Fully Abandoned Worship

Another really good one by Lee Grady - Take the Test: Are You Fully Abandoned in Worship?

I was raised in a traditional church where people worshipped God reverently while holding identical blue hymnals. The only instruments in our church were a piano and an organ, and nobody got too excited except for the one old man on the front row who sometimes belted out an uncomfortable "amen" during the preacher's sermon.

Then, at age 18, I had a life-changing experience with the Holy Spirit—and I ended up visiting an African-American church on the other side of town. These people worshipped Jesus with no inhibitions. They flailed their arms, shouted "Hallelujah!" and swayed to the beat of drums. I was so energized by their passionate praise it that I couldn't wait for the next meeting.

I soon learned from studying Scripture that my African-American brothers and sisters were worshipping the biblical way, even though it was foreign to me. God never intended His people to hide their enthusiasm. The more exuberant I became in my worship, the more personal freedom I experienced. I began to leave the shallow waters of religious tradition. I ventured into the deep ocean of total abandonment.

I learned what it means to worship God with my whole heart—with no fear of people's opinions.

Many churches today have adopted a free style of worship, and some of the best praise music ever recorded is available to our generation. Yet I find that many Christians have still not learned the secret of uninhibited praise. Many of us are content to listen to a music team on stage when God never intended a worship service to be a concert. He invites all of us to be fully and radically engaged in extravagant worship.

Have you shed your inhibitions in worship? I often challenge people to compare their worship experience with the book of Psalms, which should be the standard for every church regardless of nationality, culture or denomination. Psalms calls us to joyful, energetic, unreserved, high-voltage praise.

Have you found the freedom to express your worship in these ways?

1. Declaring praise. The psalmist says: "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so." (Ps. 107:2). Praise is simply honoring God for His character and attributes. But it is not enough to just think nice thoughts about Him—you must verbalize how much you are thankful for His mercy, forgiveness and goodness.

2. Raising hands. King David said: "I will lift up my hands in Your name" (Ps. 63:4). I'll never forget the first time I saw a room full of Christians praising God with their hands in the air. It looked like a bank robbery! God asks us to raise our hands because our physical posture affects our hearts. Lifting your hands will help you surrender totally to Him.

3. Singing. Can you imagine a world without music? It lifts our hearts, releases joy and breaks the power of anxiety. The psalmist said: "I will sing of lovingkindness and justice, to You O Lord I will sing praises" (Ps. 101:1). Don't just listen to songs in church or mouth the words halfheartedly. Turn up your volume and belt it out—and don't worry if you are in tune. All God wants from you is a joyful noise.

4. Shouting. We don't think anything about screaming at the top of our lungs for our favorite sports team. But are you comfortable cheering for Jesus? The psalmist wrote: "My lips will shout for joy when I sing praises to You" (Ps. 71:23). The shouts of God's people caused the walls of Jericho to fall. Some types of spiritual resistance will not come down until you raise your voice.....

Much more at the link.

Lifting and Kneeling

From Robbie Seay at Desiring God- Be There To Respond:

The Psalms give us two reoccurring physical responses to God: Lift your hands and kneel down.

“Come let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our maker!” (Psalm 95:6)

“But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you.”(Psalm 5:7)

“So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands.”(Psalm 63:4)

“Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord!” (Psalm 134:2)

Because of the cross, these invitations to worship are not part of a formula or ritual that grants us access to God. They become honest, outward expressions of an inward surrender to God.

Pressing In

As you gather this Sunday with the people of God, hopefully you greet one another in the name of Jesus, and perhaps even have a good cup of coffee. But more than that, hopefully you’ll celebrate the grace and love of Jesus Christ. Rejoice in the salvation that God has made yours by way of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Know that the Spirit of God is with you, that he speaks through God’s word, that he intercedes for you according to God’s will (Romans 8:27).And whether you are a worship leader or an engineer, a teacher or businessman, a student or a nurse, let’s together put down the phones, and put down the coffee, and let’s press into God’s grace and be moved by it. Let’s be there to respond.

