The Second Sunday of Lent, Year B
Psalm 22:22-30; Mark
Pastor Gayle M. Pope
PLANNED
FOR GOD’S PLEASURE
Last week’s sermon raised the question, “What on earth am I here for?” The
answer: We were created to be loved by God.
We heard about God’s mission to save us – going all the way
back to Noah, with a covenant sealed by a rainbow – and being completed in
Jesus with a covenant sealed by Jesus’ blood.
We heard about God’s great love for us and the lengths to
which God goes in order to save us and keep us in relationship with Him.
This morning we’re going to look at the flip side of that
truth: not only were we created to be loved BY God, but also to LOVE GOD back. Our love for God PLEASES God.
That is the first purpose of our lives – to bring pleasure
to God by knowing and loving God – this is called “worship.” The first of the five purposes in the
purpose-driven life is to worship God.
Right away there is a problem with this because the word
“worship” is not fully understood.
People tend to think of “worship” as what we do in church
Sunday morning – singing, praying, and going through rituals. You might also consider the praying you do on
your own as worshipping God.
But that is just a tiny, tiny tip of the ice berg of what
true worship means.
Romans 12:1 says, in Today’s
English Version, “Because of God’s great
mercy to us... Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to His
service and pleasing to Him. This is the true worship that you should offer.”
True worship is giving our WHOLE SELVES to God – every part
of our lives and everything we do. It is
the natural response when we begin to comprehend how much God loves us!
Worship is giving back to God what God first gives to us –
which is everything – our lives, our time, our possessions – but especially God’s
love. The Bible says in 1 John 4:19, “We
love, because GOD first loved us.” Worship
is our RESPONSE to God’s initiative in loving us and saving us.
In Mark’s gospel, we hear about a scribe who asked Jesus, “Which
is the greatest commandment?” Jesus replied,
“You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind, and with all your strength.”
To love God with our MINDS is to love God THOUGHTFULLY – to
continually keep God in our thoughts. In
this sense, worship is “focusing my
attention” on God. Psalm 105:4 says,
“Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his
presence continually.”
There are some things we can do to help us keep God in our
thoughts. For example:
§
Read a daily devotional
§
Say prayers before every meal and when you go to bed at
night
§
Put a Bible verse or inspirational message on your mirror,
your desk, your file cabinet or refrigerator
§
When you are stopped by a line at the grocery store or a
stoplight or barge, get in the habit of using that time to pray.
To love God with our HEARTS AND SOULS is to love God PASSIONATELY. In this sense, worship is “expressing my affection” to God. Through the prophet Hosea, God said, “For I desire steadfast love and not
sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
One way to express affection for God is just to say, “thank
you.” Whenever you see something
beautiful or feel something good, say “thank you, Jesus.” Or even when something bad or challenging
happens, say, “Thank you God for whatever you are teaching me through this.”
To love God with our STRENGTH is to love God PRACTICALLY. In this sense, worship is “using my abilities” for God. Colossians
Sometimes we think of only the religious or church things we
do as using our abilities for God. But God GAVE us our abilities, and so
ANYTHING we do with them is worship when we do it with God in mind – from
changing diapers to taking out the garbage.
Martin Luther was very strong on this point. He wrote and
talked a lot about the “priesthood of all believers” and about our vocations
being whatever work God calls us to.
He wrote, “Even the
poor maid should have the joy in her heart of being able to say:
‘Now I am cooking, making the bed,
sweeping the house. Who has commanded me to do these things? My master and
mistress have. Who has given them this authority over me? God has. Very well,
then it must be true that I am serving not them alone but also God in heaven
and that God must be pleased with my service, How could I possibly be more
blessed? Why, my service is equal to cooking for God in heaven!’
“In this way a man
could be happy and of good cheer in all his trouble and labor; and if he
accustomed himself to look at his service and calling in this way nothing would
be distasteful to him.”
