you need to do it i found that it's much better to have that confirmed than to coerce then the second thing is this is that when you worship i will get this i will get this i will get this if i just continue to worship what it does is it creates this formula based uh system with god and i don't know about you but i would think an omniscient you know omnipotent god would know what my motives are behind it i mean we can tell that just when people are hanging out on a one-on-one basis or or if you're you have that friend that that super generous friend and you find people hanging out with them just because they're generous and they find out and they're like oh yeah i'm not hanging out with that guy anymore and we're not omnipotent or omniscient so i would think god could figure that kind of thing out so i want to take a few minutes here and i want to break some of this stuff down so we're going to actually talk about the bible because i feel like that's a thing that's good and we're going to start in genesis because this is my first time preaching and it seemed like we just opened up the bible and there's we there we are so we're going to talk about adam and eve just for a second uh adam and eve were in the garden they were hanging out with god and then they were tricked into taking the uh the fruit from the knowledge or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right so when i was young and even early on i was taught that that was a sin of threefold one it was the lust of the eyes two lust of the flesh three pride of life the fruit looked good they thought it would taste good and they thought they knew better than god now it's a way simpler than that what it is is that adam and eve found a shortcut to knowing the knowledge of good and evil they always had the ability to find out what good and what evil was because genesis tells us that they that god walked in the garden in the cool of the evening so they had the opportunity to spend time with god and to learn these things but instead they chose a shortcut they chose the cliff notes version so that they didn't need god that they could separate from god side note cliff notes were how i got through high school so i can understand i can understand the tendency towards that but instead of choosing a relationship they decided it would be easier to choose the answers to choose knowledge over relationship and we've been doing that ever since we continually do that i'm going to look at another story a story about the still small voice i'm sure some of you in this room have heard that story or maybe you've you've seen a bumper sticker or instagram quote about how god speaks in a still small voice that comes from a story in first kings about elijah and we'll take a minute and we're going to read it real quick first kings 19 verses 11 through 13. and then he said go out and stand on the mountain before the lord and behold the lord passed by in a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks and pieces before the lord but the lord was not in the wind and after the wind an earthquake but the lord was not in the earthquake and after the earthquake of fire but the lord was not in the fire so after the fire a still small voice so it was when elijah heard it that he wrapped his face in the mantle and went and stood at the entrance of the cave suddenly a voice came to him and said what are you doing here elijah so earlier in first kings we find out that elijah has gone to uh mount horeb so mount horeb is also called mount sinai in uh in exodus and um if you're if you want to fact check me on that um check deuteronomy 5. what we know about about mount horeb or mount sinai is that is where moses received the ten commandments so moses encounter at at uh mount horeb or mount sinai was a little different let's look at exodus 19 and see uh what it was like when he received the ten commandments so verses six through 20 16 through 20 sorry on the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightning and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast it's a little different so far so that all the people in the camp trembled then moses brought the people out of the camp to meet god and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain now mount sinai was wrapped in smoke because the lord had descended on it in fire the smoke of it went up like a smoke of the kiln and the whole mountain trembled greatly and as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder moses spoke and god answered him in thunder and the lightning the lord came down on mount sinai to the top of the mountain and the lord called moses to the top of the mountain and moses went up okay so elijah would have known this story so when elijah goes to mount horeb he's going there to meet with god because he knows that is where moses met with god what he would have been expecting was thunder what he would have been expecting was fire he would have been expecting something boisterous something crazy something loud and instead he waded through all that and he heard and heard god in a still small voice the point of this story is not that god speaks in a still small voice the point of the story is that god speaks however he wants to speak he speaks in the ways that he chooses and all we need to do is go to the mountain so when we go around and we start telling people that god speaks in a still small voice while that's true it doesn't change that he speaks through thunder and through fire and so we'd actually are missing the point entirely of that story we're creating a formula for how god speaks we're putting a bumper sticker on god will speak to you in a still small voice and god's like ah if i want to speak to you in a loud trumpet blast i'll do that too and this is what we continually do is we try and see somebody else's experience and we try and replicate it for ourselves because we feel like god is going to work in the same way over and over and over again moses did this as well moses went to was in the wilderness and they were at a point where they had no water and so god told moses to strike a rock and water is going to come out of it so he does he strikes the rock water comes out of it they've got water for the whole tribe years later similar thing happens they're out of water and so god tells moses that he needs to speak to the rock this time because again not going to be on a formula it's not about how this works moses decides to strike the war the rock again instead of speaking to it and because of that we find out that he's not able to to go into the promised land because instead of choosing to work in relationship moses chose to work in a formula so the old testament can be kind of murky and a little confusing so let's look at jesus because jesus was really good at this he was really good at taking your expectations and subverting them and taking what you thought was going to happen and doing it in a completely different way we look at three different ways jesus healed a blind man or blind men matthew 9 verses 29-30 and as jesus passed on from there two blind man followed him crying aloud have mercy on his son of david when he entered the house the blind man came to him and jesus said to them do you believe that i am able to do this they said to him yes lord then he touched their eyes saying according to your faith be it done to you and