Worship That Engages the World

This morning, I want to begin by telling you of a man by the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who was arguably the nineteenth century's most influential philosopher. A firm atheist, he famously wrote a book entitled "God is Dead". In it, he wrote, "God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him." Why does he imply that the human mind, the evolution of so-called knowledge, had disproven God and there was no need for him anymore? At one time, when Nietzsche was presented with the Christian gospel, he replied, apparently, "Show me that you are redeemed and I will believe in your redeemer."

And since that time, many of Nietzsche's philosophical arguments and ideas have come under scrutiny by modern philosophers. A lot of his stuff has been undermined. But what I want to ask you this morning is, if someone said to you, "Show me that you are redeemed and I will believe in your redeemer," what would you think of that statement? As arrogant as it sounds, I am going to argue this morning that there is biblical precedent for that logic: "Show me you are redeemed and I will believe in your redeemer."

The precedent, surprisingly, this morning, is found in the realm of public church worship. Corporate worship, like we are engaged in this morning, is that opportunity to show the world that we are redeemed, to give the opportunity for those to believe in the redeemer. Some of you will know that this upcoming Thursday, we are doing another membership class and this time, we will be looking at the mission of the church, specifically evangelism, this idea of a desire to reach the lost. And this morning, to get ourselves, I guess, ready for that, we will be looking at both how evangelism and public worship actually fuse together to become one of God's most effective ways of bringing non-believers into the kingdom.

We're going to look at two main texts this morning to see how evangelism and worship happen together. So let's turn firstly to Acts chapter 2. Many of us will remember that we recently have worked through the book of Acts, and Acts 2 is perhaps one of the most significant moments in the whole story of the book of Acts. It's the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Acts 2:1.

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all, the disciples, together in one place. And suddenly, there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues, as of fire, appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now they were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.

And at this sound, the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"

And then we're going to turn to 1 Corinthians 14 from verse 13. And you will remember that we have also recently worked through 1 Corinthians 12 and 14. We're going to read from verse 13 to 25. Paul writes to the church in Corinth, "Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.

What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also. I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say amen to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying? For you may be giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not being built up.

I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in church, I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others than 10,000 words in a tongue. Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking, be mature. In the law, it is written, 'By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners, will I speak to this people, and even then, they will not listen to me,' says the Lord.

Thus, tongues are a sign not for believers, but for unbelievers, while prophecy is a sign not for unbelievers, but for believers. If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds? But if all prophesy and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all. He is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are disclosed and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you."

So far, our reading, this is God's word. Now from these two passages, we're going to pick up on a few things. As you can understand and appreciate, they happen in very different contexts. In 1 Corinthians 14, we see a conversion, a hypothetical conversion happening on the spot in the church service. In Acts chapter 2, there are non-believers that have been shaken out of their indifference to the message of Jesus Christ, firstly, but then an actual conversion happens later when Peter explains the gospel over the entire course of a day.

We know, obviously, from other examples of Paul's missionary journeys that people became Christians, people were saved over the course of weeks and months. So we're not finding here a pattern that will always happen in this way. We're giving different expressions of conversion, but it's conversion nonetheless. And this conversion has similar elements to it across these various contexts. Three things from these passages that we see are held in common.

Very quickly, and then we'll explain them as we go. Firstly, we see that non-believers are expected to be present in Christian worship. Non-believers are expected to be present in Christian worship. Secondly, non-believers must find the praise of Christians to be comprehensible, understandable. And thirdly, non-believers fall under the conviction of the gospel through comprehensible language.

The question we must answer for ourselves is, how many people who are witness to our worship come home sick for God? How many people that may come into our church on a given Sunday morning will see that worship and will miss God? How many will feel our excitement or our joy about God's goodness? How many will feel our longing to be with Him? How many will be moved as they witness our humility at God's amazing grace?

We are not simply to communicate the gospel to them. We are to celebrate the gospel before them. So how do we, as a church, align ourselves with this understanding of evangelistic worship? Well, like I said, there are a few key issues that we get from our texts this morning. Firstly, welcoming non-Christians into public worship.

