Worshiping God With Our Heart

Introduction

We are here again. Here we often are. Doing what we often do. And I want you to contemplate the things in your life that you often do. If you could make a list of the things that you do with the greatest amount of frequency. What would be at the top of that list? It’d probably be very common things for most, if not all of us, things that we do with great frequency. And there may be a few exceptions, but most of the things that we do with the greatest frequency, we do them because of one of two reasons. We may do those things with great frequency because we have to.

That are far lower on my list are things that I just do not enjoy, and so I do them less frequently. That makes sense, doesn’t it? What’s one of the things in our Christian life that we do with tremendous frequency? It would have to be worship, wouldn’t it? It’s a child of God. I want you to think about, and don’t get your phones and your calculators out and try to figure it out right now. You can do that later, but think about how many worship services you’ve attended in your lifetime. For most of us, it’d be a very high number. As Christians, we do this with great frequency. And I would hope, as children of God, that we do these things with great frequency for those very two reasons.

Number one is we need to do this.

I do this because I enjoy it. And so I choose to do this. To worship God, to be with others who voluntarily worship God. But it’s often the case when there’s something that we do with great and regular frequency, there is the tendency to give little or no thought to that. Probably the top ten things on your list that you do with the greatest frequency, you do with very little or no thought to them. And there’s always been that danger with God’s people. To be frequent in our worship attendance, but to be infrequent in our thoughts about our worship service. And so this morning I’d like for us to begin this day of worship by going back in the Old Testament to Psalm 95. And I hope you’ll get your Bibles, your Old Testaments, and go to Psalm 95.

We’ll be looking at a couple other passages of Scripture, but for the most part, we’ll be camped out in Psalm 95 as we talk about worship this morning. And we want to focus this lesson about worship in talking about engaging the mind and the heart in worship. We’re going to talk very little about the acts that we perform in worship. Those are important, but that’s not the emphasis this morning. The emphasis this morning is going to be upon engaging our heart in worship. To truly worship God is not simply to perform the acts, even the acts prescribed by God, but true worship is attained when we perform those acts prescribed by God with the heart and mind engaged in worship to God. As a student of the Bible, you recognize that the psalms have a lot to do with worship.

The Psalms were the Hebrew song book that they used in their worship to God. And these songs, these psalms that we know as poems, were really songs that were sung in the worship to God, but they weren’t only used in worship. You recognize that many of the psalms talk about worship. And they talk about praising God and why God is to be praised and how he is to be praised, and even the frequency with which a servant of God was to worship and praise God. And Psalm 95 is one of those. 11 verses. And so let’s just begin this morning by reading Psalm 95, and then we’ll break it down into its component parts and see what we can learn about worshiping God with our hearts today.

Read with me, Psalm 95. Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to him with psalms. For the Lord is the great God and the great king above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the hills are his also. The sea is his, and he made it. And his land, his hands form the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, when your fathers tested me.

They tried me, though they saw my work. For forty years I was grieved with that generation and said, It is a people who go astray in their hearts, and they do not know my ways. So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.

Now, first we need to recognize that the psalms find themselves in the old covenant, and the method and means of worship in the old covenant were different than the method and means of worship that we engage in today. But there are two things that never change about worship. Across covenants, across centuries, two things about worship are constant. And number one is that God’s people will worship Godf you were to study the Old Testament, the New Testament, Genesis to the maps, you would recognize that it’s always been the case that God’s people worship God. Again, that may look different from the patriarchal, the mosaic in the Christian age, but one constant is they worshiped God. The second constant that has never changed is the concept of worship of what at its heart, at its basis of what worship is.

1. An Intentional Expression of Praise to God

And so what can we learn even from this old covenant passage about worshiping God with our heart? The first thing that we recognize in Psalm 95 is that worship, properly offered, worship involves an intentional expression of praise to God. Intentional.

We recognize that at its heart, the very act of worship has to be intentional. Man may accidentally do things that God wants them to do. A person can be a good person without doing it out of some kind of Christian urging. But understand this that worship cannot be accidentally offered. Worship is something that has to be intentionally offered, and God calls upon his people to do just that. And this intentional worship is to be offered outwardly. It is to be expressed. And so while worship, and really the whole point of this lesson this morning is to talking about engaging our hearts internally, but to worship to truly be worshiped has to be expressed and emoted externally. Worship involves praise to God. Look in the first two verses of Psalm 95 again at the repetition of this thought.