their eyes were opened okay let's look at another story in mark 8. another blind man comes to him and he said and they came to betsada and some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him and they took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him he asked him do you see anything and he looked up and said i see people but they look like trees walking around probably because he had spit in his eyes then jesus laid his hands on his eyes and he opened his eyes his sight was restored because the spit was gone and he saw everything clearly maybe that wasn't exactly it but it seems like a reasonable thing to uh take a leap for then john 9 and i'm not going to read this one i'll just summarize it for you jesus meets another blind man he makes some mud with his bit puts it on his eyes tells him to go to the pool of siloam and wash it off and then he's completely healed see it's not the formula jesus decided intentionally to heal people differently because it wasn't about how he was doing it it was about the person who was doing it it was about jesus and his heart for the blind person not about the way he was going to heal them when i was in college uh i had a three or four month stint where i had lost about 80 of my hearing um i've always kind of had issues now here and there with like ear infections and stuff but this was really different and i as a musician this was particularly a problem luckily i play guitar so or electric guitar and it's really loud so i was able to continue doing some of this stuff and when i was when i'd go to lectures luckily they would be with a microphone and i could sit back at the sound booth with some headphones on they'd crank it up so i could actually hear what was going on but when i go home i just have to sit by myself because i couldn't talk with anyone and i've never been able to read lips and i've just have always struggled with that kind of thing and so for three months i just wasn't able to do stuff and i went to a service uh one sunday night and and we were singing a song about the healing power of god and so i i just sang this song with everything that i had and uh and my ears opened and i was completely healed i walked out of that that place completely restored and uh and i was feeling great and to be honest it wasn't the first time i'd sang that song it wasn't the first time i'd been a church on a sunday night but for whatever reason god chose to heal me that night and i was and i was completely back to normal and the tendency for us is to then go okay well if you need healing now what we need to do is we need to sing songs about healing and we need to believe it wholeheartedly and for sure that's how you will be healed but i know that that's not true because while god can use those things it's going to be individualized and it's going to be in relationship every time see there's nothing wrong with coming to god and asking for healing and even doing it in in different ways that you've heard other people do it but the problem is when we come expecting that it's the formula itself that's going to bring us our healing or it's the formula that's going to give us our breakthroughs the formula that's going to do this even though jesus is part of the formula it's the whole thing surrounding it that's allowing us to receive what we want to receive and that's just not how god works see we can learn we can learn from tradition and we can and there's a lot of good that comes in that there's nothing wrong with tradition itself i love the fact that communion has basically been the same for 2000 years i love that we do advent i love that we connect with the greater church through these different things and in in all honesty i actually pray some of the prayers of the early church fathers because i find that they help connect me with god but i don't do it in a way that says that if i do this i will receive this or that if i use this formula i'm going to receive something they're just vehicles for encounters with god so let's let's talk a little bit more specifically about worship i could sit here and we could talk about the hebrew words for praise right there's seven of them there's yadah halal zamar tauda barak tahila and shabbac tehillah is a cool word zamar is the best word because it literally means to play guitar okay so they didn't have guitars back then but they did have stringed instruments and that's what they're talking about and so if it was written today they would say play guitar and i love i love those old hebrew words because they help me connect with some of the stories uh in the bible and to be honest i've got these tattoos on my on my arms and i've got this one uh i have love written down in hebrew on my arm or at least i thought and so so when i was uh it was several years ago it was probably 10 years ago i was working at the brew and uh in the coffee shop downtown when we still had it and i'd gotten this tattoo and and this lady comes up and she's like she's like oh i see that you have hebrew letters on your on your arm and i said yeah she goes i'm from israel and i go yeah that's that's so cool it says love and she goes no it doesn't and i'm like great i'm the guy who's got hebrew for soup on his arm and i'm walking around telling people that i you know i'm look at me i've got love written on my arm and it's really soup and and then the to to make it worse she just goes thanks for the coffee and walks off she doesn't tell me it's soup i don't even know now what i did so now i spend the next two hours just freaking out thinking that i had gotten a tattoo i was the guy i was that one that everybody says as soon as you get uh some other language on your arm or on tattooed on you it's gonna be the wrong thing and she comes back two hours later and i swear to you she must have just been messed with messing with me because she goes just so you know that does say love it's just the verb not the noun thanks thanks for the last two hours lady that was that was really good now i'm pretty sure i texted my wife i'm like well i i apparently have soup on my arm so we could we could take uh we could take and we look at those words um and we could see how they apply to us we could see that yada means uh to stretch a hand right so so if you see people uh in worship and how they raise their hands that might be where that comes from or we could look at specific stories we could look at how how david danced around through the streets and how he took off took off all his clothes and i don't think we should do that we could look at we could look at uh paul and silas singing singing praises in the uh in the jail cells and we could look at specifically at the psalms and as c.s lewis said we could see the delight in god that caused david to dance and that could that's good and we can that can help with our relation to those people but if we start taking those things and we start making in a plus b equals c then we're going to be disappointed because god's not looking for you to insert a formula he's looking for you to come to him in relationship so jesus didn't talk that much about worship uh in fact there's only two spots in in the recorded uh history and the four gospels that i can find that he actually even mentions it one of them is when he says that people are criticizing uh the praises that he were he was given he said well if