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All Together Now....

"The only way to understand the Psalms is on your knees, the whole congregation praying (singing) the words of the Psalms with all it’s strength. "

              - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

HT:Desiring God

Worship in the Wild

Distracted during worship services? Read Worship Where the Wild Things Are from Desiring God:

One of the unavoidable realities of corporate worship in this world is distraction. Our minds are already prone to wander completely apart from anything happening around us in that room. But anyone who’s been in church for more than a few minutes knows there are always more things going on than we can ignore. Unruly children, unresolved conflict, uninhibited personalities, untalented singers, unsilenced technology, and an unending list of other disturbances.

If you’re like me, those moments can be a real challenge. After all, I’ve come here to meet God, to hear from him and offer my worship to him. The movement, tensions, and noises are keeping me from him, right? They’re stealing my attention in some of the most precious minutes of the week. Distractions in church can quickly give rise to impatience, irritation,exasperation, and even anger.

Five Ways to Worship in the Wild

But I wonder if we’ve missed the point of the wildness in corporate worship. Yes, God mainly wants to speak to us through his word, but what if he has other things to say in less grammatical, less authoritative ways? What if God wants these unwanted distractions to show us more of himself and more about what it means to love his children than we could see alone at home with our Bibles?

Here are five ways God might just bless and inspire your worship in the wild, where you're really not sure what might happen next.

1. Screaming Babies or Unruly Infants

Any church with young families knows well the cries of new life. The little ones that are so adorable and beautiful before and after a service can temporarily become annoying or inconvenient when they speak up during the announcements or a sermon. But this is new life. If we realize what’s happening — a new human being added to our church family, a future man or woman, potentially a husband and father or a wife and mother — we would have every reason to be blown away by our creating God, rejoice in the gift of this baby girl or boy, and bear patiently with this screaming image-in-process.

2. Bad Singing

Some of you are this person, and you know it. Some of you are married to this person. Some of you sit a couple pews away from this person week after week. You’ve thought about a move, but that’s too big of a statement in a small church. Some people simply can’t sing very well. Despite the beautifully good heart, the ensuing sound would make more sense in the local zoo than the church's choir.

We’ve all been commanded to sing (Psalm 47:6–7), but we’ve not been equally gifted for it. The miracle, though, is that any of us, who once dead in our sin, would sing to our God at all. Each of us was made to image and worship God, but we all turned away from him, offended him, and earned his wrath. But God overwhelmed our rebellion to win our worship through Jesus.

Our hearts will always and only find their greatest satisfaction in God. That’s what worshipis. Our hymns and songs give voice to that happiness. God is not listening for pitch, but for heart in worship. Anyone singing to any tune, in any octave, with whatever rhythm to God is a stunning, miraculous, wonderful thing. We should be developing an attitude that rejoices in all the voices that are lifted to make much of him.

5 Benefits of Corporate Worship

From David Mathis at Desiring God - Five Benefits of Corporate Worship 

Worshiping Jesus together may be the single most important thing we do. It plays an indispensable role in rekindling our spiritual fire, and keeping it burning. Corporate worship brings together God’s word, prayer, and fellowship, and so makes for the greatest means of God’s ongoing grace in the Christian life.

But thinking of worship as a means can be dangerous. True worship is fundamentally an experience of the heart, and not a means to anything else. So it’s important to distinguish between what benefits might motivate us to be regular in corporate worship, and what focus our minds and hearts should pursue in the moment.

According to Don Whitney, “There’s an element of worship and Christianity that cannot be experienced in private worship or by watching worship. There are some graces and blessings that God gives only in the ‘meeting together’ with other believers” (Spiritual Disciplines, 92). Surely, many more could be given, but here are five such “graces and benefits” that we experience uniquely in the context of corporate worship....

He goes on to list the five benefits of corporate public worship as:

1. Awakening
2. Assurance
3. Advance
4. Accepting Another's Leading
5. Accentuated Joy

You can read the full article at the link

We're Curved In On Ourselves

Ever found your "worship" experience to be really more about you and your feelings about God than about God Himself? I know I have- It's a frequent and common issue.  Learning a little Latin phrase (Incurvatus in se) has helped me to understand the problem better, and reminds me to turn my heart upward and outward in worship away from my own feelings and problems.

