Why Do I Worship? (sermon series?)
I. Introduction
a. Icebreaker
b. Background of subject
i. I have preached on the subject of worship many times here, and I don’t believe it is possible to exhaust the topic. The reason I say that is that the entire bible is a book about the worship of God!
1. You cannot go more than a chapter or two without finding some reference to an act of worship of God.
2. From the Old Testament all of the way through the New, from Genesis to Revelation, you find man responding to God in acts of worship.
3. What is worship?
a. Warren Wiersbe defines worship as “the believer’s response of all he is (mind, will, emotions and body) to all that God is, says and does.
b. In short, Worship is the response of all we are to all that God is.
c. At its core, worship is the proper response of a created being to its Creator.
d. In other words, worship is a response to the personal revelation of God.
4. And here is the problem…We don’t really know who we are and we don’t know who God is. And as a result, we do not worship Him as He designed us to.
ii. One reason for this is because for most people, God is a god of inference, He is not a God of reality.
1. What this means is God is just a deduction from evidence which a person considers reasonable, but God remains “unknown” to that person. He is a “being” which they must believe in.
2. What this means is God is an Intellectual CONCEPT to grasp, or an IDEAL to keep or a FORCE that exists.
a. The Living God simply is not personally experienced by people.
b. In fact, the very idea of an intimate, personal acquaintance is foreign to many people.
c. And even while Christianity holds to the doctrine that God is personal, for many Christians, He still seems far off and distant.
3. How about you? Is God an idea or a concept for you?
a. Is He some unseen force that may or may not be benevolent, someone who you can attribute creation to?
b. Is God someone who you can learn about but with whom intimacy is a foreign concept?
c. Do you hear about people saying that they “hear God” or who “enjoy His presence” and wonder what they mean?
d. Have you been going through life trying to love an “ideal” or an “idea?”
4. How can this change for you?
5. Or if you struggle to encounter God in a real, personal and intimate way on a regular basis, how can you experience His intimate presence more often?
iii. Think about why
II. The Presence of God
a. Genesis 28:10 Jacob left Beersheba and started toward Haran. 11At sunset he came to a holy place and camped there. He lay down to sleep, resting his head on a stone. 12 He dreamed that he saw a stairway reaching from earth to heaven, with angels going up and coming down on it. 13 And there was the LORD standing beside him. “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham and Isaac,” he said. “I will give to you and to your descendants this land on which you are lying. 14 They will be as numerous as the specks of dust on the earth. They will extend their territory in all directions, and through you and your descendants I will bless all the nations. 15Remember, I will be with you and protect you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done all that I have promised you.” 16Jacob woke up and said, “The LORD is here! He is in this place, and I didn't know it!” 17He was afraid and said, “What a terrifying place this is! It must be the house of God; it must be the gate that opens into heaven”"
b. I believe that the first place to answer the question of “why do I worship?” lies with the presence of God.
i. In this passage, Jacob has a very moving dream. He sees the Lord God in his dream and hears a very personal message. When we wakes us, he is shaken to his core. He comes to grips with the fact that God was “there” and he didn’t even know it.
ii. One of the answers to the question of “why do I worship” is that an encounter with the manifest presence of God results in worship…that is, it results in a response from us that we can only define as worship.
iii. The reason we sing worship songs here on Sunday morning isn’t so you can have great memories evoked from your childhood.
iv. We don’t sing certain songs or favorites just so that you can have that feel-good emotional feeling that you remember the first time you sang it.
1. In fact, there is a temptation to the modern church to use worship as an avenue so that we “feel good” about ourselves. When this happens, we shift the focal point of worship off of the Creator and Redeemer and put it on ourselves and our needs and desires.
2. That experience will ultimately leave us feeling very empty and unfulfilled inside.
3. This is because worship is an eternal experience.
a. It is the unending song of the angels, the elders and the saints that will ring through heaven for eternity!
v. We sing because the bible tells us that it is through praise that we enter the presence of God.
