Your worship is a big deal to you personally. Worship is a big deal down throughout history. Think about the importance of worship down through the ages: Cain killed his brother, Abel, over worship in Genesis 4. Moses asked Pharaoh for some time to away in the wilderness so the children of Israel could worship (Exodus 8:27). Ancient Jewish families would bring animals to Jerusalem to sacrifice them for the purpose of worship. Jesus spoke to the Woman at the Well about where and how to worship (John 4:21-24). And Jesus turned over the tables in the Temple because the moneychangers were ruining worship (Matthew 21:12-17). Worship is a big deal.
I want to release the power of worship in your life. I want you to experience the transformative power of worship personally. For so many of you, too much of your time in worship is a “yawnfest.” How can Someone so great be worshipped with so little? We need a worship transformation.
Keep your Bibles open to Psalm 95 – page 590 in you pew Bibles. If worship is eternal, then it’s important enough for you and I to spend some of brain matter on for the next few weeks.
Some of you have spent years inside churches while you’re bored to death during a worship service. Worship can personally transformative. If your worship is be transformative, there needs to be three layers to your worship. Genuine, transformational worship involved your emotions, your thoughts, and your actions. If your worship is going to be transformative, then it must include your heart, your mind, and your WILL.
Today’s Scripture
Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest” (Psalm 95:1-11).
1. Enter into God’s Presence with Your Emotions
1.1 Our Emotions
We are called to worship the Lord with our emotions. Worship is to be emotional: “Oh come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation” (Psalm 95:1)!
Our English translation, “O come let us sing to the Lord” is too tame. The Bible is calling on us to shout and sing aloud. Every so often there should be an exclamation point to our worship. Again, the Bible calls on us to worship the Lord with our emotions: “Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise” (Psalm 95:2)! These two verses call for us to be noisy. Worship should engage your emotions. Worship should actually engages your imagination. Do you ever have an exclamation point in your worship?
1.2 The Greatness of God
We’re celebrating something that is weighty and substantial: “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods” (Psalm 95:3).
Notice the word “For” at the beginning of verse 3. The word “For” signals you to the reasons why you should become so emotional. All of our emotion is triggered by the greatness of God: “Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! 3 For…” (Psalm 95:2-3a).
This isn’t to be a forced emotion. Not at all for we can begin to see the greatness of God when we consider His creation. You see the link between the greatness of creation and the greatness of the Creator in verses 4-5: “In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. 5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land” (Psalm 95:4-5).
I wonder what poem would be written if the psalmist could see the three mile wide comet, Neowise that is circling about us right now?
King David wrote: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him” (Psalm 8:3-4)?
David wrote those words 3,000 years ago when he could only see a few celestial items belonging to our solar system. What if someone had told David, “if our solar system . . . were the size of a grain of salt, the Milky Way galaxy would be about the length of a football field.” What if David had known there were more insects in a single square mile of fertile soil than there were human beings on the planet? What David had written had he known that? How would David had praised the Lord had he known that inside just on single human cell is more atoms than there are stars in the entire Milky Way?
See the greatness of our God when we consider the majesty of His creation.
1.3 Calculated Joy
Worship isn’t mindless, forced emotion but it’s a calculated emotional response to the greatness of God. Jesus told a story of how we are to treasure the Lord: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44).
There is a calculated joy in worship where I gladly sell all I have for Christ! I am glad to do this. I’m in a hurry to sale everything for Him. It’s the wonder-filled hurry of a small child getting a new toy and rushing to the Christmas tree!
1.4 Emotional Ballast
Yes, God wants you to worship Him out-loud for He is worthy of your emotions! He wants your full-throated enthusiasm, even your noisy gusto. Why? Because you are to honor the Lord by the feeling the worth of His real essence. But emotions need a ballast like a ship - you need something to balance your emotions in worship.
