I would like to look at Revelation 4:11, which is talking to God: "You created everything, and it is for Your pleasure that they exist, that we are created." Everything that God made was for His pleasure. God made you and God made you for His pleasure. That is why you should worship God, because worship is understanding that we were made for God's pleasure, and then responding in to how we were made.
Worship is an awesome thing of how God just responds back to us when we simply respond to Him. Worship is giving back to Him what He gave us. You see it is like this--parents, you understand what I'm talking about: if your kids ever come up to and they say "Thank you", you go "uh, what do you want?" But if they really have a heart of gratitude, that makes you feel good, doesn't it?
It is the same with God. We are His children, and when we go to God to express our gratitude to God, it makes Him feel good. He enjoys it when we say "Thank You" and we respond back to Him for what He has given us. It makes God's heart glad, it really does.
One day Jesus was walking down the street and some guy was talking to Him and asking Him all kinds of questions. He asked, "What is the big thing? What is the major thing that we should be about?" Jesus responded in that question in Matthew 22:37. He said, "Love the Lord, your God....This is the first and the greatest commandment."
What does first mean to you? It doesn't mean second, it's not third or fourth. I mean, first is first.; it has the highest priority. It is the greatest, and there is nothing, nothing greater than this one. So your primary call upon your life--the biggest commandment there is--is to learn to love the Lord with all of your heart, your soul and your mind . This is the first greatest commandment is to love God. It's the first one; it's the big one.
Earlier, we talked about how when God created us, He made us in order to love us. Now we are talking the flip side of that--simply responding to that love by worshipping Him. You see, our first purpose is to love and worship God. It is our primary purpose, that is why we are here.
I don't know what you think of when you hear the word worship. It is more than just having a song service, it' more than just spending time with God daily. Worship is beyond just praying. I think we need to expand what we think worship really is because there are a whole lot of things involve with worship, and with what really worship really is. Romans 12:1, says, "Because God's great mercy to us, offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicate to His service and pleasing to Him. This is the true worship that you should offer."
There are three key words I want you to remember. The first one is "because," and the second it's the same word, but it is used two different times, it is the word "offer." You will see, this is the essence of what worship is.
First of all, worship is my response to God's love. God loved me and in response to that, I love Him. That is what that word "because" is-- because of what He did, because of His love, because of the way He demonstrated His love. If you can really understand and comprehend the love that God has for us you, can give that back to Him. So, what is my response to God's love? It is giving my love back to God, giving myself back to Him.
You may ask yourself, what can you give God? Think about it, God has everything, right? I mean, what can you give back to God that He does not already have? (Talk about those people that it's hard to find a Christmas presents for!) What can you give God?
That is that word "offer" means--offer is "to give." You can offer up to God your life, because that is what He wants. He wants your heart, He wants your love. When you give Him your love, you are giving Him something He has chosen not to take; something that you have to chose to give.
Love or worship is simply giving back to God. Mark 12:30 says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength." The word "all" is pretty consistent in there. It is a pretty comprehensive word that you just means "all." It is everything.
God wants us to love Him in three ways. First, He wants us to love Him thoughtfully, which means God wants us to love Him from our mind. God want us to have our thoughts, and our minds. Second, He wants us to love Him passionately. That means we love Him with all of our heart, with all of our soul. Third, God wants me to love Him practically, with my strength, with my abilities. God wants me to love Him in these three ways.
We are going to use different terms for these words because we are going to talk about attention. God wants my attention, He wants my thoughts, He wants my mind. God is also going to want my affection, my passion, my heart, my soul. In addition, He is going to want my abilities. He is going to want my strength practically, loving Him. I just want us to really focus our minds on Him because worship is about Him.
Worship is when I focus my attention upon the Lord. I am to love my Lord with all of my mind. E.g., I am to give Him my attention. Sometimes when we come to a relationship with God or when we come to encounter God, sometimes we get on spiritual automatic. You know what I am talking about? Does anybody every do that?
I remember when I was in 9th grade and I was in Sunday School. My Sunday school teacher was closing the time together and he called on me to pray. I went on prayer automatic and before I knew it, I blessed the food. Have you ever been there and done that? Have you ever been on prayer automatic? I was so embarrassed that I have never lived that thing down, and my friends would never let me forget it. I shoved it to the back of my mind, but it just came up recently and I had to go get some inner healing on that.
Sometimes we just go on spiritual automatic. Some people do it every Sunday morning when they go to church. They kind of zone out..."is the pastor done yet?" You know what I mean. We get on this automatic zone, and sometimes we approach God thoughtlessly. But God wants us to approach Him thoughtfully--He wants our attention and He deserves our attention.
