The Church: Why Bother? Part Two - Exalting

Acts 2:42-47 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.

Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Now as you look at the various things they were doing in the early church, you’ll see that they fall into four broad categories:

Teaching - the early Christians devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.

The Ministry of Equipping: because the Lord expects us to do more than just educate people; He wants us to equip people so that they will know how to live for Christ and how to serve Christ.

The goal of our teaching ministry is to do far more than just convey theological information. We need to be engaged in practical training; the imparting of skills; mentoring, coaching, and practice. Because this is why God gave us the Scriptures in the first place. It wasn’t so that we could just KNOW the truth; it was so that we could LIVE the truth…

2 Timothy 3:16-17 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Worship - the early Christians devoted themselves to the breaking of bread and to prayer. They praised the Lord together and they had a sense of wonder and awe because they could sense the presence of the Lord in their midst.

The Ministry of Exalting: Exalting is when we lift up the Lord and celebrate his glory. I will exalt you, my God the King; I will praise your name for ever and ever (Psalm 145:1)

A healthy church is going to be a worshiping church—a church that loves to come together and lift up the name of the Lord; a church that loves to praise together and to pray together.

Fellowship - the early Christians were together a lot. They ate meals together; they met together daily in the temple courts. And they shared their material possessions with one another in practical ways.

The Ministry of Encouraging The biblical word for “fellowship” is the word “koinonia” and it means to come alongside and share things in common. And the purpose of true biblical fellowship is that together we would encourage one another to live the Christian life.

A healthy church is going to be a church in which the people do more than just show up on Sundays. They are going to be with each other through the week, building deep friendships, sharing each other’s burdens and encouraging each other in the faith.

Outreach - the early Christians had good community relations - they enjoyed the favor of all the people in the city of Jerusalem, and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. They were a growing church.

The Ministry of Extending – a healthy church is going to be a church that reaches out to a world that needs Christ, both in its own community and further abroad.

So if we take this biblical blueprint of the church and put it all together, we have a picture of what God wants our church to look like. We can express it as a mission statement…

The mission of Erindale Bible Chapel is to equip the people of God with the Word of God so that together we might…

• exalt Christ in worship and prayer

• encourage one another to live for Christ and serve Him, and

• extend the Good News about Christ to a world that needs Him

Last week, we looked at the ministry of equipping. If you missed that, you’ll want to get the tape of that message. This week, we’re going to look at the ministry of exalting.

Now the word “exalt” means to lift up, to glorify, to praise, to honor.

The word “exalt” appears 102 times in our English Bible. Can you guess where the word appears most often in the Bible? It’s in the book of Psalms, which is our worship manual.

Psalm 34:3 Glorify the Lord with me; let us exalt his name together.

Psalm 21:13 Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength; we will sing and praise your might.

(The word that is translated “exalt” is actually derived from about a dozen different Hebrew or Greek words.) But they all have in common this sense of looking up and lifting up. When we are exalting, we are directing our attention away from ourselves and up toward God.

In the latest issue of Christianity Today, theologian Donald Bloesch has written a very thought-provoking article on the subject of worship. It’s entitled “Whatever Happened to God?”

• Evangelical Protestantism is in trouble today and an increasing number of people are searching for a new church. The complaint I hear most often is that people can no longer sense the sacred either in the preaching or in the liturgy. The atmosphere in our services is clubby and convivial rather than adoring and expectant. What is missing is the fear of God.

• Worship has become performance rather than praise. Our worship is essentially a spectacle that appeals to our senses rather than an act of obeisance to the mighty God who is both holiness and love.

• Contemporary worship is far more egocentric than theocentric. The aim is less to give glory to God than to satisfy the longings of the human heart. Even when we sing God’s praises, our focus is on fulfilling and satisfying our human desire for wholeness and serenity.

• Do you hear what he’s saying? He’s saying that when we worship like that, we’re not looking up, we’re looking within—we’re not forgetting ourselves and exalting God, we’re focusing on ourselves and the enjoyment of how we feel.

• And if we keep doing that, we’ll end up worshiping a God we’ve made in our own image rather than worshiping the God who made us in His.

• In Acts 2:43, it says “Everyone was filled with awe” as they worshiped and praised God together.

• A few years ago, I had the privilege of visiting the Grand Canyon in Arizona. And as I stood on the lip of that incredible place, I was filled with a sense of awe. The enormity of it, the incredible beauty of it left me utterly speechless.

• And I’ve always wanted to go back there. Why? So that I could experience the sense of awe again? No… so that I could gaze on the Canyon again and lose myself in the wonder of it all. The sense of awe is merely a byproduct of the thing we adore. But I fear, in much of our modern worship, that we are focusing on our sense of awe rather than on the God who is Awesome.

• As human beings, exalting God is what we’re here to do.

• 1. It is the purpose of our existence

David said in Psalm 145 “I will exalt you, my God the King; I will praise your name for ever and ever. Every day I will praise you and extol your name for ever and ever.”

• You can’t read that without concluding that David knew that worshiping God was what he was created for. It was what he wanted to do every day of his life forever.

• The Westminster Catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Worship is what God created us to do, and it is what we find our ultimate fulfilment in doing. We are most fully human when we are worshiping God because we are wired for worshiping Him.

• Our impulse to worship has been damaged by the fall, and we have turned our backs on the true God and run off and worshiped other things: false gods, material things, even ourselves. But we cannot NOT worship.

• And it is only when we recover a true sense of who God is through Jesus Christ that we become able to worship him.

• So worship is the purpose of our existence and therefore it is the priority of believers.

1 Peter 2:9-10 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

• Our priority as believers is to declare the praises of the God who rescued us from darkness and brought us into the bright kingdom of His Son. As believers, we belong to him. We are a holy nation. We are a royal priesthood.

• Sometimes, as Christians, we talk about work, worship, and witness as though they are three separate things that we do. But according to this verse, our work IS to worship, and our worship IS our witness.

• As we exalt God, as we lift him up—not just on Sunday, but every day in all that we say and do—others will see God for who He really is. Jesus said “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”

• Our work and our worship and our witness are inseparable. That is why exalting in the priority of believers.

• And exalting is the principal activity of heaven.

• In the book of Revelation, we have a window into heaven. What’s going on there? Worship.

• After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

• And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying: “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!”

• Some day, all of the things that we do as believers are going to end. Teaching is going to end. Preaching is going to end. Outreach is going to end. But worship is never going to end. We’re going to be doing that for all eternity—exalting the Lord forever and ever.

• So it’s exciting that we have the opportunity to learn how to do it here.