Worship Really Works When God is Enough

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

“Daddy, our life together has been more than enough.  Your love is all I ever needed.  I wish you enough, too, Daddy.”  This was the end of a conversation that a man had heard when in the airport.  He listened because he saw a daughter and her father saying goodbye.  It was a tearful goodbye and was obviously going to be for a long time.  But this phrase caught him, “I wish you enough.”  He had heard the father say it to the daughter, and then she repeated it to him.

After they had said their goodbyes, the man could see that the father was upset.  He didn’t want to intrude but went up to see if he could help; the man welcomed him.  They began a conversation and the father asked, “Did you ever say goodbye to someone, knowing that it would be forever?” 

“Yes, I have,” the man replied, and shared that it brought back memories that he had experienced himself with his own father and how they had said goodbye. 

“Forgive me for asking, but is this a forever goodbye?” he asked. 

“Well, I am old and she lives far away.  I have challenges ahead and the reality is that the next trip back will be for my funeral.” 

“When you said goodbye I heard you say something.  You said, ‘I wish you enough.’  May I ask what that means?”

The old man began to smile and said, “That is a wish that has been in my family for a long, long time.  My parents used to say it to everyone.”  He paused, as if waiting to remember something in detail and he smiled even more.  “When we said, ‘I wish you enough,’ we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them.”

And then he recited, “I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.  I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.  I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.  I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.  I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.  I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.  I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final goodbye.”  Then the man walked away in tears.

Last week, I started a series of sermons leading up to Easter on worship dealing with the question, “Why isn’t worship what we want it to be?”  For some of us it is sometimes a struggle to get here or even to do it in our own private lives.  Sometimes for us, worship just doesn’t work.

Last week we talked about using the Lord’s Prayer, how worship works when we realize that worship isn’t about us.  Jesus begins the Lord’s Prayer talking about God first; about who God is, the Father…our papa.  Then talking about honoring God’s name…praising it.  Then being concerned about the things that God is concerned about, His kingdom and His will.  Worship begins with these things but it certainly doesn’t end there; it also moves to us because it deals with our needs as well.  So, what is it about worship that works for us when it concerns us?  In many ways, I have come to believe that worship works when God is enough.

I have a couple of scriptures to read to you today, the Lord’s Prayer as we find it in Matthew 6: 9-13 and from John 4 beginning at verse 21-24.  This is the word of the Lord:

This, then, is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.'

Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

Would you pray with me?  

Father, be with us now as we hear your word preached.  May this word bless us, may it say to us what you want us to hear.  Lord God, prepare our hearts for the communion service coming up.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”  Now, in Jesus’ culture that was a prayer that the people needed to pray; many of them were looking for their daily bread.  For us, I think, it is one of those prayers that maybe doesn’t mean much, but it is really broader than that.  We are asking God to provide for our needs, “Give us today our needs.”  Yes, our daily bread, but more than that.  I believe that as we look at worship in this context, worship works when we believe that God is enough to provide.

This has been a question for many years, ‘Is God enough?’  As a matter of fact, I believe it started at the beginning.  The whole Bible is, in a sense, an attempt to convince us that God will provide for us.  At the very beginning, Adam and Eve are tempted by Satan.  You know the story, how Satan puts doubts in their minds.  “God is a real meany for not letting you do these things.”  “Maybe he doesn’t want you to be like him.”  “Maybe he is not good enough.  If you put your lives in his hands are you really sure that he is going to take care of you?” 

Obviously, they began to believe this kind of thing and they disobeyed.  The whole Bible is convincing people that God is going to provide.  Even in the names of God we find that God is named, Yahweh Jaira, My Provider.  The Lord provides.  The Lord is My Shield, My Rock, My Redeemer.  He is Almighty.  Even in the name of Jesus, Yeshua, Yahweh Saves…God provides.

We have trouble believing that sometimes.  I think part of it is, as James says when he is talking about prayer, that we often don’t get what we pray for because we pray for the wrong things.  Or we do so with the wrong sort of attitude.  I think we are just not satisfied.  When we talk about God being enough, well, we want more out of life.  There is nothing wrong with wanting more, but sometimes we just go overboard.

Some of you may remember a song by a female rocker named, Janis Joplin.  She sang a song that went something like this, “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?  My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.  I worked all of my lifetime, no help from my friends.  O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”  You know, of course it is a joke, but it really talks about what is in our hearts.  Sometimes, when we come to worship, we come waiting to see what God will give us.  Of course, sometimes we don’t know what we want.

