Sundays at SSCC: Reflections & Recap

Watch the sermon video below if you missed the final week of our "WE ARE THE CHURCH" series, or if you would like to revisit the lessons we explored. Pastor Nate spoke about worship and reflected on what and who we worship as believers in Christ.

Heavenly Father,

In Your presence, we gather as Your congregation with open hearts and willing spirits, seeking the path to worship You with unwavering faith and honesty. Please guide us, Lord, in honoring You not only with our words but with our entire beings.

Teach us the true depth of worship, beyond just singing songs and saying words, but through acts of kindness, moments of forgiveness, and lives lived reflecting Your love and grace.

Help us to have a spirit of humility as we approach Your throne, recognizing our unworthiness and Your boundless grace. May this humility remind us of our dependence on You and guide us in our worship so that it may be a faithful reflection of Your goodness rather than a display of our own righteousness.

Inspire us to seek You sincerely, laying bare our fears, failures, and doubts before You. May we have the courage to admit where we have faltered, knowing that Your love is steadfast and Your arms are always open for our return.

Through Your Holy Spirit, may we see You in all things and worship You in every moment of our lives. Whether in the sanctuary, the stillness of our homes, or the chaos of our daily routines, help us to recognize Your divine presence and to respond with heartfelt adoration.

May our worship be a beacon of Your light in a dark world, pointing the way to You, the source of all hope and salvation. Give us the strength to live out our worship through acts of love, mercy, and justice, visibly representing Your Kingdom here on earth.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who taught us the fullness of worship through His life, death, and resurrection, we commit ourselves to this journey of faithful and honest worship today and every day.

Amen.

Romans 12:1-2 NRSV
I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual (or reasonable) worship. Do not be conformed to this world (or age), but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what the will of God is—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

"Two golden rules at the heart of spirituality. You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship. Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating machines. Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess. Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.

Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn’t, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—you may well feel a brief “high.” But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry." - N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense