Shabbat Shalom! It's so good that you can join us for our weekend service!
If you're new with us, I want to extend a very warm welcome to you and say how glad we are that you can be part of our service.
On behalf of Church of Our Saviour and the family and the community here, we welcome you.
For the rest of us this is going to be a special weekend, because on 10.30 Sunday morning,
we are going to be having a Holy Communion online together.
So if you're listening to this on Saturday, remember to join us 10.30 tomorrow morning.
Now, we have been talking a little bit about what it means to be a church in these very challenging times.
What it means to worship God in a time when we cannot meet together as we used to do,
when we are not allowed to lift up our voices in song,
a time that challenges our very notion of what it means to worship God.
The first time the word 'worship' appears in the English Bible is in Genesis 22:5,
when Abraham was bringing Isaac to Mount Moriah to offer him up to God.
[Passage Reading: Genesis 22:5]
Now Abraham said that he was going to worship God.
Now obviously he did not mean that he was going to Mount Moriah to sing some songs,
you know, wave his hands around a little bit, maybe even dance and jump a pew.
He was going there to do what God had commanded him to do in verse 2, where God said, [Passage Reading: Genesis 22:2]
So what did Abraham mean when he said that he was going to worship?
Well for him, worship meant choices, and obedience in his service to God.
This is what true worship means, in fact, the word 'worship', the word that is translated 'worship',
comes from the Hebrew word 'nishtakaweh', which means to bow before, to bow down.
This is the same word that was used to describe what Abraham did when he saw the angel of the Lord in Genesis 18:2 [Passage Reading]
Right? So that's the word 'worship'. It is a word that denotes submission, service, and allegiance.
And this is why the psalmist wrote in Psalms 95:6-8, [Passage Reading]
The challenge of worship in our day is not about the songs that we sing, but to whom we bend our knee and bow before.
Just as it was in the days of the Old Testament when there were many idols competing for our allegiance,
for our love and the love of the children of Israel, so too today there are many idols that compete for our loyalty and service.
These idols seek our love, our passion, our attention, our time, our resources, and above all, our heart.
They draw us away from the true worship of God, and offer us something else that appears exciting, novel, interesting.
And that is why Paul warns the church to be on guard. In Ephesians 6:10-12 he says, [Passage Reading]
What ARE these principalities and powers that rule over this age?
Well, unlike the past, today's principalities come in the form of worldviews and ideologies.
And if we are not careful or informed, it is very easy for you and me to be drawn into
some of these secular worldviews that lead us to bow before the world and its idols.
This is why I want to remind you about the narrative that God is writing, the worldview that God has,
over and against the narrative that is being foisted upon us today by the world.
There is, as it were, a contest of narratives today.
One that is of God, and the other belonging to the world.
And frankly, the prophets of the worldly narrative FAR outnumber the prophets of God today!
Just as it was on Mount Carmel when Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal and Asherah.
As Christians, the thing that governs our life is our belief and our faith, formed into what we call a world view!
It includes what you believe about God, about the Bible, about yourself, about your community.
It provides us a way to harmonise our inward instincts and inclinations with our outward choices and actions.
It is also what gives us a framework to evaluate what we see in the world around us, and help us to form moral assessments.
So, for instance, two people can be completely committed to the idea of holiness,
but they can have completely opposite ways of evaluating what constitutes holiness, or what it looks like.
You could, for instance, have one person who believes that good Christians should not join the Armed Forces,
and another who believes that Christians should be patriots and soldiers.
If you look around the world today, you will find many examples of such dissonances WITHIN the Church,
all of whom profess to love God and are committed to Biblical values, but they end up taking very different positions.
How can this be?
Well, a simple way of answering this is because we do not have consistently shared worldviews.
I'm saying this to let you know that worldviews are powerful things that govern every single one of our lives,
and as such they are vitally important to our Christian walk.
