Worship

I listened to a sermon by Jeff Schlenz today. He is a pastor of Calvary Chapel DC Metro in Washington DC. It's a church my good friends go to, and I went there when I visited them.

Pastor Jeff is an amazing teacher and God always challenges me through him. He spent 4 Sundays talking about worship. This is what he talked about the first 15 minutes of the first Sunday.

What is worship?

Is worship something you came to consume or to produce?

Did you evaluate the worship or did you participate in the worship?

Is worship something you came to observe or is worship something you came to enact?

Is worship just the musical portion of gathering? It must be more than that, right?

When Satan was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, he said “All this I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me.”… - Matthew 4:9

Satan wasn't talking about singing here, was he? 

Worship must be an attitude 

before it ever becomes an action!

Mechanics – what is worship, why those songs, how loud, how soft, how long, hands raised…

What's the heart behind it though?

Both are necessary – a right heart AND right actions! But before we dig into the mechanics of worhsip, we need to have a right heart. 

Why + how do we worship?

"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." - John 4:23-24

True worshippers – one group. Their heart is in the right place about worshipping God. 

Are we doing what we do for our own purposes, to accomplish our own goals – or are we doing what we do completely for Him?
We can use God/worship as a tool to achieve our own emotional objectives! 

God had given explicit instructions on how He was to be worshipped. We have an obligation to obey God. We often do what we want to do instead of having a heart that is set on serving + obeying God. Both have to be in place: authentic attitude + heart = authentic worship. But you don't get to give yourself your own stamp of authenticity. You don't get to decide based on what gives you the greatest goosebumps what is the most authentic. It's objective and it changes from time to time. 

God established an unchanging set of principles what creates authentic worship. Do we accept His authority to define for us what authentic worship is or do we continue in the realm of worship to say »I will determine what I like the best, how I like to worship the best, and I will bring that to my God.«?

If you want to worship God the Father, Jesus says »you must worship in Spirit and in truth!«

It's not optional and it's not occasional – it's essential. You must worship in Spirit and truth – and God is the authority who defines what that is.

So what is our attitude? Is it about our needs or about God's glory?

This really challenged me today. Musical worship is different in every church, of course. And I find myself thinking about the way people sing and play guitar so many times! Am I worshipping God with it? No!
Where is my heart in worshipping God? I often have an attitude of complaining and I often think worship is to be in a way I like it to be. This message challenged me not to think that way but to focus on my attitude of worshipping God - in Spirit and in truth!

This is only 1 out of 4 sermons on worship, I'm excited to hear more!
You can listen to them with me: What is worship?