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Worship - Defining the Heart of Worship
I have wanted to study the topic of worship for a long time now.
And so I am hoping today will be the first of many sermons on this topic.
I am still creating a road map for where I want to go because there is so much to study and so many different avenues to explore.
While I am still mapping out where to go and how I want to approach this, it is important that we begin at the very foundation of what worship is supposed to be for the life of a Christian.
To help us define worship I plan on starting this series with a few sermons that will touch on what worship is and why we worship.
Worship Reality Check
Before we dive in, I want us all to take a moment and do a reality check of our own worship in our walk with God.
It is important to be honest with ourselves in this because we really need to be intentional in worship.
Reality checks are important because they help us to stay focused.
I will give an example.
Recently, Nate Lewis beat me in a weight loss competition.
While I am a gracious loser, we immediately decided that we had to have another competition so I can get a second chance at beating him.
So now I have a routine to help me stay better on track.
Every morning I get on the scale and read those numbers that don’t lie.
That moment is my reality check.
My morning weigh-in lets me know if I did the right thing the day before and it spurs me on to make better choices the rest of the day.
And so lets do a worship reality check - So get a piece of paper and a pen or use your phone and get ready to write or type this out.
I want you to think for a minute about how you worship God in your life.
The two questions that I want you to answer are as follows.
How do you worship God in your own life?
How much time do you devote to this?
(I pray and read my Bible nearly every day for about 20 minutes to an hour.
I sing in church and sometimes I sing at home when I have time or think to do so.
)
Now don’t worry, we are not going to share this or start a contest except for maybe Nate and myself.
There is no right or wrong answer here.
This is just being honest with ourselves.
So we are all going to do this for just a moment.
(wait a couple minutes)
Okay - now that you have done that, I want you to tuck that away safely.
The point of this exercise is not to make you feel guilty.
You will never hit a final mark when it comes to worshiping God because God’s glory and worth is beyond measure.
There is no end.
This is why we are going to have an eternity to make up for lost time.
The point of this exercise is to make sure that we are really being intentional in our worship life, because as we learn about worship we are going to see why this is really the most important thing that we do.
It is our highest calling.
So save that note because I want you to go back and revisit it and continue to be honest with yourself.
Do a reality check every few days.
Keep it on the forefront of your mind.
What is worship?
So what is worship?
Let me first give a brief definition of worship.
Worship is our awed response and expressed reverence and adoration to God.
There are many Bible dictionaries with slightly different ways of defining it, but they all basically define worship in these terms.
Worship is our awed response and expressed reverence and adoration to God.
But that definition is not complete.
I like how the Evangelical Bible Dictionary puts it:
One may always consult Webster’s Dictionary for the precise meaning of worship (adore, idolize, esteem worthy, reverence, homage, etc.).
Yet truly defining worship proves more difficult because it is both an attitude and an act.
And so to really define worship we are dealing with the attitude and posture of our heart in addition to our acts of singing, raising our hands, or dancing.
It is something that we do that expresses inner emotions and thought.
I chose today’s text because I think it so perfectly embodies what worship is really about.
Psalm 95:6–7 (ESV)
Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
I want to look deeper at this passage and use 3 statements as our guide.
We worship because we are invited to worship.
We worship because the LORD is our God.
We worship because we are His people.
We Worship Because We Are Invited
The psalmist says “Oh Come, let us worship and bow down”.
This call to come is not merely saying, come here.
It is much stronger that that.
One Commentator I read wrote this:
The word here rendered “come” is not the same which is used in ver. 1.
Its literal meaning is come, and it is an earnest exhortation to come and worship.
It is not a particle merely calling attention to a subject, but it is an exhortation to approach—to enter—to engage in a thing.
We are invited to come and engage in and enter into worship and bowing down.
Now for a moment, think back to your answer on how you worship God.
Did any of you write bow down?
If you did that is great!
But I did not.
I put down things like pray, sing, and spend time in God’s word.
When I first thought about this and was honest with myself, my definition of worship was a list of what to do and the physical act, but the spirit of worship or my posture was void in my definition.
And I believe that we, to our detriment, often view worship as just an act.
We come to the church and we sing songs or listen to a sermon.
We go to prayer meetings and pray.
And when we view worship as just an action we lose sight of the state or our heart and the reason for our awed response and adoration.
We often treat worship in church and our own life as a minor thing because we often forget we can only worship by the power and invitation of God.
When we begin to understand that we are allowed and made able to worship God, we will see that our hearts begin to become humbled.
We will approach our worship to God with more reverence and sincerity the more we grow in the realization we can worship only because we are called and invited by God.
The deeper and more real our realization of this is, the more we will have a hearts that bow.
Now something interesting to note here in the Psalm.
We are called to worship and bow down, and to kneel before the Lord our maker.
These three actions - all point to the same thing.
When we look to the very definition of the word worship, used in the Bible we are pointed toward not just an action but a state of the heart.
The definition of the word for worship in the Hebrew is as follows.
חָוָה (ḥāwâ).
vb. to bow down, worship.
Refers to bowing down in an act of worship, reverence, or respect.
And if you look to the Greek in the NT it is the same.
προσκυνέω (proskyneō).
vb. to bow down, worship.
To bow down before a human as a sign of respect or before a divine figure as an act of worship.
This is so significant and important for us to remember because in the Bible you can’t separate worship from bowing.
At the very core of the definition of worship and all actions of worship is to bow down.
But of course, you can’t kneel down and dance at the same time.
And so when you see the word worship in the Bible it is more about the state of someone’s heart rather than the act of their expression of worship.
Their hearts are bowed.
They are prostrate before God.
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