Transformed Through Worship | Elijah Lamb

Join us for a powerful sermon on the true essence of worship and its profound impact on our transformation as followers of Christ. Dive deep into the insights from the book of Revelation, as we explore how every knee bowing and every tongue confessing that Christ is Lord is not only significant but transformative.

In this message, we'll uncover eye-opening teachings from the Apostle Paul about sanctification and how worship is more than a mere experience—it's a catalyst for personal transformation. Discover the importance of rightly placed worship and how it shapes our identity as image-bearers of God.

Through biblical examples and engaging analogies, learn about the innate desire within us to reflect what we revere. Explore how genuine worship leads us to become more like Jesus, impacting our lives from the inside out. Whether you're questioning why we worship the way we do or seeking a deeper connection with God, this message is for you.

Don't miss this enlightening journey into the heart of worship, where we align our hearts with heaven's perspective and live lives that truly honor the Lamb of God.

Remember to like, comment, and subscribe for more inspiring messages.

#Worship #Transformation #Sanctification #ApostlePaul #ChristianLiving #Jesus #BookOfRevelation

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Transcript

 So I want to share this morning on worship.

As we've been going through the book of Revelation, we were building up this really cool moment in Revelation where literally what we just described, every knee bowing and every tongue confessing that Christ is Lord, really happens.

And every angel and creature and elder and person who's ever lived proclaiming the glory and beauty and wonder of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who has taken away the sins of the world.

It's really dramatic and amazing.

And

 You've all seen this morning, if you've been to our church a couple times, you've stepped in the room in cathedral, you've seen that when we gather and when we worship, that's kind of one of our distinctives.

That's kind of one of the things that makes us us, is that we are going to go crazy.

That is who we are.

We are going to shout.

You're going to hear weird noises.

We are going to sing loudly.

You're going to hear stomping feet.

We're going to dance and lift our hands.

We're going to do those things.

 It can be easy to look at that and sort of wonder why.

Maybe you were here for the second service last week and you're like, why did these people go an hour longer than usual?

Like, why are we doing that?

And that happened, right?

Two weeks ago.

You know, I've been gone the whole time.

So time is not a thing for me right now, man.

Anyway, two weeks ago.

Darn.

Should have checked the timeline on that one.

Anyway.

 I'm embarrassed.

No, I'm sort of wondering, like, man, what is up with these people and the way that they worship?

Maybe you didn't grow up in that kind of church.

Or maybe you're a part of Cathedral and you're like, dude, we talked about this in Essentials.

They let me know.

Praise is one of our things.

This is what we do.

But sort of like I'm wondering a little bit more why.

So I want to talk about worship.

 To get there, I want to talk about the Apostle Paul.

I love Paul and classic.

He wrote like a ton of the New Testament legend.

San Pablo, you know, he's a goat and a huge fan of him.

And in the book of First Thessalonians, which is probably the earliest letter that he wrote in chapter four, there's all these famous, really, really short verses that are like two to three words long.

They're awesome.

Super easy to memorize.

You know, you can learn rejoice always.

And you can be like, yeah, memorize the Bible verse this week.

 You know, pray without ceasing.

Oh, that's a whole verse, really, in Thessalonians.

Got that one down.

You know, you get Bible books downstairs if you go to the right kids leader.

 My favorite one, though, has always been, since I was in high school when I first started to read the Bible, is 1 Thessalonians 4, verse 3, where Paul says, very simply, this is the will of God, your sanctification.

The word sanctification means to become holy, to become holy, to become more like Jesus.

And, you know, I, growing up in the church, I had all these, like, confusion all the time.

Like, what am I, what's my calling?

What does God want me to do?

What nation am I supposed to go to?

Or something like that.

Like, I needed some big, dramatic, lifelong Elijah.

This is your one calling.

 The only thing I'll ever really want from you.

And that's just like, not the way the Bible talks about it.

And so this is a very relieving verse for me.

What's my calling from God?

Be holy, right?

Like what is God?

What is God's will for your life?

Be transformed.

You want to know what God cares about for you and for your story is that you would become like Jesus in every way.

That's God's will do that.

And you'll be fine.

You know, like all the other like mission based stuff.

It's like become like Jesus and the mission will find its way to you.

You know, that's the way that I've begun to think.

And, um,

 In the Apostle Paul's writings and thinking, another way of talking about transformation or sanctification is, and this is sort of like the big meta version, is recreation.

And that sort of fits into the big overarching story of the Bible.

The meta-narrative of Scripture.

If you've gone through essentials, you've heard that big, crazy, nerdy phrase.

The meta-narrative of Scripture.

And basically, the story of the Bible can be summarized in three words.

 Ready?

Write this down.

Write this down.

This is huge.

Creation, decreation, recreation.

Those are the three words.

Creation, God made everything good.

We were like, yo, I have this idea.

What if we ruined it?

And God was like, yeah.

So then he was like, all right, I'm going to fix it.

And so the rest of the Bible, everything past Genesis 3 is us like, we're going to ruin it even harder.

And God is like, I am totally going to fix this.

 And so the story is us sort of being drawn nearer and nearer to God and joining him in this process of remaking the world.

And so God has this desire, as is communicated all throughout Scripture, to make all things new.

He wants to make all things new and re-beautify the world that we live in.

And that includes you.

God wants to remake and recreate and transform you as an individual.

Not only does he want to re-beautify and recreate the world around you, but he wants to recreate the world inside of us.

Does that make sense?

 And so we get this sense that sanctification or transformation toward holiness is really about recreation from several places in the Apostle Paul's letters where he talks about us being made like the image of Christ.

So let me give you three examples really quick.

This will be cool, I think.

