Worship

Researcher Arthur Brooks tells the story of a college student enrolled in an introductory astronomy class. She wasn’t a science major. She walked into class each week carrying the same worries we all carry, but after 90 minutes in class studying galaxies, nebulae, and the billions of stars swirling above us, she would walk out of class feeling strangely… relieved. Why? Because, she said, “I am just a speck on a speck.”

It sounds like an insult—but for her, it was liberation. Standing in awe before something vast made her smaller, and in becoming smaller, she found peace. Brooks argues that we become miserable when we try to make ourselves big—important, admired, at the center of everything. But when we shrink in honest humility, we lose ourselves in wonder.

And this, Scripture says, is exactly where God meets us: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). And “When I consider your heavens… what is man that you are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:3–4).

We are, as Brooks puts it, “specks”—but “beloved specks.” In the vast universe God created, He knows your name, your needs, and calls you His own. True humility is not thinking less of yourself—it’s seeing yourself honestly before a God immeasurably great.

On a cloudless November night in 1572, Tycho Brahe observed an unusually bright star in the northern sky that suddenly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It had been assumed since antiquity that anything beyond the moon's orbit was eternally immutable. That star, SN 1572, is now classified as a supernova that is 7,500 light-years from Earth.

By 1592, Tycho Brahe had cataloged 777 stars. His mapping of those fixed stars blazed a trail for his protege, Johannes Kepler, to discover the laws that govern planetary motion. Several centuries later, it was a telescope named in Kepler's honor—the Kepler space telescope—that would catalog 530,506 stars.

Tycho Brahe is widely regarded as the greatest observer of the skies who had ever lived, but even Brahe couldn't have imagined the existence of half a million stars. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Astronomers now estimate the existence of more than two trillion gal¬axies. Each of those two trillion galaxies has an average of one hundred billion stars. Do the math, and that adds up to two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe.

The point? Creation is much larger than any of us can imagine! And the same goes for the Creator. Like Tycho Brahe, some of us are quite content with our catalog of 777 stars. We think that's all there is. We've settled for a god we can measure and manage. If that's you, your god is too small.

Possible Preaching Angle: Why did God tell Abram to count the stars? (Gen. 15:5). God was messing with his mind, in a good way. He was giving Abram a nightlight—a visual reminder of both his history and his destiny. The same God who hung the stars in the sky can give you descendants. Faith adds God to every equation. When you do that, five loaves plus two fish equals all-you-can-eat for five thousand people. And there is more left over than you started with.

All cultures seem to have at least one thing in common—they write music and sing. But why? Music baffled the evolutionist, Charles Darwin. Humanity’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”

All human societies made music, and yet, for Darwin, it seemed to offer no advantage to our survival. He speculated that music evolved as a way to win over potential mates. Other scientists were skeptical. That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing.

In recent years, scientists have analyzed the acoustic properties of thousands of songs recorded in dozens of cultures. One researcher offered the following guess for why we sing: “Maybe music was needed to improve group cohesion.” Or maybe sharing choruses and melodies, could have brought people together whether as a community or in preparation for a battle. Or maybe it helped parents bond with children.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The fact is, these are all guesses, but the Christian knows the best reason for singing—because the Living God is worthy of our joyful worship. He puts a new song in our mouth.

Journalist Derek Thompson is lamenting the decline of church attendance in America. As an agnostic, one would think he would be pleased. In a piece for The Atlantic, he writes: "Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence."

Thompson paraphrases social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation:

Many Americans have developed a new relationship with a technology that is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. (To) stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. Digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals put us in our body, requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews pray. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people.

I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against his church, but sleet and hail will keep many churchgoers out of the pew on a Sunday. In fact, some may even skip to get a little extra sleep or watch their favorite team.

Respondents were asked how often they would skip a weekly worship service for six different scenarios—to avoid severe weather, to enjoy an outdoor activity in good weather, to get extra sleep, to meet friends, to avoid traveling when it’s raining, or to watch sports.

Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research said, “Churchgoers are not on autopilot. Each week they are faced with a choice of whether to attend church, and there is more than one tradeoff when it comes to this decision.”

Most regular churchgoers say they would miss a weekly worship service at least once a year:

To avoid traveling in severe weather (77%)

To enjoy an outdoor activity (55%)

To get some extra sleep (54%)

To meet a friend or group of friends (50%)

To not have to travel when it was raining (43%)

To watch a sporting event or their favorite team (42%)

One in 10 Protestant churchgoers (11%) say they would never skip for any of these reasons. Twice as many (22%) say they would never skip due to the five options besides severe weather situations.

Additionally, the oldest group of churchgoers (65+) and those of other ethnicities (not white, Hispanic, or African American) are among the least likely to say they’d miss for those reasons.

Astronomers have found the brightest known object in the universe—a glowing core of a galaxy, called a quasar, located 12 billion light-years away. Quasars are the brightest objects in the cosmos, each consisting of a supermassive black hole that’s actively devouring an orbiting disc of gas and dust. But the black hole in this record-setting quasar is gobbling up more than a sun’s-worth of mass every day, making it the fastest growing black hole scientists have ever seen.

The gargantuan object stretches about seven light-years across, and it puts our sun’s luminosity to shame—the quasar shines more than 500 trillion times brighter than the star in our solar system.

Christian Wolf, lead author of the new study, said, “This quasar is the most violent place that we know in the universe. It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now.”

The black hole in the quasar is ravenous, consuming an amount of material equivalent to as much as 413 suns each year, and its black hole weighs about the same as 17 billion suns.

Wolf said, “It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second. He told reports that he doesn’t think anything will ever top this record for the universe’s brightest object.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This newly identified object is 500 trillion times brighter than our sun! How can anything be that bright? Thinking about this star gives us a sense of what the glorious presence of God is like, for Scripture says that God is a being who "lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."

What's blasting from your car speakers, and more important, how does it sound? For sound-system engineers at the audio-equipment manufacturer Bose, a playlist is more than tracks that slap. To test stereos, they need songs representing a variety of sounds and recording techniques to make sure new systems can re-create a song with the depth of the original recording.

To have a common reference point, Bose engineers all over the globe share a master playlist. Mark Armitage, head of the acoustical-engineering team at Bose says, "Every system engineer knows these tracks inside and out. It makes for a universal language we can use when testing and tuning." He named a few selections from the test list:

Bruno Mars, "24K Magic" – It features a lot of instruments from the high tweeter notes all the way down.

Tom Petty, "Learning to Fly (Live)” - The crowd starts singing along, Petty's voice drops out, and you get a real sense of how big that auditorium is.

Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five" - Listen for the cymbals from the intro, which are hard to reproduce.

Straight No Chaser, "Homeward Bound" All a cappella. The vocals span all the way across the stage and you can independently hear each person singing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We also use music to tunes our minds and souls. The world has its music, which attunes them to worldly thoughts, desires, and actions. But believers also have music which tunes our hearts to God by giving us the vocabulary to express praise and worship to God, unifying us as we gather for worship, and adjusting our hearts so that our faith is expressed to God in worship.

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki. They had the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.

The experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.

A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, (but) one key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or berries. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.

The next year, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com, explains “We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible also emphasizes the need for occasional restful silence in our pursuit of God. Prayer (Luke 5:16), seeking God’s will before making decisions (Luke 6:12), and rest from a busy ministry (Mark 6:31) all led Jesus to model withdrawal to quiet places (Matt. 14:13).

Here's the most famous place you've never heard of. It's St. Peter's Church Hall in Liverpool, England. It looks like a typical church gym except for the heavily-timbered cathedral ceiling and missing basketball hoops.

St. Peter's was having a church social with a local music group performing. During a break in the music, Paul, a 15-year-old guest, played songs on the guitar and piano impressing the teen band leader, John. A few weeks later, John Lennon invited Paul McCartney to join the Quarrymen, later known as The Beatles. That first meeting was July 6, 1957 - a historic place and moment in music but nobody knew it.

