Good Worship Services?

Well, it's good to be back.

Um I had to duck out at the last moment or a day or so before the last moment last week.

I was uh sick, and uh it was the first time in at least 15 years that I haven't been able to do my Sunday morning responsibilities, and uh Greg was uh very kind to uh volunteer to cover for me and I appreciate that.

Today is Sunday, the 14th of February, 2016, and God is still on the throne.

He was all week long, he is today, and he will be in the week ahead.

Today's also, as we know, Valentine's Day.

I got thinking this morning, I'd like to challenge you to do something this Valentine's Day.

There is someone in your life that you highly value.

Chocolate melts.

Flowers fade.

A big meal, who needs more of that?

Could I ask you to honestly think about doing something sometime today, if you could possibly communicate to someone that you care deeply about the following?

Today is Sunday, the 14th of February, 2016, and God is still on the throne.

Could you just take the challenge to say that out loud to someone, to look them in the eyes and just say, God is still on the throne?

I don't repeat it week after week to remind myself, in the way I do, but I'm repeating it that it might be a part of our thinking.

There is hardly anything more important to know than who God is, and our God is sovereign and he's good and he's gracious, and he rules and he reigns, and we can trust him.

And the goal really would not be for you to get used to hearing me say it all the time, but then in the in the moments in which it counts, when life is hard, or when you just want to tell somebody something that is powerful and true, that you would say out loud with your own voice in your own way, God is on the throne.

So that's my Valentine's uh challenge to you.

Flowers fade, chocolate melts, nobody needs another big meal.

But we all need a God who is on the throne, who is good.

So let's say that.

All right.

I'd like to have you turn, if you would, please, to uh James chapter one.

You may still be there.

Um the book of James, we have been looking at for a number of weeks.

We will continue to look at it.

We're not in a hurry.

We have two verses before us this morning.

Um I got thinking, well, since I wasn't able to be here last week, maybe I should just uh skip over this and go on to the next section.

I thought, wait a minute, Walt, what kind of an idiot are you?

Why would you do that?

Um these two verses are incredibly difficult.

Not to understand, but to really do.

What he says to us is that we can be doing all kinds of things in here.

We can be doing our religious thing.

And if it doesn't cause us to do something different out there, then all it is is a religious thing, and it's worthless and it's meaningless, has no value before God and no value in your own life.

The theme from these two verses that I want to bring to the fore, and I'll explain to you how I get it from this text, because I think this is what it's saying, is that when we're being religious in the sense of doing the things that religious people do, unless that produces some very concrete action out there in our lives, in the weak, in the world, and there's a whole bunch of things that it ought to result in, and three of them are mentioned here.

If those things are missing, then there is no point for all of our religious stuff in here.

So the question is, what makes this a good service?

What makes this good worship?

And the answer is not that I like the music or it moves me or that Patrick and the team did a wonderful job.

The answer is what makes good worship is what we do with it out there.

If anyone thinks he's religious, verse 26, and does not bridle his tongue, he deceives his heart.

This person's religion is worthless.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, to keep oneself unstained from the world.

And in these two little verses, he says three things ought to be the outcome of our gathering together here this morning.

And none of it has to do whether you're enjoying it, whether the music is the kind of music you like, whether the sermon is a sermon you agree with or not.

It has nothing to do with that.

It has to do, are we learning to bridle our tongues?

Are we helping the most helpless?

And are we keeping our lives pure?

That is what determines good worship.

Alright, that's where we're going.

James, as you know, the uh the younger brother of Jesus, um, became a believer in Christ.

Uh we read in Acts 1.14 that after the resurrection, when the believers, there was only 120 of them that were gathered that uh that day in an upper room, they'd been told to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the promise of the Father.

They didn't quite know what that would mean.

It ended up being the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a miraculous way, a powerful sign of something new God was doing.

And in that group of 120 was Mary and Jesus brothers.

So Joseph was the legal father of Jesus, but he was not the biological father.

God was the biological father.

There were siblings, multiple siblings, of which one was James.