In the movie, “Bruce Almighty,” Bruce is given godly powers over the area of Buffalo, New York.  He is god for a while and he hears all of these people making prayers to him.  So he comes up and in a typical human fashion he gets a computer out and begins to deal with them, answering this prayer and that prayer, but there are just too many of them.  Finally, he just presses a button answering ‘Yes’ to all of them, causing chaos all over the city.   He discusses it with God later and God said, “Since when do human beings really know what they want?”  We don’t see the big picture.  We don’t know what we want.

I think that sometimes our worship isn’t satisfying because we just aren’t grateful.  There is a story about a man who talked of an African American woman he knew growing up.  She would always say something like, ‘Thank you for this (just any old thing).’  Every time she would sit down to a meal she would say, “Thank you Lord, for this meal.”  As a child he asked the question, “Why do you thank God for something you are going to get anyway?”  She said something like this, “Food tastes sweeter when you are grateful.”  I think that is just right.  We will never be happy unless we are grateful. Maybe our worship doesn’t work very well because we are not grateful.  We don’t believe that God is enough to provide.

Then Jesus moves on to something a little bit harder.  He moves on to forgiveness.  Forgiveness is hard.  He says particularly, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive others.”  But there is that issue of forgiveness for us first.  Worship does work when we believe that God is enough to forgive.  Yet forgiveness becomes hard for us because on one level we take it for granted.  I remember reading a writer who said, “Oh that is just God’s business.  He forgives.”  We have kind of grown up to believe that, God will forgive everything.  Luckily he does!  But, we take it for granted.  Every human being I have met, especially myself, we all have this psychological belief that, ‘people should forgive me.’  You know, I pulled out in front of them, but that is there problem…they should forgive me.  Oh, I forgot to do this, but they should forgive me.  Of course, if somebody else does it we get a little irritated, but we believe we should be forgiven.

Or we believe we are pretty good.  I remember a story about a man who went to heaven and went into this room of clocks.  Each clock had a name on it and they happened to be all of his friends.  He asked the angel what it meant and every time the clock ticked the angel said, “That is the person committing a sin.”  He saw his friend John, tick, tick… “Oh yeah, I know what John is doing.”  There was Mark over here, tick, tick, tick…he saw all of his friends and thought I know what all of these guys are up to.  Then he asked the angel, “Where is my clock?”  The angel answered, “We have it in the kitchen and are using it for a fan.”

We take it for granted, and yet, every human being is aware of guilt.  Some guilt is good.  We are all aware of it in some way or another.  Every culture, every person deals with it differently…we deal with it in our own particular.  We medicate it a lot. Some people medicate it through a lifestyle of sex or drinking or drugs.  Some of us just simple deny it; we simply say, “Oh it isn’t real.”  Some of us deal with it all different kinds of unhealthy ways.  But, we are all guilty…we deny, we medicate, we blame others which also came from the very beginning… “Lord, it was the woman’s fault.”  “Lord, it was the snake’s fault.” 

As kids we are always going, “It’s his fault, I didn’t do it.”  In the Star Wars movie, when everything is going wrong with the Millennium Falcon and Han Solo says, “It’s not my fault.”  We are just like that.  We deal with it, sometimes just by denying it, or in whatever way we can….all of those ways, though, are outward ways and they don’t deal with the heart.  Some of you are old enough to remember the television show, Candid Camera.  In one of the shows, Alan Funt put a bar of soap in a bathroom and the soap, instead of cleaning the hands, made them more dirty.  The camera would roll and watch as the people would wash their hands and they would get more dirty; it was funny to watch.  That is like our efforts to clean ourselves of our own guilt. 

God deals with our guilt in a radical sort of way.  He sent His son to die for our sins.  He paid the price.  Christianity is different that way; it is God who has to pay the price, we can’t.  In our modern era, some people are offended by the idea of a sacrifice on a cross… “Why would God be so bloody as to require a death?”  God is not bloody.  God is just.  That is what deals with the guilt; we can be forgiven, as the song says, because he was forsaken.  We can be accepted because he was condemned.  God does forgive and accept.

One of my favorite verses when I get into trouble and do things wrong, I quote it because it reflects the whole New Testament, “There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  You should memorize that, it is easy.  It is all through the New Testament, in Christ we are forgiven.

