The Joy Of Worship – What God Gets From Your Worship Series

The JOY of Worship – What God Gets from your worship

Gladstone Baptist Church – 13/3/05 am

Well, we’ve come to the end of our series on the JOY of Worship.

We’ve seen so far that Worship is living a life that is surrendered to Jesus. It involves the SPECIFIC act of singing praises or giving glory to God, but it also involves the GENERAL act of living a life of surrender in every area of our lives. It is handing over our will to God in our work life, our family life, our social life, our recreational life, our financial life and even our emotional life.

So far we’ve investigated what Others Get out of our worship and what You get out of your worship.

- When we worship, the church is BUILT UP. Worship involves us doing, not just singing. It involves us caring for others, and ministering to their needs. If we truly worship God, we will be involved in the activities of fellowship and of ministry and in so doing, we will build up the body of believers we call Gladstone Baptist Church. Is your worship building up the body?

- When we worship, others outside of the church will be BROUGHT IN. Worship is meant to be a witness to those around us of God’s goodness, His might, His power. When we live a life that is surrendered to God, it is meant to be so obvious to those around us, that they will be attracted, challenged and led into a relationship with God. When we worship, we will evangelise this world. Is your worship bringing in the unbelievers?

- When we worship, we BECOME best friends with God and we BECOME LIKE Christ. Worship is surrender to God. Worship is living a life that is in accordance with His will, with His standards, with his plan for our life. Christ lived such a life - He submitted to God’s will, He lived a perfect life in line with God’s standards, He followed God’s plan for His life and death. When we live a life surrendered to God, we become like Jesus, our perfect example of a surrendered life and we learn about who God is in all his glory. This is dischipleship. When we worship, we will get to Know God and we become like Christ

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve covered the O – Others and the Y – Yourself in the last 3 weeks. This morning we are going to consider the J – What does God or Jesus get out of our worship.

We’ve come to learn, that worship is not about us. It is not centred on us, but on GOD. Though worship may have some benefits for us, it is not about us. Our worship should never be based on whether we FEEL like it, or whether the music is to our liking, or whether we are please with the situation we find ourselves in. I know we don’t have servants any more, but imagine you lived a couple of hundred years ago and you had maids and servants. Could you imagine a servant saying to their master, “I don’t feel like bringing you your coffee this morning – I had a fight with my wife this morning”, or “I don’t want to clean the house today – I don’t like the music you’ve got on your CD”, or “I’m happy to serve you, but only between 9:30 and 11:00 on Sunday morning.” If this was the attitude of your servant, you would get rid of them fairly quickly wouldn’t you. They wouldn’t be worth having around at all, because you couldn’t depend on them.

When we live a life of surrender to God, it should not depend on how we are feeling or where we are. God desires we live a life of full surrender to him. It is a 24hr, 7 day a week thing. It is something we do through our whole life because our surrender involves living as a sacrifice to God. It is a commitment we make to Him because of what He has done for us.

So what does God get from our worship?

1) Our worship gives God PATERNAL PLEASURE.

First and foremost, God is pleased when we worship Him. We were CREATED for God’s pleasure. – We know that. Ps 147:11 “The Lord is pleased only with those who worship Him and trust his love.” Our worship gives God pleasure … so God wants us to worship Him.

Some people can’t accept that a good God would create us to worship Him. They say such a God would have to be an EGOCENTRIC MANIAC who gets off on people worshipping Him. Some would say that God is incredibly vain to want people to say how great He is. There are several responses to this dilemma …