Intimacy In Worship

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The heartbeat of God’s Word is worship.

The driving message of God’s Word is worship.

The only thing God seeks is worship.

The purpose of salvation is to worship the God of Heaven.

The Scriptures open in Genesis with God walking and talking with His Worshippers.
The next book Exodus contains elaborate plans for a tent whose sole purpose was to bring worshippers to God.
The longest book at the heart of God’s Word is a manual on ways to worship the God of the Universe.
The rest of the Old Testament is a series of prophets lamenting the neglect and abandonment of worship by God’s people, who were to be a kingdom of Worshippers (priests).
The Gospels open with the God of Heaven on earth seeking creatures who would be willing to be Worshippers.
The Book of Acts records what happens when average people from every walk of life, every strata of society and every depth of sin are bound together with a common passion of being life long Worshippers.
The Epistles are a manual on how to grow as worshippers.
And God’s Word closes with all of God’s Worshippers at last Home with their Creator and Worshiping HIM!

Is your heart the heart of a worshipper? What possibly has happened to us? Someone once said, “The immense tragedy of the contemporary church is that most people worship their work, work at their play, and play at their worship”.

Transcript

And what a wonderful evening singing those songs. I agree with this morning; we should sing the songs of Christmas all year round, right? And worship our Lord Jesus Christ. If you want to be opening in your Bibles with me, we’re going to Hebrews chapter 12 to read tonight, just three verses there. As you turn there, I want to explain where we’re going. We have been looking at the tabernacle. In fact, the special this evening that Mary sang was “Beyond the Curtain.” That’s based on the last couple verses of Hebrews chapter 6, which says, Christ our forerunner has gone within the veil and has put—and the veil is the word for the curtain of the temple and tabernacle—and He has put the anchor of our soul inside the veil, and He’s pulling us toward that heavenly sanctuary into His presence. It’s a beautiful metaphor. But the whole time that we’ve been studying, we’ve been looking at how to cultivate intimacy, how to express that intimacy with God in worship, and we’ve used the hardware of the tabernacle. We’ve used the whole spiritual message of the tabernacle to look at that, but tonight we’re going to sum all this up with just rehearsing everything that we can cultivate personally to have that intimate worship with the Lord. And the reason for that is that the heartbeat of God’s Word is that we, God’s creatures, be worshiping Him. The driving message of God’s Word is that God has called us as people to be worshipers. God is seeking worshipers, it says in John 4. In fact, that is the only thing that He seeks. God seeks worshipers. Now, He came to seek and to save the lost, to make them worshipers, and He seeks us who come to Him to worship Him.

And the purpose of our salvation, when we look at the conclusion of the Bible, is to be worshiping the God of Heaven. In fact, the Scriptures, as we saw this morning, open in Genesis with God walking and talking with His worshipers and showing them how to approach Him, how to offer sacrifice, how to come into His presence. The next book of the Bible, Exodus, which we’ve spent so long in, contains elaborate plans. What are those plans for? Chapter after chapter, telling all the minutia of a tent, and that tent was to be a passageway into the very presence of God in order that God might bring worshipers into His presence. The longest book, in fact, the center of your Bible, the heart of God’s Word is a manual, the book of Psalms. It’s a manual on worshiping God: words, expressions, and different mechanisms with instruments, with song from the meditations of our heart of worshiping God, the God of the universe who seeks our worship. The rest of the Old Testament is a series of prophetic lamentations about the neglect, the abandonment of worship by God’s people who are to be a kingdom of worshiping priests. And so, the prophets all say, you are not worshiping, you’re not worshiping, you’re not worshiping. God wants worship. In fact, it’s so clear. It says, God says, I would rather not have rivers of oil or countless beasts. I would rather have your hearts worshiping Me. The Gospels open with the God of Heaven coming to Earth, personally seeking out creatures who would be willing to be worshipers. The book of Acts records what happens when average people from every walk of life, from every strata of society, from every depth of sin are bound together with a common passion to be lifelong worshipers of God. The epistles are written as a manual on how to grow and how to cultivate a lifestyle of worshiping God. We are to present our bodies as living, sacrificial, worshiping instruments to God. We are to let our mouths be offering constant worship of praise. We are to cultivate acts of worship and kindness to people all in the name of Christ as worship to Him. And, of course, God’s Word, the book of Revelation, closes with all of God’s worshipers at last home with their Creator, and we see the final scene in Heaven of those worshipers around His throne worshiping Him. So, worship is the heartbeat of God’s Word.

But the question for us tonight is do we have the hearts of a worshiper? Do each of us individually have a heart of a worshiper? I wonder, if not, what has happened to us. Someone put it this way: the immense tragedy of our modern church in the 1990s is that most people worship their work. They work at their play, and they play at their worship. We’ve got everything reversed. Instead of the highest calling in life being to worship God, our highest calling seems to be to work and to do our careers, and we’re just playing at worship. A great prophet, modern day preacher on worship who died in 1963, who pastored here in the United States for 44 years by the name of A. W. Tozer wrote this. He says, we have lost our spirit of worship. We have lost our ability to withdraw inwardly in order to meet God in adoring silence. In fact, this week as we are reading, progressing through, it seems like the Chronicles are endless, especially when you read them with 2-, 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-year-olds, it seems endless because it’s just boring unless you can see the wonder of it all. But as we were plodding through, I shared with them how most young people today have trouble worshiping because they have trouble with quietness. They go to sleep with their earphones on, with the tunes going. And if it’s not that, the radio’s on, in the morning that’s on, and in their car it’s on, and wherever they are it’s on. And you go to wherever young people are, and there’s always noise, but God says that we have to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. What does it say? Be still and know that I am God. Tozer continues, modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life of the Spirit, the words of the psalmist, to be still and know that I am God, mean absolutely nothing to our self-confident, bustling worshiper in the 20th century.

