God's Voice in Worship

I have told you that the ways to hear God’s voice is through worship, prayer and His Word. Today and tonight we will look at worship and hearing God’s voice in worship. More importantly, we will see what hinders us from hearing God’s voice in worship. But we must start off by defining what is worship. Most of us think of worship as the music that we listen too that is christian in nature. This is a very singular look at worship. The best definition of worship I found was from Warren Weirsbe...

For worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose -- and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.

Notice how Warren states that it is the chief remedy for our self-centeredness. Worship is meant to take us out of the picture and put all the adoration on God. The one worthy of our praise. The verse I am about to put up there is one that we normally state for doing a good job but I want you to look at it with eyes of worship.

Colossians 3:23 CSB

Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people,

Our worship is not the songs we sing, the service we have here at church, the fellowship we have together…it is all that and your very actions through out the day. It is the submission of everything you do and say. Your life is to be a worship to the Lord. And guess what you can not fake it. Our verse for this 2 part sermon is this

1 Samuel 16:7 CSB

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or his stature because I have rejected him. Humans do not see what the Lord sees, for humans see what is visible, but the Lord sees the heart.”

Meaning do not come in here raising holy hands to the Lord and then raising a middle finger to your brother cause he made you mad. The Lord sees your heart.

Do not come in here praising God’s name with your voice, then turn around and raise curse words to your brother with that same voice. The Lord sees your heart.

Do not come in here partaking of the Lord’s supper and not want to help the ones that don’t have bread to eat or water to drink. The Lord sees your heart.

Robert Webber wrote a book and coined the statement

Worship is a verb!

When I come to Church and begin to worship God, it is just a continuation of the worship that I do when I am not at Church. The same applies to you when you come to Church. Our worship of God does not start at Church, but at home, on our jobs and wherever else we may be.

Matthew 15:17–19 CSB

“Don’t you realize that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is eliminated? But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a person. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander.

This is a good bases on what worship is and what it isn’t. So today and tonight, we will look at the hindrances that stop us from hearing God’s voice in worship. A fellow pastor by the name Rodney Johnson once stated that there was 5 hindrances in worship that stops us from hearing God’s voice and they all deal with selfishness and how we view worship.

5 Hindrances in Worship

1. Intellectualism

2. Idealism

3. Imperialism

4. Isolationism

5. Institutionalism

You will be happy to know, I will not go through all 5 today. I will hit just a couple today and finish the rest tonight.

The first thing we must understand is that our enemy, Satan, does not want us worshipping God and will do whatever he can to hinder that true, heartfelt worship. We know from Scripture that Satan is very crafty and sneaky and his ways of doing things are so quiet that if we are not careful, we will totally miss it when he is doing his thing. This is how it is with the hindrances to our worship. The things that hinder our worship are some of the very things we believe we need in order to worship God. That is how sneaky and crafty our enemy is, he makes us believe we need those things that are actually hindering us.

When we are in worship service, we look at what is happening around us and think it is true worship, but God looks at the heart of those who are worshipping him and He knows what is happening. As we talk about these hindrances, I am referring to the attitude of the person in most cases versus the person themselves. For example, the first one we will look at deals with intellectualism. There are people out there who are very smart and considers themselves an intellectual, but that does not mean that they approach worship as an intellectual. There are also people out there whose intelligence equals that of a box of fruity pebbles and their approach to worship can be described as one of intellectualism. So keep that in mind as we work our way through these.

5 Hindrances in Worship

1. Intellectualism

Intellectualism is the doctrine that knowledge comes from pure reason without any aid from our senses. This doctrine is also known as rationalism. The person who worships with an attitude of an intellectual can find it difficult to worship God because there is always a rational explanation for why things happen. If there is a rational reason as to why things happen then it would appear that those things would have happened whether someone prayed or not. All of us act out on some level or with some issues this doctrine of intellectualism. This is why we are selective as to what we will take to God and what credit we will give God for the things happening in our lives. The intellectual person takes the intended emotional and spiritual experience of worship and turns it into a mental exercise as they try to determine what is happening and the “whys” behind it. They can often be found shaking their heads at the emotional experience of others because in their minds this is not a rational behavior. For this individual, everything is intellectualized and must have a rational meaning. Everything is broken down, analyzed, evaluated and reconsidered: the music, the sermon, how offering is done, everything. This worshipper evaluates the purpose, process and implications involved in every aspect of worship and those things that are deemed unimportant, inappropriate (by their measurement of appropriateness), and inconsistent with logical thinking are often ignored or explained away.

