The Essence of Worship
9/12/99
Open your Bibles to John 4 where Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. While you’re turning there I’ll tell you the subject of this morning’s message - The Essence of Worship.
(John 4:21-24) Jesus said to her, “Woman believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall you worship the Father. You worship that which you do not know; we worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit; and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
The phrase I’d like you to underline in your mind is toward the end of verse 23 where it says “for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.” Recently I was driving home from Houston with Nathanael - Nathanael was in the back seat sleeping, or reading - and I was praying and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with gratefulness to God for my life. I was just filled with thankfulness to the point that I felt like I was going to burst. Have you ever had an experience like that? But something even stranger happened next, and this doesn’t happen to me very often, but I had a vision - or what approximated a vision - I think it really was a vision from the Lord because it was intense, it was sudden and unexpected and it has grown in intensity in my mind’s eye since that time. What I saw were two big hands reach deep into my chest, even into my heart, and open it up. What I saw there was something incredibly beautiful. I saw a concert of praise and worship going on in the inner room of my heart. That is so unusual, because probably like you, when I try to look into my heart with my natural eyes what I see is all the bad stuff. I see the anger, the selfishness, greed and lust and all this stuff. But this time, I believe what I saw is what God is doing in there. There is a sanctifying work going on in our hearts that we aren’t aware of. There is a consistent or continual work of praise and worship ascending to the Father in that deepest place of our hearts. I wonder if the reason we see all the junk is because God is pushing that to the outside, to the outer rim of our hearts as he is sanctifying that inner place. After all, maybe we should believe Him when he says, “I am at work in you both to will and to do my good pleasure.” And I am confident of this very thing that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. I want you to be encouraged this morning as we start to talk about worship that God is doing a sanctifying work in you. You may be worshipping in that deepest place of your heart all the time and not even be aware of it. Doesn’t it make sense that we may not even be aware of 90% of what God is doing in us. We only see so little and in such a limited way.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about worship. Here’s Jesus with the Samaritan woman and he says to her, “You worship that which you do not know.” Now, a careful reading of that passage reveals something and what it reveals is this: He wasn’t just saying her concept of the Father was limited. He was saying more than that - He was saying her whole system of worship, her preconceived ideas, her patterns of worship are skewed, or just flat wrong. There is evidence of that because she tries to draw him into this Jewish/Samaritan argument that has been going on about where the holy place is to worship. And Jesus says all of that is wrong now with my coming - He didn’t add that at that point - but he was beginning to say all of that is wrong and those who worship in spirit and the truth can worship anywhere at any time. Even though I had this wonderful experience in the car I have to confess that when it comes to trying to think more deeply about worship I can relate somewhat to the Samaritan woman. I begin to ask myself questions like this: Do I really understand what it is to worship the Living God? Do I have certain misconceptions about worship? Am I missing some of the richness of communion that God intends for me because of some lack of understanding on my part? Perhaps the most daunting question of all is this: When God seeks me out, will he find a true worshiper? Will he assess me to be one of his true worshipers?
