The Ultimate Worship Leader

Get us to open to the book of Hebrews chapter two. Before we read that, one of the discussions and the easiest ways to cause a healthy, robust, passionate discussion, if not a very fiery, heated debate in a full room of Christians, is to ask someone in the room about the music style in their church that they attend and what their preferences are for worship music. And then to sort of throw that steak into a room full of dogs and just to see what happens. I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised if I told you that one of the most common critiques that a pastor hears from the congregation week after week, week in week out, is how the music went. What the style was like, what the volume was like, what the songs that were chosen were like.

It very rarely fails to produce animated discussion. And it's not simply worship music. It's not simply the music that I'm talking about here either, although that is often the one that comes up the most, but preaching. The role of preaching and the exposition of God's word and how the preacher brought the message across. The slideshows that are played, the fellowship that was experienced afterwards or during the worship service, everyone will and does have an opinion on the worship service.

But in response to this question, a second question that is worthwhile asking, after the what is your sort of preferred style of worship, a fascinating follow-up question to ask this room of Christians is to ask, can you describe two or three instances in your Christian life that made the most profound impression upon you? And this may be across forty, fifty, sixty years of being Christian. And usually under those circumstances, you will discover responses that are totally different to perhaps their week in week out sort of ideas of the ideal of what a worship service looks like. They may tell you of an incredible experience around an intimate gathering of Christians in a small group, where someone just pulled out an old, out of tune guitar and led a spontaneous worship session. They may tell you of massive gatherings of 30,000 Christians packed out stadiums worshipping God with some old ancient hymn that made them feel connected to the thousands upon thousands of Christians that have gone before.

They may tell you of hushed prayer in a persecuted church in a far off country, in an underground church worshipping this God who is illegal to be worshipped. It may be worship that was done completely in another language without any understanding on your part, but you sense the spirit of God is there. So their answer to that question may be very different to their critique or their opinion of day to day church. But then if you ask a third question, it's this answer to this third question that's really the most significant of all. What is it that made those services so significant, those moments so significant in your Christian life?

And more often than not, the real answer to that question is, regardless of the context, that Jesus Christ was in the centre. He was significantly present in that moment. We're going to read from Hebrews 2 that talks about this phenomenon, this reality in the Christian life, and then the life of worship of God, where Christ is intimately and significantly involved in the worship of God. Let's turn to Hebrews 2. We're going to read from the first verse to give us a context, but our aim, our main passage is from verse 10 to the end of the chapter to verse 18, but we're going to start at verse 1.

Hebrews 2:1. Therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will. For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, 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.

This is Jesus who He is talking about. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to Him, 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. And this is our text. For He sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source.

This 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. So far in our reading, the author of Hebrews is writing to a church very accustomed to the worship of the Old Testament.

This is why the book has been labelled the book of Hebrews, writing to a Jewish audience. These readers would have been accustomed to the high liturgy of the temple worship. They would have understood the liturgy, the order of service, when to sit, when to stand, when to kneel, when to bring offerings of sacrifice, when to receive the blessing of the priests. They had a temple. They had priests.

They had an orchestra. They had choirs. They had visible sacrifices. But now these Jews have become Christians, and they, as a result, were excommunicated from the temple worship. They were kicked out of church.

And now they were just meeting in simple homes. They were meeting in Bob's place around the corner, around the three musty couches at his place. Just singing and worshipping very newly written and composed hymns to Jesus. Maybe reflecting on the Psalms of the Old Testament and singing them, but it was a very different context, and the troubling thing on their hearts was, is this legitimate? Is what we're doing here worth anything?

And the author of Hebrews writes to them a little bit later. He says, fix your gaze. Fix your eyes on what God has given to you in the gospel because Christ is standing as your high priest, as your worship leader, and offering sacrifices and praise on your behalf with you. And if you gaze not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen, who keeps His promise that where two or three are gathered in His name, He will be there in the midst of them, if you hold to this promise, then it will dawn upon you that you have privileges way beyond what you have ever known in the past. Now what is helpful for us to understand in reading Hebrews 2 is also reading Hebrews 8:2.

So if you have your Bibles, let's skip to that as well, which is a summary statement. Hebrews 8, the first two verses, sort of summarises what the author has been writing up until now before he goes on to the next stage. And he says, now the point of what we are saying is this. In conclusion, this is what we're saying. We have a high priest.

We have such a high priest. One who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven. Verse two, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent, the true tabernacle that the Lord set up, not man. That word, a minister in the holy places, a very specific word that actually is the root word from which our English word for liturgy is formed. Liturgy is our order of service, what we do, our worship singing, why we have songs to start, why we have a reading take place, why we sing certain songs at different times.

