Psalm 103:13-14

January 8, 2017

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Download the bulletin.

The sermon starts at 14:36 in the audio file.

Or, A Father Who Knows His Children

Where does God want worshippers to come from? The easiest answer is: everywhere. “Everything that has breath praise the LORD!” (Psalm 150:6) “Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth! Young men and maidens together, old men and children! Let them praise the name of the LORD” (Psalm 148:11-13). The Great Commission is to make disciples of all the nations. The apostle John saw “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb…crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10).

When Paul preached to the Greeks in Athens he said that God “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). God wants worshippers to come from among the unbelievers, the disobedient, the ungrateful, the idolators, the rebels. This means that God wants worshippers to come from conversion, as men turn “from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9).

But God also wants worshippers to come from fathers. We could say families, that’s fine, but Paul told children to obey their parents and then he specifically told fathers, “do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). What is the goal of such discipline and instruction? Good morals? Bible knowledge? Kinda, sorta. The goal is to raise children to be worshippers of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is an area where our Baptistic background betrays disobedience to the Bible. We think that a person needs to be at a certain point before he can worship. And, sure. An idolator must first repent from idolatry and then turn to worship the true God. But young kids, the ones in a house with Christian parents, would only know idolatry if their parents taught it to them. Our kids do not believe out of the womb, but that doesn’t mean that we raise them by keeping our spiritual hands off until they reach an adult crisis point where they can finally decide for themselves. That’s disobedient to Ephesians 6:4. We raise our children to believe, and that means that their conversion will look different than those growing up in an unbelieving home.

So as we’re talking about our worship and liturgy at the beginning of our seventh year together, I want to talk about kids in worship. We considered the liturgy of prayer last Lord’s Day and this morning we’ll have one more message about worship before restarting Genesis next week.

The pastors at TEC have consciously chosen to include kids in our worship. This is not because it’s the way we’ve always done it, far from it. It is not because we think Sunday School and Children’s Church is straight from the pit per se. It is not even because we think that families must always be together. It is because we think fathers have the responsibility to raise worshippers and worshipping does not start at age 13, 16, 18, or 21.

Success in bringing up our kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord will look like them in worship. That means we should include them in worship, lead and show them how to worship, explain along the way why we worship and why we worship the way that we do, and worship with them as younger brothers and sisters in the Lord. Again, the Lord calls all creatures to worship Him, even the inanimate ones (like the sun, moon, shining stars, and highest heavens – Psalm 148:3-4), so certainly He expects worship from the immature ones.

There are numerous metaphors to describe the Church: Bride, Body, Temple, Flock, and also Family. In this family we have a Father and an older Brother. When we meet as a family, we come to honor our Father. As Jesus taught us to pray, we begin with[...]