“The Purpose Driven Church” –Worship – Psalm 95

Ok, I’m going to say a word and I want you to say the first thing that comes into your mind. Whatever comes to your mind, just holler it out. “Worship”

Now, let me ask some questions. How important is it to worship that it be done in a church building? It’s absolutely NOT important, is it? Martin Luther once said, “A dairymaid can milk cows to the glory of God.” You can worship anywhere. Even churches don’t have to be in a building.

What about a preacher? Do you need a preacher to worship? Nope. Don’t have to, do you? A preacher can lead worship or contribute to the process. He can be a part of it but it’s not necessary to have a preacher.

What about music? Can you worship without music? Sure you can but at the same time, worship can be more powerful and more meaningful when music is involved. What is the right kind of music? Contemporary or traditional? If you came to worship, then either one can be worshipful.

How about prayer? Now, technically, you can worship things or people besides God but if you are going to worship God then prayer is vital. Prayer is vital to worship because worship is between you and God and that communication is called prayer. Does it have to start with, “Dear Lord” and end with “In Jesus name, Amen”? No, formal prayer is not necessary.

What about the Bible? Do we have to read from the Bible during worship? Technically no. I believe you can worship if you are on a deserted island with nobody and nothing except God and a willingness to do so but when we come together for the purpose of worship, we will always read from the Bible and have prayer. If worship consists of communicating with God, then we will pray to Him and listen to what He has to say through His Word.

Almost done with my questions. Do you believe that anybody can worship? The problem with that question is that you assume I am talking about believers. Can someone who does not have a relationship with God through His Son Jesus communicate with Him in worship? Can that person who is not born again, as Jesus said, understand what God wants if the Holy Spirit is not inside him?

I believe that non-believers can be part of the worship service. In fact, that is one of the purposes of our church; to encourage unbelievers to be part of our times of worship so they can become believers. But on their own, they have no real communication with God so they cannot worship. They can be blessed and encouraged and even feel the presence of God but true worship is done in spirit and in truth and someone who has made the choice not to accept Jesus cannot do that.

So, now that we have an overview of what worship is and what it isn’t, let’s see what it really looks like. How do we know how to do it if we don’t have a model? Well, we have models of worship all through the Bible. And that is just another reason to incorporate scripture into our worship. You can find people worshiping from Genesis to Revelation but I picked a few verses from right in the middle, from the book of Psalms.

On Wednesday nights, we are going through the Purpose Driven Life book written by Rick Warren. It’s not too late to join us for that. But I thought it would be appropriate to look at what it means to be a purpose driven church at the same time. In his book, Pastor Warren writes that the first purpose of our lives is for God’s pleasure. Is it any different for a church?

A church is just a group of individuals so if the first purpose of our individual lives is to bring pleasure to God, then that should be the first purpose of a church as well. And one of the ways we bring pleasure to God as a church is simply to worship God. So let’s look at what worship really consists of as we look at Psalm 95. Again, I encourage you to follow along in the Bible as we read. If you didn’t bring yours, there is a copy in the back of the pew in front of you. Just turn to page 426 in most of those Bibles and follow along silently as I read out loud.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
² Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.

³ For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
⁴ In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
⁵ The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.

⁶ Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker;
⁷ for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.

Today, if only you would hear his voice,
⁸ “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
⁹ where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
¹⁰ For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
¹¹ So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’”

The Psalms are full of worship. Almost every one conveys some aspect of worship about it. But not all of them are happy. And when we worship, we are not always going to be happy. In Job chapter 1, Job gets word that everything he has is now gone including his 10 children and all of his possessions. And the very first thing Job does is to fall to the ground in worship.

I’ll tell you what. I was going to make a point here about how sometimes we might not want to sing happy tunes when we are not happy. And so I grabbed a hymn book and flipped through there trying to find a song we might sing when we are happy. And I was trying to think of songs like “Glorious Day” or “10,000 Reasons” that are upbeat but when I got to looking, I realized that all of those songs would be appropriate to sing no matter how we feel because our worship shouldn’t be based on how we feel or how good our circumstances are at the time.