In Acts 2, it happens by word-of-mouth excitement. In 1 Corinthians 14, it happens in a small church setting by the invitation, probably, of Christian friends. So we're meeting in that church. "Come along on Sunday and see what we're about." But Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:23 in our passage says that he expects both unbelievers and, he calls them, "the unlearned," literally the seekers who do not understand to be present in worship.

So when we talk about our church needing to be a welcoming space for non-Christians in our time of public worship, the challenge is that we may find worship to be particularly edifying for ourselves, but something so foreign that people either react neutrally to it, like they shrug their shoulders and say, "Is that it?" Or they respond negatively. And the reason we think that people experience it that way is, well, because we are weird. We are weird. There's a type of language when we meet together that we speak, that is foreign to the way that most Aussies speak.

We speak a biblical language that is at times very foreign. We use words like propitiation, sanctification. "I've been edified by our fellowship." Now, these are all good, biblical concepts and words, but not words or concepts we would use in the marketplace or at the pub. So from an outsider's perspective, all these things can be really hard to enter into.

But Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 14 that we have a responsibility as Christians, especially Christian leaders, to make adaptations that demystify the worship experience. You see, in many churches, there exists this vicious cycle where pastors only ever see Christians present, Christians present at the worship service. So pastors then lack the incentive to think hard, and it has to be a deliberate thing to think clearly about how I preach, how I define the things that we generally hold in common. And because preaching can then become not understandable, our church members go, "This is too hard. My friend from down the road, the fitter and turner Bob, he's not going to come to this church.

It's too hard to understand." So then, no non-Christians come to the church. The pastor sees no non-Christians in the church and so he doesn't think clearly about what he's saying. And that cycle continues. So for us, as established Christians, the best way to encourage incorporation of non-Christians into the church is to worship as though there are skeptical onlookers with us all the time.

It's not to assume that it's just the flock that are here. It's a useful thing for us to come to church every Sunday expecting it to be full of unbelievers who won't naturally understand what is taking place. So firstly, we have to intentionally become a place that welcomes non-Christians into our public worship. Secondly, we have to make worship comprehensible to non-Christians. In the book of Acts, Acts 2, it happens by a miraculous intervention by the Holy Spirit.

In 1 Corinthians 14, it happens by human design and effort. But public worship of God needs to be comprehensible, understandable. Paul rebukes the Corinthian Christians for speaking in tongues because it caused people not to understand what they were supposed to be praising God for. We cannot overlook that Paul directly tells a local congregation to adapt its worship for whom? Non-Christians, unbelievers.

From time to time, I hear the crazy thing said by Christians that corporate worship is only for the saints. Paul disagrees. It is wrong to insist that we don't need to talk about what the unchurched would feel like in our worship services. It is actually important to be thoughtful about someone coming off the street who will experience what we have here and how they will experience that. But it is also true that our purpose in worship services is never to make the unbeliever comfortable necessarily.

In verses 24 and 25 of 1 Corinthians 14, but also in verses 12 and 37 in Acts 2, the unbelievers who are present are cut to the heart. They are made very uncomfortable about their situation before God. They are deeply distressed by what they hear and experience. They are not at all comfortable because the gospel message has rocked them. So the command is not to make unbelievers comfortable to placate them on their path to hell.

We are to allow them by all means, however, to understand the claims of the gospel. So how do we do that? How do we make the gospel understandable as far as humanly possible by making our corporate worship comprehensible? Five quick sub-points here. I hope we can get them.

Firstly, worship and preaching must be done in the common language. It's one of the main foundations often forgotten in our circles of modern day churches that the Reformation, led by Martin Luther, built one of its foundations on this. Worship had to be done in common day German. The bible was translated into German for the first time by Martin Luther because every believer needed to be able to worship God in their language. Paul criticises the Corinthian church of speaking in tongues and confusing onlookers.

In Acts 2, the gift of tongues is also involved, but this time for a slightly different purpose. The gift is given so that all the people there may understand, from all the different countries that they've come from. It's hard to overstate the ghettoisaton of the Christian gospel in our churches. On a given Sunday, it's normal to make all kinds of clichéd statements that appear persuasive to insiders like us, but are based upon premises that a secular person doesn't hold or doesn't understand. What does it mean for an everyday Aussie to talk about righteousness?

What is it to be righteous? For most of us, we think of eighties surfers that are righteous. What does it mean to be washed in the blood of Jesus? Only psychopaths want to shower in human blood. Whether you are running a Bible study or whether you are preaching a sermon, we have to show continual willingness to address the questions that a non-Christian will ask.

So my responsibility regularly as I write sermons is I have to imagine a particular skeptical non-Christian listening to me even as I address a church that is filled mostly with Christians. When we meet publicly, our job is to define and explain and qualify what we say. The second way to make our public worship more comprehensible is to explain the service as we go along. Reformed worship has a traditional shape. We begin each Sunday morning with a call to worship.

We hear God's law. We respond with a reminder of God's grace to us through Jesus. We then hear a specific teaching from His word. We participate in the sacraments, and then we finish with a doxology, a casting back the glory to God for what He has done. We repeat that same shape every Sunday.

Why? Because it's the gospel message being played out like a drama every time. We're walking through the work of Christ every single week. God's greatness, we begin with. Our sin, His forgiveness, our response out of thankfulness, and then God receiving all the honour, all the praise, all the glory for what He has done.

But for a non-Christian, that shape is foreign. So it's a good reminder for myself and for our elders and for our music leaders, but also our Sunday school teachers and our catechism teachers, our deacons, and those of us sitting in the pews that we should be quick to give an explanation of each part of the service as it is going along. That's helpful not only for non-Christians, but for Christians. There may be some people that have been in Reformed churches for all their life and still haven't put together that gospel-shaped flow of our worship service. We just think it's some dead tradition.

Thirdly, directly address and welcome unbelievers. In our worship service, whether you are a worship leader or an elder or pastor or a church member, we need to make people feel welcome and at home. In worship leading, expect people not to understand why we are standing up to sing, and why we need to sit back down again when we hear a Bible reading. As a church member, expect that people feel uncomfortable in a church setting. They probably need someone warm and welcoming to sit next to them and to help them when they feel lost or isolated.

We are hoping to get our welcoming ministry up and running again. We're out of COVID and we need to get that going too. We need door greeters and we need people that follow people up and get their contact details. That is all part of worship. Fourthly, we work towards a comfortable environment.

Now, we might feel that some churches go too far in creating awe-inspiring and expensive buildings, but there is some truth to the idea that we should be comfortable, or rather, not distracted by the space we meet in for worship. There is, I believe, a God-given power in architecture and in art, in space and in function. And there is a way that this is used that draws us into reflection and deeper thinking. We cannot assume that people will simply grin and bear sitting in a stuffy, untidy room. Neither should we accept that auditory distractions like music, absolutely unpractised and unrehearsed, will be sufficient.

The quality of the physical worship space and its constituent parts does have a natural impact on the receptiveness of the message. And again, I want to qualify that by saying we don't have to recreate the Sistine Chapel, but we should try and remove as many distractions to the gospel as possible. Again, removing distracting distractions go both ways. We can cause a distraction by focusing too much on the lights and the sounds and the smoke machines and that sort of thing, that distracts from the gospel definitely. But boy oh boy, a bad smell, that distracts.

You know, buzzing mic, that distracts. And so there is a tension there as well to create a space that will be comfortable, or should I say, not distracting. And then lastly, the last sub-point here on how to make our worship comprehensible is we need to preach grace. The one message that both believers and unbelievers need to hear again and again is that salvation and adoption into God's family is by His grace alone. A worship service that focused too much on educating Christians in obscure details of politics or ethics or philosophy and even theology will simply bore or confuse both believers and unbelievers.

A sermon on abortion, for example, will generally assume that the listener believes in the authority of God's word, the authority of Jesus, and does not believe in individual moral autonomy. In other words, a sermon on abortion is doctrine D, but it's based on doctrines A, B and C. Therefore, people who don't believe or understand the doctrines A, B and C will find such a sermon alienating or unconvincing, potentially. It doesn't mean that we don't preach the whole counsel of God's word and we don't touch those issues, but we have to come back regularly to the foundational truths of Christianity, A, B and C. So those are five ways by which we can strive to make our worship evangelistic.

