More of God - Worship
In this series of evening sermons we are wrestling with the question of how we go deeper with God. We are asking “what does it mean to grow in our Christian walk.” The series is born out of a conviction that the picture of discipleship and church life that we get in the New Testament can often seem much more vibrant, alive and full of power than our experience in Orpington in 2008. And therefore it is right and good to ask whether what we have now is all God has for us, spiritually, or whether it is possible to pursue him for more of himself.
And the Bible says that we should indeed pursue him for more, and that we should expect to grow and go deeper for the whole of our lives, whether we are young or whether we are old. It says that as we gaze on Christ we are transformed from one degree of glory to another, with ever increasing glory, by the Holy Spirit. The truth about God is not merely informational, it is transformational. We should expect to grow, and we ought to be concerned if we can’t identify that we are.
A little while ago I asked two well known Christian leaders what God was doing in their life at the moment. One said "I can’t remember the last time anyone asked" and the other burst into tears saying "I should be able to answer, shouldn’t I?" That is the right response. We should be able to answer.
Richard began this series of messages with the question from Ps 42, what does it mean for our souls to thirst for God as deer pants for streams of water in a dry land? Tonight we are asking “what does that desire to go further, to receive more, mean for our worship lives.” I have several questions in mind:
· Why is worship a route into enjoying and experiencing more of God?
· What are we talking about when we speak about worship? Is it merely music? Is it something emotional? Is it to do with proclaiming truth about God? Is it inward or outward?
· What does it mean to be growing as a worshipper?
A great book was written about this in 1677 by a 27 year old Scot called Henry Scougal. [ed. thanks to John Piper for pointing me at Scougal] The book is called “The Life of God in the Soul of Man” which would be a great subtitle for this series. How do we get more of the life of God in our souls? In his book this young man, who died of TB a year later, wrote this:
The soul of man hath in it a raging and inextinguishable thirst.
That’s Ps 42 language. We are meant to yearn and desire after God. We are meant to pour out our love. We are meant to say “unless I have you then I faint and die.”
And then he says this, which I think is profoundly heart-searching:
The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love
I think that is deep and wonderful, and I want to spend just a few minutes picking it apart a little. The thing about desiring more of God is that it is an internal thing. It’s a desire that resides in the heart and our hearts are invisible. We can’t see them. A lot of the time we don’t even comprehend what is going on in our own hearts. So how can we see or measure whether, in our hearts, we are growing in God? Its very difficult.
But then along comes Henry Scougal and he says “here is one tool for making visible what is otherwise invisible in your heart. The worth of your invisible heart is shown by the visible things that it loves.” And that is very closely linked to worshipping.
Worship Defined
Here is my definition of worship:
Worship is delighting in, extolling, enjoying and making much of the object of your love
The goal of worship is that the person or thing you love is seen and praised for being excellent. Let me give you an example. This is a picture of my favourite place. I spent a lot of my childhood here. When I am there I feel alive. In this area there are one or two places where most of the beauty is hidden until you suddenly come around a corner and are confronted with the mountains, not a little bit at a time, but all at once in one fabulous moment. You go from having a limited horizon to a spectacular panorama in an instant. And its jaw-droppingly lovely. You see people taken unawares just gaping at it, unable to move.
Every time I get to go there its like its just fresh, all over again. I see it and I go “wow! I love it!” It makes my heart leap. And you hear people round about you praising the view and extolling it and marvelling at it to each other. They just can’t help but go “would you look at that. I never saw anything as beautiful as that.”
You know, it’s the praising of it that shows that they love it. If someone turns to a companion and invites them to praise it by saying “don’t you think that is fantastic” it shows that they love it. What they are doing, in a real sense is worshipping. Setting forth the worth of the beautiful view. But we can say more than that. Praising doesn’t just show that I think its great. Praising also increases my enjoyment of it. In fact praising completes my enjoyment of it. It shares, it vocalises, it gives shape to my enjoyment of it. In the presence of extreme beauty and wonder, our enjoyment is incomplete without it bursting out of us.
