The Ways Of Worship
The Presence of God
7/18/04
I. Introduction
More than 250 years ago, George Handel was a musical composer living in England. He accepted an assignment to write the music for a new collection titled Messiah. A unique aspect of this collection was that all the words were taken directly from Bible passages. As he began writing the music for Messiah, composer George Handel became consumed with his task. He was so caught up in the worshipful activity of creating this masterpiece that he often simply forgot to eat or sleep. The finale to Handel’s musical was titled, “The Hallelujah Chorus.” Using the words of Scripture, this song is approximately five minutes of powerful praise to Jesus and has become Handel’s most remembered work. Just after George Handel finished writing “The Hallelujah Chorus,” his servant came in the room. He found Handel sitting at a table with tears streaming down his face. Handel said, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself.”
What a powerful time of worship, and today I’m going to share with you how you, too, can experience for yourself powerful times of worship.
Now, the term worship is really a very religious-sounding word with a lot of different meanings. And worship is displayed all throughout the Bible, there are different styles of worship, methods of worship, principles of worship, but since we live in the new covenant that Jesus established when He came to earth, it’s very important for us to see what He said about worship, and so we’ll begin in the book of John chapter 4.
II. Understanding God’s Love
John 4:23 23But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.
God is seeking true worshipers. And that’s exactly the reason we need to know what it means to be a true worshiper. Now, Jesus gave us a great revelation of the attributes and characteristics of a true worshiper when he was talking to this Samaritan woman.
Now, the people of Samaria were a mixed race of mostly poor people who had built a temple on Mount Gerazim to worship the God of Israel. But they built their temple “in competition” with the temple in Jerusalem. The Jews (God’s covenant people) of Jerusalem hated the Samaritans because they considered the Samaritans idolaters.
However, it was to one of these “idolaters” that Jesus chose to give His revelation about worship on a hot day at noontime at a well in foreign territory.
John 4:5-26 5So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink." 8For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
9Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
10Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, "Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."
11The woman said to Him, "Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? 12Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?"
13Jesus answered and said to her, "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, 14but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life."
15The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw."
16Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come here."
17The woman answered and said, "I have no husband."
Jesus said to her, "You have well said, "I have no husband,’ 18for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly."
19The woman said to Him, "Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship."
21Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. 22You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. 24God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."
25The woman said to Him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When He comes, He will tell us all things."
26Jesus said to her, "I who speak to you am He."
Now, the very first principle we must understand if we’re going to become true worshipers is not a step made by us, but by God. That step is understanding the depths of God’s love for the people on this earth. If you’re going to become a true worshiper, you need to know how much God loves you.
Although Jesus began his conversation with this woman by asking her to do something for him, he really wanted to do something for her. This was a woman with extreme needs and hurts and Jesus wanted to help her. But in order to receive help from Jesus, she needed to ask Him. God is a gentleman and he’ll never intrude or barge right into your life.
So Jesus asked her for a drink. He may well have been thirsty, but his whole point was to reach out to her. He stepped into her world, hoping she in turn would respond and ask him some questions.
John 6:44 44No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.
God always begins any dealings He has with man by taking the first step and then standing back to see what man will do with what He offers.
I have this Snickers bar here. I bought and paid for it, and it’s mine. But who in here is hungry and loves chocolate, specifically Snickers? Now, I want to give this candy bar to somebody free of charge. So, I approach you, hold out my hand and offer you this Snickers. It’s there for you to take, but if you refuse and turn and walk away, I’m not going to chase you down the aisle and cram it in your mouth. That would just be wrong. Even though I cared enough to give you the candy bar, and I’m sad because you rejected my offer, I must allow you to make your own choice.
And being a true worshiper begins with understanding this step, that God Himself stepped down into our world, paid a debt we could not pay, and offers this salvation to us free of charge, simply because He loves us. True worship begins with understanding God’s love. That’s why in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, he prays that they would know and understand the width, the depth, and the height of Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge.
III. Ask And You Shall Receive
So before we ever knew that we needed Him, He reached out to this world by sending Jesus. The first step was all God. It was His idea and His love and compassion that came to us.
The second step is all us.
Look at verse 10 again.
John 4:10 10Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, "Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."
Jesus was saying, “Look, if you only knew Me, that I have come as a sacrifice, to bear the debt of humanity, that I’m going to pay the price for you, then you would have ASKED, and I would have given you living water, the life-giving source that will meet your every need.
You have to ask, but if you don’t ask God, He can’t help you.
John Wesley said, “It seems God is limited by our prayer life - that He can do nothing for humanity unless someone asks Him.”
God created man with the gift of choice and God will not override man’s decision. God does not force Himself on any one, and He won’t force you to worship him. But anybody who came to Jesus with a need and asked Him for the answer with the respectful attitude of worship always-100 percent of the time- got what they came for.
Matthew 8:1-3 1 When He had come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed Him. 2And behold, a leper came and worshiped Him, saying, "Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean."
3Then Jesus put out His hand and touched him, saying, "I am willing; be cleansed." Immediately his leprosy was cleansed.
This leper came and WORSHIPED Him. Because of his attitude, he caught Jesus’s attention and ultimately Jesus healed him and met his need.