And James became the pastor, to put it in our terms, of the of the first church.

And I don't mean the first Baptist church or the first congregational church.

I mean the first church in Jerusalem.

It doesn't take us long to see that this church exploded after, on the day of Pentecost, 3,000 people came to faith, and the story keeps going on.

But what we find is that a church was born there.

Some were scattered to take the message of the gospel to the ends of the earth, and some stayed there.

And James was the shepherd.

James was a shepherd.

He was a pastor.

That's what pastors are supposed to be.

The role of a pastor is not to be the CEO of the church, the role of the pastor is to care for the spiritual well-being of the flock.

The role of the pastor is not to be a great orator.

The role of the pastor is not to say cute things, striking stories, wonderful illustrations.

The role of the pastor is to care for the flock and be deeply concerned for the spiritual well-being of the flock.

Now it doesn't help if the pastor can't speak or gets in the way, but that's not what it's all about.

Sometimes I think I try my darndest to communicate in a way that keeps you awake and is engaging, and sometimes it works, sometimes it obviously doesn't.

But you know, sometimes I have a dynamite illustration.

If you were here a couple of weeks ago, I'm sure that you remember me talking about this three-way switch that I wired at our home in Indiana, and I had all kinds of problems with it.

And, you know, I went on, and and people were talking about that afterwards.

The interesting thing was at one point I asked somebody, so what was that illustration about?

And I wasn't really asking whether that person had gotten.

I asked myself, okay, you had a great illustration.

Do people walk away with the illustration?

Or do they walk away with what God is saying?

You see, oratory or rhetoric or good delivery or bad delivery is not the point.

That's not what a pastor is called to do.

A pastor is called to care for the spiritual well-being of the flock.

We're about to begin the selection process of a new senior pastor for this church.

Come to the congregational meeting, the annual business meeting next Sunday evening, and you'll hear a little bit about that, and there'll probably be another business meeting called shortly after that as we put together a search committee and so forth.

So we're going to be looking for a pastor.

What are you looking for?

What God is looking for is a man after God's heart, who, in all simplicity and humility and with all of his imperfections, will help you spiritually.

Don't look for anything else.

It's not only the pastor, the pastor with a stained glassed voice who is to be a shepherd, the elders.

That's what elders are.

They're not board members who follow Robert's rules of order and make sure that.

I mean, there's some of that that has to be done, but the biblical role of being an elder is a shepherd.

There are multiple shepherds in this congregation.

And there's plenty of people who are shepherds here who don't have a formal role as an elder or a pastor.

There are people whom God has gifted to care for the spiritual well-being of other people.

I see it all over this church.

Maybe you're one of those.

Luther, I'll embarrass you, but uh what I one of the things I appreciate about you is you just have a heart for people.

I wish I could express it with the sincerity and humility that you do.

I won't go down the list and I shouldn't have embarrassed you.

But there's plenty of people, and it's not only men, by the way.

There are women pastors.

I'm not talking about women preachers.

They exist too, just not in our circle.

But there is no spiritual gift that is limited to one gender.

There are women in our congregation who have shepherding gifts, and they are so valuable.

Don't let those go to waste.

If you have something in your heart that just causes you to care about other people, nurture that.

Nurture that.

Use that.

Our gifts get better by doing.

Anyway, what James is doing here is as a pastor, is trying to focus on a very simple and very important question.

What makes our religious activities in our context, our worship services, good?

Now, this was written in a very different context.

This was written in a different culture.

This was written in a different time.

And the language that he uses here could, if we're not careful, because there's a big gap we have to cross, could maybe get us going in a different direction.

But there's two New Testament words for religious.

The most common word for religion or religious has to do with what we would call spirituality, qualities of godliness, of the old-fashioned word, which is a beautiful word, piety.

Somehow or another, pious has such a negative connotation, yet in the scriptures it just means there's a heart that's godward-focused and really intent on just being God's kind of person.

That's not the word that he uses in this passage.

He uses a different word, a relatively rare word.

