MOVEMENT THINKING at DIVINITY SCHOOL _ part 4 WORSHIP

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MOVEMENT THINKING at DIVINITY SCHOOL _ part 4 WORSHIP
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HIS LIFE DIVINITY SCHOOL

PART 4 of 10


THE WORSHIP FACTOR

If your worship services are totally predictable every time your church is suffering from a lack of unrestrained worship. How high on the list of church growth factors is proper worship? It has to be very close to the top. Since 93% of all first-time visitors make their first contact with a local church by attending a morning worship service, something significant and awesome better happen there. It cant be “business as usual”.

If its true that true worship is the total extension of our total beings to God in praise, adulation and adoration, we better make sure that all the dynamics for  the expressions of that worship are present.

Without a long , theological treatise on Biblical worship, some things must be said to form the backdrop for any church that desires to see people drawn to Christ through worship. Only a few years ago, worship did not appear on my list of church growth factors and principles as a key for growth. But having understood just a little of the true meaning of worship and having experienced personally the joy and fulfillment of unrestrained worship, I would not only add it to my list, but push it up to the top.

Its no secret today that the church, from what we read in the scriptures has a four-fold ministry. It is WORSHIP, WORD, WITNESS and WORK. Though these flow together and overlap, if the real worship isn’t there, both corporately and individually, the rest is quite redundant. Fortunately for the church today , worship the long missing jewel, is being rediscovered as well as recovered. Somehow, some way, at some point in our history, Satan cleverly stole worship away from the church. Devoid of true worship, the church has basically” gone through the motions” it has pumped itself up by programs, plants, projects, promotions and a plethora of activities, but the jewel that brings the life has truly been missing. At all costs, we must storm the gates of hell and re-capture this jewel, restoring it to its rightful position. Then and only then will God’s church begin to move again.

Jesus made it clear at the outset of his ministry that there is a true worship as opposed to the false.
But the is coming and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24).

Notice something in that scripture we tend to forget. Jesus referred to the “true” worship. That implies that there is a phony , false , counterfeit worship that also happens. There are good  examples of in biblical history. Nadab and Abihu offered  strange fire. Making a sacrifice in worship not according to divine  plans ( Lev. 0:1-2). Saul disregarded God’s plan that none but were to function at the altar and as a results of that plusother things lost his kingship (1Sam. 13:8-14a). of course the scribes and Pharisees in Jesus day made void the word of God  by their legalistic tradition, thus their worship was hollow and meaningless (Matt. 15 :1-9) . Much of Israel’s worship had been reduced to only forms. That’s why God said what He said in Isaiah 1:11.

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? Says the Lord” I have enougn of burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; I  do not delight in the blood of bulls or lambs or he goats”.

That’s why Jesus said we are to worship Him in spirit and truth. Spirit without the truth is aimless, experiential subjectivism. Truth without the spirit of man is nothing more than  cold form of legalism. God wants both spirit and truth.

What is real worship? It is attributing to God in thought, word  and deed the glory, honor, the praise and adoration that is due Him

Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord the glory of His name; worship the Lord in Holy array (Psa. 29:1a-2).

We try again and again to get across to our audience that they come to church to offer the Lord something , not to get something out of the Lord. We’ve all heared the remark. “I didn’t get anything out of the service today.” I always want to say “Who said you were supposed to?” Now to be sure, we always “get” something when we give something! But our primary purpose for gathering in assembly on Sundays is to ascribed to the Lord the worship and praise due His name. that is our objective. God is the audience, we, the congregation, are the performers. In a day when so much of church life has become “religious show biz”, and the “stars” are  performing on the platform while the people applaud their talent, the true biblical concept is hard  to get through! It’s not that God NEEDS our worship. God NEEDS nothing! He is self-sufficient, but He wants our worship because of what happens when we give it.

True worship is the best understood in the truth that God dwells and manifests Himself in the midst of a praising people rather than a watching people rather than a watching people. That’s why Psalm 22:3 tells us: “Yet thou art holy, ENTHRONED ON THE PRAISES OF ISRAEL.” There is a lot of punch in that verse! The King James version makes it even more graphic when it says that God INHABITS the praises of Israel. What a truth, God inhabits (lives, dwells, is at home, abides) in the midst of a praising people. Is God made to be “at home” in your worship services?

I think one reason so many worship services are cold, routine, predictable and unmoving is that they lack the sense that God is manifestly present, sitting enthroned on the praises of the people. When there is no praise, there is no sense of His presence. When there is no sense of His presence, there is no excitement or joy.

