This is lesson number two, In Spirit and Truth, the Fundamentals of Biblical
Worship. And tonight, The Practice of Biblical Worship, which is
submission. Now last week I started this series on biblical worship by explaining
that the essence of worship is communication, whether in private or at
public worship, our goal in worship is to communicate with God. I also reviewed the
various languages we use to communicate with God, and these languages are prayer
languages. I talked about prayers of praise, prayers of mercy, and supplication,
prayers of request, prayers of confession, confirmation, prayers of
remembrance, prayers of adoration, prayers of wonder. Notice they're all prayers, but
they're very different types of prayers, are they not. We tend to kind of lock
into one type of prayer and always repeat that same type of prayer, but
there are many different types of prayer. And this is the language of
communication between God and men. Now remember that if you're not
communicating with God, you're not really worshiping. You may be at a worship event,
but you're not worshiping. There has to be communication. All right, so we've
talked about the essence of worship, which is communication, and the various
languages used to communicate with God. We've listed several of these here in
the overhead. Next question, how do you get good at worship? I hear that all the
time. We need to improve our worship. We need to get better at worship. Okay, how
do you do that? I want to go back to my sports analogy that I did in
the first lesson. I talked about the Olympic sport analogy. I said that sports
is about competition and winning. You get good at your sport by training, by
practice, by competing often. And your type of training depends on the type of
sport you have. One thing I learned, very interesting, I saw a program
that showed how Olympic table tennis, table, ping-pong, Olympic table
tennis players - One of their main training methods, you know what it is?
Skipping rope, because in professional table tennis there's a lot of lateral
movement, from side to side. A lot of footwork. You really have to move your
feet very quickly. And skipping rope, like for boxers, helps develop quick and
accurate footwork. So the type of training you do, depending on the
sport that you do. So we go back into our lesson idea. What's the practice or
what's the training for worship? How do you improve your communication abilities
with God? Answer in one word - submission. Submission. This is an easy one to figure
out, because the Hebrew and the Greek words in the Bible translated into the
English word worship convey this idea. In the Hebrew, shachah, to bow down, to
prostrate oneself. In the Greek, proskuneo, to kiss or to kiss forward, or to
do reverence, or to bow down before. The words themselves give an image of one
who was in submission to and reverence of another one,
usually God. And so, the practice of worship, the spirit of worship, the way
one actually approaches God for the communication is in a position of
submission. So in answer to the question, how do we improve our worship services?
One should reply, learn and practice greater submission to God. This will
improve your communication or worship with God. Of course, that's not what men
do, is it. That isn't what we do. No, we try all the things to improve our worship. In
order to improve our worship we codify our rituals
and we make these the practice of our worship. In other words, we think the
value of our worship is tied to the correctness of our rituals, rather than
the submission of our wills to God. Now we're going to improve our worship,
yeah, how are we going to do that? We're going to learn five new songs. Well,
that's good, but that doesn't necessarily improve your communication with God. Of
course, this is a normal human phenomena when it comes to worshiping God and in
religion in general. For example, Muslims do this very same thing. They have the
five pillars of faith, which guide their entire religious and worship experience.
Pillar one, confession - there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet. Pillar
number two, almsgiving - the two and a half percent, the zakat, everyone needs to
give two and half percent. Pillar number three, prayer five times
per day facing Mecca. Pillar number four, fasting, Ramadan, the holy month. Pillar
number five, pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime.
These practices become their worship. The better they do it, the better their
worship. Nothing new here. The Sikh religion has the same formula for
worship and religious life. They call it the five K's. The kesh, which is the long
hair and the the long beard. The kanga, the comb or the turban. The kachera,
the shorts or the cotton undergarments. The kara, steel bracelet that they wear.
And the kirpan, which is the sword, usually a small knife that they carry.
You want another example of people who codify their rituals and make that their
exercise of worship? How about the Jews, the Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews
with the yarmulke, this is the skullcap, long sideburns, the curls, the
round hats, the long black coats, the dress.
They codify that and somehow that improves their worship, their
communication with God. So every religion tries to codify their rituals or their
particular dress and focus exclusively on these things to create or even
enhance their worship to God. This, in their minds, improves the worship.
In some instances we do the same, don't we. We think that improving our a
cappella singing is the way to improve our worship. So we spend money to expand
our auditoriums, we add cry rooms, we create PowerPoint images, we hire more
ministers, or we fire the one that we have, we add worship teams, we start
clapping, we get women to pray. Why? Because this will somehow improve our
worship. We focus on the rituals, we focus on the mechanics, rather than the spirit.
Thinking that changes on the outside will create changes on the inside. And
yet, we know, the Bible teaches us that change in worship and spiritual things
must first take place on the inside before outside things are affected.
Listen to the words of somebody who really knew how to worship God in spirit
and truth. He said, "The sacrifice you desire is a
broken spirit, you will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God."
