Grace and peace to you in the name of our Almighty Lord, who sits on his throne and is deserving of honor, praise, and glory. Amen.

1 Corinthians 14:12-20 So it is with you. Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, try to excel in gifts that build up the church. ¹³ For this reason anyone who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret what he says. ¹⁴ For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. ¹⁵ So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind. ¹⁶ If you are praising God with your spirit, how can one who finds himself among those who do not understand say "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since he does not know what you are saying? ¹⁷ You may be giving thanks well enough, but the other man is not edified. ¹⁸ I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. ¹⁹ But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue. ²⁰ Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.

Corinth must have really been a "happening" place. Sometimes we may think that our congregation can be a bit noisy. Talking with people before the service. Babies being fussy. Children getting up to go to the bathroom. But throughout the service we enjoy meaningful, respectful, purposeful, and edifying worship.

That is nothing like Paul was experiencing in the Corinthian congregation. From what Paul describes in chapter 14, when you went to church in Corinth, you would have seen people jumping up to speak in tongues, others would be standing up to try to interpret the tongues, others would be trying to pass on words of prophecy. The picture you get is a general hubbub of noise and confusion.

So Paul says, hang on a second. This isn’t how worship should be. Worship needs to be uplifting. It needs to be orderly. It needs to speak to all who are present, whether it’s believers or unbelievers. So he gives a set of guidelines for conducting Christian worship.

He begins by saying that if anyone speaks in a tongue, someone should be there to interpret what he says. Otherwise, no one else understands, no one else is being edified and built up.

That would be like me saying in my sermon, "Birisheet barah, Elohim et hashamim viat haretz." Or "Houtos gar agapesen ho Theo ton kosmon." What I said was, Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." And John 3:16: "For God so loved the world." Familiar passages, but since you don’t know Hebrew or Greek, you weren’t edified. Your faith wasn’t built up. Or I could say the only thing I remember from Spanish class, "Hay elephante in la classe?" "No, hay elephante in la classe." Is there an elephant in the classroom? No, there isn’t an elephant in the classroom." Not a very edifying message whether you understand it or not.

Paul said that speaking in tongues, in other languages, was wonderful, but it should be controlled, restrained so others would receive benefit in the worship service. You and I want the same thing out of our worship services that Paul wanted in the Corinthian congregation – worship that builds up the church. "Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, try to excel in gifts that build up the church." Worship that builds up the church, that edifies the people in the service, is worship that is not designed to glorify ourselves. Instead it is worship that is designed to primarily and only glorify God.

One day two guys, Carlton and Andrew wanted to have a special worship service for the Lord. They could not agree on what exactly they should do in the order of service. Andrew said, "Why don’t we worship God in the way God has told us to worship him in the past?" Carlton said, "That’s old fashioned. We need to do something new, something entertaining for worship." Andrew disagreed. "Look, if you want to do something different, that’s fine with me. I just want to make sure that my worship glorifies God, so I’m going to stick to what my parents did." As he left, Carlton yelled at him, "There’s more than one way to worship God. I guarantee you God is going to like what I’ve got in mind."

Well, they both had their worship service. After the service was over, God made it perfectly clear he was pleased with Andrew’s worship service and was totally dissatisfied with Carlton’s. God refused to accept Calrton’s new idea of church.

God told Carlton, "Now go and do the right thing and your worship will be pleasing to me." Instead of doing it, Carlton got so jealous that Andrew’s worship had been accepted and his wasn’t, that he took matters into his own hands. He jumped Andrew when Andrew was off guard and beat him to death. Andrew’s blood spilled all over the ground where he lay.

Now you might be thinking, I can’t believe that somebody would do that over worship. Well, read Genesis chapter four and put in the name Cain for Carlton and Abel for Andrew and you will see that it’s all true.

Today we call them the "worship wars." How should we worship? Should we have contemporary music or traditional hymns? Guitars and drums or pipe organ? Chancel dramas with actors putting on plays in the front of the church or follow a responsive liturgy? The choir sings all the songs or the congregation sings? The pastor preaches for an hour or for twenty minutes?

There is something about the worship of God that we almost feel entitled to the right "to do it our own way." How many times have you heard people say, "Well, I can stay home and worship God," or "I don’t believe in doing that in worship God", or "We’ve never done it that way before"?

Well at the heart of each of these statements is the attitude of Cain, "I will worship God in the way I please." There’s nothing wrong with worshipping God in the way we please, so long as the way we please is in accordance with what the Word of God tells us to do. There is a difference between our preference and God’s commandments.

There are probably more arguments and headaches about worship styles than possibly anything else in the life of the church. People questioning the amount of money spent on making the church or the music as beautiful as possible. People complaining that the songs are old or hard to sing. People thinking that a certain style of worship is boring or that it is too new. A bad attitude can spread through the choir in a minute. A negative spirit from an usher can get several people growling. A disagreement with the pastor can cause people to sulk through the service. The devil loves for these kinds of thoughts to filter into our heads. He wants us to come to worship angry, hurt, mad, resentful, and full of unforgiveness. When these feelings are in our hearts, we may come together, we may be going through the motions, but we are certainly not worshiping God. Paul says in our text that when we act like that, we are acting like spoiled children and we need to grow up.

