Or, The Assembly of Worship
Scripture: Ephesians 2:22
Date: January 15, 2012
Speaker: Sean Higgins
More than likely, if you’ve spent most of your church life in a Protestant, Bible-reading places, you’ve heard a hundred times that the church is not a building, it’s the people. This is true, mainly. Worshipping God does not depend on a particular place. Worship can, and should, happen in all places. God doesn’t accept some worship because it takes places within a certain set of four walls.
But, worship does involve a building. Worship can’t happen without walls, it’s just that the walls of this building have faces. We are God’s building, we are the place for worship. Our assembling together makes a worship center.
One unfortunate by-product of right thinking about the spiritual reality of the church is the wrong thinking that the church has no physical manifestation. We have confined church and worship to our cerebral gray matter and, therefore, anything outside the brain doesn’t matter. Following that way of thinking, we eventually come to think that we can be an assembly without assembling. The disconnect kills our fellowship, not only with each other, but also with God.
Our lives are disconnected, within and without, because we do not really know who God is, what God is doing with us, or who we are. Our lives are disconnected because we do not really understand worship. It’s no surprise that a disconnected church of disconnected people who worship in ignorance makes such little impact in an unbelieving world. Our Boom! can’t help but be muffled.
This series is an attempt to evaluate and fuel our corporate worship. Last week we examined some of the purposes for a worshipping assembly. When we gather to worship, God transforms us, He unites us, He directs us, and through us He batters down unbelief in the world. Things happen when we get together that do not happen when we’re apart. That’s because of who God is, what God’s doing with us, and who we are. That’s what we’ll consider today: the people of worship, the who? of worship.
On a worship train, Who is the engine that pulls the What, When, Where, and How cars. Stated another way, doing always comes out of being, even in God’s case. God does what He does because of who He is. So do we. And as we consider our part in corporate worship, who are we?
From eternity past, God planned to make a people for Himself. In particular, He chose to redeem a group of rebels through His Son, for His Son, by the work of His Spirit.
The story’s timeline starts in Genesis. God chose Seth, Noah, then Abram. God promised Abram, in particular, that He would make Abram into a people (Genesis 12:2-3). From Abram, God chose Isaac (not Ishmael), then Jacob (not Esau), and renamed Jacob, “Israel” from whom came the twelve tribes. What is it, from a human perspective, that set God’s chosen people apart? Worship. God gave them His law, the covenants, the sacrifices, the temple, the Sabbath. All those things defined Israel’s worship (see also Romans 9:4).
God’s promise to Abram extended to all the nations. Though many Jews didn’t understand it, God intended to make Gentiles His people as well. “Scripture, forseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.‘” (Galatians 3:8). That group of believers are known as the Church. The Church doesn’t replace Israel as God’s chosen nation, but the church (of Jews and Gentiles) is God’s people.
Paul describes this in Ephesians 2:11-22.
You were…separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ (vv.12-13) You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundations of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone… (vv.19-20)
Peter makes the same point in 1 Peter 2:4-11.
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (vv.9-10)
Being God’s people means what? It means that we have relationship with Him. We are not far off, we are close. We are not strangers, we are well known. We’re no longer enemies, now we have peace. We are not separated, we “have access in one Spirit to the Father.” The point of being His people is that we get to have fellowship with Him. Fellowship is what Adam and Eve lost, fellowship is what sin destroys, fellowship is what Jesus Christ came to restore. We are, in Christ by grace through faith, God’s people. We are defined by our worship of Him, which means we are defined by our fellowship with Him.
In the Old Testament, God set aside a certain place for His people to be with Him, to fellowship in His presence, to worship Him. As we already studied in John, though, Jesus said He was God’s temple (John 2:19-21). People meet God in Jesus because the fulness of deity dwells in Him bodily (Colossians 2:9). That’s part of the reason that Jesus told the woman from Sychar that true worship, true fellowship with God, can’t be restricted to one mountain.
When He told her that she would have a living fountain inside of her (John 4:14), He was saying (without these words) that she would be a temple, that God Himself would dwell in her (see more explanation in John 7:38-39). Paul later wrote that we are, each individual believer, the temple of God because God’s Spirit lives in us.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1 Corinthians 3:16)
do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, (1 Corinthians 6:19)
I can say, “I am God’s temple,” but that’s not the whole story. We are God’s temple.
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19–22)
As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house. (1 Peter 2:4-5)
God redeems persons into a people. He saves individuals into a body, into one Bride for His Son. Yes, we are, each Christian, a temple, but we are, all of us Christians, His temple (see also 2 Corinthians 6:16-18).
We are the Ship of Orthodoxy, not three-hundred fifty separate rafts in a lagoon. (Monte E. Wilson, quoted in The Lord’s Service, 140).
What happens in/at the temple? This is really important. All the temple activities facilitated fellowship with God. So, for whatever else we do on the Lord’s day, we assemble as God’s temple to meet with Him.