You only find it a few times in the New Testament, three of which are in this passage.

If anyone thinks he's religious and doesn't bridle his tongue, he deceives himself.

Religion that is pure and undefiled is this, and he goes on and explains it.

If we don't do these things, then our religion is worthless.

Now, what I want you to understand is that he's using this other word.

It's an unusual word, which has to do with the kinds of activities that religious people do when they're being religious.

Especially when they gather together.

What are those religious practices that people do?

The word that is used here was used frequently in pagan contexts, in totally non-Christian contexts, and in pagan religion, their services, their spiritual activities, the things that they did when they were being religious, was things like ritual washings or chanting or libations or sacrifices or secret rites that only the initiated would have any knowledge of.

They were being religious when they did those things.

In the Old Testament, there were religious activities.

There were things that religious Jews did when they came together.

Some of them were similar.

There were ritual washings, there was the sacrifice, there was the public reading of the Old Testament.

If you've ever even seen a picture of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, you'll see a lot of people doing this.

There are major circles in our culture today, major church traditions, where the religious activities involve formalized prayers.

Nothing wrong with that.

Genuflecting, the reenactment of the cross in the sacrament, in the Mass.

We would have some issues with that, but those are religious activities.

In Greek Orthodox circles, it would be veneration of icons, aids to worship for them.

In our circles, of course, we don't have any liturgies, right?

Ha! What Sunday morning involves for most of us is trying to get here without World War III breaking out in the car, especially if you have little kids.

It's a good thing.

It's actually a good thing.

You get here and you might go to Sunday school class.

If you have that, have had that challenge in the car, you're probably quite happy to get rid of those little ones and entrust them into the hands of somebody who wants to actually talk to them this morning.

And then you get to Sunday school or you come to church, maybe you get a bulletin stuffed in your hand, you come in, the lights go down, the uh uh the praise band um starts out, or this morning we started out with a hymn.

Uh we sing a little bit.

Uh oh, we must not forget to have announcements.

That's part of our liturgy, actually.

And part of our liturgy here is we must take a moment and stand and go over and pretend like you care about the person three repews behind you.

Now there's nothing wrong with being friendly.

Okay?

And even when you don't feel like it, there's nothing wrong with that.

It's it's actually pretty nice.

But that's part of our liturgy, that's part of what we do.

And then uh eventually everybody settles down and I drone on and on and on and on and on.

And then at some point you're released from that, and you go out, and maybe you have another cup of coffee, or you stuff the kids in the car, and at some point or another you say, wow, that was a good worship service this morning.

That's what you say every week, I'm sure, right?

Or maybe you say, that wasn't very good this morning.

And if you were honest, what wasn't very good about it was that, yeah, maybe they played off key.

Uh maybe the different parts of the orchestra didn't come in quite right.

Maybe, maybe Patrick hit a wrong chord.

Um, maybe we just played music that at most I tolerate.

Now, for some of you, that's the contemporary.

For some of you, that's a hymn that you have to have the hymnal to be able to sing it because you don't know it.

Understandably, no problem with that.

But we begin to evaluate whether it was a good service or not by whether we liked it, whether it made us feel right.

James says, sanctified hogwash.

That is not what makes a service good or bad.

Okay?

So he's trying to talk about the things that we do when we gather on Sundays for worship.

If we were to put it into our context as evangelical Christians in this century, it would be what happens when we gather for worship.

And my question for you is James' question.

What makes good religion, good religious activities good?

And what he says is, you can think that it was a good service, and if it doesn't result in certain things, it was worthless.

Or you may think that wasn't the way I like it.

I think I'll go to the church down the road because they do it the way I like it.

If that's your attitude, then please do.

Quite frankly, or change your attitude.

We're not here to make you feel good.

We're not here to be, we're not here to get a warm, fuzzy feeling.

We're here to open up the scriptures, to listen to the words of songs and worship, to reflect, to take the Lord's Supper, that it may penetrate into our being and change us so that as we leave here, there's something different about us.

