Bobby Schuller - Venite Adoremus, Come Let Us Adore Him
Well, today is Adoration Sunday. So, you know, in the these old traditions, we line each Sunday with a particular word, and that kind of helps preachers like me kind of think about what to talk about. But adoration is an interesting one. It's not a word you hear a lot in church, but it's one that I think so aligns well with the final Sunday of Advent. So, let me just begin by asking you this question, what is something that you really adore? Like, you really, you adore this thing or person? Or I can tell you something Cohen, my son, adores. He adores Disneyland. I took him yesterday. We have annual passes to Disneyland, they were given to us by friends of ours, and it is amazing that for years I have taken this kid to Disneyland, almost every Saturday forever, and every single time he acts like it's the very first time.
When I tell him we're gonna go, always put a dutch, orange jersey on him, so, like, sometimes we're in the bathroom, and we're both going, and he goes a little quicker than I do, so he'll run out of there, and I'm still going, and it's probably more than you wanted to know. But then I'll run out and like, look for him, you know. I'm like, where'd he go? You know, but it's always an adventure, you know. And every time before we go, he will, if I tell him, he'll just get so excited. He starts dancing and he gets all thrilled and he starts telling everybody he's gonna go to Disneyland. And even when we leave, you know, a lot of kids are crabby and they're upset. He just goes, "Thank you, daddy. Thank you so much, daddy".
And then, like, when we get home, he'll say, "I want to tell mommy I went to Disneyland. I wanna tell mom". "Okay, go tell her". So, he'll run into the house and go, "Mommy, I went to Disneyland. Daddy took me to Disneyland". And it's like this every Sunday. Now, that's why people are like, "How do you go every Sunday? Don't you get sick of it"? And the answer is, yes, I get sick of it, but I never get sick of that. You know, I never get sick of that. There's something about being a parent, if you have kids or a grandparent, that's how God sees you. You know, it's important, we're gonna talk about that a little bit this morning. But what do you adore? Cohen adores, you know, Disneyland.
Maybe you adore fashion, and you love clothes and design, and you love special fabrics and colors, and the way, you love how there's always new techniques or events or ways in which, you know, dresses or suits or whatever it is, you just enjoy it and you adore it. Maybe you like architecture, my grandpa Schuller adored architecture. He built, you know, there's nowhere in the world you can find more than one gold medal architect except at the Crystal Cathedral campus where you can find three. In fact, I believe he's the only person in the Architectural Hall of Fame that's not an architect, isn't that amazing? But he could sit for hours and talk about all these things, and I didn't understand at all, but I did love it and enjoy it. Or maybe you adore something even better.
Maybe you adore your kids or maybe your grandkids. I know a lot of us don't have kids, but for those that you do, someone told me once that grandkids is your reward for having kids. I don't get that because I don't have teenagers, but apparently having teenagers is really a hard thing to do. I have a 12 year old, she's getting there. She's nudging close. She calls herself a tweenager, so we'll see, we'll see. But for now I still really enjoy my daughter. But who knows? Maybe you adore your grandkids. I hear that a lot from men, actually, which is a surprise, about how much grandpas love their kids. Or maybe it's some other relationship, maybe you just got a new girlfriend or a new boyfriend or something you just adore.
You think about this person all the time. And isn't it interesting when we have things in our lives and we adore them and we think about them a lot how it can affect the way we talk, can affect the way we look? If I told you, picture someone in, like, all black leather that rides Harley Davidsons, you would say that person is a biker, right? You just picture that. Or if I said picture a teenage girl with pom poms that likes to dance a lot, you would say, well, that's a cheerleader, right? So, it's weird how when we adore things or become part of these groups, we even change the way physically we look, and we even talk differently. Isn't that interesting?
All of this to say that I think there's something so human about adoration, about having something that you adore. It brings you to life. It brings you, it makes you feel alive, makes you feel alive. I think of adoration as an unhurried, deep appreciation for something where you give worth to the thing and value the thing. And it's in most cases, if it's true adoration, it's usually worth what you're giving, you know, the attention that you're giving to it, and it makes you feel alive.
