| “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!” (First in a series on “Member Privileges”) Deuteronomy 6:1-25; Mark 12:28-34 Olivet Covenant Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, PA © Rev. Linda Jaymes, 2/21/10 FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT |
This is the time of year when we do the “business” of the church. By that I am referring to last week’s installation of
Trustees and today’s ordination and installation of Deacons and Elders, all of whom were elected at our annual business meeting
a few weeks ago. But what really is the “business” of the church? I hope we all recognize that it’s more than having meetings
and electing people to serve. As Lent begins, a time when we examine our personal lives and relationship with God, this is also
a good time to examine our corporate life; a time to consider what our business or purpose as a church really is. Or to put it
even more simply, to remember why we’re here.
Some folks might say that that’s a matter of opinion. People come to church for a number of different reasons. But
according to Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Church, the Church really has five main purposes. Warren also
believes that in order for a church to be healthy, regardless of its size or location or personality, it needs to balance all five of
these purposes and not neglect any of them. So what I’d like for us to do is examine these purposes during Lent to help us
focus on why we’re here. I also want to suggest that we think of these reasons not only as the purposes of the church, but as
our “member privileges, “as well.
The first and most important purpose and privilege of the Body of Christ in any time and place is worship. That ought to
be obvious, but when the obvious becomes routine we have a tendency to forget how important it is or even take it for
granted. We may lose sight of why we worship if we don’t continually remind ourselves why we’re here. It’s even possible
that we have never really understood why we do worship. If that’s the case, we may feel a bit like the little girl who was
getting bored while at worship with her mother. In her church, they took the offering after the sermon, and she always looked
forward to that because she knew it meant that the service was almost over. One Sunday she was getting so restless as the
preacher droned on and on that she finally leaned over and whispered, “Mommy, if we give him the money now, will he let us
go?”
I fear that too many adults sometimes have that same attitude toward worship! It’s so easy to fall into the pattern of
thinking that the purpose of worship is to feed us—or even worse—to entertain us. But that’s not why we’re here. Worship is
not for our benefit. Of course we always hope and pray that we do benefit from worship, but that’s not why we worship.
Fundamentally, and literally, we’re here for the love of God. We’re here to tell God of his worth, his “worth-ship,” which is
what the word worship really means. The goal of all our worship activity is to give God the love, honor, reverence, devotion,
loyalty and praise that He is truly worthy to receive. And so if you consider it a sacrifice to take the time to come and do that
every week, well, you’re on the right track! Worship is supposed to be a living sacrifice and offering of ourselves: heart, soul,
mind, strength, time, talent and treasure, because God is worthy of it all.
From the time God first called a people to Himself, love for God has been the purpose and focus of worship. If you’ve
been attending Bruce’s class on the Ten Commandments you’ll remember that we learned that those commandments begin with
very specific instructions about worship. The first commandment tells us who we are to worship—none other but the one and
only God, the Lord, YAYWEH, the great “I AM.” The second commandment then tells us how (or how not) to worship the
Lord: by not making or bowing down to idols. In today’s Old Testament lesson Moses reiterates and expands on those first
two commandments as he neared the end of his life. The people were about to move into the Promised Land without him and
Moses wanted them to remember the importance of worshiping God and God alone. He exhorted them to love the Lord with all
of their heart, all of their soul and all of their strength.
I suspect that the Hebrews understood that better than we do. Their word for heart included the mind and the will and the
emotions. They knew that those things should never be separated or divided, especially when it comes to worshiping God. To
properly worship God, it requires all of our human personality, not merely emotion and not only intellectual activity. A writer
from another era commented about the imbalance lof worship in his day by comparing Muslims and Christians. He said that
“Muslims, upon entering a mosque, leave their shoes outside, whereas Christians, upon entering a church, leave their brains
outside.” I’m not sure that has ever been a problem for Presbyterians, but at one time it was said that upon entering a church
we tended to leave our emotions outside! The point is that God wants us to worship with all of our heart, soul and strength.