The problem is that this is not often addressed or attended to, so we do not guard our worldviews,
so the Enemy now comes in and tries to seduce us with alternative ideas and world views,
just like how the serpent seduced Eve, saying in Genesis 3:1 [Passage Reading]
You can almost see the gears turning in Eve's head as this suggestion was processed.
It began with the sowing of a seed of a doubt: "Has God indeed said you will not surely die?"
and then the serpent injected an appeal to Eve's inner sense of justice.
In Genesis 3:5, [Passage Reading]
"Eve, there is NO reason for God to deny you your right, your right to eat, your right to this power!"
I can just imagine Eve moving from doubt, slowly nodding her head, and becoming a little bit indignant.
"Yeah! Why can't I be like God? If it's good enough for God, why is it not good enough for me?"
You see, this whole point worked because it was appealing to an inward instinct that we all have for fairness, and for justice.
A good thing! But here the serpent managed to subvert and twist that instinct towards a self-centered, rather than a God-centered outcome.
Today, more than ever, the Enemy is seducing entire generations with similarly alternative worldviews.
These ideas often sound and feel reasonable, appealing to our inward instincts and desires of fairness and justice.
So it kind of works, because it touches on those areas that are important to us.
The problem is that these emotions are too easily manipulated and subverted towards a vision that is NOT from God.
If true worship is obedience towards God's vision, then this shift in world view has a power to redirect our worship to something other than God, to idolatry.
In other words, if you want to worship God correctly in this day, 2020, we cannot ignore the problem of worldview.
The idols are no longer just statues in some temple somewhere; they are all around us being fed to us on the Internet,
online, through mass media, every day, every moment of the day.
A wrong worldview will ultimately result in a wrong relationship with God, and a wrong worship, or even no worship of God.
Once again, we find ourselves as Christians, especially the younger generation of Christians, standing on Mount Carmel
presented on the one side with Elijah, and on the other side, the multitude of priests and prophets of Baal and Asherah.
Let’s talk a little bit about what these are in our day.
I’m sure that many of you are aware of the great turmoil that is enveloping United States today.
It is difficult to ignore the incessant news about the ongoing riots with Black Lives Matter and Antifa,
the growing political divide between the left and the right.
I’m not sure about you, but on my Facebook and Youtube, I get a lot of these videos about police brutality,
and honestly when I watch those, I feel upset and indignant.
How can the police, who are supposed to protect people, do these seemingly oppressive things?
Social media will be happy to keep feeding you video after video like this, to stir up your inward outrage,
a sense of unfairness, injustice and moral indignation about the situation.
It leaves you angry, maybe even a sense of righteous anger.
So what do we make of this news?
Well, here is where the first failure of our Christian discipleship and formation comes into focus.
Most of us, as Christians, do not have a clear sense of what to make of these situations, because we haven’t talked about it as a Church.
As a result, many of us default to our feelings or to whatever the news and propaganda it is that we’re being fed with, sometimes even fake news.
There is a vacuum in our discipleship because we have not been taught clearly
or studied this issue of what God’s vision is concerning these things.
So what do the priests of Baal and Asherah tell us about the world today?
Let’s listen to what they are offering you, the temptation.
They tell us that it is all about power, about oppressors and the oppressed, about the privileged and the underprivileged.
They want us to see the world through the lens of the haves and the have-nots.
In this way, you will judge everything and everyone you see and divide them into two classes,
the rich and the poor, for instance; The powerful and the downtrodden, the privileged and the exploited,
the majority versus the minority, whether it’s by race, economic class, gender or even sexuality.
This idea of placing everyone within some kind of socio-economic class was something that developed out of Marxism,
and today, goes under different names, such as critical theory, intersectionality, Identitarianism, Cultural-Marxism, and so on.
For them, all history is basically about class struggles.
The idea seems to be to take power from the oppressor and to give it to the oppressed
as a way of equalising these struggles.
Injustice for them is defined by the gap that exists between these competing classes,
and the means of overthrowing the oppressors, how you level things out is usually through violent revolution.