Good piece here from Zac Hicks (Worship Pastor at Coral Rdige Presbyterian Church):

A Latin Phrase Worth Knowing

I’m a sucker for cool Latin phrases. Incurvatus in se, or “curved in on itself,” is one such phrase, possibly coined by Augustine and definitely expounded upon by Martin Luther.  The Reformer wrote:

"Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake."

Me, Me, Me

It’s such a vivid picture. Incurvatus in se is that self-obsessed tendency in all of us to naval gaze.  Every human being is bent inward, even taking the good things of God and making them “all about me.” For Christians, incurvatus in semanifests itself in unhealthy levels of attention on our own Christian growth and spiritual formation. (Yes, this really is possible, and it may very well be at fever pitch in American evangelicalism.) We become expert self-analysts, tracking every notch of progress and regress, victory and loss, growth and atrophy. We engage in formal and informal scorekeeping of the hopefully upward mobility of our spiritual maturity. Did I spend time in the Word today? How many lustful thoughts did I have? Was my tongue controlled? Was my temper checked? Did I practice the presence of God? Did I exhibit the fruit of the Spirit? Was my prayer intentional and purposeful? Diagnostic questions like these aren’t bad in and of themselves, but they become destructive and antithetical to the Gospel when they are our dominant pattern. If “Christian living,” for you, is defined by your constant asking and answering of such questions, you are probably suffering from a severe case of incurvatus in se, because Christian living at its core has nothing to do with these things.

I-Can-Do-It Worship

Unfortunately, because this incurvature is such a fundamental reality for all of us, it has crept into our worship, preeminently in the songs that we sing and in the way that we sing them. Elsewhere, I and others have called such songs, phrases, and lyrics elements of “triumphalism”—that obsession with how we’re living for God, loving God, giving it all for God, etc. It’s in the “surrender” language we often employ, and it’s in the “I’m doing it all for you” and “I’m giving it all away” lines that we gush. It’s painfully ironic that as we sing such lines, though we’re singing to God, we may be actually reveling in ourselves.... 

Much more at the link.

Understanding Worship

From Ron Edmondson on "10 Signs You May Not Understand Worship":

1. The volume or tempo of the music determines whether you think it’s a worship song. 
2. A slight change in the order of the service makes you think they’ve harmed “worship”.
3. You think raising hands or not raising hands determines the depth of a person’s worship.
4. You believe the “proper” length of a “worship” service is dictated by your lunch schedule.
5. You think worship has to be in a service or part of a programmed event.
6. Certain instruments keep you from thinking worship is possible.
7. You think worship is confined to a certain place or a certain time.
8. The clothes you wear determines the quality of worship…for you AND others.
9. You think worship always involves music.
10. Your attempt to worship has more to do with a personal preference than the subject of worship.

If any of these describe you, then you might need a refresher study of what it means to worship God.

HT: Blogotional

Shaped by the Doxology

I grew up singing the little chorus know as the Doxology: "Praise God from Whom all blessings flow..." Thanks to Zac Hicks for the reminder that singing such words that are full of Biblical content also shapes us.

One drop of water on a rock has little effect, but a steady dripping will eventually wear a hole into a seemingly impenetrable stone. Singing the Doxology every week is like getting a steady drip of life-giving Trinitarian water over hardened hearts.

James K. A. Smith, in Desiring the Kingdom, reminds us that the very form and rituals of worship have a shaping effect on us.  We don’t just become more godly by learning the theology of the songs and imbibing the propositional content of the sermon.  Our desires and habits, as we move along the path of the liturgy, are shaped to more subconsciously and instinctively move along the direction of that path.   For instance, I have been in a context where I have experienced the same weekly liturgy of Confession, Assurance, and Repentance for over ten years now.  I now find that I have new instincts and desires when I slip into sin.  With nearly Pavlovian certainty, my heart drops to its knees, I acknowledge it before God, I preach the good news to my heart of God’s assurance of my pardon through Christ, and I find greater strength to turn and re-commit myself to God’s service.  Repeated liturgy makes you love it and live it every day of the week.  There are many things that we could point out about the shaping effect of the Doxology.  I will mention three.