It’s hard to bring the right emotional tone into your worship. You don’t want to enter the church services with a painted chest for God. The Bible isn’t calling on you to get a foam #1 finger and wave it around like you would at a game. No, you don’t worship God with pom poms. Instead, you are to unite powerful feelings of enthusiasm and joy with a tremendous reverence for the Lord.
To unite emotional enthusiasm with reverence isn’t easy. Usually, when I have a lot of celebratory emotion, I don’t put feelings of reverence around this. And when I show a lot of reverence for the Lord, it can quickly be a killjoy on anyone’s celebration. God is calling you to tune your emotions to Him.
Have you ever watched someone tune a piano where they “tune it”? You are to tune your emotions to greatness of our God. Find an emotional ballast in the greatness of our God. But there’s not JUST ONE layer to your worship – no, there’s much more than JUST ONE layer. Genuine worship is never a mere emotional experience.
1. Enter into God’s Presence with Your Emotions
2. Enter into God’s Presence with Your Humility
You are to worship the Lord with your WILL as well. Your WILL is a separate part of you from your heart and your mind. The WILL is that part of you where you determine to do something. Your WILL is that part of you that determines your actions. You need to submit your WILL to the Lord too. Worship isn’t an emotional pep-rally where all we do is talk about the Lord.
It’s much more than this - let me show you …
2.1 Worship
You need to know there are 3 words here in verse 6 that call you to lower yourself in the presence of Almighty God. We will look at three words in succession: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker” (Psalm 95:6)!
The word “worship” in verse 6 literally means, “bow down.” Worship is to prostrate yourself before the Lord. Abraham did this when the three men arrived at his tent. When he recognized these men were not simply ordinary men but were God, Abraham bowed himself low to them: “When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth” (Genesis 18:2b). But verse 6 doesn’t stop there.
2.2 Bow Down
Like layers to a cake, the Bible calls on us to: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker” (Psalm 95:6)!
Worship is to prostrate yourself before a Superior Being. If the first word “worship ” called for us to bend ourselves at the waist, then perhaps here, we are to put our foreheads to the floor. You go to the floor because the One in front of you is Superior. Worship isn’t worship if doesn’t engage all of me. Worship isn’t worship if it engages my emotions only but not my Will. God is so great that He is worthy of my submission to Him. All of me to submitting to all of Him.
2.3 Kneel
Look now for the third layer now: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker” (Psalm 95:6)!
After I prostrate myself before the Lord, the Lord calls on me to kneel before the Lord. If our worship is to be transformative then we must show our humility. In fact, truly seeing the Lord will produce humility in us.
2.4 Jesus and Peter
I am reminded of Peter when he first met Jesus in the gospels. Jesus used Peter’s boat to speak to a crowd of people and when Jesus finished speaking, He then told Peter: “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch” (Luke 5:4b). Jesus’ request had two strikes against it. Jesus is the son of a carpenter and He is talking to professional fishermen. They had nothing to show for their all-night efforts and now Jesus wanted them to fish in the morning. All their nets were washed and put up to dry for the day. I like how Peter responded to Jesus on this occasion: “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5). The size of the catch was so large that two boats began to sink. Surprisingly, Jesus knew Peter’s vocation better than Peter. The next thing you know Peter is on his knees before Jesus. Peter is worshipping God in great humility. Can you submit to the authority of the King even in places you know best?
2.5 God is Our Shepherd
How do you know you can submit yourself to the Lord? Because of verse 7: “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand” (Psalm 95:7). You can be confident in submitting your WILL to the Lord for He is a Shepherd. You can be sure you can trust the Lord with all that you have because He cares for you.
2.6 Oh Come
By the way, did you notice how verse 6 begins: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker” (Psalm 95:6)!
The Bible says to you, “Oh come” as if I call you up and say, “Come over to my house.” There’s a kind call here combined with something more authoritative like a command. The invitation to worship is repeated again back in verse 1: “Oh come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation” (Psalm 95:1)! In fact, this psalm is actually sung by our Anglican friends and they have given this psalm a nickname – the Venite. Venite is the Latin word for the first two words “Oh come.”