Come let us sing to the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving, and let us shout joyfully to Him with Psalms. Four times in those two short verses, the psalmist says, express your praise to God. Sing twice, he says, shout, and once he says, to bring thanksgiving to God. And so our worship is to be expressed, our worship is to be communicated. And one of the primary ways that God has sought for us to worship Him is with communication, with verbal communication, with singing. A constant through the old and the new covenant is the idea of worshiping God with song. And what’s interesting is to recognize why that is the case, or just the fact that that is the case.

An all-knowing and all-seeing God would recognize my heart, know the place that God has in my heart, but he still wants me to verbalize it. He wants me to say it. And that does not come as a surprise to us because that’s the way God Himself works. That when God created the heavens and the earth, he spoke them into existence. Read Genesis 1 and 2. And God said, Let there be light. Before there was even a human being to hear what God would say, God was speaking. God was expressing himself. And God has expressed himself to mankind throughout history. He was with Adam and Eve in the garden, and he talked with them in the garden. He called Abraham out of the Ur of the Chaldees.

He met with Moses, the representative of God’s people at the mountain and spoke the law to them. He spoke to his people over and over again, both through lawmakers, through priests, and through prophets, of communicating himself to man. And when the perfect embodiment of deity would come to this earth to show not only through spoken word, but through the very embodiment of his divine life, the scriptures would call him the word.

And so it should come as no surprise to us that God wants us to reciprocate. That God wants us to speak, to sing, to shout praises to him as an expression of our worship. It would be difficult and maybe a dangerous endeavor to try to rank the acts of worship in their importance. And so I won’t try to do it this morning. But what I will try to do is to elevate the place of singing in our worship. I fear to some singing ranks low when it comes to the idea and the concept of worship in our worship services. To some, at least, singing is the song service is kind of just the opening act for the preacher. And that’s not a biblical concept. Read the Psalms, read the New Testament commands for us to sing and make melodies in our heart.

And there is absolutely no allowance that I can find in Scripture for this verbal expression of praise to God, which is at its heart the essence of worship. There is no allowance in Scripture for the worshiper to God to opt out of this form of worship. To say, because, well, singing’s just not my thing. Or I don’t have a very good voice. Imagine if we applied that logic to other acts of worship. I cringe to even use these illustrations, but bear with me. What if somebody says, I just really don’t like bread, or I’m on a low carb diet, and grape juice isn’t the best tasting thing, and so I’ll not participate in the Lord’s Supper. What if someone said, I’m not the best student, I’m not really good at listening, and so during Bible class or during the sermon, I won’t participate.

I’ve never been very good at praying, and so I think I’ll just not pray. But we say it’s just a song service. Or I’m not really a singer. And so I will choose not to worship God. In one of the primary ways that God has said we’re to worship Him. Another thing we notice about this idea of an intentional expression of praise is that the worshiper must place emotion in the right priority of worship. And I’ll be honest with you, I struggle with this. But we understand that at its heart and its most basic level, worship is not simply an expression of emotion. Because the psalmist here, and God throughout Scripture has commanded his people to worship. It is an intentional act. It is not something to be simply offered spontaneously when I’m in the mood, when I feel like it.

It is an intentional act. Now, surely emotion for a true lover of God, a true worshiper of God, worship will be involved, and emotion will be involved in that worship, but it can never truly be just motivated by emotion. It’s motivated by something else. With emotion playing its part. Look over in the New Testament, in the book of Hebrews, chapter 13. We could look at several New Testament passages that talk about this idea of expressing our worship. But let’s look at Hebrews chapter 13. And as you know, the book of Hebrews uses the Old Testament covenant, the old covenant, in a comparison to the new, and the word of the book of Hebrews is better. We have a better covenant. But there are comparisons to be made.