Does that have anything to do with new song books, how close to the front or how far
from the front you sit? Psalm 34, "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted." And
doesn't Jesus say, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven." Matthew 5:3. And Paul summarizes perfectly the entire issue of the
practice of worship when he says the following in Romans 12:1,
"Therefore, I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a
living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of
worship." How do we glide over this particular verse here when thinking
about worship? I mean, I've been in the church long enough to have sat on, quote,
worship committees. And the agenda was, how are we going to improve our worship?
And, I mean, I bought into it too for a time. Almost every one of these
meetings always had to do with mechanics. How do we improve the
mechanics. The essence of worship is communication using the
language of prayer and praise. The spiritual exercise the vehicle that
brings our communication before God is our submissive hearts, our submissive
wills. If worship were like a computer, because not everybody's into
sports. Let's use the computer analogy then. It's like the rituals and the
building and the order of worship, that's the hardware, the language of
communication, praise, request supplication, confession, this is the
software. That's what brings the computer to life, but submission of one's will to
God, that's the internet connection. That's how you make contact. Now this
example may be easy to understand, but not easy to apply, because we are
sometimes confused about how each part works. So here are some common mistakes
that we make or sometimes common errors that we think. First of all, sometimes we
think it's all about the hardware when we're talking about worship and
improving it, it's all about the hardware. We've got to
maintain the status quo: two songs, one prayer, communion, sermon, invitation song,
closing prayer, out the door. All the energy is used to maintain the building
and the personnel so we can repeat the process once or more during a week. We
resist any change based on our belief that we have restored New Testament
Christianity by building this hardware and no change is needed or permitted.
There's a problem here. The problem is this ideology doesn't
understand what biblical worship is. And the result many times, dry and lifeless
churches, dwindling in members, poor spiritual lives, small faith. Or we think
it's all about the software. Let's get rid of the bulky hardware, let's upgrade
to an iPad or an iPhone, get the iPhone 10. In other words, let's do
house churches, or let's experiment with other ways to feel about God, let's
encourage spiritual experimentation, tongues. Hey, let's have women prophesying
in tongues in public, let's go all out. Why not?
It's all about communication isn't it? This extreme forgets that the
communication, the worship with and before God is regulated by Him in His
Word, and not by us. He gives us the language. He establishes the significance
of the rituals and their forums. He provides the guidelines for how and when
we worship and for what purpose. Him. He does this. He gives us that. And this is
where submission comes in. I want to read Romans 12:1 over again, but out of
another version, that kind of brings out different aspects of this
particular verse. "And so dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your
bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy
sacrifice - the kind that He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to
worship Him." Notice here, there's no mechanics here. There's no hardware here.
Paul explains that our personal, daily, spiritual worship is expressed mainly in
the way we submit our bodies to God in purity, service, and obedience. I may not
have the opportunity or time to articulate my worship in words, to
communicate my love and praise to God, however the actions of my body as I
submit to His will in the way that I think and act are a continual act of
worship. Or as Paul says, a true spiritual worship to Him. And
I haven't even cracked open a songbook.
In this way, my actions and my words, form a unified communication that service by
complete devotion to the Lord each day. At some point in the day I will be
tempted to honor myself at the expense of someone else.
The words are just on the tip of my tongue, and if I say them, I'm going to
feel really good about myself, because I have elevated myself by stepping on
someone else. We all do it, right? And at that very
moment the Spirit of God will remind me that God raises the humble and He lowers
the proud; or will remind me that before a fall comes pride. And I
will hopefully bite my tongue and not say the thing that would so gratify my
flesh, and just swallow it. Let it go. I have worshipped God right there. I have
offered my flesh to Him, right then and there. The best advice I heard to start
this process, someone said, learn to say no to yourself one time a day. Just learn
to say no to yourself one time a day. As I said, in this way, my actions and my
words form a unified communication that serve as my complete devotion to the
Lord. When Jesus said that God was looking for those who would worship Him
in spirit and truth, this is what He meant. Submission on a daily basis
permits one to be in a worship mode constantly, an idea much superior to the
Muslim concept of daily prayer repeated five times facing Mecca. Five times
a day, that's it? You're boasting about that? You think that's a lot of prayer?
You think that's what God wants? How about twenty-four hours a day? How
about every time you think of Him. You're peeling carrots, you're making a stew,
you smell the carrots, they're so fresh. Lord, thank you so much. I can eat what I want,
when I want, how much I want, what a blessing, thank you, God.
Now, another notion of submission, in First Corinthians chapters 11 to 15,
obviously not going to read those, but I think you're familiar with these. In this
section Paul explains the necessity for submission in corporate worship as well.
