Ascent #2 - Ascend for Worship (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the message series "Ascent" exploring Psalms 120–134. Together, we’ll reflect on the journey of rising—whether in personal growth, spiritual depth, or relational connection—embracing challenges, celebrating triumphs, and discovering deeper lessons along the way.

Message Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2025/1/13/ascent-2-ascend-for-worship

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Transcript

Good morning. It's great to be together. As we begin the new year, I was thinking about my relationship with church and church attendance specifically. So, since I was 22, I graduated college, I went to work at a church, a little church in Chicago. And basically, from that decision on, my decision about my weekends has been largely made for me, meaning it was made then. 

And at that time, I think I went to 50 out of 52 weekends. So, I had two weekends that I could choose not to go to church. And then I went to work at a different church and was there. And I think I was supposed to be there 48 out of 52 weekends. And here at Orchard Hill, if I'm not here, sometimes I'm physically here, but not teaching. 

Sometimes I'm somewhere else, maybe speaking, or I'm with my family. But most weekends, my decision is made for me. Well, last fall, my wife and I went to Chicago to visit one of our sons who was living there at the time. And I woke up on Sunday morning and I didn't have to go to church. And I had one of those moments where I said, I don't want to go to church. 

I don't know if you've had that moment. Maybe you had that moment this morning, but I had this moment where I thought there are a lot of things we could do. We have limited time with our son. There are things I would rather do today than go to church. And so I kind of floated the idea to my family. My son wanted us to go where he was going to church, so we ended up going to church with him. But I had this moment after that where I thought, this is how most people wake up and experience Sunday. It's a choice that you get to make week after week to say, will I spend part of my day in a public worship environment or will I not? 

Eugene Peterson wrote a book years ago called the Long Obedience in the same direction. It was on the Psalms of Ascent that we're looking at in these weekends. And in a chapter on Psalm 122, 123, he talks about as a pastor, how often people would give excuses about why they didn't go to church on a regular basis. He says sometimes people would say it's my only day to sleep in. I was forced to go when I was a kid. 

I don't like the whole obligation thing. The church is full of hypocrites and people who are difficult. And he said early in his years of being a pastor, he said, I would try to convince people that they should attend church. And he said, as I went longer and longer through my years as being a pastor, he said, I realized that it didn't make a difference. People did what they wanted to do when it came to this. 

But then he said this. And he said, but I have come to the conclusion that there is no single discipline that leads to discipleship that is as important as regular participation in public worship. 

And today we're going to look at Psalm 122 and 123, which is part of these Psalms of Ascent. So, the Book of Psalms has 150 Psalms, but from Psalm 120 to 134, there's a title above each Psalm that says Psalm of Ascent. And most scholars think that the ascents were the people as they would go up to Jerusalem. Because from anywhere in the region, you went up physically to go to Jerusalem for the three festivals that were compulsory and obligatory for the people who were part of the covenant community. Did you hear that? 

Compulsory, obligatory. Okay. They were required to go. Now, I don't know how you respond to obligation or something that's compulsory. I personally hate it when somebody tells me I have to do something. 

And I can imagine that the people had moments when they said, we have to go to Jerusalem again. Weren't we just there? It's the third time this year. And they had us sing the same songs over and over as they went on this ascent. If that interpretation is correct, and this wasn't the only obligation for public worship that was part of the Old Testament. 

People were compelled in the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment, to hold the Sabbath day as holy unto the Lord, to set it aside for worship and devotion. It wasn't an hour, it was a day that people compelled to say, public worship is our thing. So the pattern in the Old Testament for the people of God was to say, one day you set aside and prioritize worship, and three times a year you go to Jerusalem for an extended festival to be reminded about the glory and the splendor of God, whether you like it or not. Okay, so now you rightly should be asking, well, that was then, this is now obligation. Now it's freedom. 

So how does this work for you and for me in the era in which we live? Well, the Ten Commandments are picked up in the New Testament, all of them. And you may say, well, there's ceremonial law, like going to Jerusalem. We're not required to go to Jerusalem. So, is there any obligation for public worship? 