It'll be a little cool.

Romans 8, verse 29.

The Bible says, Paul says, for those he foreknew, for those God foreknew, be also predestined.

I'm going to pretend that word's not in there.

 For those he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

Conformed to the image of his son.

Let me show you Colossians chapter 3, verse 10.

Paul says in verse 9 that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self.

And you are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your creator.

 And then lastly, in 2 Corinthians 3, 18, Paul says, we all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image.

 from glory to glory.

This is from the Lord who is the Spirit.

So Paul is picking up and reusing language from the book of Genesis.

In Genesis 1, 26 to 28, the Bible says, God says, let us make man in our image.

And here's something really important to understand.

When the book of Genesis came on the scene in the ancient world, in the ancient Near Eastern world with lots of surrounding societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylon, like all of these cultures that are around Israel, they all had really complex, crazy cosmological stories, cosmologies or origin stories that

 of their culture and the universe as a whole.

They had long, very, very sort of God-infused explanations of where things came from.

They had these large pantheons, and each of these different gods were of different ranks, played different roles in the making of the world and the creation of things the way that they were experiencing them.

And so when Genesis comes on the scene, it makes some tremendously difficult and controversial claims in light of the other stories that people around Israel would have been familiar with.

 There's really two.

The first one is that there's only one God.

Monotheism is novel to the Bible.

Before the scripture, before the Bible that we still read today, there is no such thing as monotheism.

There is not a culture or religion in the entire world that believed there was only one God and that he reigns supreme over all creation and that he made everything.

So that's Genesis' first crazy, wild, amazing claim.

The second one is that man is made in God's image and that all men are made in God's image.

 Okay, everyone hearing that in the ancient world or reading those words would have had a good idea of what was meant.

We kind of miss out because we don't really talk that way anymore.

And so can I give you some nerd context really quick so that you can understand the book of Genesis and therefore the New Testament.

Okay, cool.

Send me a thumbs up here because I'm feeling discouraged.

Okay.

So in the ancient Near Eastern world where Israel is, there were political images and cultic images.

Okay, everyone say political and cultic.

 I intentionally use two words that feel like gross and weird, like political and cultic.

Gross, I don't want to talk about either of those things.

The political images served, so basically what a political image was in the ancient Near East was like, hey, so let's say you were a king or a queen.

You know, Egypt had like brief matriarchal societies.

It was pretty tight.

You know, it was a whole thing.

And then, or maybe you were like an emperor or something and you had won a lot of land and you had all these tribes and villages underneath your authority, but you have like a palace in one city because you can't be in multiple places at once because you're,

 a human person.

And so the person who was like reigning and they were reigning in their palace, they would put up like images.

So statues or like propaganda of themselves and other places that they technically owned and ruled over so that the people in those places would know who was in charge.

That's a political image.

Uh, and then Kings and Queens were said to literally bear the image of the gods and represent their dominion and rule.

Um, and, and they reflected their glory as like a manifestation of manifestation of their presence and authority in the world.

So like

 The kings or the pharaohs, for example, were thought to be sons of gods.

And it's the whole thing.

That's the political.

Then you have cultic or ceremonial religious images.

And this is just like when ancient people would build temples.

They would then make an image of that god, like a statue, an idol of that god.

And they didn't think it was just like a pretty picture.

They thought that that god literally infused its power and presence into that image.

So that when they came into the temple, their gods, their pantheons, were really there to

 in the images.

It's crazy.

And so that is the language that Moses is intentionally pulling on when he says this in Genesis 1.

He's not saying that those guys are necessarily getting it right, but there's a sense in which they have something.

And for Moses to say that we, all people, bear God's image, what he means to say...

 is that we are meant on the earth to reflect God's authority over all creation as his co-rulers.

So we are those symbols of who is in charge over everything that exists.

And we are embodied reminders of his presence in the world.

We show that there really is one God, and we're symbols of his presence in creation.

And so we are walking, talking, living, breathing, cultic, and political images that show the presence and authority of the God who made everything.

Basically, we reflect God.

 And this fact about us, the fact that you bear the image of God according to Genesis, is the most fundamental thing about you.

Preachers often say things like, or Christians often say things like, oh, you were made.

 to worship.

And that is true.

That is absolutely correct.

You were made to worship, but that's not the most fundamental thing about you.

That's not what makes us different from the rest of creation.

Everything that exists, exists to worship.

That's not unique for human beings.

According to the Bible, rocks worship.

If we don't do it, they'll start doing it.

The angels worship, the creatures worship, animals worship in a sense.

That's at least what Paul thinks throughout

 the book of Romans and other places, like everything that exists, exists to proclaim the glory and beauty of God.

So that's not what makes humans us, what makes us us.

And the real shocking claim of Genesis is not that we ought to worship God, but that we reflect God, that we look like him, that we resemble him, that we bear his image.

 And so the very, very bad news of the Bible with that fact in mind is that we have sort of, in a sense, we've forfeited that image.

We retain the image of God, but in a very marred, disfigured, misaligned way.

And the church fathers, who were writing sometimes 1,800 years ago,

 like in the second and third generation of the church, they tried to explain this.

And the language that they would use, in Genesis, God says, let us make man in our image and let us make man in our likeness.

And that's really just two ways of saying basically the same thing.

But the church fathers were trying so hard to explain that human beings no longer exist the way that they're supposed to, that they went, being in God's image and God's likeness are two different things, and we've lost one and we've kept the other.

 I wouldn't go that far, but this is like ancient Christian thinking.

They're just trying to explain this tension.

Something has happened to us that has so deeply disfigured what we're supposed to be that we no longer exist in God's world the way that he intended.

