Shifting Our Worship | Crossroads Students

When you think of worship, what do you think of? Music? Church? Praying in a circle? But worship isn't just something you do here. It's something you're already doing every single day. Worship is what you give your attention, your energy, and your heart to. And everyone has given it to something. Hallelujah! He is Lord! The older I get, the more comfortable I am becoming with everything being about me. Let me give you an example. DoorDash is one of the most dangerous inventions, I believe, of the 21st century. And here's why. When I was growing up, you had to order a pizza with parent permission. They would write a check or something, and somebody would deliver. And pizza was the only real food you could get to your door. But now, I can get my favorite food from any restaurant delivered right to my door at any time of day. And that's dangerous for me. And worse than that is I have really strong preferences about how my food is delivered. And I hate to sound like a diva here, but this is the truth. My apartment is behind the actual front of the building I live in. And here's why that matters. When I order DoorDash and I give them my address, they always take it to the front door of the building. They never bring it to my apartment. No matter what I do. So my DoorDash description right now for the Dashers is about a whole paragraph. And it says you need to walk around, you need to go left at the light. Once you go to the back, you can find my apartment. It doesn't matter what I write. The Dashers are not reading it, and they're dropping my food off at the front door. So it doesn't matter what I do. I have to go all the way outside of my apartment, walk around to the front of the building just to get my food.

And at a certain point, it's offensive that I have to do that much work to get my food. Let me pause. I know how insane I sound. I get how entitled and rude and like the worst customer ever I sound. But isn't it kind of how we all are now? I mean, let's think about it this way. Our entire lives are built around whatever we want. I can prove it to you. Go to Spotify, and you will find playlist after playlist made by Spotify based on the things that you listen to and the things you like. If you go to Netflix, you're getting recommendations on what they think you're going to love based off other things you've already watched. There's literally a page on TikTok called a For You Page that is designed to meet your needs, your likes, videos you enjoy. Our algorithms aren't the same. The things we see aren't the same because the things we like are different. But it's always, always right now about you and about me. We've been in a series called Hallelujah around here at Crossroads Students and taking a really deep look at this word, worship. And worship to you might mean something very different than it means to somebody else. Maybe you hear worship and you think about big stages and loud music and people singing songs. Maybe worship for you looks like a different area altogether. We've taken a deeper look at worship because we believe that God is deserving of worship. Just before I started talking today, somebody came up on stage and told you about who Jesus is. They told you about how Jesus lived a perfect life and he paid the price for the things we do wrong so that we could be in connection with our creator. That whole concept of what Jesus has done is called the good news. The actual word for it is the gospel. And worship is our natural response to the gospel. It's focusing our attention, our adoration, our focus, everything on who God is and why he deserves our worship. What he deserves from us. I believe that we, whether intentionally or not, have started to drift away from a focus on who God is to even our worship has become kind of like everything else in our lives, which is about us. I can prove it to you. My wife and I, we attend Crossroads Oakley on Saturdays because Sunday mornings I'm hanging out with the middle schoolers at Crossroads Florence, which I love. And we go to church on Saturdays.

because it's when we get to go together. And I can't tell you how many times I have walked out of Saturday service at Crossroads Oakley and I've gotten in the car and I've turned to my wife and I've said something like this, and maybe you've said something like this too. I said, man, the worship just didn't hit for me tonight. Or I've said, man, I really wish that they had this person sing because I have a preference on who I like to hear. Or man, they didn't even hear my song. They didn't play my song tonight. I wish I had heard that. Or I'll listen to whoever's talking and giving like this for adults. And I'm just like, man, that didn't hit tonight. I wish it was this other person who was speaking. And it's not because I tried to be this bad person who doesn't really focus or care about Jesus. That's not true. It's because I live in a world, and you do too, where it's really, really easy to make things about us. But worship was never designed to be that way. Like I said, worship isn't about us at all. Instead, worship is our natural response to who Jesus is and what he did for us. And it should be our attention and our focus, our loyalty, our drive. It all comes out in this thing we call worship, where we posture ourselves,

we set ourselves up to focus on Jesus. And yet, preferences and me has gotten in the way. Jesus actually talks about this in the Bible. By the way, at Crossroads Students, we believe that the Bible is our source of truth. Meaning for life's biggest, most difficult questions, and even day-to-day stuff, we think the Bible is one of the best places you can start to find an answer. It is filled with stories about people who experience things maybe a little different than us, but still in ways that we can relate to, in ways that maybe we can even apply to our own life on what we should do in things that are good and things that are bad. There's a story in the New Testament which really focuses on Jesus and the church. And the story is awesome. It's one of Jesus' most famous miracles, which are times where he would do something amazing to show people who God was. And there's this miracle that my friend Shanna talked about, if you were with us a few weeks ago, where Jesus fed over 5,000 people with just a few loaves of bread and a little bit of fish. There wasn't enough food to go around to feed everybody, and yet somehow, they fed everybody who was in attendance, and they even had food for leftovers. Jesus multiplied the food in ways that only miraculously could happen.

