Worship with Dordt University, in Sioux Center, Iowa

A worship service from the virtual Worship Symposium 2021. 

Institution Name: Dordt University 

Participants: 

Dordt Worship Ensemble: Damon Groen, Aaron Medberry, Abraham Vasquez, Daniel Ketchelos, Jeremy Perigo, Aftyn Vermeer, Alex Priore, Emily Wedel
Service Leaders: Jeremy Perigo, Angela Perigo, Aaron Medberry, Aaron Baart
Technical Support: Daniel Ketchelos, Annabelle Hosmer, Jase Nicklas, Lydia Sohre, Caleb Kaul
Camera Operators: Noah Diest, Josiah Culpepper, Nicholas Hembrough
Video Editor: Nicholas Hembrough
Audio Engineer: Alex Priore

Location: Sioux Center, Iowa 

Order of Service and Copyrights:

Welcome

Song of Praise: "King of My Heart"

Text and Music: John Mark McMillan, Sarah McMillan © Meaux Jeaux Music (admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing), Raucous Ruckus Publishing (admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing)
Sarah McMillan Publishing (admin. by Watershed Music Group)
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

Call to Worship and Psalm Reading: Psalm 139:7-12 NRSVA

"God Is So Good"

Text: Unknown
Music: Yancy © 2007 Dried Rose Music
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

"This Is Amazing Grace"

Text and Music: Jeremy Riddle, Josh Farro, Phil Wickham © 2012 Phil Wickham Music (Admin. by BMG Rights Management [c/o Music Services, Inc.]), Seems Like Music (Admin. by BMG Rights Management [c/o Music Services, Inc.]), Sing My Songs (Admin. by BMG Rights Management [c/o Music Services, Inc.]), WC Music Corp. (Admin. by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.), Bethel Music Publishing
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

"Love on Fire"

Text and Music: Gabrielle C. Balachandran, Jeremy Riddle, Ran Jackson, Ricky Jackson, Steffany Gretzinger © 2017 Jeremy Riddle Music Designee (admin. by Bethel Music Publishing), Richmond Park Publishing (admin. by Essential Music Publishing LLC), Heavenly Junkie Music (admin. by Ricky Jackson), Bethel Music Publishing 
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

Intercessory Prayer

"Our Father"

Text: Lord’s Prayer
Music: Traditional Middle Eastern tune as found in a hymnal from Turkey; arr. Jeremy Perigo

Lord’s Prayer: Prayed in heart languages

"Our Father"

Text and Music: Marcus Meier © 2009 Forerunner Worship (admin. by Music Services, Inc.)
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

New Testament Reading: Colossians 3:1-4, 11 ESV

Devotional: Fishing into the Future

Song of Unity: "They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love"

Text: Peter Scholtes © 1966 F.E.L. Publications. Assigned 1991 The Lorenz Corporation (admin. by Music Services, Inc.); Refrain: Jeremy Perigo
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

Song of Praise: "Graves into Gardens / Tumbas a Jardines"

Text and Music: Brandon Lake, Chris Brown, Steven Furtick, Tiffany Hammer; Spanish: Abraham Osorio, Crystal Osorio, Edgar Aguilar, Evan Craft, Jariel Navarro, Job Gonzalez © 2019 Music by Elevation Worship Publishing (admin. by Essential Music Publishing LLC), Maverick City Publishing Worldwide (Admin. by Heritage Worship Publishing), Bethel Music Publishing
Used by permission. CCLI #400063

Sending/Benediction

Song of Blessing: "The Blessing"

Text and Music: Chris Brown, Cody Carnes, Kari Jobe, Steven Furtick © 2020 Capitol CMG Paragon (admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing), Kari Jobe Carnes Music (Admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing), Worship Together Music (admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing), Writer's Roof Publishing (admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing), Music by Elevation Worship Publishing (admin. by Essential Music Publishing LLC)
Used by permission. CCLI #400063.