If you rationalize away the things that God is doing in your life, then you will never have a real reason to enter into true worship. If you intellectualize your faith, built on certain truths and aspects of God’s word that “makes sense” to you, you will always have a reason to believe that although God is “watching over you” the things that are happening in your life are the results of your own actions.

To this I say, why even pray? If your prayers are for naught because whatever “will be will be”, then why pray.

Isaiah 65:24 CSB

Even before they call, I will answer; while they are still speaking, I will hear.

God, our Father, has promised that because of His love for us, while we are yet speaking the desires out of our mouths, He will hear and listen. But look at this, God said that before we even call on His name, He has already answered our prayer because He knows what we need. We cannot rationalize why and what God is doing in our lives, but we can give Him praise and thanks for doing it. If our worship is dependent upon our intelligence and our ability to rationalize what is happening around us, we will miss the intimacy that God wants to have with us. Let’s move on to the second hindrance.

Hindrances in Worship

1. Intellectualism

2. Idealism

Now this one will possibly step on some of our toes. You see, idealism hinders true worship because it places the “idea” that true worship can only take place when it includes that which is familiar to our own cultural experience and is only right when it is based on the right formula – based on years of tradition. A person who is committed to idealism bases his or her worship almost completely on the cultural acceptance, their personal experience and the traditions that they are familiar with. I cannot tell you the number of people whom I have encountered that have told me that unless worship takes place a certain way, it is not true worship. You see, there must be some hands lifted up. There must be some shouting, dancing, yelling, crying, bowing, jumping, etc, etc, etc for real worship to take place. If you walked into a Catholic Church, real worship could be described as not having any shouting, dancing, yelling, crying, bowing or jumping. Real worship in those services could be the silence and the way in which they carry out their rituals. What you need to understand is that there are many Christians who believe that unless worship takes place the way it did when they were being taught how to worship, it is not real or true worship. There are many ministers who will tell you that they have the formula for what true worship is and if it is not being done the way their church does it, it is not true worship. While intellectualism allows for little or no expression of experience, this approach to worship to worship is based entirely on experience. You can easily identify someone with this mindset because you will hear them say things like: “We never did that way at my old Church” or “That’s not how it should be done.” When you hear these types of comments, someone is probably operating with an attitude of idealism when it comes to worship. Now here is the problem. The dangers of having a set program and a predetermined flow of “things to do”, is that the Holy Spirit if often programmed right out of the service. Remember, the Holy Spirit does what He wants to do when He is given access and sometimes what He wants to do does not follow our planned program. For this reason we must be sensitive to the move of the Spirit during our services. Idealism is also at work in the hearts of those who see the use of contemporary forms as the true test of real worship. There are a lot of old established Churches who refuse to have any type of contemporary music in their Church as they believe that only hymns can be part of a “real” worship service. Again, true worship is linked to a previously perceived idea of programming and not the working or presence of the Holy Spirit. Idealism can be a double-edged sword with one side being the commitment to tradition for the sake of tradition and the other side being the commitment to being contemporary for the sake of being relevant to what is needed by our “modern” Christians. In both cases, the Holy Spirit is left out in the cold.

Matthew 23:23–25 CSB

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, and yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These things should have been done without neglecting the others. Blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but gulp down a camel! “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

When you read these verses, you find that Jesus does not criticize the observance of the things of the law, but he does criticize the hypocrisy often involved. The Pharisees were very legalistic in how they kept the Law. They kept the Law externally to gain merit before God while breaking them inwardly. They were following the letter of the Law while ignoring its spirit. This is the same thing that those who are idealistic in their approach to worship. They will only define worship as the outward expression that is done in a certain format following an established program. Any deviation from the established program is met with harsh criticism and condemned. In reality, a person is considered to be truly worshipping God if they follow the program even if their hearts are far from God. This is what frustrated Jesus with the Pharisees.

I will conclude here for today, but tonight we will look at the last three hindrances. The one thing I want you to take away as you go about your day, worship is not just a Sunday Morning ritual, it has to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. We don’t hear God’s voice in worship is because we living in the first two hindrances.