That doesn't just happen in one Sunday.

But as a result of doing our religious thing, that there's life transformation that expresses itself out there.

Good works and good worship go together.

Now, when I say it that way, some of your theological hackles go up.

Let's just say it this way: good worship that doesn't lead to the following good works is not good worship.

Learning to control your tongue.

You can come here week after week, and if you still have a caustic, bitter mouth that tends to speak poorly of people and cause more harm than good, you're not getting anything from this.

Whether you thought it was a wonderful worship service or whether you hated it.

You see, the question is not what religious things did we do, but what does that cause us to go and do?

And he mentions three bridle your tongue, helping the most helpless, and keeping our lives morally pure.

That's where James wants to take us.

Good worship.

And it's very interesting that in kind of tucked away in verse 27.

It says, religion that is pure and undefiled is this to visit orphans in their affliction and widows and keep yourself unstained.

But we skipped over something.

Religion that is pure and undefiled is before God.

It's a real brief little phrase.

If you dig into that and unpack it, what it is really saying is that our worship is before God.

It's before God's face.

God, what we do here is not for us.

And it's not that we please ourselves by what happens here.

Our worship is for God.

Our religious activities, if they're not for God, if they don't draw us Godward, then they have little benefit whatsoever.

And we are deceiving ourselves, and it is worthless.

We have a problem in our culture today.

It's not only in our culture today, but we sure have it.

We've made church into a spectator sport, and you become the audience, and we become the performers on a stage.

This is not a stage, my friends, and you are not an audience.

That's not what this is about.

And if that's what's in our hearts when we're up here, or if that's what's in your heart when you're down there, then we've got it all backwards.

In worship circles today, because worship leaders and praise teams struggle with this, because and and speakers struggle with this.

We want to do things well.

But if we're not careful, we're trying to please the audience.

And boy, does the audience want to be pleased, my friends.

It's very clear when you think things are good and when you think things are poor.

We don't keep secrets very well.

As though it's about that.

If you want to say it's a you got an audience, the audience for the praise team is not you.

The audience for me as a speaker is not you.

There's one that I need to please, and one only.

And it's not you, my friends.

It's God.

Worship that isn't before God, worship that isn't God focused, worship that isn't cognizant of He's the one that we are here to focus on, and what God wants to do in our lives is what we deeply desire so that we can go out of here and be the people of God there.

That's what James is saying.

And I just don't want to skip over these two verses because we desperately need this.

All right, bridling your tongue.

Worship that doesn't lead you to control your tongue is not good worship.

If anyone thinks he's religious, if anyone is doing religious things, our context is if anybody is worshiping and doesn't bridle his tongue but deceives himself, that person's actions are worthless.

Worthless.

James is ruthless in this regard.

He's so easy on us here in this verse.

Just wait till we get to chapter three.

You'll want to stay home for a month or so.

What comes out on our lips reveals what's on the inside.

It's just as simple as that.

Sometimes we say sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never harm me.

I tell you, the words that come out of your mouth harm other people all the time, and mine do too.

They not only reflect what's in my heart, they influence what other people experience.

We know this very well in our day.

There's a lot of focus.

People who have been raised in abusive, verbally abusive kinds of like you are so dumb, you'll never amount to anything.

That's not an uncommon thing for people to be raised with.

And believe me, if you've experienced that, you know that lasts lifelong, and you have to battle with that.

Because words can build up or words can tear down.

And the question really is: as a result of us being here, do our words build up or do they tear down?

Someone said that the true test of a man's religion is his ability, not his ability to speak, but his ability to bridle his tongue.

He's just paraphrasing.

I think that was Lehman Strauss, a great Bible teacher of a previous generation.

Just paraphrasing what James says here.

Some of us speak a lot.

Some of us speak too much.

Were you saying you do too, or were you voting?

Yes, I agree with you, Walt.

It's really not.

Some people are gifted to be able to speak.

Somehow or another, they just get their thoughts together well and it comes out.

Some people work real hard at it.