1. Praise of God is mentioned 154 times in the Old Testament.
2. We are told to “enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.” (Ps. 100:4)
3. This is not some pious platitude, it is at the root of seeking and experiencing God’s presence.
4. Thanksgiving and Praise are essential elements to opening OURSELVES up to the manifest presence of God.
5. But how often do we start prayer with thanks? How often do we praise God before we pray?
a. No, we rush right into voicing our needs and ignore the presence of God.
b. So in both prayer and worship services, we have an ever present danger of turning the focal point of the event upon ourselves.
c. Like Jacob, how often are you unaware of God’s presence?
i. The bible says that there is nowhere you can go to escape from His presence.
ii. Psalms 139:7-16 7 “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. 9 If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, 10 Even there Your hand will lead me, And Your right hand will lay hold of me. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, And the light around me will be night," 12 Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You”\
iii. This is because God Himself is Omnipresent. That means He is everywhere.
1. You cannot find a place in creation where He is not present.
2. Now we may not be aware of God’s presence, but that does not make God any less present.
3. The problem with experiencing God’s presence isn’t with God.
4. It is with us.
5. We choose to ignore, be ignorant, not to experience God’s presence on a regular basis. That choice is unfortunate. God isn’t the one who loses. You are.
6. Manifestation is different than presence.
a. We can have one without the other.
b. God IS present, but we may not be AWARE of it.
c. God is MANIFEST only when we become aware of His presence.
d. That manifestation of God (Glory of God) is the difference between a nominal Christian and one who is radiant with the light of God’s face upon him.
iv. God desires to manifest His presence to us.
1. The entire bible is a record of God manifesting His presence to mankind who is pushing Him away.
2. God’s very nature is to reveal Himself to mankind.
3. This is because God is relational, He wants us to know Him, He wants an intimate relationship with us.
a. In John chapter 4, Jesus tells us that God is seeking worshipers.
b. God’s nature is to manifest Himself to us, not to keep Himself a secret like a cosmic game of cat and mouse or hide and seek.
c. When you hear a father saying, “I feel as if my son is getting closer to me as he is getting older.”
i. He may have lived in close proximity to his son all of his life.
ii. But there is an experiential intimacy that describes understanding and feelings between them. They are becoming united in heart and mind.
iii. This is what it means to draw nearer to our Lord.
1. It is not a nearness of place, but of relationship..
v. What is the result of encountering God’s presence?
1. In worship, the presence of God is what changes and transforms the heart of man.
2. When you truly encounter Him, you cannot help but be changed.
3. Its so simple. Big God, little man.
a. When the presence of the creator of everything that exists visits your space, anything can happen. Healing, changed hearts, and renewal.
d. A question we must ask is, “Why do some find God in a way that others do not?”
i. Why does God seem to manifest His presence to some and appear to let others struggle along?
ii. The difference lies with us and not with God.
iii. What common denominator do all of the great saints of God who experienced God in on-going intimacy and worship have?
1. A willingness to wait upon God.
a. To wait on God really is speaking about properly preparing your heart to encounter Him.
b. Isaiah 26:8-9 “Indeed, while following the way of Your judgments, O LORD, We have waited for You eagerly; Your name, even Your memory, is the desire of our souls. 9 At night my soul longs for You, Indeed, my spirit within me seeks You diligently;”
c. When you seek God, you cannot be in a hurry. That may be why so few people attend prayer meetings. They take time. They require that we die to our own agendas and that we get on God’s clock.
2. They were spiritually receptive.
a. SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY – is an openess to the revelation of God on His terms.
b. Something in the folks who the bible speaks of, was OPEN to heaven, something in them urged them God-ward.
c. They took the spiritual awareness that God grants every man and cultivated it.
d. They did something that many folks don’t do.
i. When they felt that inward LONGING toward God, they DID SOMETHING WITH IT!
ii. They began to learn the discipline of spiritual response
iii. See Psalm 27:8, David says in this Psalm, “When You said, "Seek My face," my heart said to You, "Your face, O LORD, I shall seek."
iv. He responded to the call of God to see His presence.
e. What is Spiritual Receptivity?
i. It is NOT a irresistible force that overwhelms us.
ii. Receptivity is not a one-time event, but something that occurs over time, it can be increased by practice or decreased by neglect.
iii. Receptivity is a gift of God that must be recognized, cultivated, and used.