And for the love of God, that’s how we should worship.
The truth is that Judeo-Christian worship is unique when compared to other religions and their worship practices. I’m not
talking about our reverence for God’s holiness and might, for those are qualities often claimed by the gods of other religions. I’
m not even talking about God’s preference for obedience over sacrifice, for that’s a characteristic that might be attributed to
Buddha. But what other religion has a God who longs for our love? Only a God who is sovereign and holy and righteous and
omnipotent and who is love would make love his supreme demand.
The only trouble is that it is very hard to love a God who is Spirit; who is mystery; a God from whom we have cut
ourselves off by our own willfulness and sin. But even this problem has been solved because out of God’s great love, He has
come to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Not only is Jesus fully God, but He is also fully human, which makes it possible for
us to see and know what God and his love are like. And through Christ, God has made it possible for us to love Him back.
This is meant to be an all-compassing love, expressed by the most intimate and warm of all human emotions, the strength of
our will and the power of our intellect, as well as an attitude of holy fear and reverence. Our love for God is meant to
transcend the love we have for one another, just as He transcends our humanity and occupies a category all his own.
According to Scripture, we don’t seem to be in any danger of loving and worshiping God too much. The Israelites were
commanded to take all of God’s commandments to heart, and impress them on their children. They were to talk about them at
home, as they traveled from place to place, at bedtime and upon awakening. They were even instructed to tie these commands
on their hands and foreheads and write them on their doorframes and gates. In short, no outward sign of genuine inward love
for God is considered to be too great, too obsessive or inappropriate.
If you have ever visited Jerusalem’s western or Wailing Wall, you couldn’t miss seeing the observant Jewish men with
their phylacteries tied on their foreheads. In fact, quite recently a plane made an emergency landing because a young man on
board was wearing one of these while he prayed and his strange ritual was mistaken for some kind of terrorist activity!
Actually, these phylacteries are little black boxes about three inches square with the “Shema” inside. “Shema” is the Hebrew
word for “Hear,” and it refers to this very section of Deuteronomy we read today which commands Israel to hear and
remember the command to love and worship God with all your heart, soul and strength. Maybe if we were willing to go around
with those little boxes on our heads we would remember that our motivation for worship should be for the love of God.
Unfortunately, that is not always our priority. We may come to worship for any number of reasons. Maybe our parents
did it. Maybe we like the music or the preacher. Or it’s the only opportunity to get out of the house and see other people. In a
country like ours, where we are free to come to worship without being persecuted, and where we have so much in the way of
material wealth or “stuff,” filling up the rest of our lives, so many choices on the menu, we can easily be distracted from
worshiping for the right reasons and with all our heart, soul and strength. We have to really work to remember that we are here
for the love of God, not for ourselves. We Americans, especially, have to be careful never to take our freedom to worship for
granted. We must never allow the many material blessings we have in this great land to lull us into believing that we have
achieved prosperity on our own and we don’t need to acknowledge that God is the source and giver of all these good gifts.
Acknowledging and thanking God for these things and for all of life is another way we worship God.
Forgetting that is the very trap that Moses warned the Israelites to avoid. Moses understood that it wasn’t the hard times
or struggles that would undermine the future of Israel, but prosperity! He reminded the people that once they were settled in
the land and enjoying the good bounty that the Lord had provided, they shouldn’t forget that it was the Lord who made it all
possible. And the best way to remember that is to come together and worship for the love of God. Worshiping for the love of
God visibly demonstrates that God—not prosperity or anything else—is at the center of who we are, both as individuals and as
a church. When we worship for the love of God, prosperity and all lesser things in our lives fall into their proper place.