"Sermon Transcript"

Your life—your life right now—is hidden with Christ in God. Your life right now is hidden with Christ in God. What a beautiful and mysterious place to be!

As you hear in the prayer—your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven—Paul pastorally encourages and exhorts his congregation already here in Colossae, the same thing: set your hearts on things above, set your minds on things above. When Jesus promised that we would have power . . . and the last thing that he ever said with his followers was “You will have power; you will receive this when the Holy Spirit comes on you. And then you’ll be my witnesses.

There is a great deal of confusion in the world today about what that power is really about. But we hear in the prayer of “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and when Jesus tells his followers that you will be fishers of men, we begin to get the idea that they are fishers of is not just of men, but of future realities collapsing into present possibilities. We do imagine the fulfillment and the finalization of all of Jesus’ promises and all of the ambitions that have always been inside the heart of God since the foundations of the world being brought into the present by his people.

And then he equips us with an arsenal of possibilities. He goes on in this passage to name things like humility. Gentleness. Kindness.

The power that we would receive would be an ability to to bring the future into the present by reflecting the character of God, that we are hidden within into the realities of the relationships in the world around us where we currently exist. You are a possibility maker when your life is hidden with Christ in God.

And for all these possibilities—and Paul goes on the passage to talk about the things we need to take off so we can enter into these possibilities, and then the last one that he names that you just heard read in Colossians 3:11, is that here, when God’s people gather here in God’s presence, here at the foot of the cross, we all collectively experience, the greatest global common denominator. We are all level before the cross. No amount of wealth or status or fame or rejection or despair or loss or pain changes that reality when we find ourselves here. For here, those differences don’t exist.

Here, the future possibility of what will happen when we sit together at the wedding supper of the Lamb, where there’ll be no flags flying of any nation that differentiates us based on our wealth, our possibilities, or our material and military might. Those will not distinguish anything between us anymore. Here there is no—hear the prohibition from Paul—here, there is no difference. But you have died,  and your life, already now, i’s hidden with Christ in God.

You see, in the New Testament, authors are always trying to help these young Christians understand that they now have the ability to see the world in a different light, to enter into conversations and difficulties with a different posture, because the possibilities that exist for those who are in Christ are simply different. Even at the close of the canon, by the time we get to the last book of scripture in Revelation, a people undergoing significant persecution, hardship, struggle, their pastor taking off, put on a prison island, they are reeling for fear of their own lives. The command more often repeated in that book than anything else, forty times over, is “Look.” Not “Fight.” Not “Flee.” Just “Look.” Look at the possibilities. Look with eyes of faith and not eyes of fear.

So here, when we gather as God’s people, we go fishing into the future and bring the promised realities of Jesus’ final fulfillment into the present. And there is strife between different peoples, and you hear it in this passage. Paul says you’ve got to get rid of this if you want to enter into, if you want to become like the character of Christ, if you want to become like him  and his father.

Here, there is no Greek, Jew, Gentile. Wasn’t this the ultimate first-century us-and-them differentiation? And we still do this today. Even as followers of Christ we talk about the differences between different types of people. We are not the antidote yet to racism and division.

When Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America and in many other places in the world, we are not there yet. The differences that Paul’s railing against in this passage are still ones we are confronting.

I came across a statistic recently that just still has my brain absolutely reeling. We keep being concerned about the differences that happen to the world as we know it when someone new comes into it. And yet the truth is that 90 percent of every refugee and immigrant that comes into this country within the first ten years either already is or will be a follower of Jesus. Now that is entering into a place where in the last, most recent years, there’s been four new nonbelievers for every one new believer here. Perhaps the greatest possibility of the propagation of the church, even in our own settings, is actually from the “other.” And the thing that we fear the most might be the thing that can save us. The best.

I am infinitely more concerned right now in this moment about the callous borders around our hearts than I am about the porous walls around our nation’s. On the other side of our fears, or when a global biological pandemic ends, unfortunately, this still remains. And we need to work harder at opening our arms wider and the postures of our heart wider to the other, or we will never be the witnesses that we are called to be. Part of that has to do with getting rid of the divisions inside of our own houses. In this passage, another thing that he lists off is not “There is no Jew or Gentile” but “There is no circumcised or uncircumcised,” their favorite religious difference of the day.