A way common misconception many have about worship is manifested is a recent church bulletin I saw. At the top of the bulletin were these words in bold type; “THIS IS THE SANCTUARY OF GOD. IF YOU MUST WHISPER, WHISPER A PRAYER TO GOD.” There are two things wrong with that exhortation. First, the building is not the sanctuary of God. We are. Secondly, worship and praise in the Bible is not done in whisper, but shout ! A good example of this comes from the Old Testament. When the builders were putting in the foundation of the temple, there was a worship service to commemorate it. Listen to this description.
And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord, according to the directions of David, king of Israel; and they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, :for He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.” And all the  shouted with great shout, when they praised the L:ord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priest  and Levites and heads of father’s houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice, when they saw the foundation of this house being laid through many shouted aloud for joy; so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with great shout and the sound was heard afar (Ezar 3:10-13)

Now if doesn’t  take Ph. D. In mathematics to know that in those four short verses, the word SHOUT or SHOUTED appears 6 times plus one other time where LOUD VIOCE is used! That church bulletin wouldn’t have been too popular in that worship assemble. If you need another example, what about the time when God’s people brought the ark of the covenant home?
When the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout so that the earth resounded (1 Sam. 4:5).

Search the Psalms and you will find nowhere that worship is to be quite and subdued. Someone may object and say, “but doesn’t the Word say the Lord is in his Holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him?” But remember, it says “all the earth”, not all worshippers! No , worship is to be expressive, that’s why the Psalmist can say, “Clap your hands all ye people, SHOUT unto God with the voice of triumph “ (Psa. 47:1).

Real praise also releases God’s power in a new and fresh way. When Jehoshaphat was hemmed in, outnumbered and about to be slaughtered , he did what the world would think foolish… he praised the Lord. One of the most significant verses in the Bible makes a comment on his action.

And when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set an ambush against the men of Ammon, Moab and Mt. Seir who had come against Judah and they were routed (1Chron. 20:22).
Is that God’s impeccable timing or not? What a message! No matter what surrounds us, no matter how black the circumstances, no matter how outnumbered we are, no matter how impossible the situation appears, praise releases God’s power and makes real His presence.
God is worthy to be  praised for who He is. He is incomparable in His position, His person and His passion. His characteristics are bound up in His names, given in scripture; he is Elohim, the one who speaks, He is El-Shaddai, the God of power. He is Adonai, the God who owns. He is Jehoveh-Jireh, our provider. He is Jehoveh-Rophe, ou healer. He is Jehoveh-Nissi, our standard bearer. He is Jehoveh-M’Kaddesh, our purifier. He is Jehoveh-Shalom, our peace. He is Jehoveh-Tsidkenu, our righteousness. He is Jehoveh-Shamnah, the God who comforts. That’s enough to get us started. He is to be praised not only for whom He is, but what He has done and does.

With that brief sketch of background of what worship is, how, practically, do we worship the Lord so that our worship services are alive, exciting, expectant, exhilarating and challenging? Without going into detail, we do need to be reminded that the biblical model for worship makes room to put our whole being in to it. There is the laughing mouth, the uplifted hands, the dancing feet, the extolling tongue, the bent knee, the clapping hands, the prostate position and the singing mouth. Does your worship service make room for any or all of that to happen?

Practically speaking, here are some solid suggestions to make your service of worship on Sunday not only biblical, but refreshing. We might call these the marks of unrestrained worship.

1. Don’t announce what you are  going to do, just do it. In other words, don’t say, “Now, we are going to sing such and such,” just do it. This brings a flow and momentum to the service that otherwise would not be present.

2. Sing TO the Lord, not just about the Lord, so much of congregational singing is comprised of one extreme or the other. We tend to sing little ditties that sound good, but don’t have much meat, or we sing the stilted hymns that leave cold and devold of life. Praise songs directed to God evoke excitement. The Psalmist said, “O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord all the earth” (Psa. 95:1).

3. Use “planned spontaneity” in the service. That may sound like doubletalk, but what it really means is to so structure your worship that there is room for spontaneous praise times, an additional chorus, scripture or whatever. Spontaneity doesn’t have to mean confusion, but is means giving the Holy Spirit the room and freedom to do what He wants to when He wants to.

4. Omit the “printed” order of worship. When everyone can look and see what is going to happen next, it is unfruitful predictability that shouldn’t be there in my opinion. This of course, gives you freedom to  depart from the “hidden” agenda if the Lord moves you so.

5. Put the words to the music on the wall so people’s hands and arms are free to clap or be lifted. When someone is holding a hymnbook with their nose tightly fixed into it, there is somewhat of a loss of freedom in worship. Also, when the words are up on the wall, people’s heads are up when they are singing and not pointed to the floor.