Jesus also made it clear that loving God with every part of our being is the most important commandment of all, followed
closely by loving our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. In his interaction with the scribe in Mark’s gospel, Jesus didn’t
hesitate to affirm the scribe’s opinion that loving God and neighbor were more important than anything else. The two go hand
in hand, for scripture also teaches us that we are kidding ourselves—in fact, it says that we are lying--if we say we love God
and do not love our neighbor. So when we worship together as the Body of Christ, we have the opportunity to fulfill these two
most important commandments. As we come together to worship for the love of God, we cannot avoid each other. In the
process of loving God with all our heart, we discover that we are joined together as Christ’s body, sometimes for better;
sometimes for worse, but always for love as we share each other’s joys, concerns, sorrows and needs. I think it’s a very
lovely thing, for example, that we have those food baskets right here in the sanctuary where we can give and take food as we
need to. The offering of ourselves, heart, soul and strength includes our presence and the gifts we bring—both those placed in
the offering plates and in those baskets.
Of course, our love for God and our worship of God doesn’t end when we leave this place. Our lives, our work, our
relationships and everything we do is really a part of our worship of God, and so everything else we do should be done for the
love of God, too. But our worship together as a Christ’s Body is where all of that starts. We can’t really serve Him fully in the
world until we’ve worshiped Him within the Body. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “You may worship God anywhere, at any
time, but the chances are that you will not do so unless you have first learned to worship Him somewhere in some particular
place, at some particular time.”1 It’s when we do that with all of our heart and mind and strength that we find that like that
scribe, we are not far from the Kingdom, either. Worshiping for the love of God ends up changing us, and empowers us to
love Him and live for Him out in the world.
Worship really is one of the most important purposes of the Church, perhaps our central purpose. It is the very first thing
that God commands us to do. But I hope that that word command doesn’t keep us from remembering that we worship not just
because we ought to or because we have to but because we want to, for the love of God. And when we worship out of love,
the love given with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, then worship becomes not an obligation but a joy and a privilege, a
privilege of membership in the Kingdom which Christ came to bring, for the love of God.
Let us pray.
1. Joan Winmill Brown, ed., Day by Day with Billy Graham. Entry for February 5. World Wide Publications, Minn. MN. 1976.
Trustees and today’s ordination and installation of Deacons and Elders, all of whom were elected at our annual business meeting
a few weeks ago. But what really is the “business” of the church? I hope we all recognize that it’s more than having meetings
and electing people to serve. As Lent begins, a time when we examine our personal lives and relationship with God, this is also
a good time to examine our corporate life; a time to consider what our business or purpose as a church really is. Or to put it
even more simply, to remember why we’re here.
Some folks might say that that’s a matter of opinion. People come to church for a number of different reasons. But
according to Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Church, the Church really has five main purposes. Warren also
believes that in order for a church to be healthy, regardless of its size or location or personality, it needs to balance all five of
these purposes and not neglect any of them. So what I’d like for us to do is examine these purposes during Lent to help us
focus on why we’re here. I also want to suggest that we think of these reasons not only as the purposes of the church, but as
our “member privileges, “as well.
The first and most important purpose and privilege of the Body of Christ in any time and place is worship. That ought to
be obvious, but when the obvious becomes routine we have a tendency to forget how important it is or even take it for
granted. We may lose sight of why we worship if we don’t continually remind ourselves why we’re here. It’s even possible
that we have never really understood why we do worship. If that’s the case, we may feel a bit like the little girl who was
getting bored while at worship with her mother. In her church, they took the offering after the sermon, and she always looked
forward to that because she knew it meant that the service was almost over. One Sunday she was getting so restless as the
preacher droned on and on that she finally leaned over and whispered, “Mommy, if we give him the money now, will he let us
go?”
I fear that too many adults sometimes have that same attitude toward worship! It’s so easy to fall into the pattern of
thinking that the purpose of worship is to feed us—or even worse—to entertain us. But that’s not why we’re here. Worship is
not for our benefit. Of course we always hope and pray that we do benefit from worship, but that’s not why we worship.
