Gathered in Worship

Well, we are continuing our series on the church. We're in our fourth week at the moment. The series is called "The Church: Perfectly Imperfect". I was thinking this past week whether that was an imperfect title to give this series, because you sort of look at it and you're like, yeah, I wish there was something more aspiring, something more inspiring about this title, but really, if we're honest, that is what the church is: perfectly imperfect. We've heard in the past few weeks that we are perfect in our imperfection, not because of ourselves, but because of Jesus Christ who has died for the church, who loves the church, and who has a great and glorious purpose for the church.

I just want to recap, especially for those who haven't been here in the past three weeks, what we did before. The first week, we looked at what constitutes the church, what has brought the church together. From Ephesians 2, we saw that the church is made up of a bunch of people who are hostile naturally towards one another. We don't belong together naturally. We are so different.

We come from different cultures, different personalities, different character traits, and yet God brings all of us together into this one thing that He calls His body. We don't belong naturally towards one another, and yet God has broken down the wall of hostility, Paul says. But then Paul says the other thing: that there was a hostility between us and God, and in Christ, that has also been killed. God killed that hostility in Jesus Christ. And so He has constituted the church.

He has brought the church together as hostile people, reconciled in peace to God and with one another. The second thing we looked at was what keeps us together? What holds the church together? And we saw that it is this one ethic, the greatest thing. What 1 Corinthians 13 will tell us: the greatest thing is love. Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love.

It's our love for one another that keeps us going. The love that we have for one another causes us to put up with one another, to keep coming to meet together on Sundays, to meet together during the week. And then, obviously, love for God keeps us going. Last week, we then looked at the very good question: so what do we do as the church? And we looked at the Great Commission, Matthew 28. And we saw that Matthew 28 fulfils the other golden commands of God, which is to love God with everything we have and to love our neighbour as ourselves.

The loving of others causes us to make disciples, and the loving of God and His glory causes us to bring in more worshippers to glorify God all the more. The church is to make disciples of the nations and thereby complete the greatest commandments of loving God and loving our neighbours. This morning, we asked the question: what happens when we meet together? Because the church in itself is in many places called the gathered ones, the people who meet together. Really, nowhere in the church are we as Christians understood more singularly than as people who meet together, who are together, who bring worship and praises and prayer together.

And so a good question to ask as well, looking at the church, is: what happens when we come together? Well, put simply, we worship. The church gathered together worships. And in order for us to get an inkling of the magnificent spiritual reality of our gatherings, we have to go to Hebrews chapter 2 this morning to see how Jesus Christ is our worship leader in our worship. Let's read together Hebrews 2:5-18.

Hebrews 2:5, "For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, 'What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honour, putting everything in subjection under his feet.'"

"Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him, who is Jesus. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified, all have one source.

"That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, 'I will tell of your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation, I will sing your praise.' And again, 'I will put my trust in him.' And again, 'Behold, I and the children God has given me.' Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery.

"For surely, it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted." This is the word of the Lord. We come to Hebrews chapter 2, having found a great explanation of Jesus Christ as God.

Chapter 1 is all about Jesus as the Son of God, the one who has created all things, so that in the opening verses of Hebrews 1 He is the representation, the image of God Himself. But now in Hebrews chapter 2, we come to the human side of Jesus, and we're sort of taught why Jesus had to be human, why He had to share, in the words of Hebrews 2, our flesh and blood. And put simply, it was so that He could make us brothers and sisters who He leads in worship to God. Carl Dening, in his book that I showed a few weeks ago called "Gather Together: A Look at the Church and Why It Is Called to Be Together", after having done a review of all the places in the Bible that talks about what this gathered-together aspect of the church means in corporate worship, Dening comes to this conclusion.

He says, "Clearly then, there are a variety of different elements of what the church does when it gathers. But perhaps we can summarise it like this. The church gathers to hear the message of the gospel, to encourage one another with the gospel, to make the gospel known to unbelievers in their midst, to pray to God on the basis of the gospel, to praise God for the gospel, to hear about the work of the gospel, to send people into gospel ministry, to remember the gospel in the Lord's Supper and baptism, to love and serve each other on the basis of the gospel, and to apply the gospel to sin in the church." He continues, "What God calls the church to do when it gathers is stunningly simple.

It isn't rocket science. He says, 'The trick, however, is to believe God when He says this is what He wants us to do. And then to do it with perseverance, believing that God will bless us through it.'" So those things are all part of what we do. He says it's not really that hard to understand what the church is meant to do.

