A few years ago I had the opportunity of traveling to Rumania to preach. I spent the next fourteen days in a borrowed car with five other full-grown men. The roads are nothing more than a succession of potholes. We shared it with bicycles, hay wagons, and peasant women. We were slaloming around these folks at eighty miles an hour, barely missing some of them. If you get the picture, you're probably already beginning to feel car sick.

The funny thing about car sickness is that it almost never attacks the driver. The driver can see the road. He's the one holding the steering wheel, so he's reasonably certain which way the car is going to dart next.

Automobile drivers are a lot like leaders. Leaders usually have the privilege of knowing which way their organization is headed. But if they're not careful to clearly spell out the direction in which they're headed, everybody else on board is bound to get car sick.

Today we're beginning a three-part series that's intended to clearly communicate the vision of Christ Community Church for the future. We're calling this series Beyond 2000, both because we believe that these goals will carry us into the next century, and also because 2,000 weekend attenders may be just around the corner.

I don't want my opening illustration to leave you with the impression that this is just my vision, that I'm the only one holding the steering wheel. This is a strategic plan that has been six to eight months in the making and has received the input of our elders, staff, and many of you who have completed surveys in the last several months.

We've received the input of other churches that are doing similar things to what we hope to be doing in months ahead. And most importantly, we have the input of God's Word.

Second, this strategic plan is not on par with the Ten Commandments. Our vision is not cast in stone. We're open to changes along the way, and we value your questions and your concerns.

Let me give you a bird's-eye view of what this series is going to look like, then we'll dive into today's topic. Our goals for Christ Community Church as we head beyond 2000 are that this church will become more and more a place to worship; second, a place to belong and grow; and third, a place where you can pursue a relationship with God.

Today's topic is a place to worship. The goal statement is "To exalt God by worshiping him as a church in spirit and in truth."

What does it mean to "exalt God by worshiping him"?

Let me explain the first phrase, "To exalt God by worshipping him." You were designed to be a worshiper, and you will never experience lasting significance or satisfaction in this life if you neglect worship. Nothing else can take the place that worship is intended to fill in your life.

Imagine buying a new car, driving it home, parking it in your driveway, then never using it again for transportation. You do use it. You just don't use it for transportation. Your kids use it as a playhouse. Your wife decides it looks like a great greenhouse, so she puts some of her potted plants on the dashboard and on the back sill. The local kids discover this is a great ramp for roller blading, so they put their boards up and over it. The dog decides it's a place to sleep at night. But you never use it to drive anywhere.

How ridiculous. That would be a total waste of the car. Its purpose is to be driven.

Let me ask you: how much do you worship? Because that's what you were made for. God created us with a thirst that can be quenched only when we turn our full focus on him.

That's what Jesus tried to explain to a woman whom he met beside a well one day. In John 4:23, he told her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Then the woman said, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."

Are you quenching your thirst with Jesus Christ? That's one of the major objectives of worship.

G. Campbell Morgan was the pastor of a church in London at the turn of the century. Recently I read a sermon he wrote on worship in which he said, "I worship in the presence of God as I recognize that in him I find everything that my life demands. And I find that in myself I am incomplete everywhere. A sense of my need and God's resource produces the act and the attitude of worship."

Worship is my deep need; it's God's infinite resource. It's my great thirst; it's God's unlimited water supply. And the delivery system is worship.

I read this week about the Yuppies of the 1980s. You remember them? Young Upwardly-mobile Professionals. I came across an excerpt from a marketing newsletter aimed at the baby boom generation. And it said that the Yuppies have now become known as the MOSS generation, Middle-Aged, Over-Stressed, Semi-Affluent, Suburbanites. Isn't that a welcoming description?

The typical MOSS, according to this newsletter, is forty-one years old, working on a second marriage, has 2.0 biological and .5 step children, owns at least one publication on cholesterol, and is affluent but doesn't feel that way.

Let me distill that description down to one word for you. Thirsty. Thirsty people who thought they had it all are discovering a thirst that's gone unsatisfied. We've got needs that only God can fill. Worship turns our attention to him.

I want to introduce you to a friend of mine this morning who has been discovering this truth for himself in recent days, John Gorby.

Testimony: "Three-and-a-half years ago I was diagnosed with leukemia; and I would like to stand here and tell you that this story has a happy ending, but so far it doesn't. In the last year my disease has progressed rapidly, and we have exhausted all of the medical options that are known to treat this disease. So my wife, Darla, and I are now at a point of seeking God's will, trying to decide whether to try somebody's experimental research project or just let this disease run its course.