The crucial beginning fact of Christianity is that God is good and that there is something wrong with us.

It's awesome.

It's so positive.

It's amazing.

That's the way that things begin.

Coming to Christ begins with a recognition of...

 This isn't right.

Something needs to happen here.

That's literally the way that you get the first foot in the door is through repentance and confession and recognizing your need for God's forgiveness.

And so here's what's crucial.

That loss of that image, that step away from being what we're supposed to be in the book of Genesis, that happens, that forfeiting that we've all participated in, happened in the original case in Adam and Eve and their decision to put something else in the place of God.

 By misplacing our worship and putting our priorities in the wrong order, we lose what it means to really be human according to God's design.

We forfeit what it means to really live in the image of God, to really reflect and resemble the Lord.

 And the question is, why does it work that way?

Because Paul's like, look, dude, I want you to be remade into Christ's image.

You're not imaging him the way that you're supposed to.

And there's all this language.

Here's what God is trying to do.

He's trying to transform you by bringing you back to the image of Christ, by bringing you back to the archetype of what humans are supposed to be like, trying to reinvent you and recreate you.

But how did me worshiping the wrong thing result in such an ultimate effect where there's now something wrong with me?

How are those two things connected?

 Okay, this is really cool.

We're going to get even a little nerdier.

This is like a central thought throughout the Old Testament, that those who worship idols become like them.

That if you worship the wrong thing, you'll remake yourself into that different, uglier image over time.

So let me give you some examples.

Psalm 115, verses 4-8 says that their idols, the people who worship other gods, their idols are silver and gold made by human hands.

They have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see.

They have ears but cannot hear, noses but cannot smell.

 They have hands but cannot feel, feet but cannot walk.

In other words, they're useless.

And those who make them are just like them, as are all who trust.

Jeremiah chapter 2, verse 5.

This is what the Lord says.

What fault did your ancestors find in me that they went so far for me, followed worthless idols, and became worthless themselves?

It's more of that imitation of whatever it is that you worship.

And lastly, Hosea 9, chapter 9, verse 10.

This is like the strongest one, I think.

 God says, I discovered Israel like grapes in the wilderness.

I saw your ancestors like the first fruit of the fig tree in its first season.

God's like, I've chosen you, but you rejected me.

You went to Baal Peor, which is a place of worship, another temple basically, and consecrated themselves to shame and became abhorrent like the thing they love.

So a consistent teaching through the Old Testament is that if you worship something, you will become like that thing.

 that you really inwardly, you bear the image of whatever God you worship, you will remake yourself into the wrong thing based on what you prioritize and what you love and desire most.

So as you and I, we can't avoid the fact that we're going to worship things.

The problem is if we do it to the wrong thing, it has a deeper effect on us than we often realize.

When we declare ultimate allegiance to something, when we love one thing more than anything else, when we orient our lives around a certain desire, when we make a God out of something, we become like that thing.

 And we become disfigured as we're transformed into the image of that thing.

This happens because when you make a God out of something, whether you know it or not, you are giving that thing every right to decide what you become.

You're laying down your rights to self-actualization, which you think you would retain in the situation, but actually you're surrendering that and going, my desire for this thing is, I'm so shaped by that desire that I will become whatever it wants me to be.

Another way of explaining this, here comes my Elijah analogies.

Have you ever seen Terminator 2?

 Incredible movie.

You know the T-1000, the non-Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator, who's the bad guy who can, like, touch people and then, like, the metal alloy, like, reforms into the other person.

Or, like, you ever seen, like, X-Men?

You know, I love those old X-Men movies.

So good.

You know, like, Harry Chess, Hugh Jackman.

You guys know what I'm talking about.

And, you know, Mystique, the blue lady who, like, her skin, like, and she can... Okay, so should I just keep listing shapeshifters in movies?

You know, Beast Boy, Teen Titans, that's a clutch one.

You know what I'm talking about.

 You're a skinwalker.

No, the Bible's perception of you is that you're a spiritual shapeshifter.

That's the way the Bible speaks of you.

That's the Old Testament.

You shapeshift into the image of whatever thing that you want most.

And that's a fact about worship that we have to recognize.

The fact that we become whatever we behold is not a flaw or a bug, but an intentional feature of worship.

God intended for worship to do that to us.

Worship and praise has been designed by God to be, by nature, transformative to the person who does it.

 So it's not like this thing, it's like, oh man, I can't stop becoming what I worship.

Yeah, that's not a negative thing.

It's supposed to work that way.

You're just supposed to worship the right thing.

G.K.

Beale says this.

This is really helpful, I think.

He says, at the core of our beings, we are imaging creatures.

It is not possible to be neutral on this issue.

We either reflect the creator or something in creation.

All humans have been created to be reflecting beings, and they will reflect whatever they are ultimately committed to.

Thus, we resemble what we revere, either for ruin,

 or for restoration.

And so then, here's like the double trouble for us.

Like, we've lost this image, and we keep remaking ourselves into the wrong things, and I'm like, this is like, the picture is just getting drearier.

John Calvin says, I think this is the best way to put it, he says, the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols.

 Yeah, you're so right.

I am so good at making gods out of things that should not be God.

In fact, I have a talent for it.

You know, nobody ever needed to teach me that.

I'm incredible.

Give me something I enjoy.

I'm like one of those real obsessive guys.

Like, you introduce me to some new hobby, I worship that thing for six to seven weeks.

Oh, there's one Gen Z that got my slip up there.

Okay, sorry about that.

 In other words, the teaching of the Bible, seriously, that was an accident.

In other words, there is often, what the Bible is teaching is that there is often a competition happening in us about who and what we should become.

