The Elements of Worship:
God’s Mercy and Our Thankfulness and Forgiveness
Sycamore Creek Church
December 12, 2010
Tom Arthur
Isaiah 6:1-8
Peace, Friends!
We embark on this third week of a series about worship where we’re looking at four elements of God’s character and our response. I’m just now jumping into the series because some elements in my own life changed these past two weeks. My wife and I gave birth to our first child, a boy, named Micah John! I’ve been spending a lot of time contemplating the mystery of each person as described in Psalm 139 which says:
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,
Wonderful are your works;
That I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you ,
When I was being made in secret,
Intricately woven in the depth of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
All the days that were formed for me,
When none of them as yet existed.
Sarah and I are deeply grateful for how well this church community has taken care of us. I hope that we take care of one another just as well as you take care of Sarah and me. I am especially thankful for Mark Aupperlee who stepped in to preach two weeks in a row so that I could spend time at home just beginning to get used to being a dad. Thank you, Mark.
While Sarah and I have been waiting for this baby to come, we are in a season of the church calendar when we too wait the coming of another baby, Jesus. We’re in the season of Advent and “advent” is Latin for coming. We’re preparing our hearts to worship this baby Jesus who is God in the flesh, our Lord, king, and savior. This is a great time to be exploring more deeply what it means to worship.
There’s another good reason for us to be studying worship. You asked for it. A year ago we had a congregation-wide consultation day and out of that came a process of dialogue groups, and one of those dialogue groups focused on the area of worship, and that dialogue group said one thing we must do is some teaching on worship. So here we are: The Elements of Worship.
We’ve been looking at different definitions of worship over the past two weeks. On the first week we asked you to submit some definitions. I’ve posted all those on my blog. I’d like to share a sample of them with you this morning. You said that worship is…
- Loving God
- Any act that celebrates God’s presence
- Living out your faith
- In Hebrew it means, “To bend the knee.” For me I see it as me choosing to agree with God & submit to His will…
- An expression of our gratitude and devotion to our God incorporating all elements of our life
- Putting your heart in alignment with God – with mind, heart, and actions
- Celebrating God for who God is and what God has done
- Boring.
I love that last one, just because of the honesty of it. Isn’t it good to be part of a community that strives to be honest with one another? We don’t always get it right, but at least we’re willing to say we’re bored when we are!
So we’ve been working with a definition throughout this series that was my own attempt at summing up a lot of other definitions. I like to say that worship happens most fully when the community gathers to encounter God and respond with everything we’ve got!
There are three key parts of this definition. First, worship is first and foremost about God, not you or what you get out of worship. Second, worship happens most fully in community. As Mark, our resident scientist-preacher, said last week, scientists work best together in a lab rather than by themselves. Same thing is true of worship. And I’m not just talking about the present community. I’m talking about the universal “catholic” community of all the Christians present on Earth and all the Christians who have come before us and even all the company of heaven who join in with our worship. Have you ever thought of that? Actually, it’s more like us joining in with the company of heaven! Lastly, worship is also about our response. When we come into contact with the character of God there are some natural and even supernatural responses that we have. When we encounter God’s glory, we praise. When we encounter God’s holiness, we confess. And today when we encounter God’s mercy, we give thanks. This response doesn’t just hang around on Sunday morning. It continues on throughout the week.
So today we look at God’s mercy. Thank God for God’s mercy. After a week like last week with God’s holiness, we’d all be toast if that’s where the story ended!
Along the way in this series we’ve used the periodic table of elements to help us understand each of these elements of God’s character. Glory equals carbon which can be seen in the beauty of a diamond. Holiness equals hydrogen because it is simple, pure, and dangerous. Mercy equals copper.
One book about the elements says of copper:
“Copper is wonderful stuff. Just wonderful. Many other elements have some kind of a gotcha about them: maybe they are great in every way except that they’re poisonous, or they would be perfect except they explode when they touch water [or cesium which explodes when it touches skin!]. Copper has no gotcha—it’s just nice stuff all around.”
I love that description of copper. You could insert “God’s mercy” in the place of copper and it would be pretty accurate. Copper has some wonderful properties too. It’s very conductive. It gets energy from one place to another. It is valuable right now. A friend of mine moved into an apartment and found that none of the electricity worked. All the copper wiring had been ripped out and stolen! Copper is also known for being one of the most flexible metals and easy to work with. Let’s explore copper a little bit more.
To bring you up to speed on copper, we’re going to turn to Professor Martyn Poliakoff of the University of Nottingham who with the help of some others has made a whole series of videos on the periodic table of elements.
So know that you know about copper, let’s turn to the other side of the equation. Copper = God’s mercy. We’ve been using Isaiah 6:1-8 each week to explore the Elements of Worship. Let’s look for God’s mercy in this story of Isaiah’s encounter with God.
Isaiah 6:1-8 (NLT)
1 In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple. 2 Hovering around him were mighty seraphim, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with the remaining two they flew. 3 In a great chorus they sang,
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty!
The whole earth is filled with his glory!”
4 The glorious singing shook the Temple to its foundations, and the entire sanctuary was filled with smoke. 5 Then I said, “My destruction is sealed, for I am a sinful man and a member of a sinful race. Yet I have seen the King, the LORD Almighty!”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew over to the altar, and he picked up a burning coal with a pair of tongs. 7 He touched my lips with it and said, “See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven.” 8 Then I heard the Lord asking, “Whom should I send as a messenger to my people? Who will go for us?” And I said, “Lord, I’ll go! Send me.”
This is God’s story for us today. Thank you, God!
