“What does worship mean to me?"

“If Worship Is The Treasure Of Heaven, What Does Worship Mean To Me?”

Psalm 95

February 25, 2001

Introduction: There is a story in the Talmud about a wise and pious rabbi whose name was Akiba. He had taken a trip to a strange country where mystery still dwelt. With him he took his three possessions – a donkey, a rooster, and a lamp. When he stopped at a village for lodging, the people would not receive him; instead they drove him out and he was forced to spend the night in the forest. Being the holy and pious man he was, he took his pains with ease and said, “All that God does is done well.”
So he found a tree under which to sleep, lit his lamp and prepared to study the Torah before retiring. But a fierce wind blew out the light, forcing him to go to sleep early. Later that night, wild animals came through and chased away his rooster. Still later, thieves sneaked into his campsite and stole his donkey. But in each case, Rabbi Akiba said, “All that God does is done well.”
The next morning he arose and went back to the village. There he discovered that soldiers had come and killed everyone in the village. Had he been permitted to stay there, he too would have died. He learned also that the soldiers had traveled through the same part of the forest where he had slept. Had they seen his lamp or heard his rooster crow or his donkey bray, again, he would have been killed. Thinking on all these things, he replied as he always did: “All that God does is done well.”
Rabbi Akiba knew something about the definition of worship that we want to nail down this morning.
Ben Patterson, in his good book, Waiting, tells another story about a lady named Gwen. Her “eyes twinkled as she told the story. The year she graduated, she was the youngest woman ever to finish medical college in the British Isles. When she arrived at the mission station in northern India, she felt as if she had finally come home. All she had waited for – all the hard work, all the years in school, all she had pointed toward since she was a girl had come to fruition at last. No more waiting! Now Gwen could begin her life’s work.
As she walked across the grounds of the mission station, her heart overflowed with thanksgiving. She prayed, ‘Thank you, Lord, for bringing me to the place where I will do my life’s work.’
When God spoke back, she was not as surprised that He spoke as she was by what He said. Said God, “If I tell you to move tomorrow, you’ll move!’
It wasn’t long before He did, and she did. That was more than forty astonishingly productive and adventure-filled years ago. Gwen’s lived all over the world. The last time I talked to her she was still waiting to come home.”
The missionary doctor discovered something about the definition of worship that we want to nail down this morning.
So, what is worship? We saw last week two characteristics of worship. It is the sole privilege of those who possess eternal life. If we haven’t been saved, we cannot be worshipers of God. We don’t have the capacity in our spirits to worship Him, for those ‘who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’ Worship is the sole privilege of those who possess eternal life. And secondly, worship is the treasure of heaven. Earth and earth’s population have many treasures; heaven treasures the worship of sinners saved by grace. In the best way we know how, we have to imagine the eternal God spending His time actively seeking those who will worship Him. He has a record of going to great lengths to find worshipers –
from Adam and Eve in the garden after their sin
to the fleeing Jonah on a ship to Tarshish
to the Pharisee Saul bent on destroying the new church
to the Philippian jailer ready to fall on his sword
and even to Adriana.
Adriana is a co-worker of our own Jenn Dake. Jenn went from here after graduating from the university to take up ministry in Nashville at a place called Rocketown. When money got tight, she went to work waiting tables in a bar. The owner of the bar, a man of great faith, reminded Jenn that Jesus had said that it was the sick who needed a doctor, and every night his restaurant was filled with those in need.
As Jenn prayed the prayer of Jabez found in I Chron. 4:10, “Now Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, ‘Oh that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my border, and that Your hand might be with me…’”, and as she especially highlighted that part about ‘enlarge my border’, God began to expand her focus.
She writes in a letter this past week, “My mission field soon became more than the expanse of Rocketown. It now included my co-workers at the bar. I guess it always should have, but the Lord chose to show me with the heat of His Holy Spirit blazing through the non-Christians at work that He is very much present. He was in the bars when He walked the earth and He would start His revival among the sick again.
Enter Adriana, my co-worker, who came up to me one day and very clearly said, ‘Jennifer, I want to know Jesus. I know all the stories and the Scriptures, but I want to know Jesus, because nothing else matters if I don’t know Him.’”
Over the next few months, Adriana told Jenn that she is a God-send to her, and that Jenn has been an encouragement to her as she has been trying to find out what would fill her life.
God found another worshiper, and the living water flooded over Adriana’s dry and barren soul.
So, just what is worship? Beyond being the treasure of heaven and the sole privilege of the redeemed, just what is it?
The Scriptures become our guidebook, and among all the various passages that we could turn to, let us turn to Psalm 95. Worship is defined for us in Psalm 95. If we can understand what it is and what it isn’t, then we can reap its many, exquisite benefits. All that troubles us, all that frustrates us, all that angers and pains us, all that belittles and demeans us, all that frightens us and makes us feel inadequate… all these things fade away in the experience of worship. And better than that, God will be pleased even as we reap worship’s marvelous benefits.
If you have found Psalm 95, let’s read it together.