William Temple, a man a generation back, defined worship, and I’d like to share that definition with you. He said this: worship is to quicken our conscience by the holiness of God. Worship is to feed our mind with the truth of God. Worship is to purge our imaginations by the beauty of God. Worship is to open our heart to the love of God. And worship culminates, he says, as we devote our will to the purpose of God. So, to quicken, feed, purge, open, and devote our hearts to God, we should begin tonight where we’re going to end, when our lives individually each are over. And that’s around the throne of God, and that’s Hebrews chapter 12. I hope you’re there by now, verse 22. And we’re going to read verses 22 to 24 as we look at what we’re going to be doing forever. Let’s stand together in the presence of God and let these three verses transport us to the very throne of God. You follow along as I read. Hebrews 12:22, but you, the writer of Hebrews says, have come to the Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly, the Church of the Firstborn who are registered in Heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel. What a powerful portion of scripture! What a[n] exciting destination, just to let our eyes rest on those words.

Let’s come before the Lord in worshipful prayer. Father in Heaven, I pray that You would anoint the preaching of Your Word, that You would illumine the understanding of our hearts and that You would quicken our wills to obey tonight. There are definite choices we can make that will make our worship, in the year that lies before us, should You let us live into the new year, that will give us energized, powerful, spiritually overflowing worship. O Lord, teach us that tonight from Your Word, in Jesus’ name, amen.

As you’re seated, I want to remind you of what these verses say. The Scriptures tell us that the Church that we have come to tonight have some powerful realities. In fact, there’s seven realities of what we are tonight. We are headed to the city of God; that’s our final destination, it says in verse 22. We are going to meet myriads of angels. Those were our faithful servants, it says in verse 14 of chapter 1 that they have been ministering servants, serving us as we head toward Heaven. We’re going to meet our fellow believers, as it says there, to the general assembly, verse 23, and the Church. And what’s interesting is in Heaven, there’s no distinction. We are all the redeemed people of God, and there we’re going to meet with the old and new covenant saints all bound together through the work of Jesus Christ in the worship of our God, our fellow believers who were fellow pilgrims. We’re going to come before God, our focus of worship. We are going to see the Church triumphant, as it talks about the Church of the Firstborn registered in Heaven.

What a place to have your reservation! I was reading today in the Tulsa World, it says that all the New Year’s parties are flops except for the one that Barbra Streisand’s doing. All the, Michael Jackson’s is blown out, and all these other people because everybody’s afraid to travel over the New Year. But you know what? I’m registered in Heaven, and it’s not going to be a flop, and we’re all going to get there. We’re all going to get there safely, and it’s something to look forward to, the Church triumphant. And then it says, and to Jesus, verse 24, the Mediator of the new covenant. He’s our beautiful Savior. And listen to this, this ties into what we saw this morning, and to the blood of the sprinkling that speaks better things than Abel’s blood, we’ll see next week, cries from the ground for judgment. Christ’s blood proclaims forgiveness, and that is such a focus of worship. If this doesn’t create a wellspring of thanksgiving in our hearts and makes us want to march to Zion, nothing will.

But with our hearts quickened through reading this passage by God’s Word, I want to read William Temple’s definition of worship again, because every time you and I get in this Book, we should allow the Word of God to quicken our hearts, to convict us when needed of sin, to cause us to purge ourselves from anything that would hinder our worship of God, and then to begin to worship Him. Now, listen to Temple’s definition because we need to measure our personal worship temperature and health tonight. We need to do a little biopsy. We need to do a little health check. We need to check our blood sugar level. We need to check what’s going on nutritionally in our spiritual lives and what our worship level is. So, let me read this again. Temple said, worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God. When you and I see where we’re headed, when we see what we’re going to be doing forever, when we see that we are going to be with the myriads of angels, and with all the redeemed, and the Church triumphant, and the saints of all the ages gathered around the throne of God, shouldn’t we have consciences that are quickened, that we don’t want to have anything that so easily besets us, Hebrews 12:1 and 2, and we want to run for Jesus through this life. See what worship causes us to do? It quickens our conscience. We want to lay aside the weights. We should feed our mind with the truth of God. We should be cultivating worship by feeding on this Book.

This passage is a very beautiful, and the reason I brought you to it tonight is verses 22 to 24 of Hebrews 12 are a great springboard to worship. This is a place where you can practice worshiping God. You’d say, O Lord, I so long to come to Mount Zion, Your throne. I long to be in the city of You. My living God, when all the gods of this world are dead and not alive, You’re the living and true God. I can’t wait to get to heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable company of angels. They’re the ministering spirits that have ministered to me, an heir of salvation. I can’t wait to rejoin the general assembly, the Church of the Firstborn. I’m so glad I’m registered in Heaven. See, you just echo back these words to God. That’s what it means to feed our mind.

The next part of his definition is we need to learn to purge our imagination by the beauty of God. Not to be overly critical of the young people, but young people today, their imagination is polluted. They can hardly think without all the images of these incessant video, movie, video games, and this, all this, even the music videos and all the junk that’s out there. Their consciences are defiled. So, how can their consciences and their imaginations be purged by the beauty of God? Because so much of our culture today is not beautiful. That’s why a rule for how we cultivate the sense of worship is we should not watch something that is not Philippians 4:8 true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report. If it doesn’t have any virtue, and if it doesn’t praise God, then we shouldn’t be watching it. We shouldn’t be letting it into our imagination. Does that cut down how much we can watch? It certainly does! So, what do you do with your free time? You feed your mind in the Word of God because God says, you and I are going to be worshiping Him forever, and we should practice it now. And so, there are great limitations if you’re a worshiper of God.

