Title: Heartfelt Worship
Text: Psalm 100 (Heartfelt Worship - Psalm 138 and John 4:23-24)
Thesis: Heartfelt Worshipers encounter God with joy, awe and thanksgiving.
In order to understand what being a Healthy Missional Church looks like, we are unpacking a series called: The Marks of a Healthy Missional Church. Researchers have found that there are at least ten marks, characteristics, traits, qualities, etc., that are consistently found in Healthy Missional Churches.
To date we have noted that The Marks of a Healthy Missional Church are:
• Compelling Christian Community
• The Centrality of the Word of God
• Life Transforming Walk with Jesus
• Global Perspective and Intentional Evangelism
• Transforming Communities through Active Compassion, Mercy and Justice Ministries
Today we will unpack a sixth Mark of a Healthy Missional Church. A Healthy Missional Church is characterized by: Heartfelt Worship
Introduction:
Let’s begin with a couple of definitions.
Heartfelt: Deeply and sincerely felt. Ernest. Genuine. Whole heartedly. (Antonyms would include terms like artificial, false, feigned or insincere.)
Worship: Worship is the act of acknowledging and attributing worth to God. Scripture tells us that worship is one of the things we do as Christians, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” I Peter 2:9
Louie Giglio is a very unusual man. He once led a weekly bible study on the campus of Baylor University that attracted 10% of the student body every week. Among the books he has authored is “The Air I Breathe: Worship as a Way of Life.” He is known for his passion for God and for heartfelt worship. Louie Giglio says. “Worship is our response, both personal and corporate, to God for who He is, and what He has done; expressed in and by the things we say and the way we live.”
Romans 12:1-2 affirms that the way we live is in fact an expression of worship to God. “And so dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give you bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be living sacrifices, the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.”
So broadly speaking… all of life lived out for God is an act of worship. But our text today speaks of worship being expressed in the context of the faith community in a place of worship. The Psalmist is walking through the gates into the temple for the expressed purpose of worshiping God.
In that Heartfelt Worship is one of the Marks of a Healthy Missional Church… Heartfelt Worship is a Mark we want to experience here at Heritage.
Jesus said in John 4:23-24 that “true worshipers worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” That sounds a lot like “heartfelt” to me.
The concepts of “heartfelt” and “worship” do not lend themselves to insincerity. Heartfelt worship is a sincere act of attributing worth to God with wholehearted expressions of praise.
I’m in the process of reading “The Church of 80% Sincerity.” It’s not about a church church… it is more about life as a church. The author says you can be 80% sincere 100% of the time or you can be 100% sincere 80% of the time. Either way, 20% of the time you can cut yourself some slack. In other words, you may not always nail it with 100% sincerity. You may not “feel” it, so to speak, but that does not preclude your doing worship and expressing worth to God. Sometimes it is the act of doing worship that our hearts melt and we find ourselves sensing the presence and moving of God. So even if you do not always “feel it” – do it with a sincere desire to express worth to God.
In other words, sometimes worship is something you do with sincerity and not necessarily because you feel like it… though it would seem that worship is never to be approached without thoughtful preparation of the heart and mind.
Psalm 100 is short but they say it is packed tighter than a German sausage with insight into heartfelt worship. It seems to me Psalm 100 captures what Heartfelt Worship looks like.
I. Heartfelt Worship Encounters God
Shout with joy to the Lord. Worship the Lord. Come before the Lord… Psalm 100:1
Of the six church models the liturgical church seems to be most intent on gathering for the purpose of worshiping God. They quietly come into the sanctuary and make their way to a pew as the organ plays softly. They take their seat and quietly prepare their hearts to worship God and they do so with great reflection and reverence.
Liturgical worshipers are like Olympic athletes who take time to stretch and warm their muscles up before they get in their starting blocks and sprint down the track to the finish line. When they get in the blocks they are thoroughly prepared to run. When liturgical worshipers respond the to the call to worship they are thoroughly prepared to worship.
On the other hand, congregational church worshipers arrive early. They are enthusiastically greeted in the Narthex. They enter the sanctuary and make their way to where they usually sit, chatting it up all along the way. When they are seated they turn to those with whom they sit every Sunday and catch up by chatting it up some more. Eventually the bells in the tower signal that church is about to start. After some announcements and stuff, congregationalists get to stand up again and greet each other and welcome newcomers in their midst. This sometimes feels like it is cut short because congregationalists love to be together.