But anything that's repeated in the New Testament or rooted in created order has a binding effect on people still today. And what we see in the New Testament is not a jettisoning of the Ten Commandments but are affirmation of them. And this is true when it comes to public worship. Now, there was a change. It went from being the Sabbath, the day, to Sunday when the resurrection happened. 

And so, there was this change. And there's some distinction in how those things are practiced. But even In Hebrews chapter 10, verse 24 and 25, we see this, “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.” He says, “This not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day approaching.” And so, what you see is that every time you say, I will be part of a public worship event, you are saying, I am choosing to honor God. 

But not only that Jesus, the Son of God. God, when he walked on this earth, we are told in Luke 4:16, went to the synagogue. And it says, as was his custom, meaning even Jesus, when he walked this earth, went to the synagogue every week. Now, can you imagine that Son of God, Jesus sitting in the synagogue for 30 years? He lived 33 years, three years with his public ministry. 

But for 30 years he sat in the synagogue week after week, as was his custom. I mean, you think you've heard it all before. I mean, he knows everything. He's sitting there saying, okay, I'm here to worship. I'm here to participate, to honor the Father, to demonstrate the way, meaning every time that you or I come and participate in public worship, we are following the leading example of Jesus, the founder of our faith. 

But when we come to Psalm 122 and 123, I think we see some other things that happen in worship. Let me start in Psalm 1:22. You didn't hear this read but let me read a few of these verses and just comment on each of these. “I rejoiced with those who said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord. Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem.” 

So right away you see joy. Now I would imagine, as I said that, that when started this journey to Jerusalem, that many of them said, not this again. And yet there was a sense of rejoicing. Jerusalem is built, verse three, like a city that's closely compacted together. This is where the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, to praise the name of the Lord according to the statute given to Israel. 

Statute given all the people come together. People that you may not necessarily agree with, like the tribes, meant that there was diversity. It wasn't just people getting together with the people that they like and were like them, but they were with a diverse group of people. Verse 5. “There stand the thrones for judgment, the thrones of the house of David.” 

Now, this is a psalm of David. So, when he says the thrones of David, probably what he's alluding to is the promise in 2nd Samuel 7 that through David would come the king, the Messiah. And what he's doing is he's saying, we ultimately here, when we come together, are acknowledging that there's joy, because this isn't about what we do, but about who God is and who Jesus will be for us and what he will ultimately do. And this leads to a little bit of a recognition of our need. And then when we get to verses six through nine, it says, pray for the peace of Jerusalem. 

Now, the word peace here is the word shalom. It means to thrive. It means wholeness. And so, when he prays for the peace of Jerusalem, what he's doing is he's moving his eyes from a personal concern to a global concern. There's an alignment that takes place, a reorientation of the heart and the desires to say, may there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels. 

For the sake of my family and friends, I will say, peace be within you. And one of the things that happens when we come together is we move our focus, yes, in part to our. But also to God's agenda that transcends our own agenda. And then we see this when we begin Psalm 123, it says this, “I lift up my eyes to you, to you who sit enthroned in heaven.” Now, if you're here, last week we talked about our eyes, because Psalm 121 says, I lift my eyes to the hills. 

Where does my help come from? So, there's eyes that can either look around us, look within us, or look above us. And here the call again is to look up, to use our eyes to say we are clarifying what's important. But notice what this is here. Verse 2. It says, “As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he shows us his mercy.”   

Now, what's going on here? Says, the eyes of somebody looks to whatever it is that's important to them, to their master. And we look to God until he shows us mercy. And I Think there's a cry here that's basically saying the only place that we find mercy ultimately is when we worship God. 

But we all worship something all the time. And the more we worship something that isn't God, the more it becomes our master that doesn't give us mercy. Here's how Becky Pippard wrote about this years and years ago. She said, “Whatever controls us, our Lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the Lord of our lives.”  

And what happens when we come to worship is that we are moved from a sense of whatever it is that we're saying. I make much of this. This is most important to being having that idol of our heart exposed. Here's Ezekiel, chapter 14, verse 3. That just states that idols are actually something in our heart, not something external. It says, son of man. These men have set up idols in their hearts. 