We should open up our heart to the love of God and devote our will to His purposes. And key to the New Testament Church’s power was their awareness that God was with them. That’s why they could worship so beautifully, and it seemed to have led them into God’s presence because they were so aware of His presence. And we need to remember they weren’t imagining God. God truly is present. They didn’t imagine He was present. He was present. And because they realized that He was truly in their midst, this had an incredible, massive impact on their worship. In fact, I like this. Great saints since the New Testament times have also had this experience of God’s presence. And one thing, if you ever go to London, to England and get to go to Bedford, the town of Bedford, right outside of London, you can see John Bunyan’s study—Pilgrim’s Progress, Holy War—John Bunyan! This is what is still on the wall of his study. He had this little poem, and it’s in the ante room, which he has to walk through to and from the pulpit of this church. And right there on the wall was his poem, which is still there 300 years later, and it reads thusly, as you go in to preach and as you come out, you look back, these are the words on the wall. Enter this door as if the floor within were gold, and every wall of jewels, all of wealth untold, as if a choir, in robes of fire were singing here; nor shout, nor rush, but hush, for God is near. And that’s what Bunyan read every time he went out to minister God’s Word. A little different, isn’t it? I read of a service recently that was held in a large New York church where they came out, and the choir strolled in to the sounds of “The Entertainer,” the music from that movie with Robert Redford, and they all came out like that, choreography. And the pastor came out and did quite a few jokes, kind of a Johnny Carson kind of thing. And then they watched a music video, and they called that worship. And you know what? I think about how far the Church has come in 1999 from as if a choir in robes of fire were singing here; nor shout, nor rush, but hush, for God is near. And they have to descend to using music from movies and get people to choreography in and dance in. But God is here and that’s what we need.

Maybe sometimes we’re in such a hurry on Sunday, we don’t pause and let our hearts get ready to look upward in the face of God. I’m going to give you many suggestions, but just a few tonight. Something would be helpful when you come in, it’s good to find a seat and then immediately stop and offer the Lord a prayer, reflecting how much you love and adore Him. Instead of worrying about where you’re sitting and what other people are doing, just to stop and make your seat a little altar of worship. That’s a powerful thing to do. And then try to preview, look through the bulletin and see what the hymns are. Some of those this morning were just incredible, but just look over the list, and the numbers are in there, and look them up. When Royce had us look at “We Three Kings” and look at each of the gifts they brought, and the imagery of those poems tends toward getting our hearts focused on worship. And then during the preaching of God’s Word, we should ask the Lord to speak to our hearts through His Word. And like Eli told Samuel, say, speak Lord! Your servant’s listening and waiting to respond.

And this is a type of worship that’s full of meaning. This is a type of worship that fulfills the meaning of worship, which is an expression. The word worship means to fall down, to be throwing ourself at the feet, kissing the garment of someone that we love and honor. It’s a Middle Eastern metaphor. It was the idea of throwing yourself down at the hem of the garment of a very great person and just showing adoration toward them. That’s what God wants from us. That’s what we came here tonight to give Him. It’s giving something to God, and this type of worship focuses on God and God alone. And that is true spiritual worship, and worship like that can only be energized by God’s Spirit.

Now, how do we know if we’re operating in the Spirit? You just do another test, and here it is: when the Spirit of God is reigning in a church and in the lives of believers, believers begin to relate to the Word of God. That means they’re taught by the Word of God. They don’t just hear it, and they don’t just get facts; their lives are taught by it. And when the Holy Spirit is reigning, believers learn to relate to each other. That’s called koinonia. That’s called fellowship. They begin to go out of their way. In fact, I had someone from the church come to me today, and they said, how can I serve in a special way in this church? I says, I have a challenge for you. I said, why don’t you do this? Why don’t you take a little yellow Post-it note and put it in your Bible? And why don’t you, in fact, in first service I shared this with someone over here because I noticed they were sitting where they don’t normally sit. They usually sit right there, and they were over there. And so, in greeting time I said, what’s the deal? Why are you over there instead of right there? And they said, I’m trying to move around and get to know people. I says, ah. So, I told that one and someone else, I said, why don’t you write down new people that you’re meeting in your Bible? And say, you know what, I’ve seen you, but what’s your name? And write them down and then pray for them this week and then pray that the Lord will help you have a divine encounter that you’ll bump into them next week. And you’ll actually be able to share fellowship. Fellowship is not drinking a punch and eating stale cookies at a reception somewhere. As when I grew up, they always went to Fellowship Hall, and we always had pink punch and old cookies, and that was called fellowship in the Baptist church I grew up in. That’s not fellowship. Fellowship is knowing people, praying for people, ministering to people, being involved in their lives, missing them when they’re not present, rejoicing with them when great things are happening, and sorrowing with them when things don’t, and having a touch with their lives. That takes work. And when the Spirit of God reigns, believers relate to each other in biblical fellowship. And when the Spirit of God reigns, we relate to God in true worship. And when the Spirit of God reigns, believers relate to the world, we evangelize. And when God’s Spirit is at work in our lives, we are being taught, we are fellowshipping, we’re worshiping, and we’re evangelizing, and that worship is a gift that we offer to God. It’s not stained glass and organ music. It’s truly us giving from our lives to God.