The hard thing is to believe that when God says He wants us to do it, we need to do it, and to do it with perseverance. In other words, the church cannot be the church unless you and I meet together and worship God together. We're not entirely sure, but it's likely that the book of Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians who were seriously doubting their faith and were tempted to go back to Judaism. It seems that when they had become Christians, they were excommunicated from temple worship. They missed out, therefore, on the great ceremony, the great rituals of the temple worship in Jerusalem.

They missed the choirs. They missed the sacrifices. They missed the rituals. Now, as mere Christians, all they had was to meet in houses or in desert caves. And it seems that some of them were starting to long for the glory days.

They were asking, "What's left for us in our worship to God?" Part of the purpose of the book of Hebrews is then to tell us and to tell them: focus on God and what you have received in the gospel as you come together corporately, because it is nothing less than the very presence of Jesus Christ in your gathering. That He, in this meeting together, facilitates your worship in a way that the temple in reality never could. A physical temple is worthless in comparison to what you have. I want to ask you this morning: what takes place when the church gathers together on a Sunday?

What do you think takes place here? What's happening in our worship service? Well, the Bible tells us that when we worship God together like this this morning, the Lord Jesus is standing right here with us. That He facilitates our singing, that He leads our offerings, that He leads our meditations on His word. He leads the response of our heart to the gospel.

Let's have a look at what God tells us from His word in Hebrews chapter 2. The first reason that He leads us in our worship is firstly that He has made us His family. Jesus presents us as His family. Verses 5 through to 9 is an explanation of Jesus as not only having been the king of creation. That's chapter 1, really, what that's about.

But in chapter 2, in these verses, He is the king of our salvation. He is the king of our salvation. Verse 10 calls Jesus the founder of our salvation. Now the majority of verses 5 to 9, and it is a complicated text, is actually a quote from Psalm 8. "What is man that you are mindful of him?"

Now that was a Psalm written about us as mortals. It's presumably King David just blown away by the idea that God, having created the stars in the sky, would think of us. But here, the author of Hebrews applies this Psalm not to us as mortals, but he reflects on Jesus. And that idea comes out from verse 6 in the phrase "who is the son of man that you care for him?" Jesus referred to Himself as the Son of Man.

And here, the author of Hebrews says, "This is Jesus." And Jesus is introduced as the founder of our salvation by focusing on Christ's incarnation, that He was made to be a little lower than the angels, that is, He took on human form. Jesus became human, and then in His humanity, He suffers God's wrath in our place on the cross. By the end of verse 9, we see the purpose of this incarnation: so that by the grace of God, He might taste death for everyone. That's why Jesus became human.

That's why He died on the cross, so that by the grace of God, He might taste death for everyone. But having died in our place, having experienced our punishment, three days later, verse 9 also tells us that He was crowned with honour and glory in His resurrection. Through His death, through His resurrection, verse 10 concludes, He has brought many sons to glory. In other words, those who have put their trust in Jesus Christ share in the glory of His victory over sin and death. So that's what verses 5 through to 10 really is doing.

It's summarising the gospel again for us. But now the Bible moves on to tell us how we as a church experience that glory right now. How we experience that glory right now: it's not a future glory. It's a present continuous glory. Having become the source of our salvation, Jesus Christ, having ascended to heaven, is right now waiting for His enemies to be subdued by the Father.

That's what the text tells us as well. Jesus Christ is now on His throne while His Father, God the Father, puts all His enemies in subjection to Him, makes a footstool of them for His feet, as chapter 1 says. Then in verse 13, we have another Old Testament quote, this time from Isaiah 8, which simply says, "I will put my trust in him, and then behold, I and the children God has given me." The author again places those Old Testament prophetic words in the mouth of Jesus. Jesus is saying to God the Father, "I trust you.

I have trusted in you, and now here I am, and the children that you gave me, I am bringing to you." It's a triumphant view of Jesus returning to the Father after He has ascended. It's like that triumphal entry into His throne room. "Here I am and look at all the ones that I have saved." Who is it that He has brought with Him?

It's us. And in presenting us to God, verse 11 says Jesus calls us family. He calls us brothers, sisters. Do you know the most prominent picture of the church in the New Testament?

Many of us will say it's the body of Christ. But the most prominent metaphor for the church is family. The family of God, the household of God. And here we see that after having finished His work on earth and having ascended to heaven, Jesus stands before God the Father and says to Him, "Father, here I am, and I have brought with me all the sons and daughters you have sent me to rescue. They are my brothers.

They are my sisters, and we have come to bring you glory and honour for what you have willed in their rescue." In other words, we only come into the presence of God because Jesus brings us along. He's the one who invites us from the cold. It's because of Jesus' work on the cross that we have become children of God. And then by extension, as children of God, we are also brothers and sisters of God's Son Jesus. So the first point for us to understand this morning in our approach of God in worship is that Jesus has brought us to God as His family. But notice that while Hebrews talks about this finished work of Jesus on the cross, this work that He has done two thousand years ago, the language He uses, the language of this text, is present tense.