There's competing voices.

There are competing images that you're being remade to.

It's like you're being morphed into multiple things at the same time.

It's gross.

Here's what the Bible describes and says.

Ephesians 2, verse 10.

God says that we're his masterpiece.

 It's literally the word we get poem from.

We're this wonderful creative act that God has pieced together.

It's incredible.

And so God and his love is trying to keep us beautiful and do his thing.

The best way that I feel like I can explain this is God's role in our lives today is to be one of those really cool people you see on the internet whose whole job is to restore really old art.

 You know, they're like putting in new frames and they're doing like, I don't know how they do what they do, but you know, they're wiping stains off, I guess, or something like, you know what I mean?

Fixing the paint, freshening it up, making it look like it used to look.

You know what I'm talking about?

You ever seen like in an art museum when they paint the marble statues and they're like, they actually would have looked like this.

And you're like, that's hideous.

They should have kept it plain.

You know, I always thought the Greeks were onto something, but it turns out they painted those statues hideous colors.

It's like,

 You don't know that until you nerd out about it, okay?

So God's thing, he's like, he's putting us up.

He's restoring tears in the canvas.

He's going over faded paint.

He's trying to make us look more like Jesus, trying to bring us back to what we're supposed to look like.

It's incredible.

And then we, in our foolishness, because we're really good at worshiping the wrong stuff, we invite over some other artists to come take a look and see if they can contribute to the picture.

And they come and they get close.

And then, wham, it turns out it's actually a climate protester.

And now you have tomato soup all over your canvas and you look like a fool.

 You've got to be a good idea.

And then they come up and they ugly you up.

Like, that's what worshiping the wrong thing does to you.

You with me?

And so God's intention in our lives is to restore us to what was lost.

What we lost, we lost it in the original, in Adam and Eve, and in our lives, we've lost it through an act of disordered, misplaced worship.

 And so God's strategy for leading us toward who we're supposed to be is rightly placed, rightly ordered worship.

We need to reverse engineer this.

If we've walked into sin and if we've invited dysfunction into our lives through worshiping the wrong stuff, the way that we bring order into our lives and beauty and peace instead of chaos is by worshiping the right thing.

And so that is what God is going to do.

He's going to shepherd us in this direction.

Come to rightly placed, rightly ordered praise and worship.

You with me?

 And so God has designed worship and specifically praise through song to transform us.

That's why we do this.

Because God has made it in such a way that it changes who we are.

And God's will is what, Paul says?

Your sanctification.

Listen to what James K. Smith says.

He says, worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and re-habituates our loves.

 Worship isn't just something we do.

It is where God does something to us.

Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

 I love that.

That's so cool.

I love thinking about it that way.

It's like, oh, more is happening.

There's so much invisible.

Like the Christian life is full of invisible things that we can't see.

Like that's the story of communion.

There's a visible thing happening, but the real reality is the invisible thing underneath it all.

So the visible thing is like we're having like a piece of bread and some grape juice.

But the invisible thing is that we're receiving grace.

We're receiving the presence of God.

And we hold to that with faith.

And the same is the case when we worship.

The Christian life is full of these things.

 It looks like I'm singing and lifting my hand, but the invisible story is that I'm being transformed.

My soul is being brought back to where it is supposed to be.

That's what God is doing.

I think that's cool.

Lots of Christians in history, and especially charismatics like us, have thought of worship as a space that we as the church are constructing together, that we're building together this place for God to come and dwell.

Here's my favorite example.

 Scriptural example of example of it in Psalm 132 verses three to five.

Israelites, they say, I will not enter my bed or into my house and I will not get into my bed.

I will not allow my eyes to sleep or my eyelids to slumber until I find a place for the Lord, a dwelling for the mighty one of Jacob.

I kind of just love that verse and just wanted to read it because it's so cool.

 I love that attitude.

Listen to the way that they're describing their act of worship.

I'm not going to lay down.

I'm not going to rest.

I'm not going to give slumber to my eyes.

I won't do it until the Lord has somewhere to dwell, until he has somewhere to live.

And so the way that we think of worship is in the same way.

We think of ourselves when we sing and dance and shout and give and pray.

We think of ourselves as building a habitation and a dwelling place for God, a place that God is welcome to come and indwell and to be present in.

We are

 welcoming the Spirit, and asking Him to make His presence obvious to us, even as we are offering sacrifices of praise to God.

So we're offering something to God, and we're asking God, like, come and be here.

Come and be here and respond to this.

And the amazing thing about the Lord is that He's promised to make His church a place that He will live in.

He will dwell here.

And so in His mercy, He responds to us time and time and time again.

 The amazing things about being a Christian is that when you come and you engage with God, you'll find that you often have real, amazing encounters with God where we are deeply aware of his presence and his nearness to us and his love for us and his power in our lives where there's just something happening.

You with me?

And the thing we have to get about why that occurs is because God wants to transform us.

Every encounter you have with the Spirit is about God wanting to form you into his image.

That is what is the real story underneath.

That is what God is trying to do.

 And what I've learned from being led by really incredible shepherds and pastors and disciplers is that these people do nothing on accident.

Like ever.

Or at least it feels that way.

Like I can tell you when I sat down with Pastor James, I feel like I'm sitting there and I'm thinking and we're talking about stuff and the dude can see the future.

You know, like I don't understand how it works, but we're talking through some decision that feels like not a big deal to me.

But he's thinking like 30 decisions down the line.

Like he sees the big picture of what God wants to do in my life and knows how this tiny decision is going to get me there.

 So it's like this thing that feels insignificant to me, like, oh, I'd rather not serve.

But like James knows, oh, God wants to produce humility in you because you're so arrogant.

