“Give Me Jesus”
As the person who oversees the Music Ministries at First Baptist I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year or so engaging with books, blogs, sermons, and podcasts centered around the topic of “worship.”
What I’ve found is that the term “worship” has a broad usage within Christian circles. Some use it to mean literal singing, others refer to praise, and still others define it as anything done for the glory of God.
The second thing I’ve noticed—common across all these sources—is the understanding that we naturally worship what we love most.
As I’m writing this, we are in the middle of what I call “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”—and no, I’m not talking about Christmas… I mean March Madness! I absolutely love the first two weekends of the NCAA tournament, and it shows—just ask my wife, who endures the countless unsolicited tournament stats, posts, and videos I share with her this time of year. If you were to talk to me on the Sundays of these first two weekends of the tournament, my opening line would likely be, “Did you see _______ (insert some fact about a game that happened over the past few days)?”
The point is: I love the tournament, and it shows! My excitement isn’t forced or faked—it just naturally pours out of who I am.
In our key text for Sunday, Mark 8, Jesus gives us these words:
“34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’”
In light of these verses, I’m forced to ask myself: Does my love for God pour out of my life as naturally as my love for other things, or does it come across to others as fake and forced?
My favorite definition of worship comes from Deuteronomy 6:5:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
The Bible Project defines the Hebrew word for might (“Me’od”) as “devoting every possibility, opportunity, and capacity you have to honoring God.”1
Everything we do is an act of worship. Singing is just one mode of worship. The way we interact with others, the way we serve, the way we give—these can all be acts of worship.
This Sunday, we will close with a song made popular by Jeremy Camp called “Give Me Jesus,” in which the chorus says:
“You can have all this world
Just give me Jesus.”
A key refrain for the our church as we walk throughout the book of Mark together has been “Jesus is Lord.”
The question I want us to wrestle with this week is: Has the reality that Jesus is Lord penetrated our souls to such a degree that it transforms our desires—so that our love for Christ naturally pours out of who we are? Is our love for God more evident to others than our love for the things of this world?
Has the love of God transformed us to a level where we are willing to put off things of this world in pursuit of Him and Him alone?
Adam
- https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/meod-strength/ ↩︎