He deserves our mind, and to give Him our mind and we need to focus upon Him. Let me give an example. If I'm going to have a conversation with my wife, I can't be reading the newspaper or watching TV, or reading a book or anything like that. If I do, then my wife doesn't think I'm listening. She is right, because I'm not. So I've learned this, that if I'm going to talk to my wife, I have to look at her. Even then, she sometimes sees this blank stare coming over my face, and she says "You are not even listening to me, are you?' And if I don't respond, that is bad news. You women with husbands, many of you know exactly what I'm talking about.
We have to give God our attention. We can't do that if we have distractions, and if our mind is focus over here or over there. If you are thinking about those other things, then you are not able to give God your attention.
The problem is that our world is filled with distractions, and we are easily distracted. First of all, our flesh is a distraction, right? We also live in a world, in a culture that's full of distractions. Scripture says this in Roman 8:7 (in the Message Bible), "focusing on yourself is the opposite of focusing on God." Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, and ends up thinking more about self, rather than God.
If you are focusing your attention on you, you can't focus in on Him. Our problem is that within us, self-focus keeps us from focusing upon God it really hinders us in worship. We live in a culture that is self-absorbed, and our culture has so many things that pulls from us other directions, that distracts us, and keeps us from focusing our mind on God. Roman 12:2 says, "Don't become so well fixed in your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead fix your attention on God." You see we must chose to think upon God. How do you do that?
The first thing we can do is to simply spend time with God everyday. That is very important. Let me give you a hint on how to do that. Find a quiet secluded place, so that you wouldn't be tempted to go play with God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage--the focus will shift from you to God and you will begin to sense His grace. Find that quiet, secluded place. If you are going to spend time with God, you've got to find that place where you and God can come together; it's just you and God, quiet and secluded.
Now for many of you, it is not 15 minutes before you eat dinner when there is chaos in the house. It is not when everybody is running around. Find a place and find a time when you and God can get together and you guys can talk. Give Him your full attention, where you are not giving your attention to other things.
Choose a time and place that you are as free from distractions as possible, so you can give God your full attention simply and honestly. "Simply" means that you don't have to be religious, you can drop off all your religious jargon. God speaks more languages than just King James, so when you pray you don't have to revert to old English.
Just come to God very simply and very honestly. "Honestly" means that you don't have to hide anything--you are not going to surprise Him anyway. He's not going to say; 'oh, I didn't know that.' God knows everything. So come to Him in a very vulnerable and transparent fashion when you can meet Him. And we need to do it regularly and continually.
Psalm 105:4 says that we need to worship Him continually. The New Testament says, "Pray without ceasing." Continue to spend time with God, worship Him and whenever you give God your attention and your mind is focused and when your mind is fixed on Him, there is a benefit that comes in this. Isaiah, the prophet, was talking to God and he said in Isaiah 26:3: 'you keep in perfect peace, all who trust in thee, whose thoughts are fixed on you.' Did I use "thee" in there? I am so used to that "thou will keep," so let me revert to King James. "Thou will keep him in perfect peace, those whose mind is stayed on Thee." For those who don't speak King James, "You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in You and whose thoughts are fixed on You."
When you focus your mind on God, and you fix your thoughts upon Him, there is something that happens. God will keep you in a place of perfect peace. Does anybody need that? Has anybody signed up for the peace thing here? Boy, would I like to have some of that peace! What kind of peace is it? Imperfect? flaws? No, it is flawless--perfect peace. This is a promise from God.
Some of you need to start claiming that promise right now. You need to claim it if you are in a place where you don't have a peace of God, where your mind is consumed with worry, with discouragement, or your mind is filled with all these negative things with fear. If you will fix your mind upon God, then God will keep you in a place of perfect peace.
God can keep you in a place of peace, even if everything around you might be falling apart, even if all Hell is breaking loose. Why? It is because your peace doesn't have to be depended upon your circumstances. Peace doesn't have to be depended on what is going around you--it just depends on what your mind is fixed upon. The me correct that: it is not "what" your mind is fixed on, but "Who" your mind is fixed on.
Expressing Affection To God
In our last lesson, we began exploring how important it is to worship God, because we were created for His pleasure, and part of our destiny is to worship Him. We looked at Mark 12:30, which says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength."
We concluded that God wants us to love Him in three ways. First, He wants us to love Him thoughtfully, which means God wants us to love Him from our mind. (We looked at that in our last lesson.) Secondly, God wants us to love Him passionately--that means we love Him with all of our heart, with all of our soul. Third, God wants me to love Him practically, with our strength and with our abilities.
God wants me to love Him in these three ways. First of all worship is focusing my attention and my thoughts upon God. Second, it is expressing my affection to God. Let's talk about that....