Here's how Tim Keller wrote about this nearly 15 years ago in his little book Counterfeit Gods. He said, “A counterfeit God is anything so central and essential to your life that should you lose it, your life would hardly feel worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources on it without a second thought. It can be family and children or career and making money or achievement and critical acclaim or saving face and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality or virtue, or even success in Christian ministry. When your meaning in life is to fix someone else's life, we call it codependency. But in reality, it's an idol. An idol is whatever you look at and say in your heart of hearts. If I have that, then I'll feel my life has meaning. Then I'll know that I have value. Then I'll feel significant and secure. There are many ways to describe this kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is to call it worship.”  

You see what happens when you participate in public worship? Not all the time, but your heart gets reoriented to say there is something more lovely and beautiful than what my heart is prone to worship and what I'm prone to worship, what I'm prone to turn into. The idol of my heart will treat me like a master who demands from me rather than gives me mercy. 

And so, the freedom that comes from being in public worship is that is that God will often reorient our hearts. Now sometimes we don't know when or how exactly that may happen, but it happens sometimes in a song, in a moment, in a statement, in the teaching, maybe in a conversation with other people where all of a sudden our hearts are reoriented to say, that is what is worthy rather than what it is that I have made into my ultimate thing. And so, what these psalms of ascent say to us is, yes, seek God for divine help, but prioritize public worship, even the obligatory sense. And one of the ways we've talked about this around here is we've said, just part of being a follower of Jesus is just to show up, just to say, I'm going to make a commitment to be a part of public worship on an ongoing basis because it honors God, it follows the example of Jesus, it reorients my heart, and it helps me to love the God of the universe rather than the gods and the idols of my heart.  

Now I know that many who are gathered here say, you know what? I have oriented my life around participating in public worship on a regular basis. And if that has been you, I want to say, way to go. I want to say, you have chosen to honor God and to let your heart be reoriented. And some of you have done so by saying, I serve multiple services, and I attend a service, I come Saturday night and serve, I come back and participate in worship on Sunday or the other way around. Some of you have been at multiple services that are in different locations. 

And again, way to go. But there's also some of us who this is not a decision that we make and just say, this is a decision for my life, but it is a weekly decision for us. And when it's a weekly decision, what happens instead of a long-term decision? Just saying, this is what I do, what we do as a family. What happens is that week to week, there are other things that come into our mind that we say, well, maybe, maybe this week it isn't such a big deal. 

So, for example, some of us will say, well, okay, I don't know that I experience God any more in a public worship service than I do in nature or in my own reading and praying and listening to music. So why do I need to go and be a part of something that's public? Well, again, it's compulsory in the scriptures. But even more than that, what happens when you come and participate is you feed off of some of the other passion and commitment that exists. Have you ever lit A fire. And if you have a fire pit or a fireplace and you've lit a fire, what happens is if you try to burn a log alone, what happens? It doesn't catch. Usually, you have to set a second log or a third log around it so that the fire catches. And if you take a log out of the fire, what happens? It burns out. 

There's something to simply saying, I'm participating with other people. Again, notice for God, it wasn't just a small group. It was the tribes of Israel. It was people that were diverse and coming together that ignited their heart for the things of God. Some of us may look at it and simply say, well, you know, I don't know if I want to partake in church, because church is full of people who do things that are lousy, that are hypocritical. I just don't know if that's what I want. And I would understand that. And I would just say simply, you're not wrong. Any church has people that are hypocritical. And any church has people in it who will let you down. 

Even the best of people will let you down. But here's what I want to just simply say to you, and that is, if you are a fan of a football team, football team that can't win a playoff game, here's what you probably don't do. You don't go to a game sometime and say, oh, did I get annoyed at those other fans? Therefore, I hate the team and I'm not going to participate or cheer for them anymore. If you go to a game, there are fans all over the spectrum. 

There are some who are casual fans. I mean, they dress the part, but they don't even know how this whole thing works. There are fans that are fanatical, and they'll go and start tailgating at 8 o'clock in the morning and they'll be drunk by a kickoff and obnoxious. And then there are fans who sit in their boxes with wine and don't pay attention. I mean, they're all fans. 

And here's what you don't do. You don't say, because there's that fan that I had a bad experience with, I can't participate in cheering for my team. And yet somehow, when it comes to church, people often say, if there's somebody who annoys me, who irritates me, who's offended me, then I can't worship Jesus anymore in a public context and we miss something sometimes. What we'll do is we'll say, well, okay, I Understand the need to worship, but I go and I don't know that I really get anything out of it all the time. And I understand that. 