And so it's like you actually need to serve because there's a calling of God.

He didn't say that part.

He just knew that part.

He's like, but God, there's a calling on your life.

And so this actually small decision that seems insignificant to you, it's actually a big deal.

When you find it like good shepherds and pastors, they think that way.

They don't miss an opportunity to see you transformed.

 And so when I think of our pastors, like Pastor James and Pastor Jake and Pastor Nicole, they're some of the most intentional thinkers I've ever met in my life.

Like, it's transformed the way that I think about my own life to hear that they're thinking the domino effect of this will lead to this.

And I'm like, man, I think one decision at a time.

You know what I'm talking about?

I don't think about the consequences of my actions almost ever.

It's like, this is insane.

 And so this is what God does with us.

God sees the big picture of what he wants to do in your life.

He looks a thousand steps down the road, and so he knows what to do, what he needs to do, and what you need to do to bring that about.

This is what God is like.

He will never, ever, ever waste an opportunity to change us and lead us into life.

He takes advantage of everything.

He will let nothing happening in your life go to waste.

He'll use everything to transform you.

 It's like so good.

Like that's the Christian thought around suffering is that even though suffering is not in the world because God wanted to be in the world, he will use every instance of harm and suffering and pain for our good.

He will not let them go to waste.

He won't.

He's too good at his job.

He's too good at being a dad.

He's too good at being a shepherd and a leader.

He's too good at it.

It's awesome.

And so when you experience God's presence, listen, the point is for you to be changed.

And if you believe you had an encounter or an exchange with God and you have not been transformed,

 I wonder if you had an encounter with God.

You with me?

There's a question I'd like us to consider, though, this morning, of what actually counts as an encounter with God.

 Because I feel like humans, Christians, we have this tendency of missing the fact that we've experienced the Holy Spirit in a time of worship or prayer or Bible study because we've limited the scope of what counts.

We've so minimized what we think actually counts as an encounter with the Spirit that it happens to us all the time and we literally miss it.

So here I have eight things for you according to the Bible that count as encounters with God.

 And because I don't think that there's one that's better than the other, I've just put them in alphabetical order.

Do we have the slide for that?

Okay, sick.

Here you go.

So you have awe of God or fear of God.

If you want to look at that later and go read those examples, you can do that.

These are like basic.

This is not all of them, but these are things that happen to people in the scripture when they meet with God.

No, no, you go ahead.

No, seriously.

Go ahead.

Go ahead, guys.

 I just get out of that for you.

These are the things that go down.

This is the stuff that the Holy Spirit does.

If you experience one of these things, that's an encounter with God.

So if you walk away and you feel awe, like you feel wonder, you feel amazed at who God is and what he's done,

 That's the Holy Spirit.

That's what he does to people in the Bible.

When God meets the people, this happens all the time.

They leave just feeling wonder.

Oh, like amazed.

Like, wow, I can't believe God is really like that.

That's like standard.

If you leave with a commission or a calling, like a burden, like I need to do something.

Like I need to spend the next 10 years of my life doing this thing.

Or I need to be nicer to my mom.

You know what I'm saying?

Like it doesn't need to be full scale.

 that's the spirit going hey i have something for you that's like standard like that's the main one people meet god in his presence and we think we're reading the stories in the bible like oh this is going to be so beautiful god's going to be like you're a son i love you i'm just here to meet with you no god's always like hey yo it's me god i love you so i have this thing for you to do like that's like standard interaction that's all the time if you're in worship and you get a burden on your heart for something something something you're like oh that matters to me more than it did before i came here

 That's the Holy Spirit.

That's an encounter with God.

You met God.

Like, oh my goodness.

Okay, if you experience comfort, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the comforter.

This is a title that Jesus gives to the Spirit.

If you experience some kind of supernatural comfort due to some issue in your life or uneasiness in your life or some pain in your life, to whatever extent, if you experience comfort, that's the Spirit's job.

That's not you just like, wow, man, this atmosphere is making me feel better.

Stop, that's the Spirit.

That's what He does.

That's the Spirit's role.

He is the comforter.

Oh my goodness.

Okay, and then you have conviction.

 Nobody wants that encounter, but that's such a meaningful one.

Jesus says, the Spirit's coming in the world to convict people of sin and righteousness.

This is the Spirit's job.

The Spirit loves you so much, and He'll get in your face and be like, yo, this thing...

 We're done with that thing.

We're leaving that thing behind because I love you and I know it's best for you.

We're done.

Listen, they're not the easiest, most comfortable, most amazing ones.

But I'll tell you right now, some of the most transformational, like life-changing moments I've had with God were when the Holy Spirit got in my face and turned me around on my way and said, this is what you need to do instead.

Conviction is an encounter with God.

It's an act of God's mercy.

It's the presence and power of the Spirit.

You met with God if you felt convicted and you felt prompted to repent and leave forgiven.

That's the Spirit.

 I don't have a good name for this one, but there's physical experiences.

You can read those examples.

It happens to people in the Bible.

God's presence is so potent and powerful that people are like, oh my goodness, I have a real physical, tactile, tangible sense that God is here.

That happens to people.

What charismatics do is we take that one and we go, that's the real one.

That one's real.

 Yeah, those things are cool.

That's God's favorite.

Stop it.

That's not how it works.

That's not the way that it works.

It's like I got the shakes or I started to laugh or I started to cry.

Stop.

There's not an immediate natural connection between an encounter with God and how emotional you feel.

Sometimes it makes you emotional, but not every time.

That's not the way that it works.

Okay, number six, joy.

 David says, I feel joy in your presence.

If you leave and you just feel happier than when you showed up.