6. Avoid verbal announcements about events in the worship service. Print the announcements or put them on an overhead. They tend  to break the spirit of worship when verbally spoken.  Also, people don’t remember what is said  most of the time concerning dates, place and times.

7. Use as much of an orchestra in worship as possible. If your church is small, use in good taste a set of drums and a bass guitar to enhance the rhythm.

8. As stated earlier, don’t announce everything that’s going to happen, just enter into it. There is no need to say, “now the choir is going to sing,” or now Mrs. Smith will sing a solo, or “now we are going to take communion.” Also, never allow long pauses between events in the service. People have come from a week of seeing thins move right along, then come  to church and watch things drag with long sections in between has an unworshipful effect.

9. Promote a re-service praise time. This occurs 10 to 15 minutes before the stated time for worship where someone just begins leading people in praise and prayer choruses to get people in the worshipful mood before the regular service starts. It is estimated that 40% of your crowd sits in the auditorium between 10 and 15 minutes with nothing to do but watch people who come in. why not bring those people into the spirit of worship by giving them the opportunity to sing and praise the Lord?

10. Insert periodic “clap offerings” in the service to the Lord. This is when the leader simply says, “God is worthy to be applauded for His mighty___________, so let’s give Him a clap offering this morning!” this releases people to express their praise in one more way to the Lord. not everyone can sing well, but all who have two strong hands can clap well.

11. Plan some designated time, maybe not every week, for people to have the opportunity to kneel, not just to pray, but to humble themselves before God, in acknowledgment of His majesty and lordship.

12. Refer often to the offering as a tangible expression of our worship, because that is what it is. Sometimes it’s good to have people give a testimony during the offering.
How long should a worship service be? If they are the old, dead, traditional type of services, fifteen minutes would be plenty long. If they are vibrant, exciting, and uplifting, 1 ½ to 2 hours certainly isn’t too long.

Through our services vary from season to season, and sometimes from Sunday, below is a “flow” we’ve found to be highly effective:

5-10 minutes pre-service praise 
Orchestra & choir with opening chorus (always something majestic and worshipful)
Audience stand & sing two songs of praise, one right after the other Baptisms, if there are candidates 
Choir (for everyone) 
Greeting time (urge everyone to meet someone new)
Chorus
Pastor’s minutes
     Welcome first timers
      Have people fill out cards
      Lead in 3 praise choruses
Prayer time 
Communion & offering (soloist during offering)
Sermon
Invitation to come forward & accept Christ
Closing remarks and closing chorus!

Remember, there are no long pauses in between each act of worship. You’ll notice there’s no place for “promoting programs” or making long boring announcements.

Well-trained ushers can contribute greatly to the smooth running of a flowing worship service. If properly trained, they can tactfully intercept parents of screaming infants, little children causing disturbance, teens that talk and disrupt the service, and people who become ill. Also, through training, ushers can be ready for their role in receiving the offering, giving out first time visitor packets, serving communion, and other things.

Never allow the worship service to become an orchestrated performance, staged by a few and viewed by many. That totally defeats the biblical concept that real worship is not a spectator sport, but is to be entered into by all. If there is an audience at all in worship, it is God, but the people who are present, all of them, are the performers. The concept doesn’t come naturally, it must be faithfully preached and taught, and more than once! Ours is a culture of watching, performances, applause, and on-looking. Most carry that concept right across the threshold into the auditorium where they worship.

As said earlier, exciting, uplifting, and God-centered worship is a greater contribute to evangelism and church growth than most people can ever imagine. How? Again, remember that 93% of all the people who make their first contact with your  church ( from church to church that figure will vary slightly) make it through your worship service. If that first contact is unspiring, disconnected and done in a slip-shod way, the odds are great they won’t be back a second time, if , on the other hand, they see about them God’s people  intensely involved in worship and praise, putting their whole self into it, they will be moved.