Now, Romans 12, Paul is talking about my individual, every day, I can be in
worship to God. That's not to say that we just jettison all corporate worship, that
God doesn't care about that. Absolutely God cares about that, just
different than our private worship. We don't have time to examine each subject
that Paul discusses here, but obviously there were problems in the corporate or
public worship assemblies of the Corinthian church. These included dress
code, veils for women to wear or not to wear, or proper behavior
concerning fellowship meals and the Lord's Supper, the value and the practice
of spiritual gifts in the assembly, how should we do this. Now the thread that
runs through all of these chapters is that these Christians were not using the
gifts or participating in the rituals according to God's will. The answer was
not, for example, well, as far as the veils are concerned, let the women wear what
they want to wear or let's just bar them from public worship altogether. That
wasn't the answer. Or to do away with the fellowship meal and the communion,
because it just caused so much trouble. That wasn't the answer. Or to restrict
tongue speaking or limit the service to one prayer and one teaching per week.
In other words, Paul wasn't saying to them, hey, you guys make up your own rules
about public worship. Not at all. The answer was to be in submission to God's
will for public worship, just as one was in submission to His will for personal
and private worship. It's all about submitting to God. And just as Paul
briefly outlined what this meant for our everyday lives in Romans 12:1 and 2,
purity, service, devotion. That's the exercise of submission from Monday
to Saturday he does the same for the public worship as well, because of
submission to God's will, which is the true practice of worship, because of that
the women continued, in that day, to wear their veils in conformity to the
cultural norms of the time, and they were silent in the church, not leading or
teaching in conformity to eternal and spiritual norms. And the common
denominator to both of these attitudes was submission to God's will. On one hand the
women did not contravene a cultural norm. In other words, just taking off their
veils. Because in taking off their veils and being exposed to that society meant
that that woman was immoral. So they did not contravene a cultural norm,
so as not to create a scandal. And on the other, they submitted to the eternal and
spiritual norm, not cultural, of male spiritual leadership in the home and now
in the church. Two different reasons, one single reaction, submission to God. The
true spirit of worship by the women at that time. And then the men also
submitted to the order, or to the process that Paul imposed, in order to provide a
more uniform assembly. Submission was the antidote to the chaos and the
competition that was tearing apart this church. They had great software:
tongues, prophecy, knowledge; but were unable to communicate with God because
there was very little submission to the divine order. And then of course, everyone
had to submit to one another in Christian love, so that their witness to
others would be effective. Jesus said, "This is how all men will know that
you are my disciples: in the way the you love one another." John 13:35. Do you
notice He didn't say, this is how all men will know that you're my disciples: by how
you love the lost or how you love the poor or how you love the world, but
rather, how you love one another. The chapter on love, 13, is really the nuts
and bolts of how we are to submit one to another. Mutual submission is the
practice of Christian love. It's the proof that we are disciples and our best
witness for Christ. Without this kind of submission,
there is no worship to God. If you cannot submit yourself to your brother that you
can see, how are you going to submit to God who you can't see. And so in avoiding
the extremes, focusing on the status quo, and just maintaining the rituals and
thinking if we can just improve the rituals we'll have better communication,
with God, that's one extreme. And the other extreme is, well, let's just dump
everything and try to create our own spiritual experience. That won't work
either. We need to find the right balance to enhance our communication with God in
worship. And that balance is an effort at being in submission both to His will,
both in our personal everyday lives, which produces an ongoing spiritual and
acceptable worship to God, and being in submission in our corporate assemblies,
because God has also revealed the behavior and the attitude and the
practice that He accepts during these times. I would rather be in a congregation
where the brothers and sisters love each other and forgive each other their
offenses and are there for each other, then be in a congregation that sings
well. Now, if I can get both, I'm happy. If I can get a congregation that sings well
and everybody loves each other, wow, that's beautiful, that's perfect.
But if I had a choice - these people love each other, but man they got no ear.
That's okay. I'll pick love over having a good ear any day. In his famous
devotional book entitled, My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers writes
that we, as Christians, become broken bread and poured out wine. Isn't that a beautiful
image? We become broken bread and poured out wine.
A wonderful description of the merging of our personal and public worship as
those who are in submission to God. And so, how do we get better at worship?
Personal submission to God each day. And submission to God's will when we are
together. This submission not only elevates our communication to the
threshold of heaven, it also brings us to the true blessings of worship. And the
true blessing of worship - you ever wonder what do you get out of worship? What am I
supposed to get out of it? Next week we're going to talk about what we're
supposed to get out of worship. Again, in a word, the true benefit of worship -
transcendence. Transcendence. That's the benefit of communication with God -
transcendence. And so next week we'll talk about transcendence. In the meantime,
if you have not yet submitted your will to God's will in confessing the name of
Christ, repenting of your sins and being baptized, then I exhort you this
evening, if you haven't done that, please do that. Be in submission to His will
through the gospel. And if you have been rebellious in your behavior, in your
thoughts, in a way that has pushed God away from you and wish to be restored to
a good relationship with Him, then let the elders of the church pray for you
and encourage you in that. If you have a need at this time to respond to the
invitation, we do encourage you to come forward now as we stand and as we sing.