Some people don't speak because they're afraid that they're not going to say it the right way.

But the fact of the matter is that it's not about how we speak in here.

It's about what do our words do out there?

What do they do to people?

Do they build up?

Do they tear down?

Another writer said the tongue is not the only indicator of true spirituality, but it is one of the most reliable.

That's really true, my friends.

After the first service, uh I was uh chatting with somebody who came up and told me a story of a person that they were interacting with yesterday in the store, and they got talking about spiritual things, and and this person from our church, uh, the situation was right to ask the question, well, do you go to church?

And they got talking about spiritual things, and and the immediate response of that person was, no.

I I was taken to church as a child, but you know, the difference between what people say in church and the way they live outside of church, I just if that's church, I don't want anything to do with it.

Yeah.

So what James is saying is not what we say here and not whether you can say it well or not.

But what do we say out there?

And if that's missing out there, then what's happening here is missing the mark by a thousand miles.

The tongue reveals what's really going on inside.

Um I found myself in uh rush hour traffic last week.

I didn't realize the Grand Forks had rush hour traffic uh until I was watching the weather, or heard the weather, I guess, and they talked about, well, for tonight's rush hour, uh it'll be icy and uh dangerous.

So I thought, okay, this is rush hour.

So I I was I was caught at the intersection of 24th and Columbia at the wrong time.

There, the these crazy drivers.

They c they came buzzing through.

One of them ran, literally ran a lead right a lead right.

A red light in front of me.

Two days later, I found I put on the brakes and I went directly through a red light because it was slicker than I realized.

But that didn't bother me.

But this guy, and then there was somebody up here, the light changed, and that Yehoo didn't turn.

When the light changed, he had a green turn signal.

Doesn't he know how to drive?

So with my wonderful sanctified Christian attitude, I was happy I can bring some levity to your life.

Can anybody identify with that?

Whose hand is down is lying.

You see, that's where our faith plays itself out.

Are we perfect at it?

No.

Boy, I am not perfect in that area.

But I'm not the man I was.

Not the man I was ten years ago.

It gets better when we walk with Jesus.

It really does.

Not perfect, that comes.

Um so what how do you speak when when somebody does something that hurts you?

How do you speak when somebody makes a decision that affects you in a way you don't like?

What what how how do you talk?

And it usually begins in here, but we get around other people and it begins to come out.

How do we talk when things don't go our way?

How do we talk when we're disadvantaged?

How do we respond when we're truly abused?

What what in and if our speech, see, what we are under stress, we've said this a zillion times.

What comes out of your mouth when you're under stress is who you are.

It's frightening, folks.

It's frightening.

It just happens to be true.

And it drives me back to the cross.

It drives me back to a deep desire to be changed, to be different.

Worship that doesn't lead you to control your tongue is not good worship.

Worship that doesn't lead you to practically help meet needs of the most needy around us is not good worship.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this to visit orphans and widows in their affliction.

Let's just stop with that for a moment.

What he's saying, uh, a couple of different ways we could say it.

Worship is not what you do in here, but what you do out there.

We've said that.

The true test of worship is not good music, but dirty hands.

Are we doing something to help people that causes our hands to become dirty or callous or sore?

You see, James is ruthless with us.

He's saying it's not just good enough to do your religious thing.

What about honestly helping the helpless?

In biblical times, uh, the focus was on widows and orphans.

Um that has application for us today, but it had an even greater application in biblical times because you didn't have government welfare, you didn't have Medicare, you didn't have Medicaid, you didn't have Social Security, didn't have pension plans, you didn't have nothing.

And particularly for women who normally in that culture were not breadwinners, if they were on their own, if they were widowed, they risked destitution, absolute destitution.

And a child who lost his parents would be likely to become an urchin on the street, a beggar, uh, barely able to survive.

Now that was the reality then.

And so James takes his scalpel and he pushes that into that situation and he says, okay, here you have helpless, hurting, vulnerable people around you.

What are you doing for them?

Is that social gospel?