Congregationalists are like the Olympic runner who skips the warming up part and begins his race with a bang. Hopefully he is warmed up by the time he gets to the finish line.
I was a sprinter in high school. I was usually the lead-off man in the 100, 200 and 400 yard relays and I hated warming up but I did it. It was in the warming up that I was able to lunge out of the blocks with every ounce of strength in my body without tearing stuff up. And it was in being warmed up that my muscles were fully stretched and ready to run right out of the blocks.
That is not to say that liturgical worshipers are necessarily better worshipers than congregational worshipers or evangelistic church worshipers or biblical expositional church worshipers or renewal church worshipers or body life church worshipers. But all worshipers must know that when they gather for worship… God is the object of their worship.
Worship really is about God. And if we are bent on becoming a Healthy Missional Church we arrive intent on encountering the Living God and giving the Living God our praise.
So we come to shout with joy to the Lord, to worship the Lord and come before the Lord… Psalm 100:1
Heartfelt worship is also happy worship.
II. Heartfelt Worship is Happy Worship
Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth! Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before Him singing with joy. Psalm 100:1
There is a story in the Old Testament about the time David went to bring the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem. As they made their way home the bible says David danced before the Lord with all his might and all the people of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouts of joy and blowing the rams’ horns. As they came into the city, King David’s wife looked out the window and saw her husband leaping and dancing before the Lord and she was filled with contempt for him.
When he got home his wife scolded him, “How distinguished the king of Israel looked today, shamelessly exposing himself to the servant girls like any vulgar person might do!”
And David said, “I was dancing before the Lord… and yes, I am willing to look more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes! The Lord appointed me as the leader of Israel, so I celebrate before the Lord.”
In other words, David said, “I wasn’t dancing for you, I was dancing for God. And what God saw was one very blessed and happy man.” Then he went on to say, “Those servant girls you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished!” II Samuel 6:12-23 The intent of worship is to glorify God… and often it is a personal blessing as well as a blessing to others. One of the side effects of heartfelt and happy worship is that it is contagious.
Imagine how those observing David celebrating before God might have said, "Look at the King... he is having a blast before the Lord!" Worship is to be a contagiously happy occasion. In that sense Heartfelt Worship is both Healthy in its expression to God and Missional in its attractiveness to others.
Louis C.K. is generally unwatchable but he has a routine that starts with the line, “Everything’s amazing right now, but nobody’s happy.” He goes on in his routine to poke fun at our ingratitude and impatience. He cites fliers who upon their return say, “That was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn’t board for twenty minutes. And then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” If we stop to think about that we might ask with a tinge of sarcasm, “O, really, and what happened next? Did you fly in the air, incredibly like a bird? Did you experience the miracle of human flight?”
Everyone on any plane should be screaming, “Wow! We’re flying! We are sitting on a chair in the sky and flying!”
Incredibly, a few years ago a trip between New York and California would take years and a bunch of people would die along the way… “Everything is amazing, but nobody’s happy.”
My guess is that few of us are living horror story lives. Yet this past week someone asked me about my week and I said something like, “O my goodness, it’s been the week from hades.” It was a challenging week but it was also a week filled with wonder and the goodness of God.
If we are to be scowly and growly it ought not be here. This is a place intended for Heartfelt Happy Worship that blesses God and others.
Heartfelt Worship also Acknowledges God with Awe.
III. Heartfelt Worship Acknowledges God with Awe
Acknowledge that the Lord is God! He made us, and we are his. Psalm 100:3
So we sing:
• Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty
• Majesty, worship His majesty. Unto Jesus be all glory, honor and praise.
• Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise
• The splendor of a King, Clothed in majesty, Let all the earth rejoice, All the earth rejoice.
• How great is our God, sing with me, How great is our God, and all will see, How great is our God.
The bible says, “Since we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with reverence and awe. For our God is a devouring fire.” Hebrews 12:28-29
In Isaiah’s vision he saw the Lord sitting on a throne and the train of his robe filled the Temple. The winged seraphim were flying around and calling out to each other, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies! The whole earth is full of his glory!” He said their voices shook the Temple to its very foundations and the entire building filled with smoke. And Isaiah said, “I’m a dead man…” Isaiah 6:1ff
In 1996 Harlan Ullman and James Wade wrote The Doctrine of Rapid Dominance for the National Defense University of the United States.