Some people find it a bit hard to express their affection for God. They say, "I'm not a very affectionate type of a person. I wasn't raised that way. I wasn't brought up expressing myself affectionately and it is difficult for me. I'm not used to that. It is brand new..."
It is going to be new for some of you, but is that an excuse not to do it? Did God create you that way? Did God create you in such a way that you don't know how to express or to be affectionate? No, of course not. Sometimes we become that way because of the damage that we have received in our life, because of how some people related to us and treated us. Sometimes we become that way, but God didn't make us that way.
God wants to bring us to the place where we learn how to express our love to Him and to be passionate in our expressing of our love. I know expressing love can sometimes be a risky deal, just think back--remember when that first time you told someone that you loved them? That was a scary deal, wasn't it? It was kind of like: "what if I tell them and they don't tell me back? Am I willing to take that kind of risk?"
God is taking the risk out of it, because He told you first. He said, "I love you." And He just wants us to express our love back to Him. In fact, if we can truly understand His love and receive His love than we can do so.
1 John 4:19 says, "We love Him because, He first loved us." He is a loving God. In a lot of religions, God is really a mean, angry ogre who is ready to whop you, and god is always angry with you. But that is not the way our God is. That is not to say that God is not a holy and just God, but that is to say that He is also a loving and compassioned God; and God always takes the first step. God initiates everything; we only get to respond to what God initiated. When God loved us first, we then can respond to that kind of love.
Hosea 6:6 says, (God is speaking here) "I don't want your sacrifices, I want your love." In other words, 'I don't want your offerings; I want you to know Me.' This is what God wants. He wants us to give Him our love and to know Him.
If we were made for God's pleasure, and the most important and the greatest thing is to love the Lord. Since loving God is like the first thing (the most important thing), then that is what "success" really is. You see, if I finish my day and if I've known the Word a little bit more and if I love the Lord a little bit more than yesterday, then that day is very much a great success. Sometimes we have different criteria in what we think a successful day is, but a successful day is really "how much more do you love God and how much more do you know God?"
If you get up in the morning and say, "God today I'm going to love You more and know You more." You go throughout your day and all Hell breaks loose and kicks up, and everything goes down the tube, and you can't do any thing right and everything goes bad for the day. But at the end of the day, if you love God a little bit more than yesterday, and if you know Him a little bit more than the day before, then that day is a success.
On the other hand, you can get up and you can finish the day and say, "I had 27 things on my "to do list" and I accomplished everyone of those things today. but I didn't get to know God a little bit more and I didn't love Him a little bit more," then that day is not a success. God did not make you for you to complete your "to do lists". He made you to love Him and to know Him. Your "to do list" will come and go, but God doesn't. God wants to use every thing on those "to do list" in order to learn to love and know Him a little more. If you have been able do that during your day, then that day was a good, regardless what else happened in that day, regardless of how everything might have fallen apart in that day--that day was a good day.
There are people who think that God doesn't care about them. "How could He--God is too busy. He has to take care of a world." But Exodus 34:14 says, "He is a God that is passionate about His relationship with you." Now our God is a passionate God...He is passionate about you and He wants you to learn how be passionate about Him. As you begin to receive God's passion for you, then you can learn to become passionate back to Him.
Let's say that today is my anniversary and I come home, and I bring a box of See's chocolate's. That a good start. But if I say to my wife, "Mary, I'm giving you these chocolates for 3 reasons. First I'm your husband; second, it is our anniversary, and third, husbands give chocolates to their wives on their anniversary. Here you are, have them, have a great day."
What will her response be? First of all, my wife is a chocolate lover and she will take chocolate's anyway she can get it. However, my wife might be looking for a little bit more passion on my part, rather than doing something out of duty. You see, a healthy wife, enjoys it whenever her husband pursues her passionately. I did qualify in that didn't I? A healthy wife! Ok, that's another message, but you know what I mean.
In the same vein, God likes it when we are passionate about Him. We need to learn to be passionate with our God, we need to say, 'God, I love you.' We need to be okay with expressing that.
You may have sung some songs and that say: "I love You Lord," but sang sing them in a dragging voice, and there was no sincerity in our words. Now that may be where you are at, but God wants to change that so that you will be passionate toward Him. That happens when God expresses His love toward us. As we learn how to receive that love from Him, then we can be passionate back to Him and give Him our life and our heart.
When a couple is in church and getting married, we go thru the vow part. "Do you take this woman and do you take this man..." We do the "do you's" and you finish with the "I do's." What did they just do? They just simply committed themselves totally to that other person. Those vow's read "for thick and thin," "for health...for poverty." Someone may say, "Hey, I didn't sign up for that poverty one"--but the vow is for the good and the bad, for sickness and in health. You go through that and you say, "I do, I commit myself totally," and you are giving yourself to that other person. That is an act of love that you have now given your whole self to that other person, and they gave themselves to you.