Fundamentally, and literally, we’re here for the love of God. We’re here to tell God of his worth, his “worth-ship,” which is
what the word worship really means. The goal of all our worship activity is to give God the love, honor, reverence, devotion,
loyalty and praise that He is truly worthy to receive. And so if you consider it a sacrifice to take the time to come and do that
every week, well, you’re on the right track! Worship is supposed to be a living sacrifice and offering of ourselves: heart, soul,
mind, strength, time, talent and treasure, because God is worthy of it all.
From the time God first called a people to Himself, love for God has been the purpose and focus of worship. If you’ve
been attending Bruce’s class on the Ten Commandments you’ll remember that we learned that those commandments begin with
very specific instructions about worship. The first commandment tells us who we are to worship—none other but the one and
only God, the Lord, YAYWEH, the great “I AM.” The second commandment then tells us how (or how not) to worship the
Lord: by not making or bowing down to idols. In today’s Old Testament lesson Moses reiterates and expands on those first
two commandments as he neared the end of his life. The people were about to move into the Promised Land without him and
Moses wanted them to remember the importance of worshiping God and God alone. He exhorted them to love the Lord with all
of their heart, all of their soul and all of their strength.
I suspect that the Hebrews understood that better than we do. Their word for heart included the mind and the will and the
emotions. They knew that those things should never be separated or divided, especially when it comes to worshiping God. To
properly worship God, it requires all of our human personality, not merely emotion and not only intellectual activity. A writer
from another era commented about the imbalance lof worship in his day by comparing Muslims and Christians. He said that
“Muslims, upon entering a mosque, leave their shoes outside, whereas Christians, upon entering a church, leave their brains
outside.” I’m not sure that has ever been a problem for Presbyterians, but at one time it was said that upon entering a church
we tended to leave our emotions outside! The point is that God wants us to worship with all of our heart, soul and strength.
And for the love of God, that’s how we should worship.
The truth is that Judeo-Christian worship is unique when compared to other religions and their worship practices. I’m not
talking about our reverence for God’s holiness and might, for those are qualities often claimed by the gods of other religions. I’
m not even talking about God’s preference for obedience over sacrifice, for that’s a characteristic that might be attributed to
Buddha. But what other religion has a God who longs for our love? Only a God who is sovereign and holy and righteous and
omnipotent and who is love would make love his supreme demand.
The only trouble is that it is very hard to love a God who is Spirit; who is mystery; a God from whom we have cut
ourselves off by our own willfulness and sin. But even this problem has been solved because out of God’s great love, He has
come to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Not only is Jesus fully God, but He is also fully human, which makes it possible for
us to see and know what God and his love are like. And through Christ, God has made it possible for us to love Him back.
This is meant to be an all-compassing love, expressed by the most intimate and warm of all human emotions, the strength of
our will and the power of our intellect, as well as an attitude of holy fear and reverence. Our love for God is meant to
transcend the love we have for one another, just as He transcends our humanity and occupies a category all his own.
According to Scripture, we don’t seem to be in any danger of loving and worshiping God too much. The Israelites were
commanded to take all of God’s commandments to heart, and impress them on their children. They were to talk about them at
home, as they traveled from place to place, at bedtime and upon awakening. They were even instructed to tie these commands
on their hands and foreheads and write them on their doorframes and gates. In short, no outward sign of genuine inward love
for God is considered to be too great, too obsessive or inappropriate.
If you have ever visited Jerusalem’s western or Wailing Wall, you couldn’t miss seeing the observant Jewish men with
their phylacteries tied on their foreheads. In fact, quite recently a plane made an emergency landing because a young man on
board was wearing one of these while he prayed and his strange ritual was mistaken for some kind of terrorist activity!