Placing all our ATTENTION, all our AFFFECTION and all
our ABILITIES – laying them all down joyfully as an offering to God – that is
true worship, and that is pleasing to God.
This, of course, is not easy for us as human beings
bound by sin. Fear, pride and confusion
are all obstacles that get in the way of our surrendering our lives to God. The
tendency of our HUMAN nature, is to focus on
ourselves.
According to Maslow’s
theory of the hierarchy of needs, our whole being is oriented around getting
our needs met – starting with the body’s needs for survival and progressing to
the needs for safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem, self
actualization (or making a difference), and finally self-transcendence. On every level of this pyramid, the focus is
on US.
But when we turn our focus toward God and God’s love
for us in Jesus Christ – when we live in the realization that we are children
of God, saved and forgiven by God’s grace -- it becomes more natural to place
our attention, affection and abilities in service to God’s Kingdom.
Our gospel reading for today fits
perfectly into this idea of worshipping God with our whole lives. The setting for this story is right
after Jesus had asked the disciples, “Who do you say I am?” and Peter had
answered: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” And Jesus had said, “Blessed are you, Peter,
for God has revealed this to you.”
But then Jesus began to tell the disciples about how
he would die, and Peter rebuked Jesus for saying such a thing. Then Jesus
rebuked PETER and said that NOW Peter was setting his mind NOT on divine
things, but on HUMAN things. Peter, just like us, took his focus off Jesus and
put it back on himself and his survival and esteem.
Then Jesus said, “If
any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their
cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those
who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
When we hear about “taking up our cross” we tend to
think about suffering for the sake of suffering. We get this image of the Christian life as a
gloomy, serious, sad endeavor. But that is not really what Jesus is
saying. For Jesus, the cross was his
mission and his purpose.
For us to “take up the cross” means
to take up the mission and purpose that God has for us – to live for God and
not for ourselves. More than likely, we WILL have times of
suffering, but even in suffering, to live for God is to live in joy.
In the letter to the Hebrews it says that Jesus
endured the cross, disregarding its shame “for
the sake of the joy that was set before him.” Jesus could see past his suffering when he
would take his seat at the right hand of the throne of God and make a place for
all of us there, too.
As I was driving home from
Some of the words are, “Empty hands held high. Such small sacrifice.
If not joined with my life I sing in vain tonight.
“May the words I say
and the things I do make my lifesong sing, bring a
smile to You.
Lord I give my life, a living sacrifice to reach a world in need, to be Your hands and feet.
“Let my lifesong sing to You. I wanna sign Your name at the end of this day, knowing that my heart was
true. Let my lifesong sing to You.”
Mark Hall, one of the group members said, “All of life is worship. If we’re not
careful we will ‘praise worship’ and ‘worship praise.’ We begin to look at
worship as an experience when, in reality, our corporate worship is simply the
culmination of the life we should be living all week long. … We must begin to
see all of life as about Him and not us.”
Thinking of your whole life as a song sung to God is
one way of looking at true worship.
It’s easy to become discouraged over our relationship
with God if we think that we have to “get it right” BEFORE we please God. But the truth is that just our DESIRE to love
and please God, pleases God. Even when we FAIL, just the fact that we WANT
to please God, pleases him.
I’d like to close this morning with a prayer by
Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk, from a book called “Thoughts
in Solitude” written in 1953, that I think fits well with this message today.
Let us pray:
“God, we have no idea
where we are going. We do not see the road ahead of us. We cannot know for
certain where it will end. Nor do we really know ourselves, and the fact that
we think we are following your will does not mean that we are actually doing
so.
But we believe that
our desire to please you itself pleases you. And we hope we have that desire in
all that we are doing. We hope that we will never do anything apart from that
desire. And we know that if we do this you will lead us by the right road,
though we may know nothing about it.
Therefore, we will trust you always though we may
seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. We will not fear, for you are ever
with us, and you will never leave us to face our perils alone.” Amen.