Today, and I talk about this word a lot, today we live in a world though that the passion for things seems to be going down, for good things. You know, passion for bad things is going up, but good things goes down. And, in fact, there's a chronic problem that... I can't speak to this authoritatively, but that in the clinical world there's this word anhedonia that's being used a lot that used to be almost non-existent, and the word anhedonia is not depressed, but it means, it's the inability to experience pleasure. It's happening particularly with a lot of younger people, that what happens when you look at a lot of bright lights and loud sounds and these types of things, it begins to almost kind of fry your brain a little bit where it makes it very hard to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, like fishing or going for a walk or having a meaningful conversation with a friend. It's a clinical word that means you just can't experience pleasure.
Maybe you're here today, and you kind of feel that way. Sometimes you feel a little bit numb. And I just want to say that I think adoration for almost anything is almost the cure for this. Then, instead of we've gone from adoration to stimulation, and I wonder, what do you adore? What do you really adore? The problem is with all these things that we adore, whether they're, you know, sports heroes or groups that we're a part of our people, all things fade away, don't they? All things rust and rot, are pecked away by birds and bugs. All things wither and wrinkle, all things turn gray. Everything burns. It's a positive church. Except one thing, except one thing.
The kingdom of God, which is in this building, swirling all around us and inside of you right now. And there's only one person who will never fade, the Lord Almighty. And can I tell you, when we fix our adoration on these other things but don't have it fixed on the tree of life, on the thing that will never fade, on the thing that will never rot, if we have it on other things and not this thing, our life, especially as we get older, becomes this taxing journey of perpetual loss. No wonder we've become anhedonic in a godless world. Everything fades, everything rots, everything withers. But when we cling to the strong arms of God, when we adore him, it allows us to let go of the other good things we adore, even though we're brokenhearted, it allows us to endure with joy. So, let's adore the Lord most of all. Just take a moment, close your eyes, and just say in your own heart:
Lord, I adore you. I love you. I love your kingdom. Thank you for Christ and the cross and the resurrection. Thank you for your Spirit. Thank you for life. Thank you for air in these lungs. Thank you for blood in these bones. Thank you for my friends and my family. Thank you. Thank God for God. Thank you, Lord, thank you. We adore you. We worship you. Just take a deep breath and let your shoulders drop and let your tongue fall from the roof of your mouth and let your face relax, and just say, God, I trust you. I adore you. I love you. You're a healing God, you're a saving God, you're a merciful God, you're a friendly God, you're a joyful God. We thank you, we love you. Do you even experience it there? In Jesus's name, amen.
We have to say amen in Presbyterian Church or people keep your eyes closed. You know, you feel it, don't you? Just in that moment, it's just the joy of of adoring the Lord and just enjoying his presence. It allows you in a weird way to enjoy other things better. I don't know if that's... I don't speak English good, I'm not a PhD like Dr. Messalorus over there. I just have a Masters, you can call me Master Bobby. That's what I got growing up. You know, it's a funny thing. My friends used to tease me, because, it's a stupid, never mind, I'm going down a rabbit hole. I only got 17 minutes to get you out of here. Where was I? Oh yeah, worship.
So, so worship, so worship becomes this great thing. I think so often we forget that God wants your worship. You know, he wants your company. The scripture that Hannah read from, Luke today, was Luke chapter 2, probably the most famous Christian verse, Luke chapter 2, verse 8, it says, "And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks," in the morning? At night, right? Everybody say overtime. You know what's interesting about this passage? When most of us picture these shepherds, we're picturing middle to older age men in robes with white beards and canes. That's usually a picture that you see.
You know what a 1st century Bible reader would have pictured? He would have pictured someone like this. Shepherds were almost always teenage girls. Ask Bible scholars, they will tell you that a shepherd was mostly, like, 90% done by teenage girls between, say, 15 to 17, or very young boys, but not kid-kid, like, 10, 11, 12 year old boys. When those boys went through puberty, they usually didn't do shepherding work anymore. They did stuff that required, you know, more heavy lifting, et cetera. This is an actual shepherd, I think from Afghanistan. They wouldn't have worn these very nice clothes that she's wearing. She's probably at the market or something, special occasion.