So we go back to the beginning in this text to understand this one thing first. God is looking for something. He wants something. The Father is seeking something according to this passage. He’s seeking a people who know how to give him true worship because they are true worshipers. Think about the last ten years of worship in the Charismatic movement, and who are we to judge whether it’s been good or bad, pleasing to the Father or not, who are we to judge? I don’t know that we can ultimately judge that. But I think there is a good question to be asked, and that is: has the worship that has gone forth to the Father been authentic, true and holy worship? However you come out on that question it seems to me that in some mysterious way worship obviously ministers to the heart of God. In some mysterious way worship ministers to God. In Ezekiel 44:15 we read that the primary function of the Levitical priests was to come near to God and to minister to him. It’s actually the words of the father: “Come near to me and minister to me.” Many images surface in the Scriptures of waiting upon the Lord, attending to Him, appeasing His wrath. There’s even an image that Richard Wurmbrand talked about one time when he was here of smoothing out the wrinkles on God’s face. Perhaps we could even say - His troubled face. To appease means to bring rest, to settle, to console - and I was thinking about an article I read in Time magazine about a family researcher named Gottman. I may have talked about this in a message before where he was studying marriages; he was studying marriages that had endured more than 20 years or so - I think he studied over 2000 couples and he was trying to identify what the one single strongest indicator that two people will stay together for a long period of time is. Do you know what he found? It’s really not what you would expect - what he found was that the strongest single indicator of enduring marriages was the ability of one spouse to calm the other down when they were in a high, high level of agitation. Isn’t that interesting? Bringing this back to our worship, is it possible that as the Bride of Christ, when we offer true worship to the Lord that somehow it settles his wrath temporarily? Or brings him some kind of rest? That it blesses Him? Dare we say worship meets a need in God? Surely worship is not for us alone and while I cognitively and theologically believe in a God who has no need outside of himself, the Scriptures seem to indicate that God is one who is indeed affected by our worship. For example we read that God seems to want fellowship with us, he wants to receive glory, he wants to delay his wrath, he wants true worshipers to worship him. If our worship ministers to God, if in some way it brings him rest, or blesses him, doesn’t that make you desperate to want to be a true worshiper of the Living God. I think we believe, at least partially, that our worship can touch the heart of God and bring him pleasure. I know I want to be that kind of worshiper.
So I went to the Bible to study worship, hopefully with fresh eyes. Almost immediately I found something so beautiful that I could barely get past it. How many of you in here are fishermen or fisher-women? You know when you go out in the morning and you cast that first line toward those lily pads, and “Bang!” on your first cast there’s a nice three-pound bass or trout - you know when Jason and I go together it’s always his line though - I can’t figure that out. But you know things go into slow motion and that bass comes up out of the water, and splashes down and it’s just this glee goes through you. I mean it’s just a beautiful thing to experience. As I went to the Word, it was quite a bit like that. What I discovered was not only is God seeking true worshipers, but the very word “worship” literally means to prostrate oneself. It means to bow down, to kneel, to get on your face before God. The essence of worship is a bowing down, prostrating oneself. Psalm 95:6 says it well: Come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. There was an Anglican preacher named Henry Perry Litton. In a message he preached, called “Adoration”, he said: “This invitation is conveyed by words which rendered literally would run thus - O come let us prostrate ourselves, let us bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.” He goes on to say, “the word which is rendered worship here means prostration, literally nothing less than prostration.”
I went to the Concordance and I began to look at every verse in the Bible that talks about worship, worshipers, worshipping, worships and listen to these Scriptures and just take note of the link between falling down before God and worship:
Genesis 24:48 the servant of Abraham goes and finds Rebekah for Isaac, and it says this: And I bowed low and worshipped the Lord, and blessed the Lord, the God of my Master Abraham . . .
When Moses was talking to the sons of Israel and saying God has chosen me to deliver you, in Exodus 4:31 it says: So the people believer; and when they heard that the Lord was concerned about the sons of Israel and that He had seen their affliction, then they bowed low and worshipped.
When Ezra was reading the law to the Jews released from Babylonian exile in Nehemiah 8:6 we see it again: Then Ezra blessed the Lord the great God. And all the people answered, “Amen, Amen!” while lifting up their hands; then they bowed low and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground.
Job, when he heard that all his children had perished in Job 1:20 says: Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head, and he fell to the ground and worshipped.
Even the devil, when he tempted Jesus in the desert, said All these things will I give you if you fall down and worship me.
Then in Revelation we read about the twenty-four elders as they worshipped the Lion of Judah in heaven, Revelation 5:14: And the four living creatures kept saying “Amen.” And the elders fell down and worshipped.
Out of approximately 180 references to worship in the Old and New Testament, almost 20% of them include the falling down of the worshiper - falling down at his footstool, falling at his feet, bowing low, kneeling down in worship. Now, why is this important? Is it because I want you to become known as a church that lies on their face on the carpet? No! That’s not it, because the physical bowing down, getting on your face before God is only an outward demonstration of what’s going on in the heart. And Christianity is all about the heart, isn’t it! Islam says, “Get down on your face before God regardless of where your heart is.” But Christianity is concerned first with the heart. Worship in its most basic biblical essence, as demonstrated by physical prostration, is this - it’s the acknowledgment of the absolute reality of our relationship with God - that He is awesome, magnificent, holy, unfathomable. And apart from Him and his initiative of grace toward us we are lost and nothing.