We get out of worship what we put into worship. If you put forth no effort, you won’t feel edified. The pastor isn’t here to be funny. (He usually isn’t, anyhow). The choir isn’t here to entertain. The worship service is meant to focus on Jesus Christ and what he has done to save us. It is meant to be all about him and our response to his salvation.

When we come together to worship God, we need to recognize that we are moving into another level of being in God’s presence. Ecclesiastes tells us "Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few." (Ecclesiastes 5:1-2) Ultimately, then, worship should always begin with the thought, "I am seeking to go into the presence of Almighty God." As God says in Psalm 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth."

We may have different preferences in worship; different songs we like to sing; or even a different pastor that is our favorite. And that’s okay. Those are our personal preferences. But those personal preferences had better never stand in the way of true, personal worship. True worship isn’t about us. It is about God.

Two young newlyweds were preparing to enjoy their first baked ham dinner in their new apartment. After unwrapping the meat and setting it on the cutting board, the wife chopped off both ends of the ham with a butcher knife, tossing the two small ends in the garbage can. "Wait a minute," said the mystified husband. "Why did you do that? Why did you just cut off the ends of the ham like that?" "I don’t know. My mother always did," answered the wife. "Maybe it helps bring out the flavor." Unsatisfied with this answer, the husband called his mother-in-law. "Can you tell me why you cut the two ends off of a ham before you cook it?" "Well," said the mother, "I’m not really sure why. That’s just the way my mother did her ham, and it was always delicious."

As soon as he hung up he called his wife’s grandmother. "Grandma, we have an important question for you. Can you tell us why you cut the ends off of a ham before you cook it?" "Oh my yes, dear," answered Grandma in her quiet, thin voice. "I cut the ends of the ham off so it would fit in my pan."

Traditions may shape our lives, especially within the church, but it’s important to know why we do them. "Because we’ve always done it that way" doesn’t provide enough meaning to keep our traditions from becoming stale and meaningless.

We may have received our worship traditions from great great grandparents, but for us to offer authentic worship we want to understand the meaning behind the traditions. Jesus urged his followers to "worship in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24). If worship seems lifeless and dull to us, perhaps we’re just going through the motions instead of being empowered by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we may not be getting anything out of worship because we are focusing on ourselves, like the Christians in Corinth.

Very briefly, I want to explain what we do in our worship service and why. Open your hymnals to page 26. We begin our service with a confession of sins. We come before God’s presence and tell him that we are sorry for our sins and that we need his forgiveness. We begin most of our services this way because then we get rid of our sins, we are forgiven and we are in the proper mood to praise God for his awesome love in sending us forgiveness in Jesus.

We offer up our prayers to our Triune God with Lord, heavenly Father, have mercy; Christ, Savior, have mercy; Lord, Holy Spirit, have mercy. With the joy of forgiveness we give God the glory he is due when we sing, "O Lord, Our Lord." This song tells us exactly what God has done to save us. We praise, bless, worship, glorify, and give thanks to God for being our heavenly King and for Jesus Christ being our Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Throughout the service we are in a constant conversation with God. We speak to him in prayers and hymns. He speaks to us in his Word.

As we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper this morning, we sing "Holy, holy, holy" which is the same song we heard the angels sing in our Old Testament lesson for today. (Isaiah 6:1-8) God is holy and deserves our praise. Then we sing "O Christ, Lamb of God" which are the words John the Baptist spoke as he pointed to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And after communion we join together in thanking the Lord for feeding our faith with this blessed sacrament.

That is a very brief description of just one of our worship services. I wanted to go through it with you today, so that you once again realize that everything we want to do in our service, through our liturgy, our singing, the sermon, our prayers, the children’s devotion, is all about glorifying and praising God.

There are many ways to worship God. But when worship focuses on us, our hearts and minds won’t be edified and the church won’t be built up. True worship, the kind of worship that works, is the kind that is always and only focused on glorifying God.

I’ve had people tell me that they don’t go to church because they find it boring. My response is always this, "Getting something out of church is always secondary. The primary purpose for going to church is to worship God. Hopefully you do learn something from the songs, prayers, and sermon, but that comes second. The main reason you should go to church is because God deserves your presence in his house. God deserves your worship whether you feel like it or not. Your Triune God is your Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. He deserves your praise, glory, and admiration."

Johann Sebastian Bach always wrote three letters at the end of his musical scores – S.D.G. Soli Deo Gloria. Latin which means "To God alone be the glory." May our worship always remain SDG – Soli Deo Gloria – To God alone be the glory. Amen.

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To [God] be the glory forever! Amen. (Romans 11:36)