The Doctrine of Rapid Dominance is better known as the Doctrine of Shock and Awe. In the Iraq War the United States military used Shock and Awe to establish dominant battlefield awareness through maneuvers and spectacular displays of force designed to paralyze an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy his will to fight. (Shock and Awe, Wikipedia)
I love the thoughts of sweet Jesus but I also drawn to the God of shock and awe!
In one of her books Annie Dillard speaks of “awe” as something of a missing element in our worship. She asks, “Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour? Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? It’s madness for ladies to wear straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing helmets… for the sleeping God may awake some day and take offense.”
Heartfelt Worship that Acknowledges God with Awe does not, as Annie Dillard suggests, mean that we should come cowering into church to poke God with a stick as if we were attempting to rouse a sleeping bear. She is aptly pointing out that worship is about entering the presence of Almighty God not jolly old St. Nick.
When we acknowledge God with awe, we come humbly into his presence fully aware of and awed by the privilege it is for the created to be loved by the Creator. So we, “Acknowledge that the Lord is God! He made us, and we are his.” Psalm 100:3
The bible instructs us to, “be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves and making music to the Lord in your hearts. And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 5:19-`20
Heartfelt Worship is also Thankful Worship.
IV. Heartfelt Worship is Thankful Worship
Enter His gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to Him and praise his name. Psalm 100:4-5
Chuck Swindoll preached as sermon “A Heart of Gratitude” in which he made the point, “Christians can bless the Lord by concentrating on all of the benefits we receive from him, and by giving him praise.”
He was speaking from Psalm 103 which begins, “Let all that I am praise the Lord; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name. Let all that I am praise the Lord; may I never forget the good things he does for me…”
Earlier we sang:
Thanks to God for my Redeemer, thanks for all Thou dost provide!
Thanks for times now but a mem’ry, thanks for Jesus by my side!
Thanks for pleasant balmy springtime, thanks for dark and dreary fall!
Thanks for tears by now forgotten, thanks for peace within my soul!
Take your worship folder home today and use Thanks to God for My Redeemer as a prayer of thanks in your personal quiet times this week.
Sometimes we need to be shocked back to reality. Volunteering on a winter night at a homeless shelter where you see men and women coming in from having spent the day in the icy outdoors would do it. Watch each guest come to the serving line, pick up some plastic utensils and a paper plate. Watch each person make his way to a table and sit down to eat their only meal for the day. Watch each person roll out a mat in the sleeping area and curl up under a blanket for a few hours of rest.
Then go home and concentrate on all the benefits we receive from God and give him praise.
Gratitude does not come naturally. Thankfulness has to be nurtured and cultivated in our lives.
Typically parents teach their children to say, “hi,” “thanks,” and “good-bye.” Researchers have found that children will spontaneously say “hi” 27% of the time, “good-by” 25% of the time, and “thanks” 7% of the time. Parents had to prompt their children to say “hi” 28% of the time, “good-bye” 33% of the time, and “thanks” 51% of the time.
Children learn to say “thank you” long before they understand what “thank you” means. But eventually they are able to feel what their words express. In other words, the words come first, the feelings later.
Researchers also learned that once we learn to be grateful, we seldom forget it. They have found that when gratitude becomes thoroughly engrained in a person’s heart and mind, a simple “thank you” remains when all else is forgotten. (Margaret Visser, The Gift of Thanks, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, pp.8-15)
The church that experiences and expresses Heartfelt Worship is a congregation of people who have learned to come with thankful hearts.
Conclusion:
I read a story this week about an elderly retired medical missionary to India. He said that among the people he worked there was no word in their dialect for “thanks” or “thank you.” However, after receiving treatment in his clinic, in their dialect they would say, “I will tell your name!” And when a person said that term they were saying, “With my whole heart, from the bottom of my feet, all the way up through the throat of my neck and out the mouth and lips of my face, I will tell your name!”
Psalm 138 begins, “I give thanks to you with all my heart; I will sing your praises before the gods."
When the Psalmist said he would sing God’s praises before the gods he did not mean that he was going to make a worship circuit singing the praises of Almighty God before Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians or Molech the god of the Ammonites or Chemosh the god of Moab or any of the other pagan gods in his culture..,
He meant he would sing the praises of God before the peoples of those gods.
Heartfelt Worship is Healthy toward God and Missional toward others. So it would seem that when as worshipers we bring it to God we are also taking it to others.
“With my whole heart, form the bottom of my feet, all the way up through the throat of my neck and out the mouth and lips of my face, I will tell your name!”