O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord, let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving, let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods, in whose hand are the depths of the earth, the peaks of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for it was He who made it, and His hands formed the dry land.
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.
Today, if you would hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
As in the day of Massah in the wilderness,
When your fathers tested Me,
They tried Me, though they had seen My work.
For forty years I loathed that generation,
And said they are a people who err in their heart,
And they do not know My ways.
Therefore I swore in My anger,
Truly they shall not enter into My rest.”
Now as we seek this morning to define worship, we see the Psalmist moving us in that direction with his three-part Hebrew song. Verses 1-5 show us worship in celebration. Verses 6-7a show us worship in contemplation. And verses 7b-11 show us worship in submission. From seeing worship in these three contexts, we can construct our definition.
Let’s begin in the middle, since this is where we find the Hebrew word for worship that gives us a starting point for our definition. Worship in contemplation gives us three expressions, one right after the other, that all point to a definition of worship. “Let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.”
The Hebrew term here for ‘worship’ (“Let us worship…”) literally means ‘to prostrate oneself.’ To be prostrate means to be flat, prone, stretched out on the floor or ground. The terms ‘bow down’ and ‘kneel’ suggest other forms of posture, along with prostrate, that give us insight into the real meaning of worship. From these images related to posture, we could say that worship is ‘getting down low’ before our God.
Going a step further, then we have to ask, what does ‘getting down low’ mean? To kneel, to bow down, conveys a message. To worship, to be stretched out flat as low as we can go communicates something. The message we communicate is honor. Our posture is saying we willingly pay homage to our God. The image of our posture projects the idea of our humility toward the object of our worship. All that we are and all that we represent is laid out in vulnerability toward the One we worship.
Friends, when we set out to worship God, when we show honor, pay homage, and express humility… we communicate two very important ideas. When we worship, what we are doing is accepting our place in God’s will AND we are acknowledging God’s place in our lives. I accept my place as humble before the awesome God of Creation, and I acknowledge His place over every dimension of my life.
Isn’t that what the woman at the well did? As she lowered her water jar to leave it at the well (for the text of John 4 tells us that she left her water jar at the well), she no doubt bowed down, for she recognized she was in the presence of the Messiah, the One Who already knew everything about her. She bowed before Him, and then rushed off to bring others to this One at the well. She accepted her place as a sinner newly saved by grace, and she acknowledged His place over her as One worthy of the same kind of worship from all of the people in her town. So off she ran to spread the word.
Now, the psalmist has not left us ignorant of Who the object of our worship is to be. He is the One with the names Lord, Rock of our Salvation, Great God, Great King above all gods, Lord our Maker, and our God. Lord says He is the ever present one, the great I AM. Rock of our salvation says He is the deliverer from appetites, the solver of problems, the rescuer from sins, the overcomer of obstacles, the supplier of thirst-quenchers, the source of solid, stable security.
Great God, Great King above all gods, says that there are none superior and none who compares. Though there are many pretenders, He and He alone is the supreme authority in our world. Lord our Maker says He is the creator, the holder of seas and the shaper of worlds. He is the flinger of stars, the establisher of boundaries, the Governor of light that overlooks nothing in the universe He has made. Our God says He is the covenant God Who has made a commitment to us. He is constant, He is sufficient, and best of all, He cares.
The Psalmist has painted quite a picture in only 7 verses! And when we see God as He is, it is not hard to worship; to accept our place before Him and acknowledge His place over us. Fredrick Buechner said it this way: “You can think of God as a great cosmic bully… if you want, but you can also think of Him as a great cosmic artist, a singer, say, of such power and magnificence and so caught up in the incandescence of His own art that He never notices that He has long since ruptured the eardrums of His listeners and reduced them to quivering pulp.”
When we want to think about worshiping God, we want to get down low before Him, accepting our place before Him and acknowledging Him over us. The missionary doctor in India by the name of Gwen accepted her place before her Lord. When He said, “It’s time to move,” she packed her bags. The Rabbi Akiba in the Talmud acknowledged God as the One over him. “All that God does is done well.”
And remember the worshiper Job? He tells us in chapter one of his book that Sabean marauders killed his servants and stole his oxen and his donkeys. He tells us it was lightning that killed his sheep and his shepherds. He writes that it was Chaldean raiders who put his servants to the sword and stole his camels. He also says that it was a mighty wind that destroyed his sons and daughters.
But at the end of all that tragedy, Job says, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away.” El Shaddai, the Almighty, was overseeing the Sabeans, the lightning, the Chaldeans, and the mighty wind that took these things away. Nothing could happen apart from His decree. Nothing.
Job, Akiba, Gwen, and countless others have worshiped our great God. They accepted their place in humility before Him and they acknowledged God’s place in submission to Him.
Now, what does this mean to us? What is it that I want you to be sure and understand this morning?
