Not Just Another Christmas

Merry Christmas and Welcome!  Today we will have something a little bit unusual (at least for Clemson Community Church).  We’re going to have a message which is not part of an ongoing series.  It’s not that this has never happened before, but I would say that it only occurs a couple of times a year at the most.

Today’s title for the message is “Not Just Another Christmas.”  On Thursday, Carl and I were joking around a little bit about how slight changes by omitting a word or varying your inflection when reading the title significantly changes its meaning.

Us: Die

Welcome! Today we come to the final message in our relatively short series on worship. I’m not sure what the people in the cars driving by the church all week thought about the message title – “Worship:  Die”. I want to get to the meaning of our title today, the subject of our message, in a roundabout way. I want to start by reading excerpts from one of my favorite stories, “The Golden Key” by George MacDonald. My great challenge is to not give up on the message altogether and just read you this story, to only tell the little parts that directly relate to this message. 

For those of you that haven’t heard of George MacDonald, he was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister who lived from 1824 to 1905. He is probably best known for his fantasy literature and for the fact that C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll both credit him as one of their most important influences. Indeed, if you read the Narnia books of Lewis and also read enough of MacDonald’s fantasies, you will see how Lewis was definitely inspired by MacDonald and even “borrowed” some of his imagery for his own works. Similarly, you can see MacDonald when you go down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass with Carroll.

Us: Bow

“Sing and Tremble.” I am very excited about this series on worship, so I’m sorry to have missed so many of the messages. Worship is such an important concept for us to understand and apply in our lives. Worship is actually fundamental to living as a Christian, because its purpose and practice go to the very heart of our relationship with God. We were created to worship – and that is what we as believers will be doing for eternity in heaven. One of the quotes that Carl put in his introduction to the series is from Don McMinn: “Our entire being is fashioned as an instrument of praise.” So worship is something that is built into us as human beings. Everyone worships something. Some of the most intense worship experiences I have seen since moving to Clemson have been at football games. It might sound a little crass, but many people here worship football.

Worship is usually defined in terms of a ritual or response associated with reverence and adoration – of something. There must be an object of worship. But worship is more than just expressing our love for something. It is more than just cheering at the football game or singing songs in church. Worship is defined by priority. The true worshipers of football are the ones who are out there cheering on the team, regardless of the weather, paying whatever it takes, going wherever they need to. To make something a priority means giving up other things. Therefore, worship implies sacrifice. You have to give up something to be a true worshiper. You choose to make the object of your worship more important than other things in your life.