But let me ask you a question. What did you have to eat on January 12, 2020? Now, unless that that was an important day in your life, for some reason, chances are you do not remember what you ate. But do you know what that meal did for you? It provided nourishment and it gave you the strength to continue. 

Now, if you missed a meal, you're probably fine for that day. You could miss several meals. But it is the culmination of a healthy diet over time that gives you the ability to continue. And spiritual nurture is much the same. And so, my encouragement is just to say, there's a spiritual discipline in saying, I will show up. 

But I want to just press this a little harder here for a moment. And I did something like this about five years ago. It was actually the weekend before COVID hit, so I think I can repeat it because no one remembers anything from that era. 

So what do you think is reasonable in terms of reasons not to participate or prioritize public worship? Let me just give you a few ideas. So, if you miss three weekends because you have family that visits you, is that reasonable? I mean, that seems reasonable. What if you have three weekends where you visit family, you go somewhere to see other parts of your family, and then you have four weekends, we'll say where the kids have sports. 

Yes, that number is low, I'm aware. But let's just call it four for the sake of our argument. You have three weekends where somebody in your family is sick. You have two weekends that it snows, two weekends that it rains, two weekends that it's sunny. Then you have four weekends where you go on a trip somewhere. 

Your family, you. You're just on a trip somewhere. You have three weekends where either your work demands that you're taking care of work, or you work on a project around your house or something like that. You have two weekends where you just wake up tired. You have two weekends where you're annoyed and irritated at somebody or something. 

So you say, I'm just not in the frame of to participate in church. And then you have two weekends where you just say waffles or church. It's waffles. 

Now, the reason that I show you this, do you know how many weekends this equals? 32. There's 52 weekends in a year. You are approaching in this only participating in church public worship. If these are your acceptable numbers, about one in three times. 

And let me just ask you. And you might say, well, are you trying to guilt us? Maybe, but not really, because you and I cannot say that our priority is the worship of the God of the creation. And say, you fall on my priority list somewhere about a third of the time. 

What we need, if we want to prioritize worship, is to say, I will make this a priority. And so here's when I say show up as part of just the baseline of discipleship is just simply to say, what if you made a commitment this year to say, unless I'm sick or I'm out of town or providentially hindered, I will make it an absolute priority to participate in public worship. And again, I know many of you already do. So let me just point something out from these psalms. Do you notice that they didn't just show up, but they came with anticipation and participation? 

And they said, we are going to look to you until we encounter mercy, until we experience you. There was a sense in which when they came. And again, this is a ritual to go three times a year to travel, in some cases hundreds of miles uphill in a difficult terrain. And they went through this. And yet when they got there, it says, there's joy. 

When we saw the house of the Lord, we're here to praise. We're praying for the peace of Jerusalem. We are going to look to you until you give us mercy. There's anticipation, there's engagement. There's a participation in this. 

And for some of us, maybe it's not just showing up, but saying, I'll show up with everything in me to participate, to invite God's work in my heart and in the hearts and life of the broader community. Now, I know there are some weekends where simply showing up is a huge deal. Some of you may have a weekend like that right now. There are things happening in your life where it took everything you can just to get here. And I believe God is going to work and is honored even in you just coming and saying, God, I had all I could do just to get here. 

But on the weekends that you're able to say, God, I'm not just kidding here, but I'm coming with my heart to engage, to worship and to take in all that you give. There is something to that that reorients our hearts in a right way. And so today, will you just say, this year, unless I'm sick, I'm out of town, or providentially hindered, I'm going to make a priority of public worship, engaged public worship, where I'm reminded of my need of a Savior. My heart is reoriented to the things of God and see how God works in your life. Let's pray. 

God, as we're here today, I ask that you would help us to not just push aside the sense of obligation or compulsory command to be a part of worship, but that we would understand it is for our good it and if we'll engage in it, you will meet us in ways that we don't always understand or see. And I pray you would do that in each of our hearts. And we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great week. 

This transcript was automatically generated. Please excuse errors.