"Behold, I and the children you have given me. Here I am. Here they are." Which leads us to the next point: Jesus is the one who leads our worship of the Father.

We find another Old Testament quotation in verse 12, where it says, "I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation. I will sing your praise." Again, this is the Lord Jesus speaking. This time it is a quote from Psalm 22. You might remember that Psalm 22 was the Psalm that Jesus quoted on the cross.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And if you were to go and read that Psalm, you'd be amazed to see all the aspects of Jesus' work amazingly foretold in this Psalm that's a thousand years old. A thousand years before Jesus, this Psalm was written. You see the prophecies of the cross, the crucifixion, see a prophecy of His resurrection right through to His ascension. But here in Hebrews 2, when this particular verse is quoted, we see that this is a prophecy of the resurrected Messiah before the throne of God.

Now the suffering has been completed. Now His victory has been won, and He calls His brothers to join Him in worshipping the one who chose to save them. The one who chose to send Jesus Christ as the sacrifice. I can't help but read those words of Jesus saying to God the Father, "I praise you," and just be moved by the humility of our Saviour. He is the ascended victor.

He is the one who endured the cross. He stands before the Father now, still donned in His humility, in His humanity, and He says to God, "Not my glory, but yours, Father. The honour belongs to you." We see Jesus bringing us into the worship of God. And so you can in fact say that He is our true worship leader.

We don't have a worship leader in Brendan or in Rob or in KJ. Our worship leader is Jesus Christ. Many years ago, while I was studying Hebrew as a language at Bible College, we had a field trip to a Jewish synagogue in Brisbane. And the idea was for us to be immersed in the language a little bit. And I mean, I hardly understood anything that was going on.

But one of the things that struck me was how the rabbi led the worship. He would stand in the middle of the congregation. We were sort of sitting around him. And on his platform, he would sing by himself the words of Scripture. Now, this was apparently a throwback to the temple worship two thousand years ago, where the Jews had priests who would lead worship in a similar way: that they would sing and lead the worship by themselves for the people to hear.

What the Bible is envisaging here is that we have received a High Priest in Jesus, who not simply deserves our praises, which He does, but as the Son of God, He freely and wholeheartedly facilitates the glorifying of God Himself. That's why verse 11 in our passage says, "He who sanctifies," so He who has achieved our sanctification (that is, Jesus), "and those who have been sanctified," that is, us, "all have one source." What is that source? Well, it is the will of God the Father. It was the will of the Father to send the Son.

It was the will of the Father to save us. And it is the enormity of that loving action which moves Jesus so much that He praises God the Father for His grace on our behalf. "Father, how great is your salvation? How great is your steadfast love that you would come up with such a plan to save them? How great is your faithfulness?

You deserve the glory." This is fleshed out more fully as the book of Hebrews goes on. Here in chapter 2, the seeds are being planted even as we see the first mention of the word "High Priest" in these verses. The idea is being built here in chapter 2 and has its crescendo in chapters 7, 8, and 10 that Jesus Christ is the perfect High Priest. The perfect sacrifice and the perfect High Priest.

And it finishes with these words in Hebrews 10, "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he has opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water." In other words, we only draw near to God because Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, has washed us clean in order to approach the holy God. What this means in practice is that even when you turn up this morning cold, unprepared in your heart, you just rolled out of bed, you crammed those cranky kids into the car.

And you walk through those doors, and you are in your heart so far from worshipping God. You're here just out of habit. You're just here because you have to do morning tea. You are being told this morning that Jesus Christ, on your behalf, is completing your imperfect worship. Jesus, by His perfect love for the Father, right now standing at the throne of God, covers our cold hearts with His joyful, delightfilled worship.

He is the one who sings a beautiful song over our tuneless worship. In other words, our worship is perfected by the fullness of His thanksgiving. And so now He enables us to draw near to God, and then He perfects the worship we should bring Him when we have come near. Which leads us to our third and final point: He understands our need.

It's a wonderful thing that the most profound worship we Christians will ever experience is not going to listen to the perfect sermon. Our most profound worship is not hearing a singer with the most beautiful voice move our hearts or to be filled with awe by the most majestic pipe organ, Arnold. Our most profound worship isn't even dependent on how willing we are as worshippers. The most profound worship takes place one day around the throne of God when the Saviour who knew that we didn't have what it takes to bring our praise to God came and understood our need for reconciliation and chose to become the worship leader of our devotion. As the ascended Lord, He will one day lead us in that perfect worship, but also right now at this very moment is both watching the kingdom grow and fill the earth as His enemies are subdued before Him, and right now praises God the Father for that work that is being done, and praises the Father that the kingdom has started in us.

