Worship – a lifestyle?
How often do we hear, ‘Let us now enter a time of worship? Shouldn’t we be worshipping God at all times?
There is a fairly well-known chorus that goes ‘I worship you, almighty God, there is none like you. We worship you, O Prince of peace, that is what we long to do …,’ based on Jeremiah 10 v 6. We tend to sing ’WE worship you almighty God’, for there is something so profound about our total unity and concentration on Him, the One who is worthy to be praised. Suddenly we are connected to Someone who is longing to connect with us..
What is worship? We all do it possibly for forty five minutes every week in a church service. Or do we?
Worship is not an activity, it’s a relationship, the desire to worship the Great King Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah and to seek after Him with all our heart. Let’s start with Abraham. Genesis 12 v 7 “Then the Lord appeared to Abraham and said: ‘ To your offspring I will give this land’ so he built an altar to the Lord!” So Abraham acknowledged that God existed … and worshipped!
Gen. 22 v 7 ‘Stay here with the donkey, I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.’ The ultimate worship then, is that something has to be sacrificed and we do indeed leave our ‘donkeys’ behind in order to be obedient just as Abraham did, it is after all the highest sacrifice to offer your own son.
Verse 8 says ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.’ Even the pagan world that Abraham came out of knew that a sacrifice is to give something pleasing to a deity.
Worship has to cost us something. We can only submit in true worship to someone or something greater than us. This unravelling of the heart to see why or how we worship is truly mind boggling except that we must … bow down and worship!
I suggest that unless we ‘bow down our hearts’ in submission to the Great King of the entire universe, then the Holy Spirit cannot settle on a church, let alone a worship group. How wonderful it is to see the gentle dove settle on the shoulders of those in worship, though how easy it is to disturb that Holy Spirit dove in moments of distraction. How we so easily lose our focus!
Therefore, the great once-and-forever focal point of heaven and the answer to the ‘eternal how’ is Yeshua, Jesus the sacrifice, who calls us like a magnet to our God – we cling here and worship! He has saved us, and He in us calls us to worship at His footstool and to know the Father in unity with the son. All that was aimed at, all that was offered became the offering and the worship of the Great God has become our lifetime’s goal, and I might say our life-style.
1 Chronicles 16 v 29 : ‘Give to the Lord the Glory due His name; bring an offering, and come before Him . Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!’
When worship became real …
When I was first saved in 1973 I simply loved Jesus, I didn’t really know Him, but I knew instinctively that ‘the Joy of the Lord was my strength!’ But still being full of the world and largely undelivered from an occult background, let alone the total ability to submit, in the first weeks of being saved they put me in the worship band, because I was a brass teacher and played the trumpet! The church was a very good spirit-filled Anglican church in Sheffield, but I really didn’t know what worship was, all I knew was I played and taught the trumpet for a living all week, and then went to church and played it again on a Sunday. It seemed like a busman’s holiday! The musicians were very godly but I wasn’t.
Yep, I didn’t know anything except that this amazing force had changed my heart. So what was this worship? I loved Jesus, but I rather feared God, far too distant, and no one indicated that church was anything more than a place where we ‘do’ things. You have a gift, use it! This isn’t wrong, but something was wrong with me! So I obediently played in citywide worship events, I sincerely did my best. Ginnie does the trumpet, that’s her gift, but it was a strangled cry from my heart, ‘this is not me!’
It took a while for me to see that to worship Him and only Him, is to bow the heart low in adoration, forsaking all other idols, and I had a few!! Not to mention the professionalism and perfection that comes from many years training as a classical musician.
So what ISN’T worship?
So worship can be an idol. In fact anything we put above God is just that, an idol. So worship bands on platforms with flashing lights and ‘show time’ pizzazz with big name ‘celebrities’ are easy meat for idol worshippers, who begin to ‘worship’ the worship band. Sadly some worship leaders fall into sexual sin. So what is it that attracts Christian women to these anointed worship leaders? I believe these poor women genuinely see Jesus in them, but the enemy sees the idol worship and disaster. For when a worship leader falls, there is bound to be others in the church in the same sexual sin. Why, because that ‘spirit’ has a platform and a landing strip. We surely must pray for our worship leaders and, more importantly, for the ‘people’ who should be guarding them, not worshipping them!
Exodus 20 v 3: ‘You shall have no other gods before me !’
Consider the Glory in 2 Chronicles 5 v 11- 14 (Tree of Life Version) “And it came to pass, when the kohanim (priests) came out of the Holy Place – for all the kohanim that were present have consecrated themselves, without regard to divisions –All the Levite singers – Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun, their sons and their relatives – dressed in fine linen with cymbals harps and lyres, were standing at the east end of the altar and with them were 120 kohanim blowing trumpets. Then it came to pass that when the trumpeters and the singers joined as one to extol and praise Adonai, and when the sound of the trumpets, cymbals and musical instruments and the praise of Adonai – ‘For He is good, for His mercy endures for ever’ – grew louder, the Temple the House of Adonai, was filled with a cloud. The kohanim could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the Glory of Adonai filled the House of God.”
