True Worship isn't Boring
Well, praise Jesus today, everyone. I want to speak about
what it means to really worship God because growing up in church, I found
worship music and the worship time to be incredibly boring and it turned me off
to God because I imagined worship of God as extremely boring, something that
old people do. After all, I was into fast-paced punk rock, hardcore music, and
that is the kind of music that I wanted to listen to. So if I was going to
listen to something and get amped up, it wasn't going to be in church. It was
going to be at the punk rock show. So for me, all my life from when I was a
kid, the hour-long or 30-minute-long so-called worship set in church bored me
out of my mind. And the only reason that I would sing at all is because my
parents wanted me to do it.
Now in my personal life, I like to sing. I'm not really a
good singer, but I enjoy it. And throughout times in my life, i've liked to
sing songs to the Lord that were much more genuine, but I always felt disingenuine
in church when they're trying to get you to do worship as they say, do worship.
This is the time that we're going to do corporate worship or corporal worship,
worshiping as the body. But they have this worship set of 12 songs and you go
in there and it's 100 or 1,000 people, and the bass music is so loud and the
guitars are so loud, of course you can't hear anyone else singing except just
the people on stage. It's ridiculous. But this is what the church has idolized
as worship. They go back through the scriptures and they find the scriptures
that talk about worship and talk about corporate worship and they've made this
idea of worshiping together under one roof as a church. But that is not true
worship. I remember even as a kid going to Hume Lake, maybe some of you are
from California and you went to that camp that I went to as well. There would
be around 1,000 high school students at this camp and they would be playing a
worship set and they would bring in sort of popular worship bands and popular speakers.
And as a kid I kind of thought that was cool, but even so, it wasn't true
worship.
Now that I really love Jesus and I have an intimate
relationship with Him, I realize something about worship and that is, well
number one, it doesn't have anything to do with music or a stage or playing
guitar or your style, but it comes from knowing God and loving Him in the
bottom of your heart. And when you look through the Bible of other people that
knew God and they were working in this relationship with God, when they
worshipped Him, it wasn't in a setting with a group of other people. A lot of
times it was just alone in the wilderness. Abraham worshipped God below the
stars and he praised God and God said, I'm going to make you a great nation.
I'm going to come through your offspring. And he gave Abraham this covenant.
And Abraham worshipped God. So what does it mean that he worshipped God? He was
in awe of God. He knelt before Him knowing that He was King of Kings and Lord
of Lords. He worshipped God because God is awesome and he didn't worship God
because a pastor told him to or it was just the one hour worship set and now he
has to make it through six songs of so-called worship. But the sort of worship
that Abraham did came from his heart because he was in complete awe of the
majesty of God.
Heaven is full of the worship of God. When people have an
NDE, a near-death experience, and they get to see a little bit of heaven, they
always come back talking about how people worship God in heaven. They're in awe
of God. They're not being forced to worship. It's not that God is saying, sit
down and worship me. We're going to do a 12-song set of worship and Joe is
going to play the piano and Billy is going to strum the guitar. People are in
awe of God. And the power of God and His love are so overwhelming that
naturally you worship Him because that is your response to His awesomeness and
His greatness and His power. Why would you worship God if you don't know Him,
if you're being forced to?
People on earth worship what they know. They worship what
sounds good, what looks good. That's why most people worship celebrities. They
think celebrities are very cool, they're popular, they have money, and so a lot
of people will bow down and worship their celebrity or their sport or their
hobby, their athlete. They worship those people because that's what they can
see. It's the flesh and blood that they can see. But why would you worship
something or someone that you can't see, that you're not impressed with? Why
would you worship something just because someone says you ought to do this for
one hour a day? That is how religion is made. And that is how Satan makes God
and heaven and things that are eternal and awesome seem incredibly boring and
lame.
To most Christians, God is so distant and heaven is just
like this area that is just told about in child stories so it probably doesn't
really exist anyway. And it doesn't seem reasonable to worship God to them. In
fact, there's people out there that even question if they should pray to Jesus
or if they should worship Him. If you knew who Jesus was, if He was really the
King of your heart, if you had an intimate relationship with Him, you couldn't
help but worship Him because the love that is spilling out of your heart for
Him would be the natural response.
Isaac and Jacob worshipped God. Jacob worshipped God when
he had that vision for the first time. He lay his head down on a rock and at
that place he saw angels descending and ascending on a ladder. And he
worshipped God and he said, God must be in this place. And he built, I think, a
little monument in that area saying that this must be the portal to heaven. And
he worshipped God there, not because he was told to, not because it was the one
hour of due worship time, but because that was the natural response to him
having a vision of heaven. He praised God, he worshipped God, he said, God must
be real. He must be the one that can lead me and guide me. Throughout
scripture, all of the prophets, all of the men of God who experienced God, they
worshipped Him out of just what came out of their heart. When they realized the
greatness of God and the wonder of God and the power of God and everything that
He had created, they would fall down and worship Him.
We need to get to know who Jesus really is. A lot of you
are not worshipping the Lord or praising Him because you don't know who He is.
