From Praise To Power
November 15 Psalm 47:1-9 Acts 16:16-34
Suppose for a moment that you won tickets to a luncheon after the Cavs had beaten the Lakers in a playoff game in 2010. If at the luncheon Shaq stood up and said, “stand to you feet and let’s give it up for LeBron and the Cavaliers.” How many of you think that most of us would be up on our feet clapping and cheering for our Cavs?
Some of us will give hi fives, some of us will make strange rooting noises, and some of us will be smiling and grinning from here to there and waving our arms. We’re going to do it for basically three reasons. 1) We want the Cavs to feel good and appreciated. 2) We want the Cavs to feel good about us, the kind of fans they have. 3) We know when the Cavs are lifted up, the area of Cleveland is lifted up as well and we benefit from their success.
What we have offered to the Cavs at that luncheon is a form of praise and worship. True Praise and Worship of God involves three things. 1) Is God pleased with the praise and worship I am offering to Him? 2) Is God pleased with me in the way I offer it? 3) Do I realize that my success is tied in with lifting up the name of Jesus?
You know three things we wouldn’t do at the luncheon once Shaq said, “stand on your feet and give it ups for the Cavs”. 1) We wouldn’t say, I’m not going to stand and clap my hands until Coach Mike Brown invites us to stand. 2) We wouldn’t say I’m just kind of tired from a long night last night so I’ll just sit here and relax. 3) We wouldn’t say, I’m not into that cheering stuff, I’m not showing up to the banquet until the speaker gets there.
No matter how we’re feeling, most of us are going to give our best effort in that cheer in support of the team. How then can we offer less than our best to God? Even if the Cavs win the 2010 NBA championship, the benefits you get from their title, cannot come close to the daily benefits you and I each get from God.
Some people are under the impression that worship, is about how the church can entertain them. Did he church make me feel good? Did the song come out the way I liked it? Was it my kind of music? Was it exciting enough? Did they build me up to really get worked up?
What does any of this have to do with, 1) Was God pleased with what I offered to Him. 2) Was God pleased with the way I offered it. And 3) Was I lifted up as I lifted up the name of Jesus. If the answer to these questions are no, then your focus in worship has been on the wrong thing.
We have someone more powerful than Shaq inviting us to worship and we have a greater reason than the Cavs to offer our worship. The word of God calls us in Psalm 47 to [a] 1 Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. 2 For the LORD Most High is awesome, the great King over all the earth. 3 He subdued nations under us, peoples under our feet.
That’s the biblical way for saying “Everybody makes some noise up in here, and let’s give it for God. Because God has done some great things for us.” This is what God is telling us to do. One of the reasons that God is telling us to do it is so that we might bless God, so that God might bless us.
The quality of praise we offer to God determines the presence of the Spirit in our midst. A worshipper always finds something to praise God for, because he or she is looking for something to praise God for. We always have a reason to be thankful. Bad as you think you may have it, somebody has it a lot worse.
True worship focuses in on God. This is where many people make the mistake. They think the worship is to focus on them. They say, “I’m not getting anything out of worship. The real issue though is, is God getting anything out of my worship. Until God gets something out of our worship, we never will. Until God is blessed by our worship, we ourselves will not be blessed. We cannot worship God without understanding God’s awesomeness and God’s holiness. True worship leads us to change and humility and confession.
One of the purposes of praise and worship is to prepare for God to send a supernatural power into our lives. A long time ago, God’s people had to go in battle against a powerful city by the name of Jericho before they could get the land God wanted to give them. Jericho was a city surrounded by massive walls. The walls were thick enough for chariots to ride along the top of the walls. The city was a great city in its day.
God’s strategy for the people of God to take the city was for them to go into praise and worship to knock down the walls. Some of us have walls that are not going anywhere until we enter into the praise and worship of God Almighty. Ask yourself why it is so much easier for us to praise and worship people and events than it is God? What keeps us from being excited about God?
The army attacking Jericho under Joshua consisted of hundreds of thousands of troops. But God used a praise team to lead the people into battle. Seven priests were playing their trumpets after the army had marched around the city seven times. The priests blew a long note and held it. Joshua cried to the soldiers, make some noise up in hear and the army all shouted. From that praise shout, came power.