"But in spite of that sorrowful circumstance, I feel a joy that I've never felt before. And while you might expect that I would be angry with God, instead I've come to know his love for me in a way that I've never known. Now I don't mean to imply that this period has been without suffering. As recently as Friday, Darla and I were once again racked with the heartbreak and the grief of staring at what the doctors describe as a terminal illness.

"How then can somebody experience joy and come to really understand God's love in such a circumstance? I believe that much of it is through personal worship and corporate worship.

"A year ago Jim distributed a handout much like what you've got in your program this morning outlining the names of God. Ever since, I've been obediently taking three of those names every morning, and I praise the Lord for the attributes that are inherent in that name. And I've been doing this for months, and I have to admit to you that, typically by nine o'clock, I've forgotten the name of God that I started with.

"But this spring during a particularly low point when I realized that the chemotherapy treatments were not going to work, the Holy Spirit of God virtually exploded his life in my heart through this form of worship. It was God making himself known to me.

"I was doing nothing different. I was still worshiping those names of God. But the names of God brought God's presence to me as real as I am to you standing here this morning. When I worship God, I feel filled up with his spirit and I can feel God bringing life to me.

"Last year in another act of obedience I rearranged my business travel schedule so I could be here on Wednesday night for corporate worship. It's been both personal and corporate worship that has helped to sustain me through this period. When I worship the Lord with other believers, it not only helps to strengthen my weakness but it encourages me in my faith.

"I have to tell you I never imagined that I would be facing the circumstances that I face today; but even greater, I never imagined I would have a peace in the midst of it. That's God's gift to me. The God who gives us living water and who explodes his life in us is worthy of our worship."

John has not only told you how important personal worship has become to his life, he's also described what happens on Wednesday nights at Christ Community Church. That's the time when we gather for corporate worship.

I need to back up and explain something about a strategy that we've employed for the last eleven-and-a-half years at Christ Community Church. Sunday mornings have not been designed for the purpose of worship. That's been intentional, because we wanted Sunday mornings to be a basic introduction to Christianity, a place where spiritual seekers would feel comfortable. They'd be invited to come and watch as we communicated relevant truths in creative ways—through drama and contemporary music and so on.

Until now, outside of asking you to sing an opening chorus or two, this has been a very non-participatory service. We have participatory, active worship for our Wednesday night celebration service.

Now it's true that hundreds come back for that mid-week thirst quencher. But according to a survey we took, almost half of our Sunday attenders have never sampled even one celebration service. That's become a growing concern of our church's leadership team.

If life's most important activity is to exalt God by worshiping him, if worship is the primary way in which the thirst of people can be quenched, then we need to make worship as highly accessible to the greatest number of people as possible.

What does it mean to worship God "as a church"?

That takes us to the second phrase in our goal statement. Our statement is "To exalt God by worshiping him as a church."

Jesus told this woman who was spiritually thirsty, "Go call your husband and come back."

"I have no husband," she replied.

And Jesus said to her, "You're right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you've had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. So what you've said is quite true."

The conversation got started with the discussion about living water and how Jesus was willing to quench this woman's deepest thirst. But before he goes any further, Jesus wants to identify the reason behind this woman's spiritual longing. It's time to show her why her soul is so parched. It's the problem of sin.

Her moral failure was pretty obvious. She had a string broken marriages behind her and was currently involved in a relationship that violated God's holy standards.

Perhaps the clearest manifestation of sin in our lives is what sin does to our relationships with other people. Take a random catalogue of sins—pride, anger, selfishness, greed, lust, hurtful words. They all contribute to relational breakdown.

But when Christ begins to fill us with his love and patience and grace, when his Spirit begins to work on our character using God's Word to shape it, one of the most poignant demonstrations is that we begin to live in community with other people. We begin to mend broken relationships. We begin to build new friendships. We become what the Bible refers to as God's church, his family. We become brothers and sisters to each other. There's supposed to be a warmth, a depth of relationship among us that's unique in the midst of a badly splintered world.

Now if you have ever attended one of our Wednesday night celebration services, I'll bet that you have sensed a lot more of this feeling of community than what we typically experience on a Sunday morning around here.

Sunday morning has been more of a program to be watched. We're more spectators. Now, how close, how close do you feel to the other people in the theater when you go to a movie? It doesn't happen.

If your only experience of our church has been our Sunday morning services, you're missing out on a significant segment of worship. You're also missing out on community.