How much energy is expended among the people of God arguing with one another still about religious differences? How finely will we parse out our doctrinal differences with one another rather than celebrating what we have in common and this place where we are level before the cross?

You see, my guess is there will be no skill-testing question at the gates of heaven that has any sort of theological skill or knowledge to it. “Aaron, before you can come home with me and take your place that has been prepared for you since the beginning of time to be with me, I just need to know, what were your thoughts about infra- versus supralapsarianism?”

I don’t think that's part of the deal.

Is it possible that we argue and fight about these things and care more about them than Jesus himself ever will?

One of the worst dangers of our sinfulness is the division that it creates. When sin entered into creation, it created a distancing between us and God, a distancing between us and each other, a distancing between us and creation, and a distancing between us and who we are supposed to be. Social distancing in the middle of a global biological pandemic is not nearly as dangerous as a heart distancing between us and God or us and one another.

The differences listed in this text—barbarian, Scythian—barbarian, this is a Greek onomatopoeia word. They thought that everybody else who wasn't them talked funny because it wasn’t their language. So they would refer to anybody else speaking in another tongue as them saying “bar bar bar bar,” and so the word comes in Greek as barbarian. They just sound funny.

We are so capable of picking up the finest of differences between us and using those things to commodify some sort of variation between our worth. What a dangerous place to be.

And they include Scythian because at this point in time in history, this is the furthest known people group across the continent of Asia that they were aware of. They would have referred to them as barbarians, savages.

And God needs his people to know, to be reminded again and again, that when we see someone who bears any sort of difference from us, the first thing that needs to be aroused within us is not a disdain, but a curiosity, a curiosity about the creativity of God and his fascination with all the nations, that 7.8 billion people could look all entirely different. And it’s not a reason to make a difference between one person and another in a way that makes one worth less than another, but rather that we would only come to celebrate the creative diversity of our God even more.

The very things that he created, the differences between us that are supposed to be part of what drives us to all and wonder about \his creative genius, instead only because of sin become the very points of division between us.

But we were all bought at a price, slave or free. Wouldn’t it just be like the sinful, worst part of man to take one person’s life, make it worth less than another, and have them do things that we wouldn’t do ourselves.

Paul’s calling out in this text the worst of what we can be and instead telling us to go fishing with Christ into the future for what will be, most definitively, when he brings it to finality.

You see, we’re all adopted as sons and daughters and bought with a price. And so the great leveling before the cross, the common denominator for all of us, is that Christ is all. And if we’re expending more energy or anxiety these days about anything other than that, then we, my friends, have missed the mark.

Paul encourages us in this text as it starts out, as you heard in the reading, “Set your eyes on the prize.” Set your hearts on things above, set your minds on things above, take your imagination captive, and then expand it to the possibilities that all come in Christ Jesus,  because everything’s coming under his lordship, and all of these need to be offered back.

The story Jesus told— well, the story we’re told about Jesus—in Mark 12 when the Pharisees and Herodians come before him and try to test him—they want to create a division that it’s another us-versus-them question. Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? What do we give our government and what do we not? I notice it’s the political and the religious leaders who come to him. Is it them or is it us? And what is Jesus’ response? He asks for a coin and (asks), “Whose face is on it?” They tell him, “Caesar’s.” So he says, “Well, then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s.” If Caesar wants to put his face on a coin, happily give it back to him. 

But of course, the implied inverse is also true. What did God put his image on? Each and every one of his children.

And so the people of God, the new humanity on display for the world, will go out each and every day and go reeling into the future to bring it back into the present and show the world what things could be when it all falls under the imagination of Jesus. So he’s given us each a sliver and a piece of that to imagine and dream it together. To let heaven come. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. And a big part of that starts with the way that we see and act and treat one another, when we give those back to him.