At this very moment, Jesus is gathering together a people as His family, leading us in our praises to God, and He does all this because He has understood our need. Verse 14 says He partook of our flesh and blood in order that He might destroy the power of the devil over us. You may have been a Christian for a long time. You may have been a Christian for so long that you are starting to forget the dread and the fear of what a guilty conscience before God really feels like. The Bible says that the greatest fear of the human heart is not public speaking.

It is not losing your job. The greatest fear of the human heart is to come before God on the final day. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, we read earlier. The greatest fear is a guilty verdict before a righteous God. And friend, if a guilty verdict is our greatest fear, what is our greatest comfort?

That we have been reconciled with this God. That we have been cleansed of the sin that stains us before Him. Our passage ends with Jesus saying two things. Firstly, that He has destroyed the power of death, and secondly, that He delivers us from the fear of death. Power of death, the fear of death: what do those two things mean?

Firstly, it means that He is an all-sufficient Saviour. So on the one hand, it says that death is not final. He has destroyed the power of death. Death, which is the enemy of life, has been overcome. And so because Jesus was raised to life, we're shown that His sacrificial death was enough to destroy the curse of sin, which is death.

While we might die physically as a result of sin's curse, the reality is that there is life after dying. Life can be restored to our physical bodies. So firstly, Jesus has destroyed the power of death, but then secondly, these final verses say that the fear of death itself has been destroyed. The fear of death here is not fear of dying.

The fear of death is not the fear of dying. It is the fear of what happens after we die. When we die, our time for turning to Christ has ended. When we die, we come face to face with our Creator. And when we do, a thing called judgment happens.

When the Creator will say or ask all of us, "What have you done with the gift of life you were given? Was it tainted by sin? Was it tormented by moral failure during your life? Did you grasp out your hand to reach to God who had formed you?" That is the enormous moment, friends.

That is the fear of death. But if Christ has become our Saviour and therefore our worship leader, the one who already stands before God in praise to Him, then there is no fear. Since He is the perfect Priest, these verses conclude, leading our worship. Hebrews 7:25 puts it this way: "Jesus Christ is able to save to the utmost those who draw near to God through Him." Friends, are you ready for that day?

Will you be found standing at the side of Christ when He leads His brothers and sisters finally and fully in that eternal worship of the Father? If you are not sure, then believe in Jesus Christ because He is the perfect sacrifice. He is the perfect mediator. Commit yourself this morning to Him as your Lord and Saviour. When the church gathers for worship on a Sunday, we are told in the Bible that God commands a blessing there.

And there are many wonderful blessings in our corporate times together. We have fellowship. We have encouragement. We have love. But the ultimate blessing is that Jesus Christ is standing at the centre of our praise.

And so where our worship falters, His worship perfects it. Where your praise is heartfelt, His praise amplifies it. This is the reason why we come to church every week. You will never worship God in the way that you are intended to worship Him by yourself. No matter how much Bible you read on a Sunday morning by yourself, your worship is at its best with brothers and sisters led by Jesus Christ.

Don't rob God of His glory. Don't swap church out for anything less than proclaiming the excellencies of Him who brought us out of darkness and into His marvellous light. Jesus, this morning, stands among His people. In His risen power, before the throne of God, He is able to save to the utmost those who desire to draw near to God. He is a Saviour we can trust because He is a Saviour who's treated us as family.

He is the Saviour who understands us and our need. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we thank you that this morning we have a facilitator of our prayers, a mediator of the great sacrifice of His life on our behalf. He is the one who brings us before the throne room of God and introduces us as brothers and sisters. Help us, Lord, to understand what a powerful thing it is to bring our worship to You facilitated by our Lord Jesus.

As the book of Hebrews builds its case from here on out and finishes in Hebrews 10 with the words we read at the beginning of our service, to fix our eyes on those things and not to stop meeting together, because it is in the meeting of Your people, Lord, that You receive the glory. So Lord, help us to understand as a church what it means to bring our corporate worship to You. Help us to love it. Help us to persevere when things are hard, when kids are cranky and sick. Help us to know that there is grace for those things.

And help us to know that even in our faltering, tuneless worship, the weakest worship we may offer on a Sunday morning, Jesus, You perfect it. And so by Your grace, we ask that You perfect this prayer as well. Help us, Lord, in our weakness. Strengthen us to love You as You ought to be loved.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.