You've been worshipping people your whole life. Maybe you've been worshipping
money or you've been worshipping security. You've been worshipping things that you
can see, touch and physically smell. But you're not worshipping God because you
don't have an intimate relationship with Him in your soul. You don't have real
passion for Him. Maybe the only sort of worship you've ever known is that false
worship that's in church. They say the stage is the altar and they pretend that
they're worshipping God by lifting their hands and just offering God lip
service. But they don't really know God in their heart. It's obvious that they
don't really love God because if you're only supposedly worshipping Him for one
hour and then you're leaving the church and you're going back to abusing your
wife or looking at pornography or going back to drugs and alcohol or going back
to just living life for yourself without vision from God, obviously you're not
really worshipping God with your life.
We know what the Apostle Paul wrote about worship of God.
It has to be with your mind being renewed, your heart being renewed. Your
sacrifice, your whole life brought before God is a living sacrifice and this is
your reasonable act of service, or your reasonable act of worship. If we're
really worshipping God, it's with our whole life, laying down our life for Him.
You know there's people that talk about, they think that they're willing to die
for Jesus. Like how Peter, remember how he said, even if everyone turns on you
Lord, I will die for you. And people put the situation through their mind of
being in an active shooter situation where someone comes in and they say, if
you're a Christian I'm going to shoot you in the head. And a lot of Christians,
they wonder to themselves, would I be the one that professes to be a Christian?
Would I profess Jesus? Would I say, yes I'm a Christian, even if it meant my
life. And a lot of you would say that you would. A lot of you would say that
you would give your life for Jesus Christ. I was checking to see if this man
was going to interact with me but it looks like he's moving on. But the point
is, a lot of Christians would, in a situation that came up, they would give
their life for the Lord, they would stand up for Jesus, but they're not willing
to live for Jesus every single day. Peter thought that he would die for Jesus,
but because he wasn't filled with the Holy Spirit, when that moment came, he
denied Jesus. And a lot of us think that we would not deny Jesus in that
situation that we're put in, that all of a sudden there's some kind of shooter
or someone saying that they're going to kill us for our faith. We would like to
think that we would stand up for Jesus in that moment, but are you sure that
you would really stand up for Jesus in that moment without being a coward, if
on your day to day life you're not living for Jesus? It's one thing to say that
you can die for Him in the future, but what about living for Him in the moment,
every single day? Instead of in the moment living for yourself, what about in
the moment living for Jesus every second of your day? That is what a lot of
Christians are overlooking, because they think that worship is only segmented to
an hour on Sunday, or it's this time during Bible study that they do in the
evening. But Jesus has not come into their heart and into their life where
they're constantly praying. They haven't been renewed in their mind so that
they can worship Jesus in spirit and in truth. They have this religion that's
segmented from their natural life, so that in their natural life they're doing
their mundane business, whatever their work is they do during the day, they've
segmented that to be for their mundane work. But then apart from that, then
they have their Christian life on the side where they do worship and they
supposedly give an offering to God.
But we have to figure out how to have the joy of Jesus in
our heart all the time, and be ready to serve Him and worship Him all the time.
So if this is not coming natural to you, because after all it is not natural
that we are born again, it has to be supernatural that we are born again, I
want to encourage you to pray and to receive the Holy Spirit, so that you can be
born again, that you can have a new heart, a new mind, and be able to worship
the Lord all the time, that you can truly worship Him, not as in this ritual in
church, or this ceremony time, get rid of the false ceremonies, but receive the
truth of Jesus Christ, so that you can really have His love in your heart, and
then be able to worship Him in spirit and in truth. The Lord seeks such
worshipers who will worship Him all the time in spirit and in truth.
He's not looking for someone to just die for Him, you know,
three years in the future, or 50 years in the future. He's looking for someone
who will live for Him today, because they have died to the flesh. You need to
die to the flesh today, so that you can live for Him today, and whatever day
you physically die in the future, you will be able to stand for Jesus in that
moment, whether you are a martyr, or you're just someone standing up for the
truth to the end of your life. So, I want to pray for those of you that really
want to worship the Lord, and not the false sort of worship that happens in
church, but the real sort of worship that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had for the
Lord, that the prophets had, such as Elijah and Elisha, and the same sort of
worship that the early apostles had, when they were having a connection with
Jesus, and realizing that He was the Messiah, the Savior of the world. Those
guys worshipped God, not because they were told to, not because they were told
to have a feeling, but because they were receiving this regeneration and this
new covenant into their souls. They were being changed from the inside out. So,
I want to pray for those of you that want that regeneration, that want to be
made new, so that you can truly worship, and offer God your worship, and not
men any longer.
“ So, Lord Jesus, I pray for the body of Christ, for those
men and women who really want to serve you, and to receive your Holy Spirit. I
pray that people would be born again, that they would be born of the Spirit, so
that they can worship you in Spirit and in truth, and honor you with their
life. I pray that people will lay down their lives, that they can be used by
the Spirit of God, that they wouldn't be manipulated and controlled by the
devil any longer, but that they would have a backbone to stand in the truth, and
to worship the one true living God alone. So, I pray that your children would
truly repent of sins, to be unshackled from the bonds of Satan, and that they
would stand in the newness of life with you, and pick up their cross daily, and
follow you. I pray that we will have a passion to know you, that we will have
the joy of the Lord in our heart, that we will desire to stretch out our hand
and hold your hand, and be led along on the straight and narrow path of life
with you, Lord Jesus. I pray that we wouldn't look to the left or the right, or
worry about what other people are doing, but that we would focus on our own
walk with you, and that we would daily worship you and please you, that we
could be well pleasing to God in every aspect of our life. In your name I pray,
Lord Jesus. Amen.”