The walls of Jericho didn’t crumble into pieces and start falling down as you would expect. Instead the ground opened up and the walls sunk down, giving the soldiers a clear path into the heart of the city. Without that shout of praise, there would not have been a victory that day.
Suppose someone had said, “forget all that praise and worship stuff”, let’s just jump into the battle and engage the enemy. What do you think would have happened? Where does the idea of praise and worship come from? It comes from God. The psalms in the bible command us time and time again to praise the Lord and to worship Him.
What is our real attitude about God’s command to offer him praise and worship? Sometimes we do not understand the true value of praise and worship until we get into circumstances that that is all we have, that we can give.
In our New Testament reading, Paul and Silas had cast a demon out of girl who was a great fortune teller of the future. She would have made millions of dollars in the church today from people who are looking for something spiritual to happen to them without having a change in their lives. Think of how many people would come to our services if at the end of each service, we said, prophetess Joanna will now tell you part of your future for a love gift offering of $20.
Before long Joanna and not Jesus, would be the object of some of our praise and worship. She even sounded like a Christian prophet following behind Paul and Silas saying, “These men are servants of the most high God, telling you the way to be saved.” Some of us would be just as proud as we could be to have Joanna saying this about us. But the Scriptures clearly teach that power she had was from the devil. Paul recognized the devil in her and cast it out in the name of Jesus. Every spiritual experience is not from God.
In exchange for casting out the demon, the girl’s owner had Paul and Silas arrested. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas are in a prison cell in Philippi. Paul casts a demon out of a fortune-teller. Her master doesn’t like it because she loses the ability to predict the future, which means no more money will be coming in. so the slave owner has Paul and Silas arrested.
Acts 16:22 says, “A mob quickly formed against Paul and Silas, and the city officials ordered them stripped and beaten with wooden rods. They were severely beaten, and then they were thrown into prison. The jailer was ordered to make sure they didn’t escape. So he took no chances but put them into the inner dungeon and clamped their feet in the stocks.”
Have you ever had one of those days in which things just did not turn out the way you had been expected. Paul had just gotten a vision a few days earlier of a man from Macedonia saying come over and help us. They left immediately to follow the will of God. God led them to a group of women who loved the Lord and were praying on a regular basis.
One of the women, Lydia gave them food to eat and place to stay. It couldn’t get any better than this in God meeting their needs. It was while they on their way to the prayer meeting they ran into this girl, got whipped and thrown into jail. Not only that nobody knew they were in there, so nobody would be coming to post any kind of bond.
So here it is late at night and the pain in their bodies is fresh and raw for the beating. They were not just flogged they were severely flogged. The people in the mob were so angry with them that their spiritual experience with the slave girl had been taken away. Now who could they go to to get a word for the future. Nobody was happy that the demon had left the girl. They did their best to inflict as much pain on Paul and Silas as they could.
They had knots on their heads, blood over their body, clothes that were ripped, eyes that were swollen, and maybe even some fractured ribs. The place probably didn’t smell that great without any toilets. Paul and Silas didn’t have any power at that moment.
But one thing they did have was a chance to worship God and to sing praise. They could have reminded God of how they had tried to do the right thing and look what happened. But they didn’t. They could have said. “God you kept the lions from Daniel, so why didn’t you keep the mob from us” but they didn’t. They could have said, “if this is what it takes to serve God, then forget it I’m out of here” but they did not.
The Scriptures said around midnight something happened. You see Paul and Silas decided before all this happened, they had been on their way to a prayer service, so why not finish what they started. It wasn’t like they had any big plans for the night. They started to sing praises and to worship.
Now if we think we have no reason to sing praises to God, can we at least say Lord I thank you, “I’m not in the position of Paul and Silas where my obedience has gotten be beaten down to a pulp with a screaming headache, and a swollen face, and a rib or two that’s cracked. Sometimes God gives us the luxury of too much ease, and that allows too many little things get in the way of the main thing which is to love God and to love people.