But anyway, that's what they would have pictured. Mostly kids, like, teenagers. It probably would have been, like, four or five girls that were about sixteen, and, like, two boys that were, like, eleven or ten. Isn't that interesting? Not these old beardy guys out there, you know. And somebody asked me in the back, I think it was Diana, like, 'Where did we get that image from?' And I said, "I think we got it from England". You know, the medieval age, it was old beardy guys that were shepherds, but not in the Middle East, and not even today. If you go anywhere in the Middle East, it's always still gonna be teenage girls, and it's been that way for thousands of years.
So, when you think of a shepherd, think, you know, not the elite of society, which would have been the elderly, the elderly were the elite. They were going to be the most powerful, the wealthiest. Think of someone like a fry cook at McDonald's or a janitor or an expediter. Do you know what an expediter was? That was my first job at El Pueblo Viejo, which if you speak Spanish, is bad Spanish. Right, isn't it isn't it La Puebla Vieja? I'm looking at my grandpa. I don't, but anyway, and at the restaurant there were all these levels, right?
You have the GM and the owner, and then you have the bartenders, who were, like, way at the top. I don't know why. I think that every restaurant, the bartenders are the coolest, You get the servers and the host and hostesses, and then you get the busboys, and then way down below the busboys, down with the rats and the mice, was my role, the expediter, and my job was really, I was the only one, later we got another one, but was to basically bring food out, you know, and but it really meant that if you had a job you didn't feel like doing, you give it to Bobby. So, we have these... so in this world, you think about all the amazing men and women of God who were available to reveal this to.
The great rabbis and sages who wrote the Talmud, and Hillel was alive at this time, and there were many priests, and the high priests of the temple, the zealots who were ready to lay down their lives for Israel, and the Essenes who were like these monks who were constantly in prayer and seeking after God. And it didn't happen to any of them. It happened to a bunch of kids out in the field, just taking care of the sheep, the shepherds. Can I just say in a Sunday of adoration, this is the only thing I really want to get across from you from this passage today. It's just that God, and it's just this praise that, you know, from the angels, that just God wants your worship. That when you pray to God, you know, your prayers are just as powerful as my prayers or anybody else's prayers.
God loves your praise just as much as he does anybody else's praise. Did you know that, at least theologically, and I believe practically, you have more favor and power in you than the Old Testament prophets did. They were under the blood of goats and sheep and birds. You are under the blood of the living God who laid down his life so that you could be with the Lord and in his kingdom. Isn't that powerful? That that's the blood and that's the authority under which we do what we do. God is not upset at you. God is not waiting for you to get your moral report card from, like, a C minus up to, like, a B, and many of us feel that way.
When I get up to, like, a B, B minus, then I can really, then I know he's hearing my prayers, he's doing, you know. Jesus shows us what God is like. If you're a Christian, you believe that Jesus is God. You want to know what God's like? Look at Jesus, he'll just show you. Jesus never makes a single person sick to punish them, not once. Jesus invites the sinner, who a lot of these are really bad people, invites them to the table to eat with him. In fact, and Jesus does get upset, but the ones that he gets upset at are not the people you'd think. The people he gets upset at are people like Bobby Schuller, the ones who are telling you how to live and preaching at you and, you know, the religious leaders were the ones he gets upset at.
It almost makes me wonder if I need some prayer. If I need to go out there and find, you know, somebody who's, you know, a gambling addict or something. Pray for me, brother. So, so I just want to say that God wants your adoration, and that, you know, so many of the pagan gods of all, there's this old novel called "American Gods" by Gaiman, I think his name is pronounced, a fantasy novel, and in his imaginary world this idea is that the old gods, there's old gods and new gods, and, like, the new pagan gods are like the god of the internet, the god of the cell phone, and there's the old gods like Odin and Ra and these others, and they're, like, fading and withering because the gods draw their power from however many people worship them.