3. Personal Example:
a. This week, I had two dreams that caught my attention. Now I am not one to give much credence or attention to dreams or visions. In fact, I am regularly skeptical when others share theirs with me. I am equally skeptical about some of my own as I am all too aware of how mixed in my flesh can be with the dreams that I might have at night.
i. But in these two dreams, one right after the other (or so it felt), the first one consisted of an enormous translucent dove wrapping its wings around me and holding me in a tender embrace. In my dream I found myself call out over and over again, ‘Thank you Jesus.’
ii. In the second dream, a man, I do not know who it was, came up to me and took my feet with my shoes on, and began to clean my shoes, applying boot polish to them and meticulously cleaning the edges and corners of my shoes. In my dream I wept profusely as he did this.
iii. The content of the dreams is less important at this point than what their effect upon me was that next day. When I got up, I was almost teary eyed, having a sense of awe and wonder about the meaning of these two dreams. So I thanked God for the dreams and asked Him for an insight. I got no insight, but what I got instead was a rather continuous sense of the manifest presence of God nearly all day long. Nearly every praise song I heard on the radio touched me, some to the point of tears.
iv. People looked at me rather strangely as I smiled at Subway when I got my lunch. He looks like he is in another world.”
v. The effect of these two dreams was to offer me an opportunity to increase my spiritual receptivity toward God.
vi. It was as if God were saying to me, “Would you like to spend some time with me?” My answer was, “yes.”
b. Think about Receptors for a moment – like a tuner that focuses in on the desired signal from God and tunes out the distractions and the things that draw us away from God.
i. When you are receptive to God’s desire to manifest His presence to you, you seek Him, you desire Him, your heart cries out for Him.
ii. He is the only solution to your hunger and thirst.
iii. You desire His presence more than you desire what He can give you.
iv. In fact, when we treasure the stuff God can give us more than His presence, when we value the blessings more than Him, then we will find our thanksgiving short in duration and our spirits run dry all too quickly.
v. Psalm 42:1-2 “As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;”
4. They turned away from a self-led, self-oriented life
a. Acts chapter 3, during Peter’s sermon, contains a fascinating statement that encapsulates this important point.
b. Acts 3:19 19 "Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing (to cool again, to cool off, recover from the effects of heat to refresh one's spirit to recover breath, take the air, cool off, revive, refresh one's self) may come from the presence (countenance) of the Lord;
i. Repentance TO God and FROM sin is perquisite to experiencing the presence or countenance of the Lord, and the associated benefit of the experience of a time of refreshing.
ii. We cannot remain in a self-led, self-oriented lifestyle and expect God to manifest His presence to us.
iii. Why:
1. First of all, we won’t want to face Him!
a. If you have ever been in a prayer or worship service where God is manifestly present and you have unconfessed sin your life, you will be very uncomfortable.
2. Second, God will not
c.
5. God is available to you. He is present to you. For you to access, experience and enjoy His presence…requires a response toward Him.
6. It requires a heart-felt SEEKING of Him.
iv. On Wednesday night, we have a prayer and praise meeting, in which we actively seek God’s face BEFORE we pray. I encourage you to join us.
1. This past Wednesday, some of us were sharing how we seem that we “get tears in our eyes” whenever we pray or become aware of God’s manifest presence.
2. As we talked about it, we realized that what is happening is not an emotional boo-hoo, but an alignment of our soul (body, mind, emotions, will) with our spirit where God dwells.
a. n that process, we are experiencing the very pleasure of God in communing with us.
b. I believe that those tears we cannot stop dribbling down our faces are tears of joy that are squeezed out of us by the manifest presence of God Himself.
III. Now, there is one place that exists that God’s presence isn’t available:
a. It is a place called Hell.
b. A place that was prepared for the devil and his angels who prefer to rule apart from God than to serve Him.
c. It is a place where those who reject God’s offer of a relationship will go forever.
d. If someone really doesn’t want to be in God’s presence, then he doesn’t have to. God will not force you to live with Him forever.
e. He will let you send yourself to the only place where God is not.
i. A choice lies before every person. We can choose God or we can reject Him. We can say, “I want the benefits of heaven,” but if we reject God Himself, then we are no different than the unbeliever.
ii. Do you want the presence of God? Do you want to be changed by His very manifest presence?
IV. “Oh God, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has meant too much to me. You have been here and I did not know it. I have been blind to your presence. Open my eyes that I might behold You! In Jesus Name, Amen.”