Remember? Worship is not about you at all. That’s why the psalmist starts out here saying “let us shout for joy.” We can have joy in any circumstance. Even Job had joy because he knew this life was not all that there is. He knew this life was a wisp of smoke and that because he had a relationship with God, he could spend eternity in Heaven. If worship was based on happiness, we would be doing good to have 2 people here this morning.

The psalmist tells us here to sing for joy to the Lord and to shout out loud. Now, I wanted to know exactly what the psalmist meant here by “shout out loud” and so I looked it up. In the original Hebrew do you know what that means? It means ***shout***out loud***!

It means even when this life is hard and things are going wrong and the world is collapsing around you, and it’s not fair and it’s not right that you are to shout with joy, out loud to the Rock of our salvation; to the One who is the strong ground of our confidence; the basis of our hope; our security. In the New Testament and for us today that Rock is Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 10:4 says, “They drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.” He is the Rock on which the church and all believers are built.

We are literally to shout as if we were yelling at a thief, going to war or after a great victory. That is really what we are told to do here in this scripture. You yell when your team scores on TV. How much more should we shout aloud for the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ? Thank you Lord for your grace! Thank you Lord for your mercy and your forgiveness and your love!

I don’t care how bad of a day you are having; true worship will include voicing your joy for what God has done. It’s not about wanting others to see how holy we are or drawing attention to ourselves or becoming a distraction. But true worship will come from your heart and out of your mouth as a joyful noise.

In verses 3-5 the psalmist shifts his focus to acknowledging just Who God is and why we should worship Him. These verses could be summed up by saying, “Who better to worship the Creator than the created?”

Five years ago, I took a trip up to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and Montana. How many of you have ever been there? How would you describe it? For me, it was almost like being on another planet at times. Some of the stuff they have up there…we don’t have around here. You can just be driving through that huge park and see bubbling pools of sulphuric waxy acid that is boiling hot and colored in pinks, yellows, blues and reds.

There are geysers and volcanoes, all bringing up liquids or semi-liquids that used to be thousands of feet underground but are now part of the surface. Then there are towering mountains with snow on them year round. The Tetons, just south of there, have the most jagged peaks and the air is so clear that it looks like if you could put your hand up on top of those mountains you would cut yourself. And all of it is just overwhelming in its beauty.

Look at verse 4 again. “In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him.” The psalmist had never been to Yellowstone, I’m pretty sure. I doubt if he had ever seen the earth’s core or even the top of a mountain. But he had reason to know that God is great and worthy to be praised; that He is the King above all man-made gods. And so he worshiped Him. He acknowledged God for Who He is and what He has done.

In Mark chapter 4, Jesus falls asleep in the boat after a long day of teaching. It says that a storm came up and all the disciples were afraid and they woke up Jesus and it says that Jesus rebuked the winds and told the waves to be quiet and then it was completely calm. The disciples looked at each other and were terrified and asked, “Who is this? Even the winds and waves obey Him?”

Who is this? This is the One who owns the winds and the waves. And He owns them because He created them. Verse 5 says the sea is His because He created it. He made it. He is Lord and Master over it. Can’t we be as the wind and obey and can’t we acknowledge His greatness? Worship is more than just showing up for church on Sunday morning. In fact, that has little to do with true worship.

True worship will verbalize your joy and will acknowledge God’s greatness. Now look at verses 6-7. True worship will also include your submission to God. Gasp! Oh, no! He said the “s” word. Yes, verse 6 is about submission and reverence. Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. I remember as a kid wondering why we bowed our heads and closed our eyes when we pray. At no other time do we ever do that.

This is why we do that. It is symbolic and yet a very real way of showing our submission to Almighty God. In the days of kings, people would come before the king and show their submission to him by getting down on their knees and closing their eyes, showing that they are completely at his mercy. The king could do anything he wanted to them and there would be no defense.

Today we do it more out of habit than in true submission. We bow our heads and close our eyes and immediately start to think about what’s for lunch or what time the game starts. And we do that because submission is the last thing we want to be a part of. We have grown up being taken advantage of when we give in to somebody. We feel we have worked too hard to give up any advantage or leverage we might have in any situation and to submit to God is going to mean He will send us to Africa to be missionaries or something.

