Worship – Part 1
Romans 12:1; Isaiah 6:1-11a
We are about to begin a journey of study into the character of some of the key people revealed to us in God’s Word – people who were significant in His story; people whom He used in a variety of ways with a variety of results. One very striking factor is common with each and every one of them – they were worshipers; their lives were centered on true and regular worship of God. We will also be studying some individuals whose character was not godly, whose lives did not center on the worship of God. For now, I want to focus on the first group.
Abraham built altars to the Lord on a regular basis. Enoch walked with the Lord and the Lord took him heavenward without his passing through death. Rebecca’s first sight of Isaac was of him worshiping in a field. Daniel’s habit of worshiping God three times every day took Him into and out of the den of starving lions. Paul and the Apostles gave themselves over to prayer and worship of Jesus Christ. The list goes on.
Paul is the first person whose character we are going to study, so I want to look at something he wrote that gives us insight into his view of worship.
We are admonished by Paul in Romans 12:1: "I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable [well-pleasing] to God, which is your spiritual [reasonable] service of worship."
Romans 12:1 gives us a basic springboard for understanding of where true worship begins. As Jesus defined worship to the Samaritan woman at the well as recorded for us in John 4:20-24: "’Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.’" 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.’"
True worship is a total giving over of oneself in every aspect of our life to God. Think about the things that you give the most thought and consideration to throughout most of every day – personal comfort, personal pleasure, and personal well-being. That is why we work, that is why we sleep, that is why we eat and watch the shows and movies we watch. That is why we choose the entertainment that we do. Personal comfort, personal pleasure and personal well-being are the underlying motivations for what we choose to do and to not do, to give and to not give, to keep and to not keep, even to feel and to not feel. Our responses to life’s conditions and circumstances are also motivated by our sense of personal comfort, personal pleasure, and personal well-being…our bodies, as Paul reminds us.
Some might instantly object and say, “Are you saying that I should just ignore my needs? That would be poor stewardship.” Balderdash!
The truth of it is that this is just another excuse for selfishness and feeding the PIG (Personal Instant Gratification). Ignoring one’s needs isn’t really the issue at all. It isn’t the real question. No one with any real sense is going to ignore their needs. The real questions at issue are, “To what extent will we go to over-meet those needs? What are we willing to sacrifice in order to meet that ‘need’? Is it really a need, or simply a want?” We must also ask, “What is our focus and purpose in what we do and why?”
See, the unfortunate thing is that many of us approach worship with the same mindset and underlying motivation as the rest of life – we come to “worship” expecting to get something out of it, expecting to come away feeling good, feeling peaceful, feeling happy. We think worship is for us.
God’s economy is the opposite of the world’s economy.
What we are supposed to do if we are worshiping God “in spirit and in truth” is come expecting to encounter, to come face-to-face with, the Holy, Almighty, Pure and Righteous, Omnipotent God who judges all. We need to come with the knowledge and understanding that we are sinners and that we are allowed to approach God only by His grace through Jesus Christ, not through any goodness on our part. Expect to be broken.
We need to approach God from the standpoint that we are in desperate need of His grace, His mercy, His forgiveness, His cleansing, His purifying, His restoring, His strengthening, His equipping, His empowering, and His continued will in and for our lives.
We need to come with the pure knowledge that we are rebellious by nature, that our hearts are deceitfully wicked, and that we are easily deceived and led astray, let alone rebellious and willful.
We need to come to God in abject humility and poverty of soul. Anything else is pride, presumption, arrogance and self-exaltation; and, it is sin – dangerous sin.
Jesus and Paul both tell us that our focus is to be on God and on true and honest worship of Him, not on ourselves and our own comforts.
When we look at the words the Bible uses that have been translated into the English word worship, we get excellent pictures of what worship really is. The Old Testament uses only two words for worship, one Hebrew and the other Aramaic. Both words carry the same meaning: “the act of bowing down and prostrating in homage (reverence, devotion, service, respect, duty, honor) by an inferior to a superior.”
When was the last time you got on your face before God, let alone your knees? When was the last time you humbled yourself, swallowed your pride, forgot about appearances and really gave God what is His due from you?
The might, the majesty, the power, the purity, the holiness, the greatness of God demand every being, human or spirit, to quake at even the mention of His name. His name is holy, His nature and character are pure and unattainable, and His majesty is far beyond anything that we can ever achieve.
What things do we have and hold on to that we are holding back from being completely given over to God and His control and direction?
I want to talk about those things tonight.
“I don’t have a good singing voice.”
“I’m not an eloquent speaker. I wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it.”
“People might laugh at me or think poorly of me – they might even ridicule me.”
The focus of every one of these excuses is “I” and “me”.
Who is worship to? Who is worship for? Who is worship about?
Is worship for you? Is worship for me? Clear back in the Garden of Eden the desire to be worshiped caused the Fall of Man, just as it had caused the fall of Lucifer.
God is the only one who is worthy of any kind of worship.
In the New Testament, the words used for worship carry even stronger pictures of humility and deference. One of those words, which I have heard some say means blowing kisses, actually means “to kiss, like a dog licking its master’s hand.” Quite a different type and manner of kissing, wouldn’t you say? It means a humbling of oneself to the point of prostrating oneself in reverence and awe and in abject humility and lack of self-pride -- complete and total subservience and submissiveness.
Okay, let’s look at this in the context of today.
Most often, when we speak of worship, the idea of certain types of music and songs come to mind.