It didn't make a lot of sense, and it was amazing. And people were full, literally, of food. That is an amazing miracle. It's an amazing story, but it's actually not what I want us to focus on today. Instead, I wanna talk about what happened right after that miracle. You see, Jesus had gone to the other side of this lake, and he actually walked on water. It's another amazing story you could read. But after Jesus was on the other side of the lake, some of the people in the crowd who had all that bread and that fish, they wanted to keep following Jesus because they saw how amazing he was. That's my story, too. Once I saw how amazing Jesus was, I wanted to follow him. And they followed him in a really specific way. They would get in boats, and they would cross this body of water because they were that devoted to following Jesus. And if we just look at it surface level, it looks like those people did something amazing. They did everything they could to continue following Jesus. I think that's awesome. And it is. But Jesus was able to actually see something that I think you and I might miss sometimes. Here's what it says in the book of John chapter six.

When they found him on the other side of the lake, they found Jesus. They said, Jesus, when did you get here? Jesus replied, very truly I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw the signs I performed, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Jesus calls out in this moment, you're not here because you want to see me do something amazing. You're not here because you believe that I am who I say I am. You're here because I fed you, and you want to be fed again. I think unintentionally, that is what worship has become for a lot of us who've been following Jesus for a little while now. Maybe for you, it looks like worship music. And it looks like when we go to places like camp or the big night, or even at your site this morning, you hear songs, you hear musicians, you hear people using their gifts to give glory to God and all that's great. But sometimes we show up just to hear something great or experience something to fill us up. But we actually lose sight of who God is. The thing we need to be careful about is that our focus and our worship should be towards the giver of good gifts, not the gift itself.

Jesus is kind, which means he often has something for us when we worship. That's why it's not a bad thing when we're emotional or when we get goosebumps during a song. It's not a bad thing to love when a person you like. speaks or sings, but when it all becomes about what we get out of it, we've missed the point of worship altogether. And as we wrap up this series, Hallelujah, I think we would be remissed. I think we would really fall short if we failed to realize that sometimes the experience we have is something we see as more important than the God who deserves our worship. God created our bodies in a really cool way. There's this chemical that releases in our brain and in our bodies when we have something that we enjoy, and it's called dopamine. And the way that dopamine works is you listen to your favorite song on Spotify. Yeah, boy. And it's one you don't skip ever because every time it comes on, it makes your day better and you sing along. But there are also songs that don't do that. Dopamine releases when you eat your favorite food or maybe when you hold hands with somebody that you care about or get a hug or a word of encouragement that makes you feel good. You might not know what it's like to follow Jesus or you're still trying to figure out what it's like, but I bet there are things in your life that make you happier than other things. A lot of those are attributed to dopamine, this actual chemical reaction that happens in our body when we experience something we enjoy. Jesus allows for those moments when we sing, when we worship, when we're in our c-group, when we have fun playing nine square before service starts. Those are all really good things. None of those are bad. But what Jesus tells these people who cross the water and something I think he's also challenging us with is don't show up for those things because those things don't last. But if you show up for me, he says later in chapter six, I am the bread of life. The bread of life, the bread that lasts forever. You'll be filled and you'll never have to eat again. It's not literal food. He's instead talking about something deeper and bigger. He's saying if you're just coming here to get your wants met, the song I want, the experience I want, the lighting I want, the feeling I want, you're going to miss out on what you actually need, which is the creator of the universe who made a way back home for you and for me. That is the

reason we worship. So we need to be really careful not to make it about ourselves. We need to be really careful to not let Jesus become just the guy who's around the things I like and instead the one that we focus in on. When you start to look at the things provided for us, instead of looking at the provider of those things, that's when we start to slip. So if you're walking out of a crossroad service or camp or something like that and you're like, I can't wait to get that exact feeling again. I can't wait to experience that same moment again. What if I told you instead God has something new for you, amazing for you, something that's going to last. Personally, I'm really thankful that worship doesn't depend on how I feel. I don't know about you, but how I feel changes all the time. Like if something bad happens to me before a service, I'm angry during that service and my worship changes. If I don't sleep well, my attitude all day, the things I experience change. Maybe you are just hungry and it's just and it's playing a role in how you feel. It's playing a role in how you respond. Worship can't be dependent on feelings because feelings change. The cool thing about Jesus is he never changes. He is exactly who he was when you had your spiritual high moment. He's also the same when you're not feeling it. So the praise he deserves, the worship he deserves doesn't change. So the challenge is this. We need to ask ourselves a really hard question, which is am I here because Jesus deserves my worship and my attention? Or am I here because I really want to feel something and get something out of this? Worship can't become a dopamine hit that revolves all around who we are, all around our wants and our preferences. Worship can't be our Spotify, our Netflix, our TikTok that is catered to the things you like and that I like. Worship has to be catered around nothing except for who Jesus is. The goal of our time together, it's not that we walk out of a service or a time and work together and we say worship was killer, or we say that talk was perfect, or we say I had the most fun I've ever had. Those are all great things. I hope they're true for you. But we should be walking out of every encounter we have with God saying nothing except for you are so good God. You are so loving and you've done so much for me. Once our worship becomes about him instead of about the things that we bring to the table, we begin to experience Jesus fully and we begin to actually celebrate and focus in our attention on a God who deserves it. Worship cannot be about you. Worship cannot be about me. Worship always has to be about him. you