No, that's gospel.

What does our Christianity cause us to do to people who are suffering, are vulnerable, and hurt?

What about the unborn?

I'm trying to bring it into our context.

We'll talk some more about the material needs.

But when I think in our society of the most vulnerable, I'm sorry, I can't help but think of the thousands, millions of vulnerable fetuses that are killed.

And this is not a political statement, it doesn't matter whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat.

It's, and we could talk about the right to choose, but the right to choose ends when conception has taken place.

The choice should have been not to have the child to begin with.

That may sound harsh.

I'm not saying we be harsh to unwed mothers.

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying the mother will probably survive.

Will the child?

And what are we doing about that?

What are we as a church doing about that?

There are other expressions of that, and I think of three organizations in our community that are worth thinking about, Feed My Starving Children.

They're based in the cities.

They have mobile food packing things that come here.

I know our youth have been involved in it.

Have some of you done a Feed My Starving Children day?

Oh my goodness, you are missing something phenomenal.

We'll find out when it's coming next and we'll go do it.

Take two hours, load plastic, little plastic bags with nutritious food, uh, seal them up, put them in boxes, take the boxes and put them in the trucks, and in two hours you can pack two thousand or ten thousand, I don't know how many thousands, thousands upon thousands of meals.

Each packet is enough for nourishment for a starving person, feed my starving children.

It's a Christian-inspired group, it's not necessarily thoroughly evangelical, but what they are doing is pure gospel.

If you got a home group, maybe you ought to once in a while not just sit around in the living room or wherever you sit and have a wonderful Bible study.

I believe me, anybody's all for Bible studies, I'm in.

But Bible studies that don't lead us to do anything, I'm not in that.

So we had for years in one of our former churches, uh, Jane and I led a home Bible study fellowship, and uh we got convicted at one point.

So once a month, we went down to the homeless shelter and prepared food for about 60 uh people who came.

I don't know if you can do that at Northlands, but there's ways to help.

And it was just a help to us to remember, you know, it's not just about analyzing Romans unless God begins to work in our hearts and cause us to do something with it.

Uh Crisis Pregnancy Center, the the list goes on.

Worship that doesn't lead you to practically help meet needs of the most helpless and vulnerable is not good worship, says God through James to us.

Good worship?

Well, we'll see.

Um foster care and adoption.

Oh I know that there are people here who have been involved in that multiple times.

I have such a deep, deep esteem for foster parents.

Um we have a daughter-in-law who was abandoned as a child, um, was put into foster care.

Um the government put uh into a children's home.

It happened to be a Baptist children's home.

The judge who assigned her there said, I don't know what about that Baptist stuff, but I know the kids who go there, they get taken care of.

She was then put in a foster family.

She walked into that foster family and said, and she was she was probably 12 years old at the time, just a really delicate age.

And she walked in and she said, I will never call you mother and I will never become a Baptist.

And this wise foster parents, this couple, just loved her.

They've actually had something like 30 foster children over the years.

And living in that home and going of all places to a Baptist church, she came to know Christ.

And there is a transformation of this dear, dear woman's life that brings tears to my eyes.

And that's because people were reaching out and sacrificing in the name of Christ and could put up with a broken little girl who was so hurt that she didn't want to call anybody mommy and didn't want to be a Christian.

And the love of God transformed her life.

See, those ought to be the kinds of things that take place if we have good worship services.

All right, real quickly, keeping your life morally clean.

Worship that doesn't lead us to become morally different from those around us just is not good worship.

Bridling our tongue, helping the most vulnerable and helpless, and cleaning up our lives.

Um a lot I could say by way of personal testimony from this, but that's not the point this morning.

Um it's going to be different for all of us in probably different stages in life and years that we've come to know Christ.

The first thing I had to deal with as a brand new believer as a college kid was to clean up my potty mouth.

That kind of happened because I hung out with crew, and they didn't use that kind of terminology.

But there was more to it than that.

That potty mouth was coming from a sewer within, and that began to change.