The author is saying that Jesus is this worship leader. He leads this worship of God for us. What is so fascinating to see is some of the ways in which we learn how Jesus stands among us, how He intercedes for us, how He leads us in worship. What He is doing is that He's not only honouring God, but He's profoundly influencing our lives as well. And it means, as Paul says to the Corinthian church, that if someone walks in, even if they do not know God, even if they're completely new to Christianity, there may be visitors here that this is their first time in church, but who come into this place, and Paul says they will experience God and say, God is really among you.

Is that because of the speaker? Is that because of the great strumming by James in the morning? It's a spiritual thing that Christ is here, that we simply don't sing to the sky, but that we worship a God who is amongst us. So we will see how this is unfolded, unpacked in Hebrews chapter 2. That Jesus is the ultimate worship leader.

The first thing we see is that in worship, Jesus creates a unity that is as tight as family, that is as deep and as thick as blood. Hebrews 2 helps us to think about the privileges that are ours as the Lord Jesus stands among us as the worship leader of our congregation. And the first is this, that the Lord Jesus gathers us in a unity that is so tight, so bound together that it is as family. There is a quote that he brings here from Isaiah. The author pictures Jesus saying to His heavenly father, here I am and the children that You have given me.

Jesus speaking to the father saying of us, here I am and the children that You have given me. Now I wonder if you know what the basic New Testament word or image is for the church. You can have a you can yell out, we're reformed, but we can do that. What's the metaphor that we think about the most about the church?

The bride? I would say, when I think about it the most, it's the body. Right? The body of Christ. But interestingly, as I studied this concept, Paul uses the body of Christ a lot, but the one that is unified throughout all of the New Testament, throughout all the different writers, is the family of God.

The metaphor of us as church in our relationship to God is family. And so we are told here that we may call God Abba Father, as Paul makes clear in Galatians as well. And it's one of the ways in which you tell the difference between the Christians and the non-Christians, isn't it? Even the religious non-Christian who can say the creeds and believe and sing the glorias and say they believe in the teachings of the pastor and so on, they may know their Lord's Prayer, but in crisis, their hearts never go beyond, oh, my God to my father. The picture that Hebrews gives us is it uses the Old Testament scriptures as Jesus leading a church, leading a family to worship a heavenly father and saying to Him, father, here I am and the children that You have given me.

That means, of course, that there are always two things characterised here. The first thing is that the worship in which the Lord Jesus is present first is one that stuns us with awe, that we should have such a privilege. The worship of Jesus, the worship of God is one that should stun us that we would have such a privilege to call the God of the universe, our creator, the one who is righteous and majestic, powerful beyond all imagination, that we should call Him father, that we should call Him ours. And the second thing is that we call Him ours not simply as my God opposed to someone else's god, the Christian God as opposed to the Muslim god. He's my father, that we are part of His family.

So the first thing is that Jesus, as our brother, brings us with Him to worship His father. The second thing in worship, we see that Jesus is our worship leader. We've already alluded to that. Notice the quotation in verse 12, and this is why it's useful to have a paper copy of your Bible here because we do jump around here, but verse 12 says this, the first part, I will tell of Your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation, I will sing Your praise.

This is the Lord speaking, remember. I will sing Your praise. Jesus Christ saying Himself, I will sing the praise of God the father. Now if your eyesight is still good enough, you can look down to the bottom of this page, and with my little Bible here, it's very hard to see, but you'll see that there is a quotation mark here or an indication at the bottom of your page saying that this is from Psalm 22. Psalm 22.

Now you may remember that Psalm 22 was also used by Jesus one particular time. Do you remember when? When He was on the cross, wasn't it? Verse 1, my God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Jesus said.

Quoting Psalm 22. But the majestic, the wonderful thing about this psalm, it is complete and full prophecy of who Jesus is. It goes right through from Jesus' sacrifice, His death on the cross. My God, my God.

Why have You forsaken me? The sin that was poured onto Him, but it finishes with His resurrection and His ascension in the same psalm. He is redeemed. His life is redeemed, and then He is seated at God's right hand. And the passage that is quoted here, the verse that is quoted here is from that ascension part of this Psalm.

Verse 22, Jesus is the author is quoting, and that is that I will lead Your people in songs of praise to You. In light of the work of the cross, Jesus will sing God's praise on our behalf. Now many years ago, I was studying the Hebrew language at Bible college, and we had a little bit of a field trip one day, which was fantastic because Bible college can be so boring. We didn't do anything like field trips very often. So our Hebrew lecturer decided to take us to synagogue on a Friday night, the Brisbane synagogue.