And now, our third and our final point, very quickly, as we draw together 1 Corinthians 14 and Acts 2, and that is that non-Christians fall under the conviction of the gospel through comprehensible worship. In 1 Corinthians 14, we see it happening during the service, but also in Acts 2, it is supplemented by follow-up evangelism. Peter first accuses all the Jews in Acts that they were the ones responsible for Jesus' death. But yet, later, he preaches the good news of God's grace to them so that they may believe. In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul makes it clear that through the public worship of God's people, God wants the world to hear us worshiping Him.

The public worship of Christians on a Sunday, therefore, is essentially an act of evangelism. God directs people not only to worship, but to sing His praises before the nations. This is not a new concept, firmly located only in the New Testament. We began this morning from the Psalms and we hear it again and again in the Psalms. Psalm 105 this morning, we started with.

"Give thanks to the Lord, call on His name, make known among the nations what He has done. How? Sing to Him, sing praises to Him and tell of His wonderful acts." We're not simply to communicate the gospel to the non-believing world. We are to celebrate the gospel before watching eyes.

Some people say to me, KJ, mature Christians will be bored by hearing the gospel like that every week. What's in it for mature Christians like me who need to hear the gospel again and again? But that shows the misunderstanding of the power of the gospel. Friends, the gospel of free, radical grace, it's not a way that we simply enter into the kingdom. It's the way we grow into the likeness of Christ as well.

Titus 2:11-13 tells us how the saving message of the gospel leads to a sanctified life. "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age." The grace of God teaches us. There are so many so-called mature Christians that are living a defeated and stagnant faith because they try to be holy for all the wrong motives.

They believe that they have matured beyond the ABCs of the gospel. They try to say that, "I can say no to this temptation because God will smite me, or the church will find out, or I'll hate myself in the morning." Some or all of this may be true, but Titus 2 tells us they are inadequate to teach us. Only the grace of God produces godly lives. So the one basic message that both non-believers and Christians need to hear is that the gospel of God's grace transforms our lives.

Christ-centred worship, therefore, grows believers while challenging non-believers. And so it's true that if the Sunday service and a sermon aimed primarily at evangelism, if that service is trying very hard to be cool and relevant by, you know, using movie quotes and telling lots of stories, that service is going to fail. It will bore the saints. It'll probably also frustrate the non-Christians. If a worship service aims primarily at education on ethics, they'll bore and they'll confuse unbelievers.

But if we aim at praising the God who has saved us by His incredible grace, man, that inspires me. That encourages me. And that offers comfort to those who don't yet know. Our worship is to a God who has saved us through the powerful action of His son, Jesus, on the cross. And we know that our worship of Him isn't perfect.

And so even as I say this, I know that the elements of today's worship service haven't been perfect. Our follow-up of visitors this morning may not be perfect. Our warmth and our affection may not be perfect, but the truth is it never was and it probably won't be. The truth is that instead of worshiping God, you and I have chosen to worship idols of comfort and of wealth and of popularity. Instead of giving God the glory that He rightly deserves, we have become obsessed with ourselves.

We ignore our neighbour. But now, in light of His grace, we get to celebrate the fact that we have been set free from all of that. God is doing a transformation in our lives that is good and glorious. We have been released from what the Bible calls the power of sin, and so our self-absorption dies with Jesus, so that our new lives can be raised with Him in perfection. Friends, if there was ever a people who should extravagantly, engagingly praise God, it is the Christian who knows how much their Saviour loves them.

And so we shout it out among the nations. We tell the world of His wonderful acts. Let's pray. Lord, we pray that You will transform our hearts and our identity as Your people here to so marvel and to so be moved by a humble love, a grateful thankfulness, that our worship is infectious, our worship is inspiring, our worship is of such a nature that it draws onlookers to inquire and to ask and perhaps to even say, "God is really among you."

Father, that will only ever be accomplished by the Holy Spirit who is working to bring about these things. And so we must end after all of this to say, "Spirit, please bring conviction, draw believers to Yourself." We know, Lord, that we can cross every T and dot every I and yet, if it is not Your will, nothing will happen. But we pray, Lord, based upon the mercy and the grace that we have received humbly, that You will please have mercy on our friends and our family members who don't yet know You. As beautiful and as wonderful as we know You are, please give them the joy of knowing You in that same way.

Help us to be a place that glories in our God together. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.