they stop um then the rocks will cry out and then there's this other one that's a little bit more in depth and it's in john 4 and it's where jesus is talking to uh the samaritan woman at the well and she comes to him and she's asking about how and where to worship so let's read that real quick john 4 verses 20 through 24 our fathers worshipped on the mountain but you say that in jerusalem the place where the people is where the place where people ought to worship jesus said to her woman believe me the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in jerusalem jerusalem will you worship the father you worship what you do not know we worship what we know for salvation is from the jews but the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and in truth and the father is seeking such people to worship him god is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth see she looked for a formula she looked for where are we supposed to go how are we supposed to do it and jesus told her it's not about your physical space it's not about how you're going to do it it's about connecting spirit to spirit and so raise your hands don't raise your hands it doesn't really matter it's what your the posture of your heart is for him and then beyond that he says that we're worship and truth the reason we worship in truth at that point on is that jesus has revealed the heart of the father that jesus has revealed what god is really like and so now we can worship in truth so up until that point it's all partial because that no one had experienced and encountered god in the way that his fullness was revealed in jesus and this kind of leads me back to one of the reasons why i'm not too too keen to talk about worship in general specifically and it's because the more we talk about the goodness of god the more we talk about the character of jesus and what he's like and who he's like the more we're the natural response is to just worship the more natural it is for us to just give praise because it's based on who he is and not based on what he can give us so i think about i think about my relationship with my kids and and ben you can come up here if you want um they what my kids know about me first and foremost is my hope is always that what they know is that i love them what they know is that i'm for them and then i'll go to the ends of the earth for them this is the same with god god wants us to know about him that he would do anything for us right for god so loved the world that he gave his only son that he would go even to the cross to show us how much he loves us that he would he would do absolutely anything it took to get to us and that that is the thing that uh that i believe most about god and here's why a few years ago i had a um an encounter in worship where i felt god speak to me so clearly um that you know worship can be this thing where we talk about the exaltation of god and we can sing songs like how great is our god and and god of majesty and and and all of these things that that are talking about the bigness and the grandeur of god and and that's great and there's nothing wrong with that in fact we we might sing some of those here but what god told me was that the equivalent for him was that when my my son asher comes and tells me how strong i am because i can open the pop bottle and while that's nice and it's nice that he thinks that i'm strong because it's good that somebody does uh what i want to hear from asher what i want to hear from micah those are my two kids is that they know how much i love them and that they know what my heart is towards them and so so that their first thought when it comes to to me is how much i love them and that's and god told me like so it was as close to audible as i've ever heard in my life the thing i'm most proud of is my love for you the thing i'm most proud of is my heart for you and while you can sing these songs about the grandeur and and the majesty and those are great what i want most is for you to know what my heart is for you and that's worship really is just this reorienting of our posture towards god our reorienting of the way we think about god because his posture towards us never changes there's nothing that we can do there's nothing that we can say that's going to make him any closer or any further away he's always the same whether we're at on our knees or out in the gutters he's going to be the same and so in our worship we just reorient our focus we remind ourselves the goodness of god and it brings this connection because we've opened ourselves up and so this is this is why every sermon to me does this every sermon where we talk about jesus where we talk about the goodness of god it brings me back to this place of reorienting my my posture towards him and bringing us to where we want to worship again and we're gonna we're gonna do this uh we're gonna have communion together uh during this last song and it's another it's this part of um reminding ourselves who god is what he's done that he went to the cross that he was broken and he was and and bloodied for us and and it it's this act of worship that we're that we try to do every single week here at z town uh reminding ourselves who god is and the band's gonna play one more song here and so at any point you can uh take out the cracker and the juice and you can partake in that and then i encourage you to to worship however it is that will allow your spirit to connect with god's spirit so for me sometimes that's that's playing guitar that's screaming at the top of my lungs jumping up and down and other times it's sitting quiet with my head and my hands i know other people that they encounter worship just by driving through the wilderness or going out on a hike and just remembering what god is like and that's all of those are equal in their connection with god it's just what works for you so if raising your hands is for you as a sign of surrender or raising your hands is a sign of reaching out to god like a kid reaches for their dad then do it if it doesn't then don't you don't need to if if getting on your knees means something for you then do it i always tell people that the reason the bible talks about things like bowing before god and that being an expression of worship is because of what it meant in that day and age if to show a sign of respect to a king thousands of years ago would have been to do a twirly twirl or to scoot your butt on the ground that's what he would have said to do but because what they did at that point was to kneel or to bow it meant something and so if that means something to you today then go ahead use it to worship but if it doesn't then don't if it's singing means something sing if singing doesn't then don't that's why we say every single week you hear me say stan don't stand sit don't sit i i'm i should just play a little video at the beginning where you hear me say it over and over and over again because it's not about what those actions are it's about connecting with jesus so we're gonna take this time we're gonna take communion together and i would encourage you to connect spirit to spirit with god reminding yourself of the truth of who jesus is and worship in spirit and truth kick it off guys

Channel: Zootown Church

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Id: Pt8RaLs6-5Y

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021