Getting the Tone Right on Sunday Morning
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | Good Monday morning. You may remember last year Pastor John and I recorded five podcast episodes in Nashville, Tennessee,
00:00:11.000 | at the Sing Global 2022 Getty Music Conference. We recorded live before a couple thousand of you who were there.
00:00:19.000 | A lot of church leaders and worship leaders and musicians were in the house. It was a great experience and very engaged, as you're going to hear.
00:00:28.000 | Today we feature one of those recordings on getting the Sunday morning worship vibe right. Here it is.
00:00:34.000 | [Applause]
00:00:38.000 | Let's get more specific into the music worship and how you begin a Sunday morning gathering.
00:00:45.000 | Let's talk about the call to worship for a moment. Stephen is a listener to the podcast and he writes in with a question about the call to worship.
00:00:52.000 | Hello Pastor John and thank you for asking Pastor John. It has helped me think through a lot of pastoral issues over the years.
00:00:58.000 | I don't exactly remember where I heard it, but I remember you saying that Paul's claim that Christians are sorrowful yet always rejoicing,
00:01:05.000 | 2 Corinthians 6.10, that dual claim informed how you framed your welcome and call to worship in the opening moments of the Sunday morning gathering.
00:01:15.000 | You believed it was your calling to set the tenor of the corporate gathering in such a way that whether people were coming from a glorious wedding feast last night,
00:01:23.000 | or whether they just arrived from the hospital with a dying spouse in the ICU, that this moment of worship together should feel relevant to both groups.
00:01:32.000 | Can you expand on how your call to worship did this on Sunday morning?
00:01:37.000 | Whether my call to worship did it, others will have to judge, but that certainly was my aspiration.
00:01:45.000 | It starts like this. The leader, let's just say the pastor, who's going to welcome people into this event right now called corporate worship.
00:01:57.000 | At that moment, he's setting the tone for what he thinks should take place here.
00:02:07.000 | He ought to be profoundly aware that to be a human being, a consciousness in a universe created by, governed by, upheld by, guided by a person, God, three in one, is an awesome thing.
00:02:35.000 | To be a person is an awesome thing. To be a human being is a staggering reality.
00:02:45.000 | So you start there. You say, "I'm alive. I exist in that kind of personal universe created in the image of the one who made and upheld everything."
00:03:01.000 | You just let it sink in. "You exist, pastor. This is awesome."
00:03:08.000 | Then add to that, God exists, Christ exists, the Holy Spirit exists, the incarnation, unspeakable, happened.
00:03:23.000 | The Son of God lived. He died. God died for sinners. He rose again. He reigns in heaven today.
00:03:38.000 | The Holy Spirit inhabits his people. Faith connects us with God.
00:03:44.000 | There's a hell to which people are going. There's a heaven and eternal joy to which we're going.
00:03:50.000 | These are staggeringly glorious realities, all of them, beyond imagination, beyond speaking.
00:03:57.000 | He should be utterly overwhelmed with the weight of glory.
00:04:02.000 | That's where you start.
00:04:04.000 | And if you start there, you don't welcome people with slapstick.
00:04:12.000 | You don't.
00:04:14.000 | I mean, I find it incomprehensible.
00:04:19.000 | What we're dealing with on—and we just get an hour a week, basically.
00:04:25.000 | We're dealing with the greatest and most glorious and weighty things in the world.
00:04:30.000 | People have been saturated with television, saturated with movies, saturated with social media all week long.
00:04:36.000 | I find it incomprehensible that pastors would think, "Well, now what we need to do is sound more like that entertainment."
00:04:46.000 | That's just the opposite. That's just the opposite of the way I think.
00:04:51.000 | I'm desperately pleading to God for words and a demeanor that would communicate another world of joy than that.
00:05:09.000 | I have the suspicion that most people today, younger than me, younger than 76, have grown up mainly in a world of entertainment.
00:05:24.000 | And they are shot through with the whole world of this world, and happiness and joy and gladness and pleasure and well-being are all in those categories.
00:05:39.000 | So that if I try to present an alternative to that, it will only sound like morose, dismal, glum, boring.
00:05:50.000 | They have no categories for an alternative.
00:05:52.000 | Like if you say, "Not that. Not that chipper, superficial, chatty, slapstick, casual. Not that. Not that talk show host demeanor."
00:06:07.000 | The only thing they can think of is, "Hmm."
00:06:11.000 | That's tragic. That's tragic.
00:06:17.000 | As if there were no such thing as 2 Corinthians 6.10, "Sorrowful yet always rejoicing."
00:06:24.000 | So that's one way to come at it.
00:06:27.000 | Namely, it is a mysterious and glorious thing to be a human being.