At Christmastime, when we read about the Wisemen in Matthew 2, it says, they came and they fell down to worship Him. And we stop there. You know what it says? When they worshiped Him, they what? They presented their gifts. Worship in the Bible is not getting; it’s not getting something out of a concert. I meet people and they say, oh, I really got something out of that concert, and I worshiped. Worship is not getting; worship is giving, and so therefore, no matter what’s going on around, you can give if you have put something in your heart to present back to God. In the Christmas story, gold spoke of Christ’s deity, and any study of the tabernacle makes that plain. Frankincense gives forth perfume as it’s brought into contact with fire, and myrrh speaks of suffering because it’s associated with beating a tree nearly to death to make the resin ooze out. So, Jesus Christ was worshiped, and as they presented those gifts to Him, they expressed their faith in His deity, their appreciation of the fragrance of a sinless life as a sweet perfume to God, and thirdly, they estimated the value of His suffering, a vicarious suffering. That myrrh was speaking of His death. They worshiped all of the very office of Christ as Prophet, and Priest, and King.

We’ve been looking at the tabernacle, and I’m not going to rehearse all the tabernacle stuff tonight. I’m going to dig right into, in our last, we just have a few minutes I see on the clock here, I want to dig into some steps that we can take to grow into worshiping Jesus all the time.

And let me just give these to you and challenge you in your mind. And you can start with 1 Thessalonians 5:17, and I want to use that as a little hook. 1 Thessalonians, you’re in Hebrews, back up through the Timothys to Thessalonians and 1 Thessalonians 5 because we need to, first of all, cultivate worship. I don’t know about you, but my garden does not grow unless it’s cultivated, and cultivated means that it doesn’t randomly produce itself, that it has to be weeded, and it has to be the soil loosened up, and things have to be planted, and they have to be watered, and they have to be cared for, and then you have to harvest. That’s all the process of cultivation. How do you cultivate worship? Number one, ask God to help us learn to be in a spirit of prayer. 1 Thessalonians 5:17, pray without ceasing. And then, as we learned before, Psalm 55:17 says, we don’t just pray once. We pray evening, and morning, and at noon, the psalmist said in Psalm 55:17. I will let God hear my voice. And then we bring that into our public worship services. And we, as Psalm 42 says, we pant after God alone. And then we come and pant together, and it’s a group experience, but if you’re not panting alone, it’s kind of hard to crank it up together. And so, we have to cultivate worship.

Secondly, we need to vary our worship. We need to learn to worship when we’re all alone. You don’t need a band to worship. You don’t need a crowd. You just can worship alone. We need to worship when we’re at home with our family and the experience of worship together. We need to worship just with a friend. We meet with little groups of two or three. I remember when we used to work in the Eastern Bloc when it used to be the Iron Curtain, and we would go running Bibles in and out. We’d go one week in the communist countries and a week out. When we came for our week out to reload our cars and put more Bibles in, the Christians used to just come together like magnets and just like metal to a magnet. They just came like this. Why? Because we wanted to find a small group we could worship with. We used to celebrate the Lord’s table, and we used to spend nights in prayer. We just did anything we could because we so longed for shared worship. Do you vary your worship? Do you worship alone? Actually set aside a time, go to a park somewhere, or find your favorite spot, or sit out in the backyard with your Bible and worship God? Do you worship as a family? Do you worship as a small group? Vary your worship. Those little experiences of worship empower and cause our larger Sunday gatherings and midweek gatherings to be energized.

Thirdly, we need to not only cultivate worship and vary our worship; we need to prepare for worship. How do you prepare for worship? We should quiet our heart on Saturday night by going to bed early. We should prepare for Sunday by personal examination and confession. We shouldn’t bring in the leaven of our sin to multiply within the fellowship. We should always be prepared. We should warm our spirits. That’s why we practice. We sang Christmas carols all the way over here tonight in the car, and we all prayed around the car. Why? Because you warm up. You ever see someone that’s in any kind of sport, whether it’s bowling, or baseball, or any? They’re warming up! A pitcher doesn’t go from a restaurant, put on his uniform, and go throw a game. He’s out there warming up. He is preparing himself for that. Worship takes preparation. We need to prepare for worship.

Another thing is we need to guard our heart. We guard our heart for worship by actually gathering before the actual worship service and preparing, opening our Bibles, asking God to inhabit the instrumentalists, and the choir, and those special musicians that. We should all be in the Prayer Corps, not just the special 12 or 10 or 7 that are back in that room. All of us where we are can have a ministry of guarding our hearts by preparing for worship.

And then we should actually engage in worship here. We should let go of distractions. A lot of people at church are much like, I remember, it’s not, they don’t have, I don’t think, these anymore. But when I was little, I can always remember my parents went to Sears. In fact, I don’t remember there were any other stores other than Sears when I was little. We always went to Sears, and I can remember playing, and you’ve heard many stories of this, but I always remember playing in the automobile because we were always having our car fixed. But in the automobile department, they would have all those radios on the walls, and I was one of those kids that would go along and just push the buttons and change the channel from channel to channel, and I always think about that with people. When I’m speaking, they’re on this, some of you don’t even know what I mean. It used to be radios had these push buttons, and you’d push it in, and the little orange bar would go like this between the numbers, and it was preset. And a lot of people are like that. I’m preaching along here, and they’re listening to me, and they’re listening to Abel or Worship at Mount Zion, and all of a sudden, they’re over here wondering about when they’re going to get to Kmart to return that gift, and then they come back to me again. They push that button. They’re back, and now I’m with Cain, and now they’re over there wondering about what they’re going to do at the Christmas party next year, because this year was a blowout. And they just, they go like a kid pushing buttons on the radio. We need to engage in spiritual worship by letting go of all those distractions that flip us around the dial. And God says, you’ll seek Me and find Me when you seek with what? All your heart. Stay on one channel. Push that button in and take your hand away. So, we cultivate worship, we vary our worship, we prepare for worship.