The Liverpool Museum reflected, "That meeting didn't just change the lives of John and Paul, it was the spark that lit the creative (fuse) on a cultural revolution that would reverberate around the world."

St. Peter's Church Hall is a temple where two music greats met. The stage from the hall is almost an "altar" since it was moved to a museum in Liverpool.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Altar; Worship - Christians also worship at an altar, but it is exclusive to New Testament believers (Heb. 13:10); 2) Temple - The New Testament names three places as the Temple of the living God on earth: 1) The physical body of Christ (Jn. 2:19; Matt. 26:61; Mark 14:58); 2) The church, the body of Christ (1 Cor. 3:16-17); 3) The body of the individual believer (1 Cor. 6:19).

Although she served faithfully in the youth ministry of her church, Taya Smith's singing talent was largely unknown among her church congregation. Having been forced to take time off from her job during the holiday season, she delayed too long to buy a plane ticket to visit her family. Since flights had become too expensive by then, Taya was stuck in Sydney for the holiday week. After attending a church recording that Sunday night, she sang her heart out with the youth band on stage and was noticed by the producers for Hillsong music.

Two mornings later Taya received a message from producer, Mike Chislett, requesting her to come over to the studio to do some backing vocals for a new music project. Since she didn’t have a driver's license, she traveled on multiple buses and trains over two days, and then rode her skateboard from the train station to the recording studio (about one and a half hours each way).

While at the studio, she was asked to record a song titled “Oceans.” It was the fulfillment of a prayer she had prayed two weeks earlier, asking God for help to step out into the unknown.

When released, the song “Oceans (Where feet may fail),” spent 61 weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Hot Christian Songs Chart. Billboard termed it the #1 Christian song of the 2010's. The song talks about stepping out into the unknown and was based on the moment the Apostle Peter walked on water.

Musician and author Carolyn Arends shares a story in an issue of Christianity Today magazine:

On a recent trip, I had a conversation with a man who learned I was from Vancouver. He had lived there years earlier, and after asking if a particular music shop was still in the city, he told me a story.

His wife was a piano major at the University of British Columbia. When they went piano shopping as newlyweds, the saleswoman led them straight to the entry-level models. The man told me, “She had us pegged exactly right. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together. We were going to have to borrow the money to get the cheapest instrument there.”

Everything changed, however, when the name of the prospective buyer’s mentor—a world-renowned master teaching at the university—came up in conversation. The saleswoman was panic-stricken. “Not these pianos!” she exclaimed, herding the couple away from the economy section and into a private showroom of gleaming Steinways. “I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating, horrified at the thought of the teacher finding out she’d shown one of his students an inferior instrument. Try as they might, they couldn’t persuade her to take them back to the pianos they could afford. Once the master’s name came up, only the best would do.

I said “Hallowed be thy name” this morning mumbling my way through the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve prayed that phrase countless times. But today, I find myself thinking about the reverence a flustered piano saleswoman had for a teacher’s name, and the prayer begins to change shape.

What does it mean to “hallow” God’s name? I’ve heard about the extreme care taken in branches of Judaism: Pages containing the name of YHWH are never thoughtlessly discarded but rather buried or ritually burned. When I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer, I’ve tried to cultivate that kind of personal reverence for his name—even while living in a world prone to profane it.

I’m glad I was taught to avoid blasphemy. But I’m beginning to suspect that my understanding of what it means to hallow God’s name has barely scratched the surface. But if we pray as he taught us, our reverence and care for his name will grow. That’s when we’ll begin to exchange our cheap instruments of self-interest for the costly Cross of Christ—the only instrument worthy of our Master’s name.

In an article in Vice, Brian Merchant argues that the first structure that humans will probably build on the Moon after they have completed building a base there will be a church. Indeed, Christian missionaries and clergymen have built churches in the harshest of climates, whether they be the tropical jungles of Africa or the sun-drenched deserts of Australia.