But they all sort of share this, and I like this message, they all sort of share this common theme, that they consume their worshippers. You know, and their worshippers like being consumed by them. It's very, if there's ever a rated R book, by the way, this is it, so it's not for kids. But very dark book of the gods consuming the life of their worshippers, and that's really how old school pagan people viewed their gods. But our God is the exact inverse of that. He doesn't consume us, we consume him, quite literally. We eat of the bread of life and we drink of the living water. That he is our nourishment in our soul and everything we need to live and feel joy and feel life.
All the other gods were the gods of give, give, give, he's the sort of pay it forward God, you know? You're still giving, but you give away, you give away from yourself in a way, so that your life is a belief and a trust that I'm in God's loving care, and so therefore I'm going to pay forward my life to others. All right, we get it, right? Like, we get it, it's 20, you've gone 20 minutes telling us that we need to worship more. Okay, you get it. You know, there are a million ways from Sunday to worship God, and I could, it'd probably be fun if this were a seminary class to ask you what are ways in which you worship God? But I want you to consider three ways, and the last time I only got to one, so we'll see if I do it again.
But the first and I want to say most important one to me personally, and probably to you too, is music. It's interesting too, because although in this world the technology that we've developed has made it hard for many people to be Christian, they get tempted into many sorts of problems and sins and and evils, there's also this incredible benefit that you can listen to worship music, and in your car we have this incredible invention called the speaker, you know, that you can put in your ears, or it's in your house, or it's in this building right now that at any time can play some of the most amazing, inspiring music ever. And how is it too, I think the human body itself is an instrument, isn't that interesting? And I want your participation, okay. We're gonna sing together, and we're gonna just experience the music. Okay, are you ready?
So, I'm gonna sing this first line, and I want you to sing it with me, okay? The first one is the violins, not violence, violin, okay. So, it goes like this, the violins are singing with joyful ringing. Okay, so here we go, ladies, it's gonna go like this. "The violins sing with joyful ringing". A little sharp that time, I went too hard. Okay, girls, here we go, if you have a higher girls in your female, let's sing it together. And if you see your wife not singing, you just, that you can finally get her back, you know. Okay, here we go, ready? Women, here we go. "The violins sing with joyful ringing. The violins sing with joyful ringing".
Nice, that's good, pretty good. Thank you, choir, helpful choir, which is, it's not cheating at all. I know that 50% of men who come to church are over it when they walk through the door, and this has put some of you over the edge. You are so ready to get out of here. You are not into me, you're not into this, but I want you to just put all that behind you and be a pal, be a sport. I'm looking at you, orchestra. There's a lot of guys in the orchestra. Ready? Here we go. "The horn, the horn", come on, louder. Viking style. "The horn, the horn, they sound so forlorn". Okay, now the key to the song, we all start on the same note, just different octaves. Are you ready? We're gonna get together.
Come on, let's do it louder, louder church, come on one more time. Merry Christmas, give yourselves a hand. Isn't that fun? I want to point out that there is a power in consuming and utilizing and singing the kind of music that draws you to the Lord. Well, I've run fresh out of time for the other two, but I'll just say them very quickly. The second one I would recommend is just, these are just Bobby, right? It's like, I think that in the modern age we're dealing with a problem that wasn't specifically addressed in scripture, and that is that we're just in, especially if you live in a city, crowded by people and technology.
I think there's something that happens when you live in a manmade world that it just feels like man made the world. I used to think that the reason so many cities lacked faith or religion or whatever was because they were educated, which sounds like a slam against religion, but it's not that at all. Some of the best, most educated people ever have been faith filled people. Rather, I think that it's just if you just live in Yosemite for, like, a year, you're gonna come back a little more religious than you were when you were there. There's something about being outside that practically, I think, gives us sort of God glasses. I would encourage you to to spend more time outside.
And so, Father, we thank you, we love you, and we adore you. We worship you, and we're so grateful for all you've given us. I ask in Jesus's name, Lord, that this year, as we adore you and value you and worship you, that we would soften our heart towards our neighbor and our enemies and people who offend us, that we could be in a spirit of kindness and brotherly love towards people that we live life with. Father, we thank you so much. And it's in Jesus's name we pray, amen.