Worship: Life, Not Service (Part 1)

11/1987

First question: What do we need to plan for and what arrangements do we have to make in order to make change in our worship?

I think, more than anything else, the real question is about a definition of what worship is. This is kind of elusive if you have in your mind what all of us grew up with, whether it be Catholic or Methodist or Presbyterian or Church of Christ. It’s really all the same thing. It’s centered around “worship services,” and believe me this isn’t semantics. “Worship services” implies by the very concept itself that we are “going” to “worship,” just like we are “going” to “church.” We are “going” to a “worship service.” We are going to have a “worship service” for God and then we’re going to leave.

That whole idea is faulty from the beginning. Jesus never had a single “worship service” with the twelve. His life was a worship. “Consider the lily of the field,” you know? “The Kingdom of God is like this farmer over here.” And it was just a celebration of life, looking around and seeing what God had done and was doing in the world around him. Then bringing other people into an awareness, into a sensitivity of what God is doing and celebrating that.

That’s what true worship is. “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, which is your spiritual worship.” That’s the definition of worship in the Bible, in the New Covenant. The old covenant was a shadow, like tithing. “Ten percent” was a shadow of the Reality of “all of our hearts, all of our souls, all of our mind and all of our strength.” The Sabbath, Saturday Sabbath’s worship time was a shadow of what the Hebrews writer said and what it says in Colossians 2: the Reality of Jesus as our Sabbath Rest. Paul says, “I fear I wasted my time on you because you esteem one day more highly than another.”

In Romans 14 he said, “Some of you weaker brothers actually hold one day as more sacred than another. It’s not so.” I mean if you want to do that, you stand or fall before your own master and you won’t be condemned for doing that, but the highest way is that there is not a day that’s to be esteemed more highly than another.

Jesus is our sabbath. We didn’t move sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday. Jesus is the sabbath rest. Christ is the soma, the Reality of the old covenant of the sabbaths, the festivals and all those things. The law itself is a shadow it says in Hebrews 10:1. The temple is a shadow it says in Hebrews 8.

All those things were simply a shadow of the reality that’s in Jesus, and while the sabbath rest was a picture and it was necessary for them—it was a visual aid just like the temple and the sacrificial system and all those things. It was a visual aid to show us the reality in Jesus, and now Jesus as our sabbath rest has become a source of seven day a week, 24 hour a day worship. Daily in public and from house to house.

Sunday is not as we’ve always imagined it as being—the “new sabbath day.” Now if you look at it scripturally you’ll find out what I’m saying is true. There’s one place in the whole New Testament where the phrase “the Lord’s Day” is used. It doesn’t say it’s Sunday. There’s only one place, it’s in Revelation 1, and literally it probably doesn’t even say Lord’s day.

John said, “I was in the Spirit unto the day of the Lord.” Now, it’s translated by a lot of translations as, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” We immediately with our King James 1600’s catholic mindset said, “Oh, Lord’s Day, that’s probably Sunday.” There’s absolutely no proof of that anywhere in the Bible—that the Lord’s Day was Sunday that he was referring to.

“He was in the Spirit unto the day of the Lord” makes a lot more sense in the context of what the book of Revelation is all about. He was in the Spirit unto the day of the Lord. What God opened to him was the day of the Lord. It’s always referred to in the old Testament and in the New Testament as being the coming return of Jesus Christ, the Day of the Lord when all these things happen and Jesus calls up His Bride into the heavens.

So that makes a lot more sense in the context of what John was saying. “I was in the Spirit unto the Day of the Lord.” To see into the day of the Lord. And it began by seeing Jesus, which is another story. We’re not going to see anything else until we see Jesus first. The book of Revelation begins by John meeting Jesus and falling on his face as a man who was dead. Jesus said, “Be not afraid. I’m with you. I’m on your side. I’m your friend.” And then John rose to see deeper. That’s got to be the case with us, too. We’ve got to begin by seeing Jesus or the rest of the revelation will never happen to us.

Now in regard to Sunday. We know some things about Sunday. We know Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday. We know Pentacost was on Sunday. We know that in 1 Corinthians 16, they set money aside on the first day of the week. But there’s some things that need to be mentioned about that. We talked about that the other night.

Paul was with those guys a year and a half, and he never mentioned to set aside money on the first day of the week. He wrote to them a year after he left their presence. He had been with them over a year and a half, and he had to write to them to do that. That means they weren’t already doing that, and they didn’t do that while he was there, or he never would have needed to write a letter about it.

Now, also I’d like to say that if Jesus cooked hot dogs with the disciples on Tuesday, I don’t think we would make that a mandatory case for cooking hot dogs on Tuesday. If they set aside money on the first day of the week, that doesn’t mean that it was a worship service where they passed a basket around. All it means is that they probably got paid on the last day of the week and set it aside on the first day of the week.

There was something to making sure it was organized to an extent so that when Paul came back they wouldn’t need to take a big collection at that moment in time, which is what he said. He said, “So that you won’t have to take a big collection when I come, go ahead and on the first day of the week…just write that in your mind as something that you’ll do.” But it wasn’t something they did when he was there for a year and a half, and it wasn’t something that he even said needed to happen after he collected the money and took it to the saints in Jerusalem.

So there was a specific purpose for it, and a lot of things that we’ve called necessary inference are just simply people living life. You read in Acts 20 that they gathered on the first day of the week to break bread. That’s really the other substantial reference that we have. If you read the passage, you can make a real good case for the fact that it was well after midnight when they broke the bread, when they had the Lord’s supper, which makes it Monday. Ok? Read the passage. It’s pretty clear that you would really have to stretch it to even imagine that they had the Lord’s supper on Sunday rather than on Monday.