There has been more than one occasion when I have been unable to stand in worship, such was His presence and even more times when I had to put myself low in adoration of our Great King! The Holiness of Him literally floors us!
Acts 2 …They couldn’t stand up either! Verse 15: “These men are not drunk, as you suppose- for it’s only the third hour of the day!” But this is what was spoken about through the prophet Joel: verse 17: ‘And it shall be in the last days’ says God, ‘ that I will pour out my Ruach ( spirit) on all flesh.’
Oh Glory to God! That we have a choice to follow Him rather than the rules of men. Consider Acts 5. They have just been through interrogation by the Sanhedrin, flogged, ordered not to continue speaking in the name of Yeshua, and then dismissed!
Verse 41-42: ‘So they left the presence of the Sanhedrin, rejoicing that they were considered worthy to be dishonoured on account of His name. And every day, in the Temple and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming Yeshua ( Jesus) as Messiah’.
Surprised by joy
Sadly, some of the church shies away from too much joy! Be a moderate body with moderate worship, moderate love and whatever you do, don’t be extreme! This is because worship in the church is largely ‘Greek’ in its attitude. It’s often led strongly from the front and no one is required to do anything more than ‘sing along!’ No wonder God said there were only six things He hated (Prov. 6 v16) and in Rev 2 v 6 He says ‘Yet you have this going for you, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.’
There are various views as to who the Nicolaitans were. Some have interpreted their name as ‘conquering the people’ from nicao, meaning ‘to conquer’ and laos, meaning ‘the people’. John F Walvoord states that: “The Nicolaitans are the forerunners of the clerical hierarchy superimposed upon the laity and robbing them of spiritual freedom.’’
In any event, it wasn’t good and what joy there is, when a community comes together and worships as one, with everyone able to bring a chorus, a hymn, an encouragement, a Scripture, a prophecy and everything being led by the Holy Spirit. What does He want us to sing? As Dr Howard Morgan often says ‘We are not in the choruses, what does the Lord want to hear?’ Admittedly this doesn’t work for groups of thousands, but then most churches I know aren’t thousands anyway.
Here’s a great quote from Steve Maltz in ‘Livin’ the Life’. ‘Worship was intended as a spontaneous and precious function of a redeemed creation acknowledging the Creator with acts, whether through song, prayer or practical acts of service. It has become a form, a genre of music, or a segment in a church service, something quantifiable, controlled, even monetised.’
So what is worship?
Worship is clearly then not just singing worship songs, or dance or prayer and study, though study was, in the First Century, thought to be the highest form of worship. All these are the result of our loving desire and longing to know Him, for we cannot have true faith in God without having a heart of true worship and that usually means learning how to ‘push though’ and worship the Lord no matter what.
2 Cor 4 v 8 -10 ( Tree of Life Version) ‘We are hard pressed in every way, yet not crushed, perplexed , yet not in despair, persecuted but yet not forsaken; struck down, yet not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Yeshua, so that the life of Yeshua may also be revealed in our mortal bodies.’
Habbakuk 3 also has that amazing theme. When there is nothing … rejoice! To be near to Him consistently gives us a tremendous urge to worship the Almighty Elohim, which is nothing to do with ‘feeling’ His presence, for it’s the very nature of conflict and difficulty that gives us the choice. I often give this testimony as a huge breakthrough moment in my life many years ago. I dance a lot in worship, it’s my ‘voice’ and usually anytime anywhere.
Some years ago when my lovely son was not so lovely and messing about with drugs, the police had been to my door looking for him. It was an awful moment of feeling such a failure as a parent, let alone a believer. When the police had gone, I heard a clear voice in my spirit. ‘Well, are you going to dance in worship to me now?’ It was a defining moment and so, with a heavy heart and tears streaming down my face, I danced and praised my Lord Yeshua in my kitchen. That act of worship broke something over me that day, for our Lord doesn’t want worship, He wants ‘worshippers’ who are drawn near with the urge to worship even when things are impossibly hard.
James 4 v 8: ‘Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.’
Hebrews 4 v16: ‘Therefore let us draw near to the throne of grace with boldness, that we may receive mercy and find grace for help in time of need.’
How can we sing songs about Him and never to Him! Worship then is pressing in, bowing down.
Extravagant worship brings us through that fine line of presumption where we ‘demand’ God‘s will and we submit. What does He want? Our hearts! He wants us to ‘acclimatise’ to His kingdom, which might mean worshipping Jesus in our meetings until He tells us to stop, which is altogether another thing.