And while we were there, it was really just to get sort of immersed in the Hebrew language, and as the rabbi would read scripture, and they had their young fellows who were getting ready for their bar mitzvahs and someone reading the Old Testament in Hebrew. And we were just trying to listen and understand what they're reading, where they're reading from. But as they worshipped, you could see that this synagogue was meant to represent a little bit of the temple. It was a slice of temple worship, and the rabbi would lead the singing. He would sing on the congregation's behalf, and everyone there would listen as he sang it.

You know, I don't know how they do it, but their rabbis have good voices. I don't know if they train that or whatever, but great singing. You don't want me to sing and lead you in worship. Trust me. But I thought to myself, the new covenant gives us such a wonderful privilege that we get to worship our God ourselves individually.

That as Jesus worships, it's not He that's the rabbi and He does the worshipping Himself, but He brings us into this wonderful privilege, this wonderful experience of worshipping God together. It's because we have been made holy by the work of Jesus on the cross. That's why verse 11 in our passage says that He's the one who has sanctified. He who sanctifies, Jesus, and those who have been sanctified, the object of this sanctification, us, all have one source, and that is the will of God the father. And so in this process, we are brought together alongside Jesus, and by His perfect heart, He covers even our tuneless worship.

Even hearts that come here on a Sunday morning, even hearts that wake up early on a weekday and just don't feel like it, and just so laden with guilt, and just so far from God, and just so severely traumatised by our lack of love for God, Jesus and His pure love, His perfect will, stands in our stead and leads us worship that we all can say amen to. Like I said, a few chapters later in Hebrews 8, the first two verses, are given a summary of the work of Jesus, that He is like a high priest seated at the right hand of God, a minister in the holy places. A minister in the holy places, and Jesus standing in our midst as our worship leader. That's why we should be careful of who we call worship leaders and what image and what authority we give worship leaders. He is ultimately our worship leader.

He enables us to sing with heart and soul, with mind and all our strength to bring our praises into the presence of our heavenly father. He enables us to do that. And then the third and the last thing that we see here is that in worship, Jesus meets our need. In worship, Jesus meets our need. The profoundest worship we Christians can ever experience is therefore not reliant on us.

It's not reliant on how well I preach, which is such a relief to me. It is not on how well we play our musical instruments, how soft or loud it is, or how willing we are to sing as congregation members. It's not reliant on any of that, but on the perfect willingness of Christ to lead us. And that is summarised in this last point, that Jesus is our greatest provider for the need that we may not even realise we have, but is our greatest need. We see that Jesus gathers us as His family.

We see that Jesus leads us in our praises, but finally Jesus meets us in our need. That's what Hebrews 2 is really saying, isn't it? Verse 14 says that Jesus shares in our flesh, that He partook of our flesh and blood in order to destroy a power that gripped us. Power of the devil, results in death. Now you may have been a Christian for a very long time.

You may have been a Christian for so long that you've forgotten what your greatest need is. You may be forgetting the dread and the fear of a guilty conscience before God. That may be way past you. But the greatest fear of the human heart is never public speaking, although that is a good fear, a big fear. It is not losing a job, or immigrating, or having a very sick child.

If we were absolutely honest with ourselves, every human being, whether Christian or not, our greatest fear is a guilty conscience. And whether my Christian friends understand this or not, it is a guilty conscience before a perfect, righteous, holy God. That is our greatest fear. And guilty people do all sorts of things to try and neutralise this fear and to deal with it. Several years ago, I don't know if you're a follower of cricket, but there was a famous cricket commentator who was discovered to have been a paedophile, to have molested children.

And somehow the investigation and the results were leaked to the media, and he found out that the cops knew about this already. And before the police were able to get to him, he jumped off a building and himself. The guilt and the shame was so much that he couldn't live with it. He had to neutralise it some way and he thought that by ending his life, that would be the end of it. A guilty conscience is our greatest fear.

We will even end our life to get away from it. But friends, if it's our greatest fear, it is also our greatest need to be cleansed of it. Hebrews 2 ends with Jesus doing two things. Firstly, He destroys the power of death and He delivers us from the fear of death. He delivers us from death and He delivers us from the fear of death.

What this means is that He is an all-sufficient saviour. On the one side, we know that death then is not final. And we believe this for all people of all time, death, which has been the enemy of life and the enemy of God Himself because God is life, death will not continue forever. Life will be given back to everyone because of the work of Jesus. Everyone will receive the resurrection.