Paul and Silas knew they were going to need to focus on something other than how they had been unjustly treated and beaten, so they chose the route of praise and worship. They didn’t need the best band in the land to do it, or for the organ to play the dance song. They just started to forget where they were and focus on praise and worship of the God who had brought them too far just to get up and walk out on them at this point. When our focus is on God, we stop focuses in on what’s wrong with our circumstances, and we see what is right with out God.
Paul and Silas could have zoomed in and complained about their circumstances. “God, we cast out a demon and this is what we get? We’re on a missionary journey and we get beaten and thrown in jail? Instead of You “watching our backs, God ” our backs are bleeding from a beating! They could have complained till the cows came home. But they made a choice to worship God in spite of their external circumstances. You may have a reason not worship God but you’ve got a better reason to do so.
The other prisoners must have thought, what is wrong with these guys singing religious songs in the middle of the night. In this pitch black room. You hear Paul say,” hey Silas do you know the tune to Psalm 48.” Silas replies “yeah, I was just thinking about that.” Ok, let’s finish our part in the prayer meeting. “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, it the city of our God in the mountain of His holiness.”
I don’t think Paul and Silas said to each other, I think we ought to do something to break out of this place. I think it was more of thinking, “whatever comes Lord, to you we surrender.”
God was so pleased with their praise and worship that God started to send forth some power. I’d like to imagine that one of the angels must have done a dance. On the first foot down, the earth moved and the foundations of the prison was shaken. When the other foot came down the prison doors all flew open, and when he lifted his hands all the chains on all the prisoner’s came loose. That was the power of praise and worship in action.
It was their praise and worship that set them free from their chains. No only that it set others free in the prison from the chains around them. The next thing you know the guard came in ready to kill himself, because he thought all the prisoners had escaped when he saw the jail door unlocked and opened.
Paul said, “don’t hurt yourself brother, we are all here.” Before the night was over, the jailer and his entire family was saved. All because Paul and Silas remembered that worship is not about who they are, and what they liked, but about God who is worthy to be praised even when our circumstances are not to our liking.
The more we as a church focuses on what God is doing in our midst that’s right, the stronger and healthier of a church we will be. The more you try to find what’s right in our church, the happier you are going to be about it, because we often find what we go looking for in the church and in other people.
Choosing to participate in praise and worship is a choice to refocus on the big picture. What’s the big picture? It’s remembering the fact that two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sin. It’s remembering the fact that God loves me when I least expect it and least deserve it.
It’s remembering the fact that God is going to get me where God wants me to go. It’s remembering the fact that I have eternity with God to look forward to in a place where there is no mourning or sorrow or pain.
Each week I end with the benediction “I beseech you therefore brothers and sisters, to present your body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is your reasonable service.” The word service is also translated as worship. Our praise and worship is a sacrifice when we truly do not feel like doing it. Our worship is based on who God is and what God has done. Therefore all of us should come with the desire to worship God not for a feeling, but because God is worthy and there in lies our power for the coming week.
What we choose to focus on in church is going to determine what we receive out of the service. Paul and Silas were in prison. Their bodies were chained. But their spirits were bent on praising and worshipping God. They left that prison cell with a new song in their hearts and fresh experience from God in their souls. They had a power that set free even the most guilty of criminals and gave them a new. hope. They felt the power of God in a new way.
If we want power as a church, we need to engage in praise and which will allow the Spirit to do something new in our lives. Our purpose is to enter into a right relationship with God. Praise and worship allows us to enter into that right relationship. We have two many prison foundations in need of an earthquake, too many jail doors with us locked behind them, and too many chains on our hands to continue to say no to the invitation to come and offer praise and worship to God. Jesus said, those who worship me must do so in Spirit and in truth.
We can’t plan out how God is going to always going meet a need. We can’t plan miracles. But when we praise and worship God in the worst of Circumstances we never know what is going to happen. Praise and Worship sets the stage for miracles! Praise and Worship causes spiritual earthquakes that can change the circumstances of your life. God’s plan for us includes our praise and worship of Him.
**I thank Mark Batterson for his message on FOCUS which helped to shape my planning on this message.