Jesus is the cornerstone. We are the living stones, the faced-walls. That means that we are not being built as an assembly when some of the stones don’t show up. It also means that we are not being built as an assembly when some of the stones think that worship is done by other stones. We worship together, we assemble to meet with God. As Christians, we don’t have to go to a worship center, but we do have to gather as a worship center.
A people are known by their worship. They meet with God in a temple and we meet God together because we (together) are His dwelling place. We are also His priests.
In the Old Testament, God set aside certain persons to be priests to Him and for His people. What was the primary purpose of a priest? A priest, for all his assignments and duties, for all the singing or sacrificing or speaking, was a go-between, a fellowship facilitator. A priest’s work was to mediate from God to men and from men to God.
The ultimate priest was Jesus Christ, the God-Man. He is our high priest (Hebrews 2:17; 4:14), whose work not only mediates but brings us to God.
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, (1 Peter 3:18)
That isn’t the end of the story. He has made us priests.
you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood (1 Peter 2:5). you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9). [He, Jesus Christ] made us a kingdom, priests to his God and father (Revelation 1:6)
One of the glories of the Protestant Reformation was an understanding of the priesthood of all believers. We no longer depend on someone else for our access to God. We don’t need any human mediator. We have direct, firsthand access to God in Christ.
This does not mean that all of us have the same tasks or must do the same thing. We do not depend on men to go between us and God, to do worship for us. But we do depend on men to lead us in worship to God.
Are you being led or are you depending on the leaders? Do you view corporate worship as the one work of the many or as the work of one (or a few) for the many? Do you come to meet God, or to hear someone else talk about meeting God? Are we an assembly or mostly an audience?
People are identified by their worship. Worship involves a temple, priests, and sacrifices. In the Old Testament, God provided His people with a number of sacrifices, some of which we’re going to examine next Lord’s day. For now, what was the reason for the sacrifices? They were for fellowship. Sin/guilt sacrifices dealt with the hindrance to fellowship with a holy God. Peace sacrifices were to share communion with God. The offerings weren’t merely a means to the end of worship, they were part of it.
Just as Jesus replaced the temple, just as He is the high priest, so He fulfilled all the animal and grain sacrifices. In His sacrifice, we are forgiven, we are sanctified, and we commune with God.
And also, as with the temple and the priests, so we are now the sacrifices. Peter said,
to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:5)
In that sense, we offer sacrifices. But consider Paul’s appeal:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1)
For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. (2 Corinthians 2:15–16)
We are sacrifices, not in order to redeem ourselves or others, but because we have been redeemed. As our lives are burned up for God, there is a certain smell about us.
Someone may point out that we are individual sacrifices, true. But this worship isn’t mean to be separated from the whole body, so the following paragraph in Romans 12:3-8.
Worship usually includes a temple as the place to meet God. Worship involves priests who bring God and men together. Worship involves offering sacrifices that make fellowship possible. All of this defines a people.
We don’t go to a temple - now we are God’s temple.
We don’t go through a priest - now we are God’s priests.
We don’t offer sacrifices - now we are God’s sacrifices.
We weren’t God’s people - now we are.
How does the world know that? Because the church is a Trinitarian worship center.
In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:22)
In the Son we are being built into a dwelling place for the Father by the Spirit. That’s who we are.
And in our worship, as His temple, His priests, His sacrifices, we are His propaganda.
through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 3:10)
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)
In 1 Peter 2 verse 5, we are a temple/priesthood “to offer spiritual sacrifices.” In verse 9, we are a priesthood/nation “to proclaim His excellencies” in a dark world. In other words, the church’s worship is the ultimate “anti-idolatry campaign” (John Witvliet, “Series Preface” of Our Worship). When the believing, submitting, living assembly fellowships with God, it is an act of war against the world of unbelief, rebellion, and death.
It is little wonder that our lives are so disconnected. We’ve boiled down meeting with God into listening to a message. Fellowship for us, then, basically means we don’t disagree with their sentences. No wonder we don’t know how to relate to others, we have no practice relating to God.
We don’t know how to communicate love. Worship isn’t about corporate enjoyment of God. We don’t share anything, we do our own thing at the same time under the same roof. No wonder conversation is so hard at the dinner table. No wonder everyone prefers to hang out in their own rooms at home.
We’re a spectator people. The godly ones are those who really pay attention, not those who participate. We love when other people do things so that we don’t have to. We learn that attitude right here.
In all of this, we don’t make a dent in the domain of darkness. If the enemy can keep us sleepy and separated and spectating, the gates of his domain have no worries.
Maybe we need to know who we are, an assembly of worshippers, not an audience. When God builds up His people as a dwelling place, as a kingdom of priests who give themselves as living sacrifices, God knocks down unbelief and rebellion and death.
All together now, Boom!