In calling on a visitor who had visited our church for the first time on a previous Sunday, this business executive had a little or no interest in things spiritual. Through a corporate move, they were new to our area, and one of the things he promised his Christian wife was that when they got moved and settled he would go to church with her as she sought out a new church home in the area. Paraphrasing his words, this non Christian executive said to me in his home, “Frankly, preacher, I never went to church, and I wasn’t raised  in a Christian home. I agreed to visit with my wife a couple of times to satisfy her, and as before I would be content to let her come alone and do her thing at church while I did mine at the golf course. But when I walked in and saw everyone singing with uplifted hands toward God, and saw the tears rolling down the cheeks of many men my age who also wore 3-piece suits, I crackled! I knew they had something  I was missing and all of a sudden I wanted to know the God to whom  they were giving such intense intense worship .” I was privileged to be used to help lead that man to the Lord. May his tribe increased! I believe churches who suffer from a low visitor problem need to overhaul their concept of worship, as well as their worship services. There is something about praising God that evangelistically draws unsaved people toward God.
In streamlining your services, be sure and leave room for “planned spontaneity.” Those two words may sound self contradictory, but in reality it means that you plan for a “flow” but always leave room for another song, or a different song, or maybe no song at all in that particular place. There is something about the freshness of God’s presence that calls for being quite open to improvisation at the last minute. There are some weeks when the Lord seems to be leading us in the service to a time of contrition, or time of extreme joy, or a time of extended praise. There must be room to accommodate whatever God is doing at the moment, rather than just running roughshod through a printed order just because we don’t want to adapt or improvise or because it’s easier. For instance, one Sunday as we were worshipping, following what we had planned, in the middle of one of the songs, the Lord impressed upon me that many people were in the service hurting that Sunday morning. So we switched to another song, “I Cast All My Cares Upon You.” I asked for all who were being bent by a terrific load of care to come to the front altar while we sang and released the care. Almost 200 people came and knelt at the altar that morning. Believe me, that was NOT planned, but thank God the instrumentalists didn’t mind improvising, the ushers didn’t mind waiting a few minutes longer for the offering and I didn’t mind cutting my message a little shorter to accommodate what God was doing in our midst. That is planned spontaneity.

A BIBLICAL MODEL

Nowhere in scripture will you find a better “model” for worship than Psalm 113. A short Psalm, it somehow captures all the elements about worship and puts the worship of God in a different perspective than the usual.

1. IT TELLS US THE WHO OF PRAISE: It starts out by saying “Praise the LORD” in verse 1. He is the object of our praise. As started earlier, He is the audience, not the people who gather. On the contrary they are the “performers”. While true worship is subjective in that it is always experiential, it is first objective, in that the object lies beyond us. The Lord is the recipient of our adoration, blessing, thanksgiving, songs and hallelujahs. If we can remember that in planning a worship service, it will color everything we say, sing, and do.

2. IT TELLS US WHO THE PRAISE-GIVERS ARE: Again in verse 1, “Praise OSERVANTS of the Lord, praise the name of  the Lord.” We are the praise givers, not the praise receivers. Again, we enter into worship to dispense something, not to receive something. To be sure, we do receive, but the receiving is the normal outcome of the dispensing. It is interesting that David referred to the praise-givers as “servants”. He didn’t call us worshippers, congregation, audience or people, but “servants.” I believe this was deliberate, because it shows the proper relationship between the worshipper and the worshipped.

3. IT TELLS US THE TIME FACTOR OF WORSHIP: Verse 2 says, “Blessed be the name of the Lord, FROM THIS TIME FORTH AND FOREVERMORE.” So worship is not just something you do in church on Sunday mornings at 11:00 and then maybe again on Sunday evenings or mid-week. It is an on going attitude of life that should permeate our thinking and our speech. To be sure, there will be times of concentrated worship, special times of personal worship, other times set aside for entering into corporate worship with intensity. But as far as “when” to worship, its an on-going, unceasing experience we develop as an attitude of gratitude. Driving the car, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, taking a shower or just listening to music can provide excellent settings for worship. Try it!!

4. IT TELLS US THE GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDERIES OF WORSHIP: Verse 3 says, “From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised!” Any way you measure that phrase, it means the whole earth, every nation, tribe, every race, every culture ,every level of creation….. the whole earth is to praise the Lord.

5.  IT TELLS US THE PERSPECTIVE OF WORSHIP: “The Lord is high above the nations, and his glory above the heavens!” the exaltation of God makes our worship a comic exercise. He is exalted above the earth, above all that is common and mundane, above the heavens, indeed above the highest heavens! When we enter into an intense time of worship, something big is happening that transcends all human transactions! If you want your perspective stretched, then just worship in Spirit and in truth.

When the missing ruby of worship is restored, Satan will indeed be routed. He shudders to think of the power present in the midst of a worshipping people. Churches that are learning to worship God biblically, unrestrained, uninhibited and not bound and  gagged by generations of tradition are indeed growing. People are attracted to people who worship.

I am told weekly by people who visit our worship services that they finger themselves crying in worship. Most of them cannot put their finger on why they cry. One man recently  said, “I think I know why I end up crying in church every Sunday . I am so awed at the presence of God made real, I can’t stop the tears, “What a testimony! It’s true, when true worship is accorded its rightful place again, many will be awed and moved.

“O sing to the Lord a new song, For He has done marvelous things!”
Psalm 98:1

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