Why is that, do you think?
Music impacts on several levels simultaneously. Music has been used to enhance learning, to boost healing in severely ill patients (especially those suffering from emotional and mental disorders), and just to either excite or calm those listening – depending on the goal and purpose of those playing the music. Praise and worship music are impactful in the same ways.
The basic difference is that a praise song focuses on what God has done, while a worship song focuses on who God is. This is what the lyrics are about and where they put our focus.
Think about the songs that you like the most. Do they help you focus more on who God is, or on what He has done or will do for you? A song that gives a true and honest sense of the real gap between God and us and helps us realize our need of Him is a worship song, and is spiritually true and accurate. A song that acknowledges God’s ability and desire to fulfill His promises in our lives is a spiritually true and accurate song of praise because it focuses on God and what He does, not on what we get.
Worshiping God has nothing to do with how we sound or how we look. It has everything to do with what we say to and about God. Worship is to and for God, not to or for us. It doesn’t matter how it makes us feel; what matters is how it makes God feel. If we do right, we will feel right (see Genesis 4:7). The modern English word, worship, is derived from the Old English word, worthship. The meaning is the amount and degree of worship that someone is “worth”.
Throughout the Scriptures there are multiple references to blessing God with our praise, of blessing God with our worship. (Judges 5:9; Psalm 16:7; Psalm 16:2; Psalm 34:1; Psalm 63:4; Psalm 66:8, are but a few examples.) Perhaps the greatest example is Psalm 103. Stand together with your eyes closed as I read this passage, focusing on Whom this is for.
(Read Psalm 103)
Isaiah 6:1-11a is perhaps one of the best biblical models for worship seen anywhere in the Scriptures. There are many, but this, I think, is the penultimate model when coupled with celebrating Communion, a blending of the Old Testament with the fulfillment in the New.
The worship of God is a dialogue with God. It is our response to God’s revelation. God reveals and has revealed Himself to us in a multitude of ways, and our response is also somewhat varied.
God reveals His presence to us through the eyes of our faith. It is something that we perceive in our spirit, not in our minds; yet, because of the limitations of our humanity, it is first through our mind that God reaches our spirit. He does this through our five senses: hearing, sight, taste, touch and smell. The old faiths had it right with the candles and stained glass and banners and music and wood and marble and the wine and the bread for as long as the purpose was focusing those who were coming on the might and majesty of Almighty God. As with anything, however, the flesh can and did take over and it wasn’t long before all of the accoutrements to worship became points of pride and bragging rights.
God reveals his person to us so that we may worship Him in truth. We are to worship God for who He really is, not for who is He is not. In Matthew 28:17, we read, “When they saw Him, they worshipped Him.” We come to know who God is through the descriptions of His nature and character and attitudes and deeds as revealed to us in Scripture. The Word of God is an integral part of any true worship. This is why it is of such critical importance that what passes as “worship” music and “praise” music is theologically sound and correct. Otherwise, we are not praising and worshiping the true God, but one manufactured by man. Remember when we pray, “Hallowed be Thy name,” that we are asking Him to ensure that who He is will be accurately revealed to us and appropriately revered by us. We begin crossing the line of worshiping a false God when we do not keep to the truth revealed to us in the Scriptures.
God reveals His power through the deeds He has done and the works He has performed in the midst of His people. Look at the repeated rehearsing of what God has done in calling, choosing, rescuing, forgiving and being with His people throughout the Scriptures. Moses does it, David does it, Nehemiah does it, Daniel does it, Peter and Stephen and Paul and all the rest do it. It is this remembering and repeating the mighty works of God that moves us to respond to Him in awe and wonder, in thanksgiving and in praise.
God reveals His purposes on a regular, ongoing basis. His Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are either in or out of His will. In His will, and we are fulfilling His purposes for us. Out of His will, and we are rebelling against His purposes for us. Which do you think is conducive to worship? We need to be reminded in our worship time of what it is that He plans and purposes for us in general. Then our lives are touched by our time in worship so that He can mold us and shape us during that time in order to fulfill His purposes for our lives. See the cycle?
Finally, God reveals His plans when His purposes are translated into specifics, the specifics that He speaks about through Jeremiah the prophet in Jeremiah 29:11: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord; ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope.’”
This is God’s disposition toward us in worship, and our disposition toward Him is to be adoration, repentance, reverence, awe, wonder, and obedience. We are to come to our time of worship as Isaiah did, with a deep sense of our own uncleanness, our own sinfulness, our desperate need for protection and salvation from God’s wrath and judgment. We are to come with the hope and the desire to be forgiven of our sin, cleansed of the stain of our unrighteousness, allowed to bow in His presence and be invited to join the hosts of heaven in adoring worship. We are to come in complete and utter humility – no pride, no self-assurance, no self-reliance, no presumption. All access to the Father has been given us by and through the torturous death of His Holy Son. We have no right to be there in His throne room separate and apart from that.
Adoration and praise, contrition and confession, submission and dedication, supplication and petition, remembrance and celebration; these are the example of Isaiah and the Apostles in our study texts, and these are what our responses to God are to be in worship. We will look at these in greater detail next time. For now, the key is to remember that worship is about and for God, not about and for us. Only then can we approach life with the attitude of worship that will carry us through every day in the center of His will.
Do you believe that your sins are forgiven, and that Christ has made a full atonement for them?
Then worship is to be part and parcel of your grateful life in Christ.
Let’s pray.