When we look closely at this story of Isaiah’s encounter with God we learn several things about God’s mercy. First, mercy is all God’s work. Consider again how copper is conductive. It does all the work of moving energy from one place to another. You take any electric appliance and it’s worthless until you plug it into an outlet. The copper in the wires does all the heavy work.
We see in this story that Isaiah is acted upon by God, or God’s messenger. In verse six and seven we read, “Then one of the seraphim flew over to the altar, and he picked up a burning coal with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it…” Isaiah for the most part just stands there in the face of God’s holiness and considers himself doomed. That’s the danger of God’s holiness, but the wonder of God’s mercy is that God works in us despite our sin and brokenness.
We see this dynamic all over scripture but especially in Psalm 51 which begins, “Have mercy on me, O God, because of your unfailing love. Because of your great compassion, blot out the stain of my sins.” It’s God who does the blotting. We can’t get rid of the sin ourselves. God’s mercy is conducive to our forgiveness.
There is a cost to forgiving. When we forgive, something in us must die; something must be let go. Our sin and the sins of others makes in us a kind of hardness that God’s mercy must soften. God knows what this is like. Paul says, “Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said” (1 Corinthians 15:3, NLT). God’s mercy and forgiveness ultimately cost more than we could ever pay, and Jesus willingly paid that cost out of love. Paul puts it another way saying that [Jesus] “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8, NRSV). God’s mercy is all God’s work, and this work of mercy, like all works of mercy, comes at a price to God. It is free to us. It cost God something big. Mercy is all God’s work.
Mercy also means transformation. Consider again copper. Copper is hard enough to build with but soft enough to really be usable. Sarah and I own a house in Petoskey and we were having a leak in the shower. We decided to put in a new shower and we asked our neighbor, Dane, who is a contractor to do the work for us. When he was looking at the work to be done, we went in the basement and examined the plumbing. It was all galvanized steel pipes. If you’ve ever tried to work with steel pipes you know how much of a hassle it can be. Dane figured he could fairly easily attach some new copper pipes to the ends of the steel pipes. After he was all done, we went up to our house to find that he had taken out all the galvanized steel and replaced all our plumbing with new copper pipes. The basement was transformed from plumbing that is a pain to work with to plumbing that is easy and flexible to work with. We were amazed with the transformation and expect any future work to be much easier.
God’s mercy equals our transformation. We see this in the story of Isaiah’s encounter with God in verse seven. We read, “He touched my lips with it and said, ‘See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven.’” Isaiah is transformed by the forgiveness of his sins. He is made pure and holy. In the danger of God’s holiness, Isaiah was expecting destruction but what he ended up with was forgiveness. Mercy equals transformation.
We can see this kind of transformation and the experience it brings in Psalm 32.
Yes, what joy for those whose record the LORD has cleared of sin, whose lives are lived in complete honesty! When I refused to confess my sin, I was weak and miserable, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat. Finally, I confessed all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, “I will confess my rebellion to the LORD.” And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone. (Psalm 32:2-5, NLT)
Now that’s a wonderful transformation! What we’re talking about here is reconciliation. Being made right in relationship when the relationship was broken. Something not right was made right.
I have a somewhat famous cousin who is a farmer in Virginia. His name is Joel Salitin. He was featured in the book, Omnivore’s Dilemma, and also made a showing in the moving Food Inc. His farm is called Polyface farm because he raises many different kinds of animals. His method is to use all the byproducts of each animal to help the other animals so that in the end, his farm produces no waste. Sarah and I went to visit him when we lived in North Carolina. While he was giving us a tour of the farm, we came to a barn that had pigs in it. He got all giddy and jumped over the fence and reached down into the manure and lifted up two big handfuls and said, “Smell this stuff! Touch it!” We were a little reluctant at first, but then we realized leaving him with manure in his hands was kind of like leaving someone hanging in a high-five. So we smelled it and touched it. Amazing thing! It was warm and it smelled sweet! He went on to explain how he was using the pigs to compost or transform the cow manure into useful fertilizer.
That’s what God’s mercy does. It transforms something stinking into something beautiful. God’s mercy transforms our sin and brokenness into forgiveness and reconciliation and holiness. God’s mercy equals transformation.
In worship we encounter God’s mercy. If God’s mercy is all God’s work and leads to transformation, what is our response to God’s mercy? I suggest that we have two natural responses to God’s mercy. The first is that we give thanks. We thank God for all the ways that God has forgiven us and been patient with us and transformed us. We do that in song. We do it in prayer. We do it by turning and opening our hearts to God. When we encounter God’s mercy we respond with thankfulness.
There’s a second response I think we have when we encounter God’s mercy. We show mercy and forgive others. You see, when we encounter the danger of God’s holiness and realize we have fallen short of God’s glory, we are humbled. And when we encounter God’s mercy and are transformed by the work of God in our lives, we are thankful. That humility and thankfulness produces in us a kind of response to those around us that recognizes that because we have been shown mercy and forgiveness, we too ought to show mercy and forgive others. Yes, it will cost us something, just as mercy cost God something. Yes it means softening a hard spot in our hearts and being open to being hurt again, but God knows the same experience through Jesus’ death on the cross. God does not expect a response from us that God has not already paved the way forward himself. We respond to God’s mercy by being merciful and forgiving others.
When we gather to worship as a community we encounter God’s mercy. Like copper that conducts energy from one place to another, God’s mercy is all God’s work. Like copper being flexible enough to be transformed, God’s mercy transforms us. We respond by being thankful and showing mercy to others by forgiving them. In worship we encounter God’s glory, holiness, and mercy and we respond with everything we’ve got: praise, confession, and thankfulness.
Thank you, God!
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