Death has been reversed, we see, with the death of Jesus Christ and His resurrection ultimately. And while we die once, an undying live life will be restored to us. But the second fear that Jesus cleanses us from, removes us from, is the fear of death. And that is not the fear of dying. It's the fear of judgment.

Because in dying, we all know we will meet our maker. That is the fear of death. But if in Christ, you believe, if you are considered to be His brothers, His sisters, the one that He brings to God the father, that fear has been stilled forever since He is the perfect worship leader, the perfect priest. The book of Hebrews calls Him, in Hebrews 7:25, the one that is able to save to the utmost those who draw near to God through Him. God, through Jesus, is able to save to the utmost those who draw near to Him.

And how is that possible? Because He stands among the lampstands. He intercedes for God the father, our judge, on our behalf. There's a story of a famous Dark Ages, Middle Ages poet by the name of Dante Alighieri, just known as Dante, generally. So if you ever read something written by Dante, it's from this man, this Italian poet.

It's a story that he was deeply immersed because he was a Christian, a religious man. He was deeply immersed in meditation during a church service, and he failed to kneel at the appropriate spot. So, like, sometimes we stand and we sit and people don't know if they knew here when to do what. He didn't do it that right. And his enemies that didn't like his work went to the bishop, and they demanded that Dante be punished for this disrespect.

Before the bishop, Dante defended himself, however, by saying, if those who accused me had their eyes and minds on God as I had in that moment, they too would have failed to notice the events around them, and they most certainly would not have noticed what I was doing. You know, there's something about true worship that is like that, isn't it? Where everything fades to black, where our perspectives are so gripped by the love and the grace of God that whether someone is playing a ukulele or a guitar or an organ, whether someone has a croaky voice and has a bad conclusion to a sermon, it doesn't matter. The glory and the majesty and the power of Jesus Christ shines through and we ignore, we forget everything else in light of His majesty and grace. Why do people conflict about worship styles?

Why do we argue about things like this? And I'm not saying that, you know, we shouldn't talk about these things, and that these things aren't important to discuss. But if it comes down to pettiness, perhaps it's because its focus on the centrality of Christ is waning. And if the church is riddled with these arguments and debates, perhaps the focus is not on the right thing. Perhaps the hearts and the minds of its worshippers are not completely lost in the majesty and the wonder of Jesus Christ.

Our hearts and our minds aren't lost in the exasperated thought that can it really be as glorious as this? Like we just sung that my King would give His life for me. If our hearts are focused on the splendour and the beauty of Christ and the gospel, worship anywhere, at any time, in any place, with any instrument, with any speaker can reap an eternal harvest of joy. If our hearts and minds are there week in week out, the most wonderful words that we'll look forward to week in week out are the words, friends, let us worship our God. Now if you are a visitor this morning, and perhaps you're new to Christian worship and to reading the Bible and to praising God, and you've come here and thought to yourself, I didn't know church was like this.

I didn't know this is what happens here. This is the reason. Because Jesus is standing in our midst. As we bring our worship to Him of thoughts and hearts and lives, our giving to the needy as one of those examples that Jesus gave as what we do with one another after the worship service. If Jesus is standing among the people here in His risen power, He is able to be your saviour.

He is able to be your king. And therefore, friend, you are able to make Him the rock on which you build your life, to put your trust in Him. As you see these people around you, put their trust in Him as well. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, what a magnificent privilege it is, week in, week out, to bring our worship of You before You, to know and to be reminded again this morning that You are here in this place, that these aren't empty traditions, these aren't hollow habits, that it's not something we endure for a few minutes while we wait for the real thing to take place.

Lord, as musicians and singers, that this isn't a burden to endure. Lord, as preacher, that this is not a job to simply do, but father, that this is the greatest privilege and act that we can commit our lives to, the worship of You. And Lord, thank You that even with out of tune hearts and minds that can be fuzzy and lukewarm, Lord, You stand before us, Lord Jesus, and You sing on our behalf. And when we hear those words ring through the gospel, Lord, our hearts are recalibrated again, that You are that ultimate tuning fork by which we pitch ourselves right. Lord, and we can bring worship and love and sacrifices from our lips, from our hearts, from our lives to You, Lord, and be blessed in return from it because, Lord, the best thing we can hear week in week out is let us worship our God together.

So father, help us to remember this. Help us to remember when we worship You in our small groups, when we worship You by ourselves in our car, when we worship You at a lunch break around our colleagues, Lord, through our prayer life, father, in these moments, draw us to Yourself. Help us to remember that You stand there with us. You intercede for us in that moment. We thank You, Lord, for this amazing picture we have.

We pray, Lord, that it changes and influences our lives. In Jesus' name. Amen.