Here’s another point. We present ourself to God as an instrument of worship. You say, what do you mean by that? The Scriptures tell us in Romans 6 that we should mortify our pride. We mortify therefore our members. One of our members is our pride. We should let go of our agenda, of our concern, of our being blessed, of wanting to hear something specific, and just let go of that and just mortify our pride in our self-will and say, God, teach me. I think this is interesting. One of the great theologians of this century who taught in a seminary had a practice that he would critically look at every paper. He would critically look at every project, but whenever his students preached, he put down his pen and his notebook, and he said, I am being ministered to by the Word of God. I will not criticize the preaching of God’s Word. It’s interesting, he didn’t have polished preachers coming out of his seminary classroom, but he had powerful ones. Why? Because they saw how important the spirit of worship was in the proclamation of the Word of God. So, we should mortify our pride.

We should learn to use the language of gathered fellowship. Not I, but we. We should offer submission to God and our submission to one another. We should desire God’s presence. We should cultivate a life of spiritual dependency. As I said before, worship doesn’t start on Sunday morning, or Wednesday afternoon, or whenever we gather together. It starts as we cultivate it through the week.

And as we cultivate it, there’s another aspect, and actually it’s the fifth aspect: we need to learn to preserve our worship. And that is very hard to cultivate our worship. This is what the Scriptures tell us. It says, guard your soul. You say, what do you mean by that? Look back at Ephesians chapter 4 with me because I really think something we don’t do is guard ourselves. It says in Ephesians 4 verse 26, be angry, and do not sin: do not let the sun go down in your wrath. Verse 27 of Ephesians 4, nor give place to the devil. Did you know if we leave unguarded places in our life, we can be robbed of the spirit of worship [snap] just like that? You say, what do you mean by that? 1 Peter 5 says, our adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking to devour us. Satan wants to rob us of what we were created to do, and that is to worship God.

What are some ways he can rob us? Here’s one. Now this might bother some of you, but it’s true. Did you know there’s no better way to erase worship than to turn on the television the second [snap] you walk in the door of the house? Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought of how absolutely antithetical, absolutely diametrically opposed the television, which is the fountain and the river of the world, and the worship of God are? They’re at the other ends of the spectrum. I think about how Sunday afternoon sports in general with the incessant beer commercials, the inning chatter, and the surefire flattening out of our spiritual brainwaves. And so many people, they go right from the worship of God to that, and they just go from up here down, flatland again. They go right back, and they grieve and quench the Holy Spirit. Why? Because it is just impossible to maintain that level of communion with God and just mindlessly go into the flow of the world. We need to guard our soul. We need to encourage our family. I think about how many fathers, their kids say, Daddy, will you look at my Sunday school paper? And the dad says, just a minute; wait till halftime or wait till the next commercial. I don’t have time. We need to seek God completely. So many people sit in church fretting because they’ve already missed part of something they wanted to see on TV, and they wonder when it’s going to be over. They never get anything out of service. They don’t come to meet God; they came to check it off; they’re supposed to go. My heart is so drawn to when I go to services overseas, they don’t even have clocks. They don’t have schedules. The people, it’s the biggest thing of the week. That’s why they do it every day. They get together every day in Russia. They have services every day. Somewhere in Volgodonsk, our sister church, they have a service going on every day of the week. Why? Because it’s so important. Now, everybody can’t go to all of them because they don’t have cars, but it’s the biggest thing in their life. Do you know what? In America, this is one piece of the 168-hour week, and it better be one hour of it. Right? Because I’ve got a schedule. And we have scheduled God almost out of our lives because we are not preserving our worship.

We need to purge our spirit. Have you ever tried dieting your spirit: stay away from any junk food of the soul, any cancer-causing agents, any highly worldly cholesterol that hardens our spiritual arteries, as someone put it? We should seek the Lord so much that we will actually go on a spiritual diet. That we, in fact, someone caught me on this. I asked them if they saw the new Clorox spray cleaner, and I didn’t see it on television; I saw it in the Better Homes and Gardens. But I said, have you seen the new Clorox cleaner? Because they told me they got sick somewhere. And I said, oh, you should have sprayed the new Clorox cleaner around. They said, we haven’t watched TV for 10 weeks. I don’t know about that cleaner. And I thought, what a blessing! You should go to the store at least and get the Clorox spray so you don’t get sick. You don’t have to fast from the store.

But we need to also not only guard our soul, encourage our family, seek God completely, and purge our spirit; we need to avoid overexposure. I know people that, you ever seen people that have a high skin cancer risk? Those people, they have this big hat on, and they’ve got all kinds of sunscreen on. They don’t want to get skin cancer. Some of us get ready for the sun, but do we stay away from the exposure to the deadlines that eats at our souls, that distracts our worship? The world will distract, deaden, and deflate the welling up of our souls to worship God unless we avoid overexposure to it.

Here’s another one: we need to guard our worship from distraction. We need to realize that if we don’t feel like worship—maybe we’ve had so many disappointing experiences in worship that we don’t even think it’s worship—that we need to guard it and say, Lord, and I’m going to close with this.

Look at Psalm 42. That’s where we began in this process, but it’s really guarding our worship by making this choice that David made in Psalm 42, and this is what he said. As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God. What he’s talking about is that out in the desert, you know the story, the caravans used to carry these little animals that could smell water. And they’d carry them with them, and when they ran out of water for the camels, they’d let one loose, and it would run off, and it always would run toward a reservoir or toward an oasis because they could smell the water. And what it, what’s neat is these little creatures have such a thirst that there is nothing that will satisfy that thirst but water. David said, God, make me, verse 2, thirst for God. That’s worship. Thirst for the living God. That’s reality. When shall I come and appear before God? That is experiencing, cultivating, preparing for, and guarding worship, having a heart’s desire to worship God.