Oh no, it's just like the people are so... Stop it.

It's the Holy Spirit.

That's the way that he works.

That's so... Man, like I like to tell people like, man, if you don't think joy really counts as a real encounter with God, you want to skip back in my life when I was literally so lost and deep in depression and suicidal ideations and God showed up and infused my heart with joy supernaturally.

You don't get to look at Elijah's situation and go...

 That's not a very interesting encounter.

Oh my goodness, I was desperate for joy and the Holy Spirit gave it to me.

And so when I leave with a smile on my face, I go, I remember the God who does this stuff.

That's the joy of the Spirit.

That's an encounter with God.

Number seven is love.

 Paul says in Romans 5 that God, the Holy Spirit, will pour out the love of the Father into your heart.

If you leave church with a deepened sense of God's love for you, that's an encounter with God.

It can be entirely unemotional.

You can leave going, man, I need to have deeper faith in what God has done for me on the cross.

That's God's love being poured out into your heart.

 And number eight is revelation.

If you believe in some truth, some truth about yourself or about your life or about God has been unveiled to you, you feel a clarity about something you didn't have before, that's the Spirit's job.

That's why He's in there.

That's His thing.

That's an encounter with God.

These things are encounters with the living God.

You with me?

 But we miss them.

Because lots of these things are not very sexy.

They're not very glamorous.

They don't feel very impressive.

They're things that you can experience without the Holy Spirit's help sometimes.

You can go to a therapist and receive comfort.

You can have a mean conversation with someone and maybe feel a little bit of conviction.

Like, everybody's got a moral conscience.

Sure, whatever.

You can experience happiness, totally.

You can experience love for someone.

You can have an epiphany about something.

But there's a way the Holy Spirit does it, and it's unique.

And maybe these things look mundane to you, but this is what the Holy Spirit likes to do.

This is His stuff.

 This is the Holy Spirit stuff.

You with me?

And so here's, oh man, this stinks.

How many times have I left a worship service or a moment with God or I spent time with the Lord, I read my Bible or I was in a Bible study setting and I walked away because I wished God would have done something else.

 It's like, no, I have to come to terms with the fact that the Spirit knows exactly what we need and when we need it.

And so we have to overcome the silliness of walking away from church gatherings feeling disappointed because God didn't touch us in the way that we would have liked.

It's like, open your eyes.

The Spirit probably did touch you and you weren't paying attention because you have such a narrow scope of like, this is what counts.

 It's like, oh man, I'm done with the life of leaving church and telling the spirit of my heart that he did a bad job or that he did the wrong thing.

It's like, no God, come to me whatever way you want me, whatever way you want to, because I want the transformation of my life that you see, that you know that I need.

So we build and God responds by infusing us with his presence, by showing up and being among us and doing his thing.

And the spirit does his thing in us.

It's amazing.

 This is the second part.

The part that we never expect, though, is that he also means to build us up and transform us in the process.

So in the process of building this place for God, the act of constructing this place for God, that has a transformative power.

Not just the encounter with the Spirit.

God is too good at being God.

 So as we carry out God's construction plan, that changes us.

And it makes sense because he gave us the blueprint.

Like he snuck that in there.

As we are building this place of worship to the Lord, as we're responding to the truth with worship, even in that act, before we feel anything, before we know the Spirit has done anything in us, we've already been transformed.

You with me?

Okay, so let me give you some examples of what I mean.

I've got five really quick.

Number one, the act of praise to God by virtue of what it is forces us to renounce our idols.

 It forces us, when you throw up hands, when you begin to sing the kind of songs that we sing, it forces you to renounce other loves for any other thing.

Singing to God is necessarily an expression of disinterest in other loves and other gods.

When we're singing, only you are worthy.

 Is that true?

Like, why are we singing that?

You know what I'm saying?

Those words coming off of your lips, those are words that only someone who doesn't have idols can sing.

And so it forces us to get our idols out of the way.

You understand?

So before we even feel the presence of God, before we have a mighty, crazy encounter on the floor, before we get to any of those places, in the act of worshiping, we've already shooed our idols away.

We've already pushed them to the side.

You understand?

 That's formational.

When we stumble in our loyalty and our devotion to God, praise puts words on our lips that don't match a half-in heart.

It puts all the way in devoted words on our lips.

It forces us to remember how we're supposed to feel about God.

Let's go.

That's number one.

Number two, this is fun.

Here's the deal.

The real trouble of Christianity in respect to other religions is that

 The God of the Bible cares a lot about our motives.

He cares about why we do the things that we do.

Often the thought is, in other religions, the analogy that I would give you is that it's like a jacket that anybody can put on.

And it's like a bit of an inconvenience, like praying at the right time in the right direction or reading the right food label.

But...

 But anybody can do it if they try hard enough.

And that's not the way Christianity talks about transformation.

We're going, no, actually your heart is dead.

It needs to come to life.

It's hard and it needs to be refreshed.

And actually you need the Spirit of God to live in you.

And you need new eyes.

And you need new ears.

And you need a new mind.

And you need a new tongue.

All the way down the line.

No, you actually need to be literally born again and recreated.

And then you need God's grace and power in you for the rest of your life if any of this is actually going to be possible.

 And all along the way, God cares intensely about the reason why we do the things that we do.

We don't have a God in heaven who's content for you to be like, do the right stuff in the right appearance.

And it's like, oh yeah, that's fine.

No, he cares a lot about what's happening in here.

You with me?

Here's some words from the Lord in Isaiah.

These people honor me with their lips, yet their hearts are far from me.

So God doesn't want lip service.

And that is a forced confrontation with your motives.

And that's formational.