And here’s one comparison in Hebrews 13 and verse 15. Therefore, by him, that is Jesus, our sacrifice, by him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God. That is the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name. The Hebrew writer, by inspiration, combines two fundamental elements of Old Testament worship: sacrifice and verbal praise. If you were to go through the Old Testament scriptures and underline every example, every command, every allusion to sacrifice. And then go back and read the Old Testament again and underline every example, every command and every allusion to the verbal praise to God.

2. Why He Is Worthy of Our Worship

And here the Hebrew writer combines those two. By Jesus, let us offer the sacrifice of praise, the fruit of our lives. God wants his people to worship him. And one of the primary ways that is accomplished is by our verbal expressions of praise to God. Back to Psalm 95. We’ve seen what worship is. It’s an intentional expression of praise to God. But then we need to be reminded why we worship. And this gets to the heart of the matter. Where our heart can truly be engaged is that we need to be, even as God’s people, even as students of the word, we need constant reminders of why God is to be worshipped. Why he is worthy of our worship. And when we read the examples and the statements in Scripture that talk about worshiping God and why he is worshipped, there are two recurring themes.

Just because he made us. But he’s also worthy of our worship because he has redeemed us. Now that redemptive work can take different forms. In the Old Testament, God redeemed his people in a lot of ways. He chose them, he provided for them, he fed them, he watered them, he rescued them, he fought battles for them, he gave them a land. And certainly in the New Testament, that redemptive work of God takes the form of the sacrifice of Christ. And he’s worthy to be worshipped. Look in Psalm 95, beginning in verse 3. For, after saying, four times, shout, sing with thanksgiving. Here’s the reason, verse 3. For the Lord is the great God and the great King above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth, the heights of the hills are his also.

The sea is his, for he made it. And his hands form the dry land. Oh, come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God. And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. It may at first glance seem an unnecessary exercise for New Testament Christians to contemplate such basic thoughts. But it’s not.

Is the constant reminder of who he is. The constant recognition that God made everything and that I am his.

That He is God. And let us never forget that that’s why we have come together. Not to be entertained, not to be socialized, but to worship God. When God ceases to be the absolute point and emphasis of our worship, what we engage in ceases to be worship. And that can take two forms. Number one is we can adapt and change what we call worship to suit me.

I want to be engaged. I want to be uplifted. And even though it may sound like a noble endeavor, it is far from it. I want to feel closer to God. With the emphasis upon my feelings. And so we can change and alter what we call worship.

And in so doing, we’ve changed worship because we’re really worshiping self. Another way in which we can change this whole engagement of worship is not by changing the elements. We feel a strict inherent adherence to the acts of worship. And we just routinely and mindlessly go through those motions without recognizing those actions as an external intentional expression of praise to God. And so it behooves us as Christians to get closer to God, to know Him, to humble ourselves before Him, and to truly worship Him with our hearts.

3. Recognizing Who God Is Through Humility

Reminder of why we are here. And I think one of the easiest ways to do that is just to open up the word. And the Psalms might be the great place to go. And just read the first, usually five or six verses of one of the Psalms that says, here’s why we worship God. Because He is our God. Turn over and read Revelation 4 and Revelation 5 of that great throne scene in which God is worshiped because he is worthy. And how is this done? How do we intentionally express our praise to God? How do we properly recognize who God is? We do that through humility. Verse 7 again says of Psalm 95, for he is our God. We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.

Worship can only be accomplished when we surrender self to God. We recognize Him as our shepherd, and we as His sheep. And we offer ourselves body, mind, and soul in worship to Him. Will you pray with me, please? Our God. Our great God, the great King above all Gods.

We recognize, Father, that everything that we see and know, every blessing that we have in this life comes from your hand. We know that you simply spoke, and everything we see and hear came into existence. We marvel at your power and your might. We know that you spoke again through your Son. Through His life and His sacrifice, His death, we can have life more abundantly.

And what you have promised to do for us. We love you, Father. We honor, respect, and fear you. And so this day we’ve gathered together to empty ourselves of ourselves, of our worldly pride and thoughts and notions, and we come to bow down before you.

That your name will be uplifted and honored in this place and in our hearts. In Christ’s loving, precious name we pray. Amen. We’ll now be dismissed to our classes.