Their belief is that they tear down what they consider an evil and unjust social structure or value system,
they would free people from oppressive systems and traditions,
and we would naturally gravitate towards a more just society.
Now who doesn’t want a just society?
This sort of emancipatory politics is very attractive to many people
because most of us are good people who want a just and fair society,
Decent people everywhere get upset when we see people victimised, exploited, or oppressed by other groups
and there’s often a visceral emotional reaction that accompanies this because we can see ourselves as potential victims.
It is often here, then, that we are invited to join their social justice revolution,
and to do something to assuage the outrage that we feel inside.
They promise that if you join them, they can create a utopia of radical egalitarianism,
a classless society where no one has any advantage over the other, not unlike the promise of Communism and Socialism.
But the question is, is this vision God’s vision for our society?
As christians, you have to ask yourself this - Is this God’s idea? Is this how God wants us to see the world?
And sadly, the Church has been silent on this issue, it has not been clear about God’s vision,
and that is why our young people are often left without a compass to help them choose their sides.
Our silence has left a vacuum that the Left will gleefully fill, so let’s think about this for a bit.
First of all, class theory is often binary in nature, but it lacks nuance that reflects the reality and the different stations of life.
At any given time, we are not just this or that class, we can be members of multiple classes,
and we can be privileged in some ways, and we can be underprivileged in some other ways,
but the mob will simply slap a label on you without a thought.
You’re either this or that, it’s very binary.
So you’re either for them, or against them. And that’s the bottom line.
Secondly, we do not see Jesus on a mission to abolish class in the gospels.
In the time of Jesus, political oppression and slavery was rife. The poor were everywhere
but we do not see Jesus leading a revolution to overthrow the political establishment or the powers that be.
Was Jesus blind to these issues? Obviously not!
In fact, there were those who wanted to push Jesus to lead a revolution, something which Jesus refused to do, saying
[Passage Reading]
For the world, the answer to the problem of (in)equality was power.
They want power to be redistributed and that brings me to the third problem of this view.
Left to themselves, who is going to decide how the power is distributed?
There can never be equal distribution of power, so you’re going to need a greater entity
to police this distribution, and that is an all-powerful state.
The state will enforce equality, but history has taught us that
states are made up of people and people are fundamentally corrupt and selfish.
Because of this, every Socialist experiment in history has failed,
because the state cannot rise above the foibles of humanity.
The people who make up the state are themselves fallible.
Instead of equality, we usually end up with tyranny and Authoritarianism.
Instead of freedom, we are now being told of a great number of restrictions -
things you cannot say, things you cannot think, words that you cannot use, (words that you) cannot mention, and opinions that you cannot hold.
In short, like the serpent’s lie, while the promise of the worldly narrative has an appealing ring to it and promises Heaven on Earth,
the truth is that it will result in a completely broken world, and a broken relationship with God.
What sounds and feels right in the beginning ends up corrupting our soul and prevents the true worship of God.
Instead of peace, we become addicted to outrage and the feeling of self-righteousness.
If we do not see the world through the lens of class, how should we see the world?
I want to refer you to a very curious passage in Genesis 4:3-7,
[Passage reading]
I don’t know about you, but in reading this passage, there’s a (kind of) feeling of unfairness.
Why should Abel’s offering be preferred over Cain’s?
Verse 4 says that God respected Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. The word “respected” here is really not a very good translation.
In reality, the word is better translated “looked upon with favour” or “preferred.” So God preferred Abel’s offering over Cain’s and Cain got very angry with this.
In his mind, and probably many of ours too, fairness demands that God must have no preference and no favorites,
and must treat everything and everyone with radical equality.
I am sure many of us can understand why Cain was so offended
because the truth of the matter is that many of us would have felt the same way in his shoes - slighted, not acknowledged, not valued.
We would feel that we have been deprived of something that we were entitled to and our self-esteem injured.
It turns out, God doesn’t see the world the way we see it. How, then, should Cain have responded to this situation?
Well, for one - Cain could have rejoiced at Abel’s success, couldn’t he?