When the Ross Sea Party of Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 landed in Antarctica, among the men was an Anglican priest named Arnold Spencer-Smith. Spencer-Smith set up a small chapel in a dark room in Scott's Hut at Cape Evans. He built an altar with a cross and candlesticks and an aumbry where he reserved the Blessed Sacrament.

Today, there are eight churches in Antarctica. One is an Eastern Orthodox church built of wood in the Russian style. Another is The Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows which is a Catholic church located in a cave in the ice. It is the most southern place of worship of any religion in the world.

Churches have been erected in Antarctica since the 1950s. Extended stays in the region can be an extremely stressful experience for the researchers who often stay separated from their families for months at a time, which is one of the reasons why churches exist in this remote continent.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Living anywhere in the world (or space) is a stressful experience for believers. We need the church to give support, care, connectivity to others, and to center ourselves in worship of Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth.

Outside magazine featured Kurt Steiner, currently the world’s greatest stone skipper. Over 22 years, he has won 17 tournaments. In 2013, he threw a rock that skipped so many times it defied science.

Steiner has dedicated his entire life to stone skipping. It helps him deal with his depression, and he even claims it can help us achieve “inner balance.” But his quest (like every idol we worship) has cost him dearly. In part, his dedication (or worship) left him broke, divorced, and, since the death of his greatest rival, adrift from his stone-skipping peers. Now, in middle age, with a growing list of aches and pains, he contemplates the reality that he throws rocks not simply because he wants to, but because he has no choice.

Kurt split from his wife in 2017. He said:

I like to solve puzzles. My marriage was the biggest puzzle of all … Everything good was there, for a couple of [messed]-up people. But she ultimately couldn’t cope with my particularities of being [messed]-up—and it was mutual. I couldn’t be that somebody who was deserving of some kind of normalcy and love, I couldn’t be that. I tried. But I couldn’t get it the way she needed without damaging myself further.

The article concluded with Kurt’s longing for the real source of his quest:

I’ve had to accept that there are things about myself I’m never gonna get right … I don’t want to say I am never happy, or that I don’t know what that is. Stone skipping does reward me, in the way it makes me forget, in the way it gives me hope … Skipping stones makes me happy, because there are hints of happiness writ large. That happiness is not dead.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It’s easy to judge Kurt for the obsession which hasn’t healed his brokenness. But we should ask ourselves: What are the idols of my heart that prevent me from worshiping the true God?

In his recent book, Paul Tripp describes a trip to the see world’s tallest skyscraper:

Wherever you go in Dubai, you are confronted with the Burj Khalifa the world's tallest building. Impressive skyscrapers are all around Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa looms over them all with majestic glory. At 2,716 feet (just over half a mile) it dwarfs buildings that would otherwise leave you in mouth-gaping awe. As you move around Dubai, you see all of these buildings and you say to yourself again and again, "How in the world did they build that?" But the Burj Khalifa is on an entirely other scale.

Even from far away, it was hard to crank my head back far enough to see all the way to the top. The closer I got, the more imposing and amazing this structure became. As I walked, there was no thought of the other buildings in Dubai that had previously impressed me. As amazing as those build­ings were, they were simply not comparable in stunning architectural grandeur and perfection to this one.

When I finally got to the base of the Burj Khalifa, I felt incredibly small, like an ant at the base of a light pole. I entered a futuristic looking elevator and, in what seemed like seconds, was on the 125th floor. This was not the top of the building, because that was closed to visitors. As I stepped to the windows to get a feel for how high I was and to scan the city of Dubai, I immediately commented on how small the rest of the buildings looked. Those "small" buildings were skyscrapers that, in any other city, would have been the buildings that you wanted to visit. They looked small, unimpressive, and not worthy of attention, let alone awe. I had experienced the greatest, which put what had impressed me before into proper perspective.

By means of God's revelation of himself in Scripture, we see that there is no perfection like God's perfection. There is no holiness as holy as God's holiness. If you allow yourself to gaze upon his holiness, you will feel incredibly small and sinful. It is a good thing spiritually to have the assessments of your own grandeur decimated by divine glory.