It is the most natural human instinct to praise the things we prize. We honour and admire and commend the things that we love and delight in. If you ask Nathan here what colour Hannah’s eyes are, you will get a factual answer. But if you ask him to describe them, you will get a rhapsody. You will get enthusiasm and bliss and rapture. And you should! That is the absolutely right response of a groom about his bride to be. If you didn’t then something would be wrong. And all you married men – and women – I hope you are still getting better and better at doing the same.
So here is the connection between our worship life and growing in God:
The worth and excellency of our invisible soul is measured by the object of its love. And the extent of that love is seen in our worship. In our making much of it.
Before we come to see that in the Bible, the obvious question is do we desire God, do we delight in him in our hearts, and extol and make much of him in our lives more than we did a year ago? That is the more-of-God question.
3 Important things about worship
3 things follow
· Worship is far more than just singing. Singing can be worship, in as much as it reflects a heart that is making much of God. But it doesn’t have to be. If your heart isn’t delighting in him singing can just be a mask or a smokescreen to make others think you are worshipping when you aren’t
· Worship is far more than just emotion about God. Because emotion isn’t necessarily connected to truth about God. However, real worship is never less than emotional. It is always about catching up our emotions because we cannot praise something we love, without enjoying it. If you say “I will merely acknowledge truth about God, but I don’t have any delight in it”, that leaves you in the same position as the devil
· The degree to which you are genuinely worshipping, making much of God and saving work of Christ, shows the extent of your love for him, and whether you are growing in him or going backwards
Now, some of you may be thinking, that all sounds very theoretical. Maybe some of you are thinking I am just making an unbiblical plea to emotionalism and surely the Bible doesn’t actually say that. You are wondering where is the connection, in the Bible, between delighting in God and growing in God. Or to put it another way, does the Bible teach that there is a connection between worshipping and getting more of God. And the answer is “yes” to both questions, in very many places. We have to limit ourselves to a few, but you don’t have to look hard to find lots of other examples.
Ps 27 Gazing and Seeking
Earlier we heard Ps 27. Please turn to it. In v4 David, yearning for more of God, says “one thing I ask of God, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” That dwelling in the house of God, living in God’s presence is fleshed out by the two following statements, this is what it means to dwell in God’s presence:
· To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
· And to seek him in his temple
To gaze and to seek. We might say, to enjoy and to pursue. David is doing what the people do when they saw that magnificent view. Confronted with the beauty of the Lord he just wants to gaze. In saturating his eyes he satisfies his soul by enjoying the surpassing beauty of the Lord. And the second half is that he seeks him. You seek more of the one you enjoy. You pursue what you prize. That is the heart of worship. Saying to God “what I see of you delights me, and therefore I pursue you, I make much of you, I delight myself in you because I enjoy being with you and belonging to you.”
Then in v6 he gives us a glimpse of what that looks like when he is with God’s people. He says I will do my service with shouts of joy; I will sing and make music to the Lord. There is the singing and the music. The singing isn’t the foundation of the worship, but it sure is the natural symptom of a worshipping heart.
Turn if you will to Ps 84, where I have also been asked to linger. You see the connection again. In this psalm pilgrims are on their way to Jerusalem, pursing more of God. The reason for going on this pilgrimage is a deep desire for more. Read v1-2
In v7 it says as they get nearer in with God they go from strength to strength. They are pressing in. They realise that worshipping God and being near God go together, and it is better than anything else on earth. Better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. Take all the wicked pleasure that the world offers and compare it in a balance with being a doorkeeper in God’s house and the pleasure of God and delighting in God outweighs everything.
If anyone still thinks, where is the connection between worship and getting more of God, its right here again. V7 says that those who are pursuing God and getting close to God are growing in the strength of God and they are blessed. V4 says blessed are those who dwell in your house – because they are praising you.