I mean, "Great work! Wow! Well done, Abel; I'm so glad that you did well!"
In the same way, the elder brother of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 could have rejoiced in the return of the younger brother;
But instead, all he could see was how he was deprived from his entitlement and became angry at his father instead.
They responded that way from a place of insecurity. They did not believe they were loved.
These are just two of a great many such examples in the Bible which tell us that God has a very different worldview than that which we are accustomed to.
It is not a worldview of radical egalitarianism or equality, nor is it one that defines life in terms of a quest for power. No, God has a narrative of love and compassion.
Exo 20:17 tells us that we should not covet our neighbour’s belongings.
Christians should not go through life comparing what they have with what other people have because our security is in God.
So what if someone else has more than us? So what if the guy who came in and worked only one hour gets paid the same as you who have worked a whole day?
These upset workers complained to the landowner, saying:
[Passage Reading]
I want to suggest to you that every time you start to think "This is unfair,"
you are actually being seduced by a worldview that is not from God, because God has a radically different value system. Jesus’ reply to them was this:
[Passage Reading]
Does this mean that hard work has no merit or value? Of course not.
The secret to really understanding this passage is to see the world through the eyes of goodness, kindness, compassion, and grace.
If you don't have these things, you will never understand this - you will feel upset!
If you cannot see that Jesus wanted to bless even those who were undeserving, you will surely fret over this passage and find it offensive - as many surely do.
If so, Jesus says that your eye is evil - meaning that you’re not a generous person and your worldview is different from that of God’s.
How you read this passage will determine whether you rejoice over it, or fret over it. It will reveal what your underlying worldview is.
Do you see yourself as a victim deprived - or do you see yourself as someone sharing in the blessing of others?
Whereas the world is utterly concerned that we get what we are entitled to, Jesus is concerned about giving and serving.
Where the world is caught up with their rights, Jesus is concerned with grace.
The world is concerned with power but Jesus tells his disciples that they should not lord it over the others. In Matthew 20:25,
[Passage Reading]
This is radical Christianity and radical compassion. Unless you have the Spirit of God, I don’t think you can understand God’s perspective and worldview here.
Paul warns Timothy:
[Passage Reading]
This vision of God grates against our flesh
and if we want to follow Jesus, we’re going to have to crucify that fleshly worldview to take up God’s compassionate worldview.
Today as the prophets of Baal and Asherah bombard us with a worldly message
trying to subvert our innate passions to an idolatrous cause disguised under the label of social justice - I want to challenge you to put on God’s worldview.
Don’t become a social justice warrior, but become an ambassador of Christ’s compassion and kindness.
When we help the needy, we do not see them as victims of systemic oppression,
but we see them as opportunities for the kindness and generosity of a compassionate God.
There is this part within each of us that wants to burst out in moral outrage but just as God told Cain in Gen 4:7, we need to rule over that reaction:
[Passage Reading]
In Conclusion, just as it was for the children of Israel who gathered on Mt. Carmel - today, we too need to pick a side.
The side we pick will deeply shape our worship and our discipleship.
Just as we seek to purify our worship, in this time of COVID19,
one of the most important things we will need to do is to anchor our worldview in the Bible and not in the flesh.
Once you align yourself to how God sees the world,
you will be able to order your choices and actions in such a way that each one of them becomes an act of worship.
For God, justice and righteousness is not bound up with the emotions and instincts of the flesh, but with alignment with the vision of God.
I want you to think about your worldview today.
Is it one that is aligned with God’s narrative of compassion, or have you bought into the world’s narrative of power and class?
Are you living in the security and faith of God's perfect love - or are you living like a victim?
Spiritual revival today begins with this alignment and I pray that you will find yourself on the side of the God of Elijah!
"Lord, we pray that you will turn our hearts around, and cause every one of us to be spiritually aligned to you in this day and time.
May the Lord bless all of us in the name of Jesus, amen!"
[Thank you for coming, everyone!]