Picture someone standing at the doors of the worship center and motioning you inside. Come inside the sanctuary! Some of you have traveled around the globe and have been woken by the Muslim prayer call before sunrise. Others of you can remember the sound of church bells ringing out from the church’s bell tower on Sunday mornings. It’s a call to worship. Imagine if I were right out there and I said to you, “Come on. Get in here. You need this. You were built for this. Let’s worship.”
Think of an Aggie Yell Leader down at Texas A &M University and you get the picture. The Yell Leader invites the crowd to really get into it. He has all these hand motions to instruct us. So we are invited to ““come” and once you’re inside, you’re encouraged to worship.
Question: have you ever invited someone to worship? Genuine worship is never a merely act of will-power. Nor is genuine worship simply an emotional experience. Transformative worship combines both my heart and my will. My emotions and my actions come together in genuine worship.
1. Enter into God’s Presence with Your Emotions
2. Enter into God’s Presence with Your Humility
3. Enter into God’s Presence with Your Mind
Here’s the third and the last level.
We are to worship the Lord with our mind: “Today, if you hear his voice, 8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness…” (Psalm 95:7b-8).
The Bible tells you to listen, to understand and comprehend God’s message. In fact, the psalmist mentions two historical times in Israel’s past where they dug their heals in verse 8. We are told to think about the generations before us and their rebellion to the Lord (Psalm 95:9). Real worship engages this mind and makes you think. Genuine worship engages the mind as well as the heart and the WILL. Worship should engage your mind. We are to place real mental effort into worship. You should listen, consider, and think about the Lord your God.
3.1 All Three Layers Come Together
So all three layers of you come together in worship: your emotions, your will, and your mind. Yes, you’re to sing your beliefs. Yes, you’re to pray your beliefs. But you’re also to recite and study your beliefs. All three components need to unite together to sing of His greatness, to submit to His greatness, and to plumb the depths of God’s greatness. Genuine worship is never just a thinking experiment. Nor is it a mere act of will-power. And genuine worship isn’t simply an emotional experience. So what’s happening in corporate worship is it’s a practice that engages the whole person and is driving your beliefs down into your life. No, it’s all of these coming together: the emotions, your thoughts, and your will. Genuine worship hits on three cylinders: the heart, the mind, and the will. Too many Christians only talk about worship – we need to worship with all three components “kick in” to high gear.
3.2 Blowing Up Hypocrisy
Sometimes when people find out I’m a pastor, I’ll get the following question: “You Christians believe in God but you’re as messed up as everyone else. What gives?” Around this time of year, I want to be in Colorado. When the suppressive Texas summer heat kicks up, I always think, “Why aren’t I in a mountain in Colorado?” One of things that mesmerizes me is how they carve a road out of sheer mountain rock. I’m guessing they blew up boulders with dynamite back in the day. Now, imagine if you are trying to move a big boulder that sits right in the middle where you intend to place a road. Would you sit the dynamite along the side of the boulder? But this would only sheer off a part of the rock upon detonation, right? What you have to do is bore out a hole deep inside the rock and then detonate the dynamite. Once you bore deep inside the boulder, you’ll move the rock and your road can go through.
Transformative worship drives down your beliefs into your life. Transformative worship that engages all your senses drives down your beliefs and you begin to detonate your hypocrisy. Too many Southern people have only prayed another person’s prayer and God’s greatness had sunk down deep inside them. But something happens when you experience genuine, transformative worship that engages all your senses. When you heart, mind, body, and will are all united to engage in declaring the worth of your God, something powerful happens.
3.3 Conclusion - Worship is Eternal
If the Bible is right, there are very few things that are eternal. Your career accomplishments aren’t eternal. Your wealth isn’t eternal. Your marriage isn’t even eternal. Your marriage should last a lifetime, but your marriage isn’t eternal. Your patriotism isn’t eternal. At least one thing lasts for eternity, worship. Worship alone endures. If worship is eternal, should you give some attention to worship now?