 Worship makes you confront the reason you're doing the thing.

This summer at a youth camp, at C3 Atlanta's youth camp, it was amazing, it was incredible.

I was there with Pastor Amy, and we were having a conversation with this middle school boy.

It was the purest conversation of my whole life.

And he comes up to me and he tells me, I'm feeling a lot of anxiety in worship.

I just don't feel right.

I'm like, why do you feel anxiety?

And he's like, well, because I'm lifting my hands, but I don't know if I'm lifting my hands for God or for this girl.

 And I was like, listen, that's kind of funny.

But then I was like, I stopped and I paused.

And I thought to myself, yeah, I do that all the time, bro.

Like I'm trying to impress my wife all the time with how undignified I am.

You know what I'm saying?

No, I'm just kidding.

 What I thought was, wow, what a holy and mature thought to be having.

That's what praise is supposed to do to us, right?

Like he's like responding to God and he's feeling this tension of like, is this for God or is it not?

That's what praise is supposed to do to you.

It's supposed to make you confront your motives.

The way that praise is designed is it makes you think about those things.

It makes you ask yourself why you're doing those things.

The demands that worship puts on us requires us to ask, why am I doing this?

 That's formational.

God is getting into your face.

What's going on in here?

What is your motive?

What do you really want?

Every time I praise, I have to confront that.

I don't get to ignore that.

You with me?

And that's before the Spirit even did anything.

Just in the act of worship, I have to do that.

Okay, number three.

We're called by God, this is cool, to lift our hands and to clap our hands and to sing and to shout aloud and to celebrate and dance before God, even if we don't feel like doing that.

 Even if we don't want to, we're called to celebrate and thank God in the face of any and every circumstance.

So whether you show up and you feel bone dry,

 spiritually empty, Lord, come and do your thing.

I'm not feeling your presence.

It's like, that's not how this works.

Like, I don't just sit here and like hope something happens and then I'll respond.

It's like, no, I show up ready to praise, ready to go because it's not about how I feel.

The instruction of the Bible is lift your hands, clap your hands, lift your voices, dance before the Lord.

It doesn't matter how you're feeling.

And on the other side of it is that in the opposite case, like it's like, oh, I feel apathetic.

I just don't really feel motivated.

Or it's like, man, I'm suffering tremendously.

 I'm facing really, really deep difficulty.

I have a lot of pain in me.

And it's not that God wants you to ignore that because that's unholy or something.

It's not that way.

But the truth is, when we worship in the face of difficulty, that's transformative.

That shapes the way that you think and feel about hardship for the rest of your life.

If you can look hardship and difficulty in the face and praise and thank God anyway, that will shape you.

That will make you a new person.

That's discipleship.

That is God discipling you by inviting you to worship him even when you don't want to.

It's incredible.

 Number four, we sing songs to God that are full of truth.

 This is God helping us get the truth in us in a medium that is helpful, right?

So like God helps us absorb the truth of the gospel by accepting it from us through the medium of song.

And songs are uniquely powerful for the human person.

So it's not like you come to church and like you need to go live out these truths that I'm just going to read a bulleted list to you from, right?

Like I'm going to preach, I'm going to communicate them to you.

But this isn't enough by itself.

We also need the truth given to us in song so that we can proclaim it and embody it and shout it and sing it and respond to it with all of us.

 You with me?

And so truth gets into us as we praise.

Praise helps get the truth into us in a way that it otherwise could not have.

And the Bible says the truth will set you free.

It's kind of a big deal to God.

Number five, last one.

Praise has the power to reorder us inwardly entirely because it is by nature demanding upon the whole person.

It's like David says in Psalm 103, my soul bless the Lord and all that is within me bless his name.

 Praise is one of the few things that humans can do that allows us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength all at the same time.

It's one of the only things that's demanding upon all of those things at once.

And so legitimate, real, wholehearted praise usually includes the engagement of all of those things at the same time.

Every center of affection that we have in us is called to attention all at once.

And so as you are going about your life trying to love God with your heart,

 strength the thing the thing that god has given us in his mercy that re-centers and refocuses all of those things at once and then you're like don't be going through like have i loved him with my heart i love him no no all at once i can worship god with my body with my mind my soul it's happening all at the same time praise is one of the only things i can think of that actually does that so just a few examples so cool

 And so when we think of worship, together the practice of worship, the processes we build, and the encounter with the Spirit should make us into new people.

The encounter is dead and the practice is pointless if we are not transformed by them.

However subtly, a transformation takes time.

It's often a quiet, sneaky process.

It's the invisible thing.

Sometimes it feels really dramatic, but not always.

But if we don't find ourselves being transformed over time, there's questions about the way that we're engaging in the practice and whether or not we're really encountering the Lord.

If I can have the band come up.

 Here's a common theme to the Bible.

You'll find that God spends a lot of time in the scripture talking about how gross, and I'm using the word gross on purpose, how gross he finds worship that does not lead to and arise out of transformation.

It doesn't come from and lead to a changed people.

God's not interested.

Let me give you two examples.

Jeremiah chapter 7, verses 9 to 10.

 God says to Israel, do you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and follow other gods that you have not known?

Then do you come and stand before me in this house that bears my name and say, we are rescued, so we can continue doing all these detestable acts.

God says to him in verse 15, he says, I will banish you from my presence.

 God's like, no, no, no.

I don't want you to fulfill your religious duty, like show up and do your religious thing and then go live in the world whatever way that you want to.

I'm looking for a worship that transforms the worshiper and comes from a worshiper who's been transformed.

It's like both at the same time.

I want worship from a changed person and who's here so that they can be changed.

This is a crazy one.

Amos chapter 5, 23 to 24.