In days of old when somebody knelt before the king I’m sure they were desperately hoping that they had caught the king in a good mood that day. They could only hope that he wasn’t drunk or angry at somebody else and was going to take it out on them by cutting off their head. But if he decided to there was nothing they could do. There was no appeal process.

Today we come in worship and symbolically bow our heads but the very heart of true worship is the submission of our hearts and minds and will to God. And we don’t have to worry about Him being in a bad mood when we come to Him. He is not demanding submission so he can be a tyrant. In fact, 1 Peter 5:6 says, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you.”

Submission to God is acknowledging that God’s ways are higher than our ways, as Isaiah said, and that we give everything we have, everything we are and everything we ever want to Him because we trust Him. And we trust Him because He has proven Himself trustworthy. He has proven Himself trustworthy from Genesis to Revelation and all through our lives as individuals and as a church.

Worship without submission is hypocrisy. It is saying one thing and doing another. And just like delayed obedience is not obedience, partial submission is not submission. If you come to God on your knees and with head bowed and eyes closed and say, “God, you can have every part of me. I submit completely to you everything in my life…except this one little habit…except this person…except this one place I go or thing I do…” That is not submission and that is not worship.

He wants every aspect of your life because He loves you and wants what is best for you and what is best for His Kingdom. Verse 7 says, “we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.” We are not peasants serving under a tyrant. We are His beloved flock waiting for the proper time for Him to exalt us. We submit to Him because we understand that He knows and is able to provide what is best for us.

True worship includes verbalizing your joy to God, acknowledging His greatness and submitting to His will for our lives. And we do this; we worship because we want to and he deserves it, not just because He commands it. And the more we know God and have a closer and closer relationship with Him through His Son Jesus, the more we want to worship; the more we want to know Him even more.

But there’s a problem.  You know that great old hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”?  There are 2 lines in there that say, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love.”  Unfortunately, that is true of all of us.  We have a tendency to wander off, to wander away from God and the worship of Him.  And when that happens, our relationship with Him starts to suffer.  It happens every single time.  It can’t help but suffer.

You can’t be away from someone and have the best relationship; the kind of relationship you could have if you were close.  And when that relationship with God starts to suffer, the other relationships in our lives start to suffer as well.  That joy that we have in the Lord gets harder and harder to find.  That peace that we once knew starts to look more and more like that stormy sea those disciples were so afraid of on that boat.

Look at verses 8, 9 and 10 again.  The author here references something that happened way back in Exodus when the Israelites had left Egypt and were wandering in the desert.  God had provided miracle after miracle for them and yet on this day they looked up and said, “Yea, but what have you done for us lately?”  They got thirsty and forgot all that God had done for them and they complained and were ready to go back into slavery.  It says their hearts were hardened. 

How crazy is that, right?  After all God had done for them and protected and provided for them in every big or little way and now they are forgetting God’s ways.  They were not verbalizing their joy.  Instead they verbalized their complaint.

They weren’t acknowledging God’s greatness.  They were questioning and doubting His provision.  And they certainly were not submitting to God’s will.  They wanted to go back where they started.  And God said He was angry with them because their hearts had gone astray.  How awful to have God angry at you!  We started out this morning talking about how to make God happy and we saw that worship was vital to making God happy.

And now we see that not worshiping is just the right way to make God angry.  And when God is angry, we as believers start to lose our joy and our peace.  So, which do you want today?  Do you want to verbalize your joy, acknowledge God’s greatness and submit to Him in worship?  Anything less is not worship and is how we start to wander off and get in trouble.

As a believer, I can’t afford to have God angry with me.  But for non-believers; for those who don’t have that relationship with Jesus and have not admitted they are sinners and repented and asked forgiveness to God for that sin, then the Bible says there will be a horrible day of wrath coming.  Zephaniah 1 says “That day will be a day of wrath—
a day of distress and anguish, a day of trouble and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness.”

And it is your choice.  God can’t make that choice for you.  I can’t do it.  Your mama can’t do it.  It has nothing to do with your church membership or even how many times you have been baptized.  Choose you this day whom you will serve.  As for me and this house, we will serve the Lord.