The essence of worship is closer to repentance than praise. It’s that stillness of soul that enters your being. It is a “Be still and know that I am God” - and you aren’t! It’s that holy stillness that comes into us at times. The proper inner state at a moment like that is not loud declarations of praise, but ones of silence, the listening, the reverence, the humility - that is a moment of true worship. Litton, that preacher I referred to before, said this: “Pure worship has no heart for self. It lies there silent at the foot of the throne conscious only of two things: the insignificance of self and the greatness of God.” How many of you have had moments like that, where you’ve just been overwhelmed by the Presence of the Lord, and if you’ve been praising your tongue falls silent, and it’s almost like you’re suspended in holy reverence.
This leads me a third important point and this might sound funny initially, but hang with me here - worship is not the same as praise. Worship is not the same thing as praise. Now, it is appropriate to say praise is an act of worship. But it is not appropriate to say worship is the same as praising the Lord. Sometime back, I think it was Bruce in our Elders’ circle, noted that in our conversation when we were talking about the Sunday morning service, we would refer to the praise and singing portion of the service as our worship time. And he pointed out that almost every aspect of a Sunday morning worship service where the Body is gathered together is worship; that the offering is worship, that intercessory prayer is worship, that the preaching of the Word is an act of worship, and we quickly grasped what he was saying and that it was true. So we’ve tried to re-train ourselves to not call that the worship time, but to call it the praise time and see everything that happens on a Sunday morning when we’re together as a whole worship offering made to God.
Worship is larger than praise, just as the Kingdom of God is larger than the universal church. Worship is larger than praise. I think praise is meant to lead us into worship. Praise is the proper initial starting place when the people of God come together. I will enter His gates with thanksgiving and I will enter His courts with praise. Amen? But praise is verbal and emphatic and demonstrative; it’s shouting, it’s clapping, it’s extolling the character of God and thanking Him with voice for all His goodness.
Psalm 95:1-5 starts this way, O, Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.
So there’s the praise - let us come, praising. But then, guess what verse 6 says? Come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
Am I saying that praise is second-class and worship, as I’ve described it, is first-class? No, I’m not saying that, although it’s tempting. One sermon I read on worship the preacher actually called praise “secondary worship.” I don’t know that I would go that far but I believe what his point was is not to settle just for praise; that praise is not the “be-all” and “end-all” of worship. Have you ever been praising God in the congregation and all of a sudden you’re so overwhelmed with the awareness of God’s presence, His greatness, His power, His majesty - and at the same time your smallness, your unworthiness, how insignificant you are apart from Him - that you fall silent and there is a profound reverence and listening that enters your being. Sometimes at moments like that the Spirit of God has said to me, “Bow before Me - here - now - in public - bend your knees to me and worship me.”
Having already said that the physical is not as important as the heart, let me also hasten to say that if God wants a physical expression from you of what’s going on in your heart - submission, obedience, repentance, whatever - we better do it. Amen? We better do it if we want to be true worshipers. We better be quick to obey. And let me say, the leaders of this church - you know us, you know we don’t want hype, you know we don’t want manipulation, you know we don’t want uniformity of worship style, we don’t want you all to do the same thing, we feel that would be phony and untrue, nor do we want worshipping that is attention-seeking - but we do want something. We want worship that obeys the Spirit of the Living God. We want worship that’s grounded in obedience. So we just want to say that if God says to you, “Go, confess me as you Lord publicly “ - as Jacob did last Sunday - we’d better do it. If He says, “Raise your hands in praise to Me; I want to see if you still have some fear of man in you” - we’d better obey. If He says, “You have ought against your sister; I want you to go right now over there and repent to her; just ignore everything else that’s going on; I want you to go repent” - we had better be quick to obey if we want to be true worshipers. And if He says “Fall on your face right now and worship me” - I want to say to you, do it, do it. I will. I commit to you, I will. If He says that to me, I will. And I have. You know, as a song leader I can’t pick songs - I want to stress this point of obedience - because as a song leader, I can’t pick songs because I know you like them or because I think they are really cool, or because this is a new one and man, it moves. No, I have to approach the Lord and ask what songs He wants for the morning. And if I get into thinking along the lines of what the people want or need, the question I ask is “Lord, what will free your people to really enter in to worshipping you?” Obedience in our worship. We are dealing with the High and Holy One, the One Who is seeking a group of true worshippers. True worship must be grounded in obedience. True worship is obedient worship.