00:06:33.000 | And the realities of the Bible are the greatest realities in the world.
00:06:38.000 | And the emotions that correspond to them are infinite in joy, infinite in horror as we contemplate hell, and they're not trivial.
00:06:51.000 | The other way I came at it was this.
00:06:54.000 | I tried to keep my finger on the pulse of the tragedies of the world.
00:07:01.000 | So my people have heard this week, and if they haven't, they're watching the wrong newscasts,
00:07:09.000 | that Pakistan today is one-third underwater, some of it 10 feet deep.
00:07:18.000 | A thousand people have been killed, three million are displaced, and it is desperate.
00:07:26.000 | One-third of America would be the East Coast to the Mississippi underwater.
00:07:33.000 | This is what I'd be saying to my people.
00:07:36.000 | I'd be saying, "Folks, as we gather, we know that this is happening."
00:07:41.000 | And I would just say, "That's the world, folks. That's this morning's world."
00:07:47.000 | And if you don't have a theology that can turn that to serious joy, you don't have the right theology.
00:07:54.000 | Because if knowing about Pakistan can only ruin your day, all your days will be ruined.
00:08:02.000 | There's always a Pakistan.
00:08:05.000 | It's just one of a dozen horrors that are going on right now.
00:08:10.000 | So that's a piece.
00:08:11.000 | Then lastly, I'll just say I tried to keep my finger on the pulse of this people right now in this room and what they're dealing with.
00:08:21.000 | For example, I can remember this one.
00:08:23.000 | So our fighter verse was Psalm 34, "He will keep all your bones. Not one of them is broken."
00:08:32.000 | We always recited our fighter verse. I tried to weave it into our welcome.
00:08:36.000 | Well, there's a boy sitting in the third row with a cast on his arm.
00:08:41.000 | He's probably nine years old.
00:08:43.000 | And I'm saying, coming out of my mouth from the Word of God, "He keeps all your bones. Not one of them is broken."
00:08:49.000 | What are you going to do about that?
00:08:51.000 | Ignore it?
00:08:53.000 | Now, I hadn't seen him till I got down there.
00:08:57.000 | I didn't have this plan.
00:08:59.000 | But I spotted that cast.
00:09:02.000 | And how easy it would have been to joke.
00:09:05.000 | I don't know how you would turn it into a joke with a Psalm, but somebody would.
00:09:10.000 | And I walked back to him.
00:09:12.000 | I said, "Whoa, I think I knew his name. I can't remember right now.
00:09:17.000 | What happened?"
00:09:18.000 | This is in the welcome to worship.
00:09:21.000 | And then I said, let's call him Timmy.
00:09:24.000 | I said, "Timmy, you know what I think the Psalm means?"
00:09:28.000 | You got to decide for yourself what that Psalm means.
00:09:31.000 | There's Psalm 91 and Psalm 34. They say things like that.
00:09:36.000 | I said, "I think that means one of your bones will never be broken.
00:09:41.000 | He will never let your bone be broken unless he's got something amazing planned
00:09:48.000 | that he wants to do through that broken bone.
00:09:51.000 | So watch out for it." Something like that.
00:09:53.000 | Now, that was serious.
00:09:55.000 | It was light in the sense that I wasn't--he's a nine-year-old.
00:09:59.000 | I'm not going to, you know, sound real heavy.
00:10:02.000 | But it was a powerful moment for me and for our church.
00:10:07.000 | So God is--human being is big. God is big.
00:10:10.000 | The world is horrible. Pain is in your church.
00:10:14.000 | How can you be chipper?
00:10:16.000 | How can you create silliness as the modus operandi of welcome to worship?
00:10:21.000 | Yes, so good. Love the live feedback as we recorded.
00:10:28.000 | That was from our recording in Nashville, Tennessee,
00:10:31.000 | the fourth episode that we've released so far,
00:10:33.000 | which also includes APJs 1861, 1877, and 1882.
00:10:38.000 | Those are the three others that are out, episodes 1861, 1877, and 1882.
00:10:44.000 | And we have one more to come, APJ 1887, on fighting off despondency.
00:10:50.000 | That's coming up on Friday, APJ 1877.
00:10:54.000 | Well, how do we push the glorious truths that we understand with our minds
00:10:58.000 | deep into the affections of our hearts?
00:11:02.000 | That is a vital discipline that turns our daily Bible reading
00:11:05.000 | into daily Bible worship.
00:11:08.000 | And early in the new year is a good time for a refresher on how that works.
00:11:11.000 | And it's up next. I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:11:13.000 | We'll see you back here on Wednesday.
00:11:15.000 | [ Silence ]
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