What are the fruits of worship? The Scriptures tell us this, Philippians 3:3, for we are the circumcised ones, we worship God in the Spirit, rejoicing in Christ Jesus, and having no confidence in the flesh. If we worship God, we will be obeying God. We will not be self-confident. We’ll not be glorying in our flesh. We’ll be worshiping God in the Spirit with a circumcised heart, Philippians 3:3. That is a description of a true believer, a worshiper of God who rejoices in Christ. Jesus has his hope and joy, her hope and joy in Christ Jesus and no confidence in the flesh. We will be obedient. We will also be repentant. Jesus said in Matthew 5:23 and 24, if you’re coming to the altar to worship God, and you remember there, there’s something you have against someone, leave your gift and go your way, and be reconciled, and then come back. We will live with short accounts because we don’t want anything to interrupt our worship. We’ll obey God, Philippians 3:3. We’ll be keeping short accounts and cutting off anything that would cause our worship to be deadened. Relationships with others, unrepented of sin. And finally, we’ll be ministering. We’ll be obedient, repentant ministers of worship. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an escape. Worship enables us to hear the call of God. You remember Isaiah 6, when Isaiah saw God lifted up, and he saw all the glory of God filling the throne? What did he do? Did he say, I want to stay here and worship You forever? No, that worship led him to serve God. Worship always ignites us to want to serve God. Worship causes us to want to tell people about Jesus Christ. Worship causes us to have holy boldness as we tell people. Worship causes us to have the Word of God filling our lives so that the Sword of the Spirit can be a ministry in their lives. Worship leads us to ministry, but ministry without worship, it grinds us, wears us out, and makes us burn out because God designed it that worship leads us to obedience. We obey Him. Worship leads us to repentance. We don’t want anything tomorrow. And worship leads to ministry that’s energized by the Spirit.

William Temple challenged us, and I want to read his quote once more because it’s what I have been meditating on this New Year. He says this: worship will quicken our conscience that God is holy. Worship will cause us to feed our mind because God’s Word is true. Worship causes us to purge our imaginations because we want to see God’s beauty. Worship causes us to open up our hearts, and the love of God will flow through. And then worship will cause us to devote ourselves to God’s will. Because when you’re a worshiper of God, you want to accomplish His purposes both here and forever with the general assembly to which we’re going.

Let’s bow before our Lord in prayer and thank Him that we can intimately worship our almighty God and that we can cultivate that worship on a daily basis. Father in Heaven, I thank You tonight for letting us get a little glimpse into the heavenly Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable fellow pilgrims that are already there, to all the countless angels who are devoting themselves to the ministry, to the saints, in the worship of You, O God, and to our Lord Jesus. Oh, our hearts are drawn Heavenward. As Paul said, we desire to depart and to be with You would be far better. Nevertheless, to abide here is more needful because You’ve called us to serve You, but we can’t serve You if we’re not worshiping You. And I pray that our lives would be full of Your Word, and guarded, that we would cultivate and actually engage in spiritual worship, and we’ll thank You for what you accomplish through us, this fellowship, in the days, and weeks, and months ahead, should You give them to us because we should worship the Lord our God and Him only. Then will we serve. In Your precious name we thank You, the name of Jesus whom we worship, in His precious name we come before You, amen. And God bless you as you go.

The heartbeat of God’s Word is worship. The driving message of God’s Word is worship. The only thing God seeks is worship. The purpose of salvation is worshiping the God of Heaven.

The Scriptures open in Genesis with God walking and talking with His Worshippers.
The next book Exodus contains elaborate plans for a tent whose sole purpose was to bring worshippers to God.
The longest book at the heart of God’s Word is a manual on ways to Worship the God of the Universe.
The rest of the Old Testament is a series of prophets lamenting the neglect and abandonment of worship by God’s people who were to be a kingdom of Worshippers (priests).
The Gospels open with the God of Heaven on earth seeking creatures who would be willing to be Worshippers.
The Book of Acts records what happens when average people from every walk of life, every strata of society and every depth of sin are bound together with a common passion of being life long Worshippers.
The Epistles are a manual on how to grow as worshippers.
And God’s Word closes with all of God’s Worshippers at last Home with their Creator and Worshiping HIM!

Is your heart the heart of a worshipper?

What possibly has happened to us? Someone once said, “The immense tragedy of the contemporary church is that most people worship their work, work at their play, and play at their worship”.

W. Tozer (1897-1963), a pastor for 44 years across the USA was a prophet to the modern church. This is what he preached:

We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, “Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper in this middle period of the twentieth century.

Tonight we should ponder William Temple’s definition of worship :

“[Worship is] to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open up the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”

So to quicken, feed, purge, open and devote our hearts to God, we should begin where we will end, around the Throne of God. Let’s go there by way ofHebrews 12:22-24. Please stand and seek our God as He speaks to us.

The Scriptures tell us that in the Church “you have come” (right now!) to these seven sublime realities:

To the City of God, our final destination
To myriads of angels, our faithful servants
To fellow-believers, our fellow pilgrims
To God, our focus of worship
To the Church Triumphant, our faithful examples
To Jesus, our beautiful Savior
To forgiveness, our greatest possession!

If this does not create a wellspring of thanksgiving in our hearts and make us want to march to Zion, what will?

With heart quickened by God’s Word ponder William Temple”s definition of worship again only this time and measure our personal worship temperature and health:

Key to the New Testament church was awareness that God was with them, leading them. We must emphasize that they were not imagining this. God was truly present. And the realization that he was physically in their midst had a massive impact on the their exercise of faith. Great saints since have also experienced God’s presence. In John Bunyan’s church in Bedford, England, there is a poem framed in the wall of the anteroom from which the preacher exits to walk to the pulpit. It reads:

Enter this door As if the floor Within were gold, And every wall Of jewels, all Of wealth untold, As if a choir, In robes of fire Were singing here; Nor shout, nor rush, But hush, For God is near. And so he is! This is what we need.