As we've struggled as to what to do about this downside of our strategy, there are only two solutions here. One is that we could do a better job of promoting our Wednesday night celebration service and then just pray and hope that more of you begin to schedule it into your lives.

But we have already tried that in the past, and we've discovered through our surveys that many more of you want to be here on Wednesday night but scheduling conflicts often make it impossible to be here.

Solution two is to move more of Wednesday's worship and community experience to Sunday morning. That's what we've decided to do. So starting this morning, we've begun to introduce a few more participatory worship activities in the first thirty minutes of our service.

One great benefit of this strategic change is what we've just tripled the number of people who are exalting God by worshiping him at Christ Community Church each week. But even more important, it's our hope that we have taken a giant step toward making this crowd feel more like a community. It may not happen right away, but that's our hope and prayer.

There will always be an extended time for worship on Wednesday night. If you want it, it will be there for you. It's just a more informal time. It feels more like family. And we're going to do some things to enhance that family feeling along the way.

So our goal is to exalt God by worshiping him as a church, not just a third of us, but all of our church.

What does it mean to worship God "in spirit and in truth"?

Third, this is going to be worship in spirit and in truth: "To exalt God by worshiping him as a church in spirit and in truth."

In verse 19 we read, "'Sir, '" the woman said, 'I can see that you're a prophet. Now our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.' And 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 don't know; we worship what we do know, for salvation comes through the Jews. And yet a time is coming and is now come when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kinds of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.'"

The woman has brought up some logistical, technical questions about worship. Jesus said that was not important. God is concerned about men and women who will worship him in spirit and in truth.

What do these two terms mean? Spirit has to do with the attitude of our worship. Is our heart really in it? Are we just going through the motions? Are we singing in a perfunctory way when the lyrics are slapped up on the screen here? Or are we worshiping with authenticity?

Our new approach depends on your heartfelt participation. More is going to be required of you than in the past. Someone gave me a cartoon this past week. An usher is waiting to seat people at the back of the church auditorium, and he turns to them and asks, "Will it be clapping or non-clapping?" I hope that those of you who are non-clappers feel some freedom in coming weeks to clap. If you've never lifted a hand in the air, I hope you will.

If this is your first service at Christ Community Church, you may wonder what the big deal is, because participation has been normal fare for you. We're not trying to become more churchy, not in the traditional sense. We're trying to become more engaged, more participative, more worship energized.

Atlantic Monthly had an article (8/96) on growing churches. Near the conclusion of that article, the author writes, "I don't think it's an accident that the singing I heard in all these growing churches was booming and enthusiastic, partly because of the simplicity and almost child-repetitiveness of the music, but also because the people had their chins up and their hands free. Thus the spontaneous clapping and swaying and occasionally the single hand outstretched to God."

I'm glad he got that message. We want to worship God in spirit. We also want to worship God in truth. And that means we have got to discover all that the Bible has to say about who God is. We want to worship the God who is, not the God whom we create in our own imaginations.

The names of God, the characteristics, the attributes tell us so much about him. When you hear Creator and Father and Rock and Almighty, you're learning something about the character of God. We're going to get to get to know God like you've never know him before because our goal, friends, is to exalt God by worshiping him as a church in spirit and in truth.

For Your Reflection

Personal growth: How has this sermon fed your own soul? ___________________________________________

Skill growth: What did this sermon teach you about how to preach? ____________________________________________________________________________

Exegesis and exposition: Highlight the paragraphs in this sermon that helped you better understand Scripture. How does the sermon model ways you could provide helpful biblical exposition for your hearers? ____________________________________________________________________________

Theological Ideas: What biblical principles in this sermon would you like to develop in a sermon? How would you adapt these ideas to reflect your own understanding of Scripture, the Christian life, and the unique message that God is putting on your heart? ____________________________________________________________________________

Outline: How would you improve on this outline by changing the wording, or by adding or subtracting points? _____________________________________________________________________

Application: What is the main application of this sermon? What is the main application of the message you sense God wants you to bring to your hearers? ____________________________________________________________________________

Illustrations: Which illustrations in this sermon would relate well with your hearers? Which cannot be used with your hearers, but they suggest illustrations that could work with your hearers? ____________________________________________________________________________

Credit: Do you plan to use the content of this sermon to a degree that obligates you to give credit? If so, when and how will you do it?

Jim Nicodem is founder and pastor of Christ Community Church in St. Charles, Illinois.