Um, a lot of people struggle with uh sexual purity, and I get that.

And so maybe good worship helps us to be able to deal with sexual temptation, and by no means is that simple, and by the way, it's not limited to men.

It's probably different for all of us.

My question for you is what are you doing intentionally as a result of your religious activities to try to not be squeezed into the mold of the world?

Let your mind be remade and your whole nature thus transformed.

Don't be conformed to the world around us, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

What are we doing?

What are you doing?

You, you don't have to tell me, but you ought to ask yourself, what are you intentionally doing to clean up your life?

And don't tell me it doesn't need it.

Who are we kidding?

Quite frankly, you're not kidding anybody.

Maybe just yourself.

Very practically, here's a couple of things of what that looks like for me.

Um of the things that I struggle with, and probably a lot of other people do, is materialism and things.

I like things.

I like nice things.

What kind of stuff do we have laying around our house?

Is our house filled with Home Beautiful magazines?

Now, if you have a subscription to Home Beautiful, I'm I don't know it, and I really don't care that you do.

But what are we feeding?

Are we are we are we feeding the right desires and the right attitudes?

Now I have no problem with Home Beautiful magazine.

But I have a problem with TV commercials.

I begin to lust, not after the women who are gyrating trying to sell me something, but after the things that they're trying to sell me.

One of the best things that came into our family.

Was TiVo, a DVR, where the only time in the year that I watch commercials is during the Super Bowl.

And this time I watched three of them and I've skipped over the rest of them.

They don't help me.

They just make me want and want and want.

It nurtures wrong desires in me.

I don't go to the mall.

Now, part of it is I hate shopping.

But I don't walk the mall for exercise, and it's not because I don't need it or that I don't walk, it's that I get distracted by all the stuff I want to go in and buy.

I want more stuff.

So for me, at this particular moment in my life, it has to do with just trying to allow the ongoing transformation of my life to keep going.

And if I'm not working on that, then anything we do here is probably worthless.

That's really what he's saying.

So what is it that you need to do?

Final thought.

Whose responsibility is it to have a good worship service?

It's not Patrick's responsibility.

It's not the praise team's responsibility.

It's not my responsibility.

Who determines whether it's good worship?

James is saying you need to do something to make that worship good.

This is a call to action.

This is a call to action.

He's exhorting us.

You determine whether this worship service is good or not.

And from James' point of view, it has nothing to do whether you like the music, whether the pews are hard and uncomfortable, and whether the preacher preaches too long.

It doesn't have anything to do with that.

It has to do with your heart.

And are you pushing in, are you leaning in Godward and expressing it beyond the walls of this room?

God's concern is not so much with what we do here, the style, the atmosphere, and whether it pleases us.

And parenthetically, the Bible says practically nothing about worship style or worship activities.

We know that the first church got together and they had, gave themselves to apostles' doctrine, breaking of bread, fellowship and prayers.

We know some things that they did, but it says nothing about style.

Style is purely preference and culture, folks.

Get over it.

Go to another country and worship in another country.

You won't like the way they do it because they don't do it the way you like.

It's just that simple.

It's a cultural personal preference.

God is not concerned about those things.

God is concerned with what we do out there with what we have done here.

It's really just as simple as that.

I get pretty ticked off with James.

I hope you do as well.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, you know that we need to hear from you.

Lord, we want to be very open to what you're saying.

We want to be conscientious.

But we want to be teachable.

Oh Lord, teach us.

Change us.

Correct our attitudes, correct our practices, correct our lives.

We want to be your kind of people.

That's what the Lord's Supper, the sacrifice of Christ, was all about.

Oh Father, help us be good worshipers.

I pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

I'd like to ask you to stand for the benediction.

The benediction that I use virtually every week is an effort to remind you to do something with what happens in here.

So I say, as someone who needs to hear it myself, dear friends, go into the world in peace.

Have courage, hold on to what is good, honor all men, help the suffering, restore the wandering, comfort the grieving, and share the gospel.

And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all.

God bless and amen.