OF WHAT KIND OF WORSHIP IS GOD WORTH?

Moses Worshiped God

We know all the right words to apply to God: Sovereign; Worthy; Majestic; Awesome; Powerful; Mighty; Omniscient; Creator and all of the rest of them. If we believe them, why is our worship so slip-shod and puny?

When we should be falling prostrate on our faces, we are behaving like we're in a social club. When we should be humble, we are presumptuous. When we should be offering up the best there is to Him, we offer Him spiritual pablum, chaos and rank amateurism.

God's right hand spans the universe. One word from God and things come into existence or go out of existence. He is the Judge of judges. He is the keeper of eternity's books. He holds your life, temporal and eternal, in His hands. And we dare to offer up to Him disharmony and disorder in our worship? How? What makes us think that's alright?

"Well, we're just family" is not a reason to minimize the reverence we must have for God. Everything we do in worship must enhance the personal encounter with Him that is worship. Every element of  our worship must point people to God. Every part of worship should be an exaltation of Him. Every second of our worship must be for Him and only for Him. There is no place for "us-toward-ness" in worship.

That is not a call to sterility, it is a call to proper enthusiasm; enthusiasm that inhales and exhales the very Breath of God, who is the Holy Spirit. Worship should include reverent fellowship. There is more than enough entertainment in most worship services.

In worship, everything must be done as well as it can be done: singing; announcing; praying; speaking; sermonizing; inviting. Whatever we are doing in worship must demonstrate our understanding of who we serve.

Nothing, absolutely nothing in worship is about us. It is all about Him, His character, His love for His creation and His plan for its redemption.

Can we clap in worship? As long as the clapping is an offering to God and not to the "performer." Can we "Amen!" in worship? As long as the "Amen" is in agreement with one of the great principles of God, and not some phony response to some "rib-tickling" platitude.

Worship is not about what kind of music is sung, how eloquent our prayers are, how funny the pastor is or how pious his sermons sound. Church worship is coming corporately into the presence of Almighty God through Christ by His Holy Spirit.

God has given us His best: His only Son, Jesus. Ought we to offer anything less than our best in worship?

Miracles

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, you know that Jesus' first miracle was at Cana when He turned the water into wine. Why did He do that? Was He showing off? Was He demonstrating His ability to do "magical" things? Was He letting everybody know that if they just trust Him He will do great things for them?

None of those is the reason. The passage tells us why He did it. In 2:11 we read, "This, the first of His miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed His glory..."

The miracles were not about the events themselves. Nor were they about the subjects of the miracles. They are not promises to us that He will perform the same types of miracles for us. They were done to show that Jesus is God. That claim is what incited the Pharisees to kill Him.

When Jesus said to His mother, "Dear woman why do you involve me?...My time has not yet come," What did He mean?

Preachers have twisted and turned this phrase "every which way but loose," and still seemed unable to grasp what He was saying. This is one of the few miracles Jesus did that was not followed by an attack from the Pharisees. They weren't at the wedding because it was not to their advantage to be there, and the Pharisees were very opportunistic people.

Jesus' time had not yet come because the Pharisees were virtually absent from the wedding. The time for them to recognize Jesus' claim was still a bit into the future.

You see, when Jesus performed His miracles, the Pharisees recognized their meaning immediately, and they did not like what they recognized.

As John tells us, Jesus was in the beginning with God and Jesus WAS God (John 1:1). The Pharisees were not after Jesus because they were afraid of losing their power. The were not after Jesus because they thought He aroused the people against them. The Pharisees were after Jesus because they knew that through His miracles He was claiming to BE God. That, to them, was heresy of the highest order and worthy of death.

Jesus' second miracle came after He had proclaimed who He was as recorded in John 4. It was the healing at the pool of Bethesda. That miracle was followed by an inquiry by the Pharisees about who had healed the man. This marked the beginning of His time.

From then on, after most of His miracles, the Pharisees made accusations against Him. They then began to search for Him, to try to get Him to stop His miracles and to intimidate Him. When that didn't work, they began to threaten Him. Finally, they even began to set out to kill him. Eventually, they did.

God still provides miracles. He does not, however, provide a miracle every time one is asked for in faith, nor does he hand them out willy-nilly. If He did, they would not be miracles. When He provides a miracle, it is for the purpose of His own glory. It is not for the person who receives the miracle, it is for God.

We need to come to grips with and to realize that nothing is about us. Everything is all about Him. When we come to that understanding, we are more able to focus on Him, praise Him and to be content in every situation. Then we will discover how to rest in Him. We will see that Jesus, in and of Himself, is enough. We need no more; no second blessing, no second filling, and no miracles.

It Is Hard to Argue with God

Not too long ago a pastor stood before his congregation and proclaimed, “God told me….” He then proceeded to explain to the congregation what they were going to do. Trusting him, they went along with what he said God said to do. The result was catastrophic for the church.

When a pastor (or any Christian, for that matter) claims a revelation, vision or word from God, it is hard to argue with him because he thinks he has received divine direction. The Bible tells us we can “test the spirits,” but how do we do that?

The answer, of course, is that we test them against the revealed Word of God, the Bible. If a “word from God” does not conform to Scripture, it is a word from Satan, not God. The trouble with that comes when interpretations of Scripture are so divergent.

Let’s consider some things.

First, a true word from God is always verbal, the very words of God. It’s never an impulse or an impression; it’s never a feeling that needs interpretation. Rather, a word from God must be a precise message.

Second, a true word from God is testable as either true or false. If someone invokes the Holy Spirit as the source of his word from God, but what he says is false, God commands His people to reject both the “word from God” and the prophet (or preacher).

Third, a true word from God is infallible. Whatever God spoke through His pastor must error-free and utterly unaffected by human fallibility.

Fourth, because a true word from God is verbal, propositional, and inerrant, the only conclusion to draw is that it carries the full weight of divine authority. Since the end of the apostolic age and the completion of the canon, only Scripture can legitimately claim that level of authority.

Finally, a true word from God would result in Him being glorified, His church being edified and His gospel being propogated.

So is it remotely possible that the action recommended by that pastor and followed by the congregation that led to disaster was truly a word from God?

No. That is not possible.

The sad thing is many churches follow their leader wherever he takes them. They lack the Biblical knowledge to know whether he is leading the astray. They have never been trained in sound doctrine and true Bible study has been ignored so long that they do not know the difference.

As a consequence of that “followship,” some churches have been driven from a pattern of growth to a pattern of limp sheepishness.

God’s Word lays out all of the basic principles we need to know about the orderliness of God and how His business is to be conducted. It is too bad that so many churches don’t even know what those principles are, vilify the “organization” required to enact them and are too lazy to do so anyway.

After all, God is just supreme, sovereign, all powerful, everywhere at once and all knowing. No reason to be so serious about so-called “words from God.”