Ok, so, first understand how much God loves you. Second, ask God in faith for what you need. Does everybody understand that God actually wants to meet your needs? The whole purpose of Jesus’ coming to earth was to cure this disease of separation of man and God, to bridge the gap between man and God. There’s nothing too hard for Him, nothing too big for our God, amen.
We have to continue to seek Him in this attitude of worship.
Ok, so where do we worship God?
In the Old Testament, there was a place called the tabernacle. Entering the tabernacle was a process that allowed only certain members of the Levitical priesthood to come before God. God chose to dwell in this tabernacle in a place called the Holy of Holies, inside a gold-covered ark, called the ark of the covenant.
Later on, Solomon built God a temple, and it was the type of temple worship that was practiced when Jesus came on the scene. The people believed that in order to be right with God, they had to go to the temple. This brief history brings us back to the place in John 4.
John 4:20 “20Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship. 21Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. 22You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. 24God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’”
Jesus is saying that the worship of the Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim was not accepted by God as true worship because the Samaritans didn’t have a covenant with Him like the Jews who worshipped in the temple. But He continues to say that now that He’s here, even the Jews won’t have to go to the temple to worship. Because God is a Spirit, He doesn’t live in a certain building or place.
He’s saying the entire attitude toward worship has to change. Jesus said we’ll be able to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Because when you receive Jesus, you literally become a temple in the sense that you are a place where God lives all the time, a permanent home.
1 Corinthians 6:19 19Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?
You don’t just GO to a place of worship, you ARE a place of worship.
That means that I can worship God any place at any time. I can worship God even when I have no feelings about worshiping God. When our feelings are at their lowest and we are in the toughest circumstances, that’s when we need to worship God the most.
You see, your feelings will tell you the situation is hopeless. Your feelings will tell you that God is a million miles away just because you don’t “feel” close to him. Your feelings will lie to you and more than that, they are subject to change. One day you can feel close to God and like He’s right beside you and the next you can feel like He’s gone. But the Word doesn’t say that true worshipers will worship in feeling and in falsehood.
To religious people, God is really present in worship only when the music is playing a certain way, people are getting chill bumps and the feelings are strong. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE to feel God’s presence, but we can’t always control whether or not we feel God’s presence at a certain time. But no matter how we feel, Jesus is there with His power to help us through any circumstance in life when we know how to release that power through faith.
When I was in college, I led a band called His Holy Hill, and we would do 2-3 concerts a month traveling all over the Carolinas. There was this one particular concert that we did in Seneca, SC, and we were expecting to draw a pretty big crowd from Clemson University. Well, it was about an hour before the concert and I wasn’t feeling well at all, in fact, I was in the bathroom throwing up minutes before we were supposed to do this concert. But it was in that moment, when I didn’t feel like worshiping God, that I purposed in my heart to worship no matter how I felt. And we ministered to people and people got saved that night. But if I would have relied on my feelings to know whether God was there or not, we never would have gone through with that concert. You see, our greatest victories can come when the pressure is on the most and we feel as if God is there the least.
So, the first step is understanding God’s love, the second, ask in faith, and the third, don’t rely on your feelings in worship to know that God is there. Worship is a choice!
IV. Sing A New Song
Finally, I want to talk a little about the aspect of singing in worship. Singing has a way of building up and strengthening your heart like nothing else.
Ephesians 5:18-19 18And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, 19speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord,
If you’ve ever drunk an alcoholic beverage, you know that it affects you by changing your mood and attitude. As long as you’re under the effects of alcohol, you may forget your problems and feel better because of the liquor.
However, this change in mood is only temporary. When you wake up from being drunk, you still have the same problems-plus one more- a hangover. But Paul tells us that real answers come when you’re filled with the Spirit. And in the Greek, the phrase be filled with the Spirit, actually says be being filled. In other words, being filled with the Spirit is a continuous ongoing experience that we must activate in our lives.
How can we do this? One way is by singing. Paul tells us four times that the way we stay filled is by speaking to ourselves, not necessarily talking or singing publicly, but privately to ourselves in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. This isn’t the only way to continue being filled with the Spirit, but it is a very important way.
And we need to sing songs that are full of faith, based on God’s word, not songs that are full of doubt and unbelief and are all about man’s trials and experiences. And when we do this, we’ll experience the power of God working in our lives.
In Acts 16, Paul and Silas were beaten and thrown into prison for preaching the Gospel. In fact, they were placed in the inner prison, the place they put people when they didn’t want to hear from them again. It looked like the end for the two of them.
Acts 16:25-26 25 But at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were loosed.
Midnight symbolizes the darkest hour any of us will ever face. But Paul and Silas were praying and singing praises to God. Now, I doubt that they physically felt like doing that. They had just been beaten and were in a lot of pain. They weren’t at church with awesome music playing. But at the darkest moment in their lives, they began to worship God. They weren’t just thinking about it or sitting in “silent prayer.” No, it was audible, it came out of their mouths. And praise isn’t praise until it comes out of your mouth.
Paul and Silas experienced an incredible miracle, God sent an earthquake that brought deliverance to them and the other prisoners in that jail. When you develop a singing spirit, you can’t stay negative. It will lift your spirit, and as you go through life, your attitude will be a testimony to others of God’s grace.