Because we have been forgiven comes the hardest part of all.  There is a real demand in the New Testament that because we have been forgiven, we should forgive.  I do not believe he is talking about an eternal sense when he says, ‘You know, if you don’t forgive, God is not going to forgive you.’  The sense is, that life is not going to go very well if you don’t forgive.  You know, bitterness is a bitter fruit.  Resentment is a bitter fruit; it is kind of like one of those pieces of candy that is sweet on the outside but sour on the inside…tastes good when it goes in, but then it eats you alive.  We all have people out there that we haven’t forgiven every one of us.  I know it may sound like hyperbole or that I am talking in absolutes, but human nature is human nature.  If you don’t have anybody – if you have them all forgiven, good for you – but I bet that most of us don’t.  It’s hard.

It is like the story about the woman who went to heaven and when she got to the gate Peter said, “You have to spell a word to get in.”  She asked, “What is it?”  Peter said, “Love.”  That was easy and she spelled it.  She was there and enjoying herself for a long time and Peter came and said, “I need to go and take a break, can you watch the gate for me for a while?”  The woman agreed and low and behold her former husband appeared.  She asked him, “How was life after I left?”  He said, “You know, it was great.  You were sick for so long and I married that pretty nurse that took care of you.  Then I won the lottery and sold that shack we were living in and bought a mansion.  Then we traveled all over the world and had a great time.  I was skiing in Vale, fell down and hit my head, and now here I am.”  Then he asked, “How do I get in?”  She answered, “Well, you need to spell a word.”  He asked, “What word is that?”  She answered, “Czechoslovakia.”  (Now, some of you could spell that.  Maybe we should say, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.)  It is hard to forgive.

It is hard because we feel justified in our anger.  In some cases, we really are justified.  We justify our anger in what we do to others.  I have a good friend from a past church who appeared one day and announced that he was divorcing his wife; also a good friend.  The story unfolded that over the years there were different things which he had taken offense to and it all added up until it finally reached a tipping point.  Even the last thing probably wasn’t that big of a deal, but it was the accumulation of so many things.  Yet, he justified himself in not only divorcing the woman, having an affair before that and then marrying the woman – breaking up two families – and the statistics are grim for the children of divorce.  His two children are decimated, I counseled them, I know.  His justification was that he had been hurt so much, and he probably had been; yet he used that justification to hurt so many others and felt pretty good about it. 

There are all kinds of stories like that – little things in our lives, big things in our lives.  Not to forgive hurts us as much as it hurts other people. 

Today I want to give you an opportunity because God is enough to help us forgive.  Corrie ten Boom tells a story in The Hiding Place, a book she wrote about her experiences in a Nazi concentration camp.  After she got out and had become a preacher, going around evangelizing, she was in Germany preaching and there was a man in front of her who had been one of her guards in prison.  The man stuck out his hand to shake her hand and he said, “Isn’t it wonderful, as you say, that we can be forgiven?”  As he stuck out his hand to her, she said it all came back…the embarrassment of being marched in and stripped of all clothing…she remembered that and the look on her sister’s face with this man standing there.  She said, “I just could not bring myself to shake his hand and welcome him.”  Praying silently she said, “Lord, help me.”  She said it took several prayers but in the end the Lord gave her the power to forgive him.  It is the Lord, in the end, who gives us the power.  She said something very powerful, “I realized right then and there that it is not our goodness or our forgiveness, but the Lord’s goodness and the Lord’s forgiveness that gives us the power to do this.”

Theologically in our faith, we believe that God died for us while we were yet sinners….He gives us grace before we even accept it.  What I would like for you to do today, if you wish…you don’t have to…there is a yellow piece of paper and if there is one person – not a whole list – bring it with you to communion…take the elements, receive the grace, and then as you walk by, put the piece of paper in the trash…symbolizing the beginning of forgiveness, if not complete forgiveness.  A start that this is what I would like to do, Lord.  We receive God’s grace first, and then we do what he wants us to do. 

You don’t have to do this, but we hope this will be a help to you as you deal with the very hard part of leading the Christian life, and that is loving our enemies and doing good to those who hurt us, and forgiving those who have harmed us.

Let us pray,

Lord God, we thank you for the love that you give us and the power that you give us.  We ask now, as we think of those that may have hurt us, that we would forgive them.  If we can’t even do that, just to give us the desire to start.  We ask your help because you are enough in every area of our lives.  We also you, Lord, to help us in our worship not just every Sunday, but every day, that you would be enough and that being enough would move us to praise you and to seek your help and guidance in life.  We do pray this in Jesus’ name.  Amen