Maybe we are in such a hurry on Sundays we don’t pause in our hearts, and look upward into the face of God? How could we start? Try these simple steps:

When you come in, find a seat and then immediately stop and offer to the Lord a prayer reflecting on how much you love and adore Him.
Then try to preview some of the hymns to prepare your heart to meaningfully ascribe them to God.
During the preaching of God’s Word ask the Lord to speak to your heart through His Word, say ‘Speak Lord, Thy servant is listening!’

The word worship is full of meaning, expressing the idea of falling down, prostrating oneself, and kissing the feet or the hem of the garment of the one honored. [1]

This type of worship that focuses on God and God alone is true spiritual worship. Worship that is energized by the Spirit of God.

How do we know we are operating in the power of the Holy Spirit? Here is a test. When Spirit[2] reigns , believers relate to the Word – teaching;

Where the Spirit reigns, believers relate to each other – koinonia;
Where the Spirit reigns, believers relate to God -worship;
Where the Spirit reigns, believers relate to the world – evangelism;

That worship[3] is a presentation of our gifts to God. We read that these wise men “presented unto Him gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh.” The significance of these gifts is beautiful. Gold speaks of Deity, as a study of the Tabernacle makes plain. Frankincense gives forth its perfume only as it is brought into contact with fire. Myrrh speaks of suffering, and is associated with the death and burial of our Lord. Thus these wise men, by the gifts they presented to Him, expressed first, their faith in His essential and eternal Deity; second, their appreciation of the fragrance of His sinless life which should ascend, as a sweet perfume, to His Father; and third, their estimation of the virtue and value of His vicarious sufferings, by which the redemption of humanity should be accomplished.

The Tabernacle teaches us so much about the wonders of our Matchless God. Here are just a few of the lessons about the Lord.

Steps To Grow Into Worshiping Jesus All The Time

Listen to what one man[4] who spent years meditating on worship has written: Worship is something we do. Studying the theology of worship and debating the forms of worship are all good, but by themselves they are inadequate. In the final analysis we learn to worship by worshiping. Let me give a few simple steps that I hope will help in the experience of worship.

Cultivate worship. First worship must become a daily habit. learn to practice noticing God’s presence sometime each day.

AskGod to enable you to follow Paul’s words,

“Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).

Punctuateevery moment with inward whisperings of adoration, praise, and thanksgiving.

Psalm 55:17 Evening and morning and at noon, I will complain and murmur, And He will hear my voice. NASB

Scheduletimes of personal worship and confession and Bible study and attentiveness to Christ, your always present Teacher.

Colossians 3:16 Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. NASB

Joshua 1:8 “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. NKJV

Bring this atmosphere to our public worship so that our gathered experience of worship just becomes a continuation and an intensification of what you have been trying to do all week long.

Psalm 42:1-2 As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God.2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? NKJV

Vary your worship. Second, try to learn how to worship God in many different settings of worship.

Worship God when you are alone.
Have home groupsnot just for Bible study, but also for the very experience of worship itself.
Gather little groups of two and threeand learn to offer up a sacrifice of praise. Many things can happen in smaller gatherings that, just by sheer size, cannot happen in the larger experience. All of these little experiences of worship will empower and impact the larger Sunday gatherings.

Prepare for worship. Third, determine to prepare for the gathering of the church for worship.

Quiet your hearton Saturday night by going to bed early,
Always preparefor Sunday with personal examination and confession,
Warm your spiritby going over the hymns and Scripture passages that will be used on Sunday,
Guard your heartby gathering early before the actual worship service and filling the room with the presence of God. Here is how you can have one of the most vital ministries at Tulsa Bible Church – Try coming ten to fifteen minutes early and sit with your Bible open in a seat here in the worship center. Start by praying for the instrumentalists that they will be aided by the Lord in ministering the worship music, then the orchestra pray around each person, then for the choir to be full of the Holy Spirit, then the soloists, ensemble and others, then for our worship leaders, then for the ministry of the Word to be Spirit empowered.
Engage in spiritual worshipby letting go of inner distractions so that you can really seek God with all your heart.

Present yourself for worship. Fourth, willingly offer yourself to the Lord as an instrument for worship.

Mortify your prideby learning to let go of my agenda, of my concern, of my being blessed, of my hearing the word of God.
Use the languageof the gathered fellowship is not “I,” but “we.”
Offer your submission to the ways of God, and your submission to one another in the Christian fellowship.
Desire for God’s presenceto rise up in the group, not just within the individual. This is what it means to become of one mind, of one accord.
Cultivate a lifeof complete spiritual dependency. Dependency means we completely dependent upon God for anything significant to happen. The work is God’s and not yours.

Preserve your worship. Fifth, guard yourself from exposure to harmful habits that deadens worship.

Guard your soul: there is no better way to erase worship than to turn on the TV when you walk in the house after church. Sunday afternoon football, and sports in general, with the incessant beer commercials and inane chatter, is a sure-fire way to flatten out-one’s spiritual brain waves.
Encourage your family: or the whole family will suffer – “You want daddy to look at your Sunday school paper? In a moment, son. . . at half-time maybe.”
Seek God completely: Men, if you’re the kind who sits in church fretting because you’ve already missed the 1st quarter of the game and wonder when the preacher is going to end, you will rarely get anything out of the service!
Purge your spirit: Have you ever tried dieting your spirit? Stay away from any “Junk food” of the soul, cancer causing agents, high worldly cholesterol that hardens your spiritual arteries?
Avoid over exposure: Some of us are in the high skin cancer risk category. So what do we do? We stay away from exposure to those deadly UV rays. Well, all of us are prone to soul cancer that eats away at our worship so we should avoid very much exposure to TV rays. They distract, deaden and deflate the welling up of our souls in worship to God!
Do a self examination: If you can’t fast from TV, web surfing, video games, newspapers and magazines for a week then you are very weak and at risk spiritually.