First, the Doxology shapes us into whole worshipers.

• Praise God from whom all blessings flow,

• Praise Him, all creatures here below;

The first line gives us the “why” of worship (because of what He does).  But next is the “who.”  First, “all creatures” are summoned to God’s praise, and suddenly our minds are blown about the fact that worship is not merely a human activity.  It is an activity of all creation.  Before the fall, somehow all creation was more attuned to the worship of God, and there was a sense of solidarity between human beings and creation in the act of worship.  ”Praise Him, all creatures here below” is a summons toward fall-reversal, saying to the earth, “Return, and worship the One who made you.”

When we realize this, singing this weekly shapes us into a people dissatisfied with a hyper distinction between sacred and secular.  We become a people who grate against our society’s bifurcation of our private, personal religion and our public self.  God’s demand for worship has equal authority in our schools, homes, and workplaces as it does in the sanctuary.  Our worship is whole, because the summons isn’t “Praise Him, all Christians here below.”  We become a people who are passionate about the reclamation and return of all of the earth’s worship to its rightful Owner and Object.

The Divinely Commissioned Orchestra

"The gospel isn’t meant for just me in my room. The beautiful music that comes from God’s people gathered in worship and united in service isn’t meant to be performed by one person in one place. The declaration that Jesus is Lord sounds most glorious when it is proclaimed through his church. When we tailor the gospel only for individuals and make the message solely about a private religious experience, we wind up with a “cassette-tape gospel” that captures a sliver of the message but cannot do justice to the glorious melody of Christ’s lordship playing all throughout creation. It is true that the church is made up of individuals who believe that Jesus is Lord. But together we form the called-out community of faith: the church—an orchestra divinely commissioned to play the music that proclaims salvation in Jesus Christ alone. "

            -Trevin Wax, Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals

Jesus is Leading Worship Today

What a wonderful way to think about Sunday worship! From Zach Hicks:

 ...Hebrews 2:12 tells me something even more profound.  It tells me that while I'm praising God with the assembly--"in the presence of the congregation"--Jesus stands next to us, praising God alongside us.  Jesus is perfecting our worship in that very moment, too.  He's standing in our midst, singing, praying, and listening along, in real time, in real space.  He's also declaring God's name to us, meaning He's encouraging us to worship, cheering us on.  He's Prophet, Priest, King, and Cheerleader.  

Nearly every Sunday now, as I lead worship, I have a kind of Braveheart experience.  At the end of that movie, as Mel Gibson is being tortured on his death-table, he looks out into the mixed crowd of haters and sympathizers and suddenly fixates on a single figure, calmly moving through the crowd, eyes locked on his.  It's his wife, who had died previously and awaits his arrival in the afterlife.  It's a gripping scene.  When I lead worship now, as I look out on the mixed crowd of hand-raised charismaniacs and bored stiff yawners, I envision my Lord walking among us, singing as He goes, praying as He goes, encouraging as He goes.  I see Him declaring God's name to my brothers and sisters, and I hear Him singing God's praises amidst the congregation.  And our broken, selfish, mucky, sinful praise becomes perfected praise, in that very moment.

The good news about our bad worship is that Jesus worships for us.  He didn't just worship (past tense) for us, though that is remarkable enough.  Fulfilling yet another glorious aspect of His High Priestly office, He worships (present tense), in real time, in our midst.  And God the Father, through the power of the Spirit, sees Him...among us, through us, around us, and in us...and He loves it and revels in it.

What freeing news.  This means that whether I had a good Sunday or bad Sunday, Jesus was there, making it the best Sunday, every time.  Because of Jesus, God the Father loves my worship.  This is the gospel, worship-style.