Let’s be honest you and I, for a moment here. Many of you do not know it; but this service is relatively new. We’re still working on making it look, sound, and feel as we want to. We want to attract people to come here, and not just for the sake of having people here. I want it to be something that changes lives. That’s why I am a minister, a preacher, a priest…whatever you want to call me. I don’t do it for my own sake or to bring myself glory, but because it brings me joy and pleasure and happiness to see the lives of people changed for the better by the Power of God and through following His Son. We want to provide a worshipful experience not only here in this service, but also knowledge that you can take home with you and that can help transform your internal and external worlds for the better. And most importantly, I want us to glorify and worship God in this service.

John Wesley believed that after we became Christians, that God’s work in our lives was not over. He used a term called “Sanctifying Grace,” to refer to the actions of God in our lives to progressively make us more and more like Him in how we feel, how we act, how we see the world, and how we exist in this fallen world. He believed, and I agree with him, that Our Father through the Holy Spirit continues to mold us and make us into true sons and daughters of God. Wesley believed that worshipping God correctly intensifies this sanctifying grace. It changes us inside and out, whether we know it or not.

However, the problem with all of this is that we are still broken people. We are a people who are still prideful, who still have addictions, who still are depressed, anxious, angry, frustrated, deliberately sinful and totally unwilling to face that sin. Frankly, we just don’t get. We think, often times, that we understand how to worship God and how to live our lives; but if we did understand these things, what would be the point in Christianity other than avoiding Hell. You’ve got your get out of hell free card, move on…go dig a well in Africa, give nets to kids in Central America to help prevent malaria from mosquito bites. However, what if you are wrong?

The whole point of the parables are that we generally do not What if you don’t understand how to worship God? What if how you have been doing church, whether you are a visitor, a member, or a regular attendee of our congregation, what if it was wrong the way that you were doing church? What if how we are doing church –and by doing church I mean worshipping God –is wrong? If I could show you that you were wrong, based on the Bible, would you be willing to change and do things right? If not, tell me now, I will take over the 11 o’clock or 8:30 service for David and we’ll let you do what you want; because frankly I’m not interested in worshipping God in a way that entertains your or makes you think that Jesus is your boyfriend. I am interested in being in the intense presence of God as much as God will allow me to be.

This week I have been pondering these thoughts in my time alone, and I have come to feel that God is leading me and us as a church to look at how we worship and how we spend time with Him. Therefore I will be preaching on worship and how we worship for the next little while. This means that we will be studying the book of the Bible that stands as probably the most challenging and difficult book for us to understand today in our modern context. We will be looking at the book of Leviticus.

The first word in Leviticus, in Hebrew, is Wayyiqarah. Now, years later the Greeks got a hold of it, and in the Greek, the corresponding word is Leuitikon. Later, Latin speaking Christians got a hold of the book and named it Liber Leviticus, which means “The book Leviticus.” Now what is real interesting, and very telling about what the book is about, is that Leviticus, Leuitikon, and Wayyiqarah all mean the same thing – “God summoned…”

The Book of Leviticus focuses on a great many things, but it begins with the powerful and very important phrase, “God summoned…”

God summoned the Israelites out of Egypt. We all know the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery and oppression in Egypt into the promise land at the leadership of Moses. The Israelites had been living in the far northern part of Egypt, just above Cairo for hundreds of years. There they lived in peace with Egyptians and served as their northern most defense against invading forces. However, just as God promised Abraham, the Hebrew slash Israelite people continued to grow and multiply. So large did their numbers get that their friends the Egyptians began to grow fearful of them. People began to be afraid that the Israelites would try to overthrow Egypt. So, in an attempt to stop this, the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrew/Israelite people and made them do all of their manual labor.

Now over time the Israelites were assimilated into the Egyptian culture. They dressed like them, talked like them, sometimes intermarried with them, and worst of all they began to import the Egyptian styles of worship into their religion. The Israelites cried out to God for help and deliverance from captivity, and God heard their cries. From the desert he came to a man named Moses, who had once lived in Egypt and eventually fled the land. He told Moses that he had heard the cry of his people and that he was going to use him to deliver the Israelites from Egypt. As the story goes, Egypt was pounded by nine horrifying plagues that progressive became worse and worse; but was not until God struck down the first born of every home who did not put lamb’s blood on the door ceil that the Israelites were let go. And Moses, lead by God, guided the entire nation of Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness. There they camped at the base of the mountain of God…the very same mountain that Yahweh, the Hebrew God, the Father of Jesus Christ made himself known to Moses.

It is important to understand that the Israelites that approached Mount Sinai and that camped their initially were totally different than those who left Mount Sinai for the promise land. The Bible tells us that the Israel who came to the mountain of God came as a disorganized, rag tag, ravenous, blood thirsty, undisciplined group of thugs and slaves. However, the Israel that left Sinai was totally and radically altered. They flooded into the valley below Sinai, but the marched away from it in military formation, organized and with the Ark of the Covenant before them. The came as slaves and left as conquerors and as priests of the most High God, the only God whose Son was Jesus Christ and who, through Christ, by the Power of the Holy Spirit, created all things and reigns supreme as the King of the Universe.

My question is: “What happened?” What happened to Israel that they were so drastically changed? Put simply, “Leviticus happened to them.” You see, scholars have discovered that Leviticus was set forth as a manual for the sacrificial system and as a guide to the offerings and for ethical behavior. It served as Israel’s guide on how to worship God. The nation is taught, by God Himself, how to approach God.

Now see if you follow this logic, see if you can track with me here through what God has shown me. If it is true that God wishes to work in our lives and make us Holy, to sanctify us and transform us into a loving God centered people who follow Christ above all else; and if it is true that worshipping God intensifies the healing of our brokenness and our sinfulness; then it stands to reason that the book of Leviticus, which is the book worship…how to worship…for the Jews…is a call to holiness through worship. This makes “church” so much more important than we ever thought before. It makes worship important because it is through this time on Sunday mornings that many of you will come to encounter God, be faced with your sins, and even be healed of physical, mental, and emotional infirmities.

We must not let our culture demand from us how we are to worship God. We must not let our world enslave our Gospel and enslave how we spend time with God. Just because it is entertaining does not mean that it is Holy or right or appropriate. On the other hand, for those of you who are suspicious reverence and heart felt worship with good music…just because it happens to be entertaining, does not mean that it’s not holy.

God summons you to worship Him; he summons you to worship Him not for His good, as if he needed you to worship Him. He knows that following Him is going to be the best possible life that you can have…and since He loves you, he calls you to follow Him, not only in your day to day lives, but also in how you worship here and now. The problem the Israelites had was that their default position was to revert back to pagan worship, and to worship the Egyptian Gods that they had been worshipping in slavery. But God sought to release them, not to put them into bondage, and to teach them that coming to Him in moments of struggle and pain are what would free them. This is the purpose of true, genuine, authentic worship.