Now, here is a provocative thought. I’m not saying I believe this. Is it okay for me to sometimes go down a trail even when I’m preaching not 100% sure of what I think? Is that okay as long as I tell you that? Maybe if there was more worship in its biblical essence, like we’ve tried to describe here, maybe if there was more voluntary obedient prostration before the Lord where we just be quiet and let Him minister to us, maybe there wouldn’t be as big a need to be slain in the Spirit occasionally. Think about it. When you are slain in the Spirit - you are on your back instead of your stomach - but you are prostrated before the Lord by His power. When you go down, and you’re on your back, I don’t remember anyone praising the Lord at that moment in a demonstrative way. It’s more like you are out cold and God is working you over and there is a peace, there is a rest, there is almost a semi-consciousness that allows the Lord to just do what He wants to do while all your defenses are down. I do believe that when something like that happens in a service it is an evidence that God’s power is manifest. But is it also possible that it is an indication that we lack the know-how, that we lack the consistency, that we lack the desire to really worship the Lord on a deep level? I don’t know. I just throw it out there to challenge your thought processes. If it is true, it’s a disturbing thought, isn’t it?
Well, I’m on dangerous ground now because I’m on page 9 of my notes and I know that when I get to that point I’m usually wearing you out. So I know from experience that I need to close, but let me just give you about three minutes worth of some closing remarks.
First of all, worship is not an option. Worship is not an option. We can’t say, I’m a reserved person therefore I am off the hook. Because worship as we’ve described it is finding ways - prostrating yourself - finding ways to acknowledge the reality of your relationship with God. God is seeking worshippers. We were created for worship, it’s where we’re headed when we get to heaven - heaven is going to resound with worship - and God wants true worshippers. So, worship is not an option. That’s number one.
Number two. I believe if we set ourselves here at TCF to be true worshippers, I’m confident God will help us get there. We don’t need to be anxious about it. But we do need to make a decision, personally, perhaps as a Body, we want to be true worshippers. We’re not going to use other people’s models; we’re going to find what God wants for us here. Amen? Let’s find what God wants for us here and forget vespers, forget Dennis Jernigan concerts, forget that old church where I led worship and things were so great . . . . You know, let’s find what God wants here.
Third, we have to become learners again - even in the area of worship. It’s so easy to get an attitude that I’ve been in this Charismatic movement for 25 years, I’ve seen it all, I know it all, I can see it coming from a distance and I can judge it from a distance. I think we need to become learners again and trust as we do this in obedience that God will take us into true worship.
Fourth, I want to reemphasize the leaders of this church want full and rich and true worship, not manipulative, not hype, not attention-seeking, not all in one style - but we want worship that is grounded in obedience to the Spirit within the framework of the Word of God. We want you to know that the Word of God is our final authority on everything and even worship. So we want you to be free, we want you to obey the Spirit, but we want to make sure that it is within the boundaries and patterns of the Scriptures.
And then, last, as you know - it’s a reminder really - nothing can go on in here that doesn’t go on in our private lives. Dynamic public worship requires faithful private worship. I know that you know that, but it’s good to be reminded. I want to say, “Let’s go for it!” Let’s go for being true worshippers, such that when the Father seeks us, He is pleased with us as a people. God is seeking true worshippers. Lord, let it be. Let it be.
Father, we do pray that you will take these words and cause us to run more faithfully toward being true worshippers of the Living God. Thank you for a chance to dig into your Word. Thank you that we’re never left disappointed when we try to seek You and understand your ways. Bless us as we attempt to worship you in every segment of our lives, Lord. Make us true worshippers. In Christ’s name. Amen.