Why was this written down? It was written down to make us dissatisfied with hearts that don’t want more. It was written to make us discontented if we aren’t growing in our worship life. It was written so we will yearn. It was written so we will raise our affections to him and yield our lives to him in worship.
On one of the ski trips Ros and I used to lead I preached through Philippians. A man said to me “they seem to be rejoicing in God in this letter. There is nothing like that in my life. Are you saying my discipleship is somehow deficient?” And he went on “worship isn’t my singing or my emotions, it is simply every dutiful act of service I perform for God.”
That is wrong at so many levels I scarcely knew where to begin. TThat is like me saying to Ros “I will spend my time with you because it is expected. It is an obligation.” What that man said was terrible because he had replaced delight with duty. You know what? God doesn’t want duty. He hates that kind of service and is dishonoured by it. We will not get more of God by joyless duty. That is the opposite of worship.
I very much hope to have the chance to come back to the theme of worship before too long. It is an area in which I feel there are many sensitivities and maybe even some broken relationships among us at the moment about which I am really burdened. And, I feel, the Lord is really distressed. In my applications this evening I haven’t time to deal with those kinds of themes with the depth and sympathy I feel they need, but I ask you to make the way we encourage each and every other person at Crofton to be a worshipper a matter for your most urgent prayer.
Applications
Here are three applications:
· Worship is making much of Jesus in your heart as the object of your love. And then letting all your life and decisions, and speech and conversations with each other and with non-Christians reflect that he is at the centre. That is what demonstrates our direction of travel in wanting more of God. Is he more the object of your love and your affections than a year ago?
· Because worship is about making God the object of our love and making much of him, do your very best to concentrate on that core rather than the outward form that worship takes. If you go to other nations you will find the believers do things very differently. In Thailand they all stand to pray out loud simultaneously. In Germany they sit to sing and stand to pray. When we let worship form assume too large a priority for us it can prevent us from delighting in the Lord with other believers in other places. And with believers in other generations, both older and younger.
I believe this should be a real area of prayerful concern for us at the moment. I am troubled by the possibility of broken relationships among us over matters of style. I believe there is some possibility of cynicism, maybe even discord. And for some of us absent ourselves to avoid the cultural expressions of worship that help others.
This morning Chris said that we have to hand on the baton of the gospel. Deciding from week to week, meeting to meeting whether or not to come and be part of the Relay team that is Crofton Baptist church, would be like Asafa Powell saying he won’t run the 4 x 100 because Usain Bolt doesn’t run the same way as him. Or for Bolt to withdraw because he doesn’t like the fact that Asafa Powell is older. And the team loses.
Chris reminded us that the gospel is under attack in this country from secular materialism. We might want to add from militant Islam. There are believers in fear of their lives in Orissa tonight who would tell us that they would give anything for fellowship with other Christians regardless of any matter of worship form. Will we absent ourselves over matters of style? What would they say to us if we fight over worship styles?
What can I say to us tonight except that you are the church of Jesus Christ, for whom he died. You are the apple of God’s eye. Paul said that absenting ourselves is to damage the body and to grieve the Holy Spirit. Its with trepidation that I feel I have to appeal to you to be reconciled with each other for the sake of the Lord and for the health of the body.
And so I want to give you a challenge. If you hear me, or any church leader, acting in any other way but draw the church together in worship and to bear with each other; and if you see me trying to withdraw or speaking about musical form or types of instruments in ways that will bring discouragement, I want you to challenge me, as you should for the good of the body, and urge me and plead with me to join with the rest of the body in love. And in return I will urge and plead with you.
· Delight yourself in the Lord. Give expression to your joy in him. Take time to gaze upon his beauty. The promise of transformation in 2 Cor 3 is that we become like the one we behold. If you want more of him then saturate yourself with him. Paul writes Rejoice in the Lord, it’s a safeguard for your soul, it is no trouble to write the same thing again, Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, rejoice.