God says, take away from me the noise of your songs.

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

 but let justice flow like water and righteousness like an unfailing stream.

God's like, he literally says in Amos, I hate your songs.

I hate them.

It's like, God, what are you talking about?

Yeah, because he cares about what's happening here.

He cares about why we do the things that we do.

So it's like, yeah, I'll fulfill my religious duty and then I'll go on my merry way.

God's like, no, I want righteous worship.

And so we find...

 That worship is a tool designed by God to help us calibrate our image bearing.

To help us be like him.

We approach God every single week as sinners in need of grace.

As people in need of mercy.

People who have worshipped the wrong things.

Who have followed after other gods.

Who have lived and walked in all kinds of sins and mistakes and errors and failures.

 That's not the kind of people that get dismissed.

The kind of people that get dismissed are the people who think that God doesn't care about their transformation at all.

Not the people who are being imperfectly changed.

I approach the Lord in worship every single time with God.

I feel like I have more bad to bring than good.

Like I'm, I still feel like I'm not very good at this, but that's the pure heart of like, and I want you to do something about it.

Please God, like let's work together.

Let's make me different.

The kind of worship that God is not interested in is the worship that's like, yeah, yeah, I know the routine.

I'm here.

I'll do the thing.

You understand?

 It's not about being perfect, but it's about showing up and wanting God to remake us.

So here's the deal.

We become what we worship because God made it that way.

And so here's my key point for you today.

Worship is more about personal transformation than it is about personal experience.

It's more about transformation than it is about experience.

God doesn't just want us to be focused on him.

He wants us to become like him.

So here's the simple truth that you can sort of work backward to.

 If we're not becoming like the thing we think we're worshiping, then the object of our worship is actually something else.

If you want to identify whatever it is that is God in your life, whatever it is that you want to worship, what are you becoming like?

What image are you being made into?

That's what you worship.

And so there's this pure-hearted, expressive, sacrificial worship that God desires.

And it's the kind, when we do that, it helps make us more like Jesus.

 This is why I worship.

And this is really cool.

This is how I'm going to end here.

This makes me so happy.

I thank God that worship does something to me.

That it's not just a thing I show up and do and then I have to go do all the work when I leave.

God's like, no, I'm taking advantage of this opportunity.

It's so helpful.

Even when we don't notice it, as we engage with God in worship, it is making us who we ought to be.

And when you think about how that works, God is so kind.

 In his mercy, not only is he willing to accept our shabby, whack praise as delightful, but he also uses it as a sneaky machine for a reformation, often without us even realizing it.

He's so nice, dude.

God is so nice.

God could have, in his right, he could have very well made praise this thing that is only about him and only good for him, but he didn't.

He shares it with us.

He lets it do something to us.

Like we're making it about him and God in his mercy is simultaneously making it about us.

 It's like, what?

God, I don't want you to share this thing.

No, I'm going to use this thing.

He's awesome.

And so here's the deal.

When we think about worship, if praise is what the Lamb wants, why hold anything back?

If praise is what God wants from us, what are we doing?

Why hold anything back?

We worship the way that we do at Cathedral because of that basic conviction that the Lamb is worthy of our praise and of us living transformed lives.

 And those two things are not in competition, but they work beautifully together.

When we praise extravagantly, we hold to this belief that it pleases God, it welcomes His Spirit, and it changes us.

That's why we do it.

 That's why we worship a long time.

That's why we dance and clap and shout and sing.

That's why we do those things.

Because we're inviting God to be here and to do something to us.

And we're holding in faith that even while we do it, even if we have no sense of what God is doing, we are still being remade into the image of our creator.

Our lives are still being imputed with beauty and goodness and truth.

And so why hold back?

Let me stand up.

Here's a better question, I think.

 We've been talking about revelation and seeing things from heaven's perspective.

And I'd like to prompt you with a very simple question.

When it comes to the issue of worship and praise and singing and dancing, why let heaven have all the fun?

You know, they're having a great time worshiping the lamb.

 What am I doing?

You know what I mean?

If I want to see things the way that heaven sees them, I want to act the way that heaven is acting.

If I'm living my life and I'm seeing the spiritual battle that's going down from heaven's perspective, man, let me look at worship from heaven's perspective too.

I could take some notes.

I could learn a few things from the way that they're responding to Jesus.

As a matter of fact, I'm prompted to wonder, what is it about Jesus that I'm not seeing that's not, like, making me feel this, like, wow, I need to worship that way.

You know what I mean?

Like, which one of us is ignorant, me or the angels?

You know what I'm saying?

 Right?

It's us.

And so let's respond to God the way that heaven responds to God.

Right?

And then we hold in faith.

Every single time you approach the Lord to worship, something is happening.

Every time.

Something is happening.

You walk away, you feel like, oh, man, that one was a doozy.

That was like a... No, something is happening every single time.

Because God is too good of a shepherd.

He's too good of a leader.

He's too good of a father.

And so we lay aside however we feel.

We come to God week after week after week after week.

 Here's my devotion.

Here it is, expressive and loud and noisy and stupid.

Here it is, Lord, because you're worthy.

Because the Lamb of God who has taken away the sins of the world is worthy.

And this is what he's asked for.

So why keep it from him?

You with me?

It'd be a shame if we didn't worship right now, right?

But just me, it feels like we gotta, right?

 Let me pray.

Are you ready to sing?

Just thank the Lord.

Okay.

Father, in the name of Jesus, we love you so much.

We love you so much, God.

We love you.

We adore you.

Thank you for your presence.

Thank you for your nearness and for your kindness, God.

We lift our hands to you.

We lift our voices to you.

We love you, Lord.