Take a look at this real picture. This is the result of poor communication. The chief airplane washer at his company's airplane hangar hooked a high-pressure hose up to the soap suds machine and turned the machine "on". Just then he received an emergency call and had to leave work to go home. As he departed for home, he yelled to Don, his assistant, "Don, turn it off." Assistant Don thought he heard, "Don't turn it off." He shrugged, and left the area right after his boss.
Now, I know we didn’t spend any time looking at the first and third parts of our psalm, worship in celebration and worship in submission; perhaps on another time…
But the psalm did help us with what we needed in terms of a definition, and the implications of that definition for us are huge!
If accepting our place before Him and acknowledging His place over us is what worship is, then….
Worship is a dangerous thing. John Moore shared with me this week this quote from Annie Dillard. “Worship is dangerous… it is a direct engagement with ultimate reality: God. Genuine worship is a response to God and what He has done; in it we make ourselves vulnerable to the story of Israel and Jesus. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”
If we would be serious about worship, about getting down low before God, about accepting our place before Him and acknowledging His place over us, then we have to go when He says, “Go.” We go to dangerous, primitive places where we will bury our babies. We go to far away places where our brothers and sisters are left to bury our parents.
We have to say, in the face and experience of all sorts of tragedies, “All that God does is done well.” We will have to acknowledge that a hateful co-worker is in our space because of the sovereignty of the God Who loves him. We will have to sign on to huge tasks that don’t allow us to see beyond the few steps in the light of our small perspective.
Real worship, friends, is a dangerous thing.
If accepting our place before Him and acknowledging His place over us is what worship is, then….
Worship calls us to sacrifice. We may have to get over our personal preferences for music on a Sunday morning here in the sanctuary. A July 12, 1999, article in Christianity Today was titled, “The Triumph of the Praise Songs: How Guitars Beat Out the Organ in the Worship Wars.” (If there was ever an oxymoron, it should be ‘worship wars.’) The article states, “Conflicts over worship in general and music in particular have erupted in churches of every denomination… The contemporary proliferation of different worship and music styles may well be the next century’s test of our commitment to Christian unity.” Someone in the know has recently estimated that one church a week splits over worship and worship styles.
One reason for sacrifice, for accepting our place before God and acknowledging His place over us, is the influence of our culture. Our culture says, evaluate everything by asking, “Do I like it?” and “What’s in it for me?” Bob Kauflin comments, “If worship exists merely to cater to our desires and preferences, we will give more weight to whether we like the worship style than whether we encounter God in the services. The first is optional; the second is not.” Our goal in worship is to please God, not ourselves.
If worship is about God and for God, then what musical style does He like best? Who among us will be in shock when we get to heaven and find out God is, in fact, a huge fan of Country Western worship music? Or was God unhappy with the music of 16th century Europe? I wonder if He is unhappy with worship built on the foundation of a Javanese Gamelan orchestra? Don Hustad (True Worship: Reclaiming the Wonder and Majesty) has written, “We must be sure that the music we use for worship doesn’t become the music we worship.”
Jesus told the woman at the well that a time was coming when worship of the Father would take place neither on Mt. Gerizim nor in Jerusalem. The Lord Jesus was telling this woman at the very threshold of her new life in Christ that worship is not so much about places and forms.
Worship is about sacrificing my interests and my preferences for the sake of God and His work in the world through the church. How sad that the people of the church of God would rather split over forms and styles of music and worship than project a united front to their lost community! Our goal here in our worship music is to blend all kinds and all forms and all styles of music to exalt God, to acknowledge His place over us as our Lord.
It’s my personal opinion that churches with different kinds of services do their parishioners a disservice. The traditionalists go to the traditional service and have to make no sacrifices. The preferers of contemporary music go to the contemporary service and have to make no sacrifices. And though the church doesn’t split, it is divided along lines of worship forms that God never intended.
So, friends, worship, which is a dangerous thing, calls us to sacrifice. Seeking to accept my place before God and acknowledge His place over me means that I don’t come to church to worship with the spirit, “What’s in this for me today?” “If I don’t like the soloist… if I don’t like the worship leader’s selection of music… if I don’t like the praise band… then I’m outta here.”
Cultures change, styles change, traditions change, times change. God remains the same. That is why worship cannot be limited to forms, styles, and personal choices.
Friends, worship is not about me and my preferences; worship is not about you and your choices. Worship is about God and our accepting our place before Him and acknowledging His place over us.
Well, we’ll continue our look into the issue of worship in the weeks to follow. For this week, as we seek to worship God, let’s not be afraid of the dangers of submitting ourselves to the Master. As we do what He calls us to do, perhaps in fear and trembling, there will be adventure and effectiveness and productivity for the kingdom’s sake, as Gwen found out. And let’s not be afraid of making the sacrifices that He calls us to, for we all know how desperately we need to be drawn out of our selves, our little boxes, our familiar comfort zones.
Worship is the treasure of heaven, and we need to be about the business of making that our priority.


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