Guard your worship. Sixth, drown all distractions with overflowing prayers of gratefulness to GOD.

If there is noise or distraction, rather than fussing and fuming about it, learn to take it in and conquer it.
If little children are running about, bless them. Thank God that they are alive and that they have energy.
Become willing to relax with distractions-they may be a message from the Lord. When I am preaching, I love to have babies and little children in the congregation because sometimes they are the only ones that I can be sure are alive! Learn simply to receive whatever happens in a gathered worship experience, rather than feeling that distractions somehow deter you from worshiping God.

Give your worship. Seventh, practice offering actual sacrifices of worship to GOD.

Many times you will not “feel” like worship. Perhaps you have had so many disappointing experiences in the past that you think it is hardly worth it. There is such a low sense of the power of God, Few people are adequately prepared. But you need to go anyway. You need to offer a sacrifice of worship. You need to be with the people of God and say, “These are my people. As stiffnecked and hard-hearted and sinful as we may be, together we come to God.” Many times I do not feel like worshiping and I have to kneel down and say, “Lord, I don’t feel like worshiping, but I desire to give you this time. It belongs to you. I will waste this time for you.”

Isaac Pennington says that when people are gathered for genuine worship, “They are like a heap of fresh and burning coals warming one another as a great strength and freshness and vigor of life flows into all.”” One log by itself cannot burn for very long, but when many logs are put together, even if they are poor logs, they can make quite a fire. Remember the counsel ofProverbs 27:17 that “Iron sharpens iron,” and even rather dull lives can help each other if they are willing to try.

So go, even if you don’t feel like it.
Go, even if worship has been discouraging and dry before. Go, praying.
Go, expecting.
Go, looking for God to do a new and living work among you.

What are The Fruits of Worship?

OBEDIENCE: Just as worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change.

Philippians 3:3 For we are the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh, NKJV

REPENTENCE: Resentments cannot be held with the same tenacity when we enter his gracious light. As Jesus says, we need to leave our gift at the altar and go set the matter straight (Matt. 5:23,24). In worship an increased power steals its way into the heart sanctuary, an increased compassion grows in the soul. To worship is to change.

Matthew 5:23-24 “Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you,24 “leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. NKJV

MINISTRY: Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life. Worship enables us to hear the call to service clearly so that we respond, ‘Here am I! Send me”.

Isaiah 6:1-8 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.2 Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.3 And one cried to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory!” 4 And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 So I said: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with the tongs from the altar.7 And he touched my mouth with it, and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; Your iniquity is taken away, And your sin purged.” 8 Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: “Whom shall I send, And who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.” NKJV

So that is what God desires. How did He make a way possible for sinners like us to Stay in His presence?

The Tabernacle Is God’s Portrait of Christ “tenting” John 1:14 Among Us

ENTRANCE: discovering The Tabernacle: God wants us LIVING IN His Presence. Psalm 100 in unison

“I Will Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving in my Heart”
II Chronicles 5:11-14
I Chronicles 16:4, 8-17 ,23-36
“O Worship the King” #10
“O God our Help” #52
“Bless the Lord” #13

ALTAR OF BURNT OFFERING: discovering The Brazen Altar: God wants us APPROACHING HIS HOLINESS (The Doctrine of Satisfaction) Hebrews 10:4-14

“Worthy is the Lamb” #180
“Jesus paid it all” # 210
“When I survey” #185
Exodus 27:1-8

LAVER: Hebrews 10:19-25{ The Laver of Brass: God wants us CLEANSING OUR SINS (The Doctrine of Sanctification)

“Nothing but the Blood” #195
“Jesus I come” # 336
“Cleanse Me” #438/9
“Whiter than snow” #436
Leviticus 17:11
Exodus 30:18

HOLY PLACE: Hebrews 4:12-16 The Veil Which Was Rent: God wants us ENTERING HIS PRESENCE WITH BOLDNESS

“Holy, Holy, Holy” #262
“Sweet Hour of Prayer” # 433
“Teach me Thy Way” # 395
“Jesus the very Thought of Thee” #79
“Channels only” [not in book]

LAMPSTAND: The Golden Lampstand: God wants us WALKING IN HIS LIGHT

“Spirit of the Living God” #247
Leviticus 24:1-4
Ephesians 1:17-18

TABLE of the BREAD of the PRESENCE: Hebrews 2:14-18 The Table of Showbread: God wants us NOURISHED BY OUR SAVIOR

“Joyful, Joyful we adore Thee” # 1
Exodus 25:23-30

ALTAR OF INCENSE: The Altar Of Incense (30:1-10, 34-38) : God wants us PRAYING IN THE SPIRIT

“Sweet Hour of Prayer” #433
Exodus 30:1-10
I Thessalonians 5:17-18

ARK OF THE COVENANT: Hebrews 13:8, 15-16, 20-21 The Ark of the Covenant: TRUSTING HIS PROMISES

“Open our eyes, Lord” # 383
“Jesus led me all the way” [not in book]
“Near to the heart of God” # 497
“A Mighty Fortress is Our God” #26
Hebrews 9:1-9, 11-15
Exodus 25:10-22

CONCLUSION: The Mercy Seat: RESTING IN HIS SACRIFICE

Hebrews 13:20-21
“Standing on Holy Ground” [Royce Wright ]

[1]MacArthur, John F., The MacArthur New Testament Commentary, (Chicago: Moody Press) 1983.

[2] Hughes, Acts, p. 50.

[3] A. P. Gibbs, Worship, p. 45

[4] Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p. 171-73.

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