Actually, these phylacteries are little black boxes about three inches square with the “Shema” inside. “Shema” is the Hebrew
word for “Hear,” and it refers to this very section of Deuteronomy we read today which commands Israel to hear and
remember the command to love and worship God with all your heart, soul and strength. Maybe if we were willing to go around
with those little boxes on our heads we would remember that our motivation for worship should be for the love of God.
Unfortunately, that is not always our priority. We may come to worship for any number of reasons. Maybe our parents
did it. Maybe we like the music or the preacher. Or it’s the only opportunity to get out of the house and see other people. In a
country like ours, where we are free to come to worship without being persecuted, and where we have so much in the way of
material wealth or “stuff,” filling up the rest of our lives, so many choices on the menu, we can easily be distracted from
worshiping for the right reasons and with all our heart, soul and strength. We have to really work to remember that we are here
for the love of God, not for ourselves. We Americans, especially, have to be careful never to take our freedom to worship for
granted. We must never allow the many material blessings we have in this great land to lull us into believing that we have
achieved prosperity on our own and we don’t need to acknowledge that God is the source and giver of all these good gifts.
Acknowledging and thanking God for these things and for all of life is another way we worship God.
Forgetting that is the very trap that Moses warned the Israelites to avoid. Moses understood that it wasn’t the hard times
or struggles that would undermine the future of Israel, but prosperity! He reminded the people that once they were settled in
the land and enjoying the good bounty that the Lord had provided, they shouldn’t forget that it was the Lord who made it all
possible. And the best way to remember that is to come together and worship for the love of God. Worshiping for the love of
God visibly demonstrates that God—not prosperity or anything else—is at the center of who we are, both as individuals and as
a church. When we worship for the love of God, prosperity and all lesser things in our lives fall into their proper place.
Jesus also made it clear that loving God with every part of our being is the most important commandment of all, followed
closely by loving our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. In his interaction with the scribe in Mark’s gospel, Jesus didn’t
hesitate to affirm the scribe’s opinion that loving God and neighbor were more important than anything else. The two go hand
in hand, for scripture also teaches us that we are kidding ourselves—in fact, it says that we are lying--if we say we love God
and do not love our neighbor. So when we worship together as the Body of Christ, we have the opportunity to fulfill these two
most important commandments. As we come together to worship for the love of God, we cannot avoid each other. In the
process of loving God with all our heart, we discover that we are joined together as Christ’s body, sometimes for better;
sometimes for worse, but always for love as we share each other’s joys, concerns, sorrows and needs. I think it’s a very
lovely thing, for example, that we have those food baskets right here in the sanctuary where we can give and take food as we
need to. The offering of ourselves, heart, soul and strength includes our presence and the gifts we bring—both those placed in
the offering plates and in those baskets.
Of course, our love for God and our worship of God doesn’t end when we leave this place. Our lives, our work, our
relationships and everything we do is really a part of our worship of God, and so everything else we do should be done for the
love of God, too. But our worship together as a Christ’s Body is where all of that starts. We can’t really serve Him fully in the
world until we’ve worshiped Him within the Body. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “You may worship God anywhere, at any
time, but the chances are that you will not do so unless you have first learned to worship Him somewhere in some particular
place, at some particular time.”1 It’s when we do that with all of our heart and mind and strength that we find that like that
scribe, we are not far from the Kingdom, either. Worshiping for the love of God ends up changing us, and empowers us to
love Him and live for Him out in the world.
Worship really is one of the most important purposes of the Church, perhaps our central purpose. It is the very first thing
that God commands us to do. But I hope that that word command doesn’t keep us from remembering that we worship not just
because we ought to or because we have to but because we want to, for the love of God. And when we worship out of love,
the love given with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength, then worship becomes not an obligation but a joy and a privilege, a
privilege of membership in the Kingdom which Christ came to bring, for the love of God.
Let us pray.
1. Joan Winmill Brown, ed., Day by Day with Billy Graham. Entry for February 5. World Wide Publications, Minn. MN. 1976.