You see, a part of loving is giving. You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. If there is love, then you will give.
Worship is a form of giving. It is an activity of showing our love for God--we give Him our heart, we give Him all of ourselves.
Roman 6:13 says, "Give yourselves completely to God, since you have been given new life." The main reason we don't give ourselves to God, is because of fear. I don't give myself completely, because first of all I don't know what God will expect of me to give back. Or, if I give myself totally to Him, I don't know what kind of person I might become. I'm scared to death. I don't know if I want to become one of those religious weird people.
God wants your heart, and He wants your passion. But let me tell you this, if you can learn to receive God's love for you, how can you be passionate back to Him? One of our problems is if we cannot receive love. If I can receive love, then I can give love back. Do you understand? Some of us have a starting place is where we are wounded in our capacity to receive love from somebody else. And if I can't receive love, then I can't give love. Maybe walls are set up and God has to tear those walls down. God wants to do that and He will pursue that with you.
Whatever walls you have with people, you probably have the same walls with God. If you struggle with receiving love from somebody else, you probably struggle with receiving love from Him. But, if you can get to the place where you can receive God's love for you, then you will be able to give back to Him, because it's a natural response. You won't be able to help it--you will want to be able to see His love; you will want to be able to glance into His face. You will become passionate fro Him. You will want to be able to acknowledge every thing He has done for you.
Some of you will begin this with an act of thanksgiving. "I'm going to thank God for everything He has done." Then you will have eyes to begin to see all that He has done for you, and then you will have eyes to see how much He loves you. If you can see how much passion our God has for you, it will change you.
Here is a prayer that I would like to invite you to pray.
Lord, give me eyes that see your love. Remove every barrier in my life that keeps me from receiving love, so that I can receive Your love.
And when you receive that kind of love, then you will be able to be passionate toward Him in the same way that He is passionate toward you.
Loving God Practically
In lesson 4, we began exploring how important it is to worship God. It is important because we were created for His pleasure, so part of our destiny is to worship Him. Mark 12:30 says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength." We concluded that God wants us to love Him in three ways. First, He wants us to love Him thoughtfully, which means God wants us to love Him from our mind. Second, God wants us to love Him passionately, which means to love Him with all of our heart, with all of our soul. Third, God wants use to love Him practically, with our strength and with our abilities.
We looked at the first two (loving God with our mind and loving Him with our passion) in earlier lessons, so let's move on to the third one: loving God practically with our strength and abilities. That is using our ability for God. We need to love the Lord our God with all of our strength, with all of our abilities--with what God has made you with and designed you for.
In the movie, "Chariots of Fire", there is a true story of a young man who planned to go into the mission field. But before he did so, he ran in the Olympic Games. He understood the call of God on his life: the call to go to China. But, he also understood how God made him. He said, "God made me fast." He went on to say "when I run I feel His pleasure."
When you give back to God from how He made you and how He designed you, that is worship. The athlete said, "I feel His pleasure when I run." When I do what God made me and designed me to do; that gives God pleasure, and that's worship.
The athlete in this movie made another important statement. He said "If I don't do this... I'll be holding what God gave me in contempt and I'm not going to do that to God, I'm going to run."
When you do what God has made you to, that is worship. "Love the Lord your God with your heart, mind, soul and your strength, your abilities." Whenever you live out how God made you and designed you--that is worship.
Colossians 3:23 says, "Whatever you do, work at it with all of your heart, as if though you are working for the Lord and not for people." Whatever you do, don't do it for people, do it for God...whatever you do.
Some people think, that if they are going to fulfill that first and greatest commandment, loving the Lord, they need to spend five hours a day with God in their quiet time. That's great if you are able to do that, but you don't really need to do that. They think they need to go to church everyday, but they don't need to do that either. I want you to understand this, worship is more than spending time with God. Worship is more than coming to church. Worship is: doing whatever God made you to do, and doing it for Him. That is worship.
Some of you say, "Well, I've got this job, I don't like this job and I don't like this boss." In that you need to change bosses. You don't have to change jobs in order to change bosses, you understand. You just have to change who you are working for. When you get up tomorrow morning, this same job that I have been having for 10, 15, 20 years, whatever-- when I go to this job, it's going to be different because I'm going to have a different boss. I'm going to be working for Jesus now. I'm going to be working for Him...whenever you do that, for Him, that's called worship.
Whatever you do, if you are doing it for God, that is worship. It doesn't matter whether you are home and doing the menial task. In fact Roman 12 says, "Take your everyday ordinary life, your sleeping, your eating, your going to work, you are walking around like and place it toward God." You see, that's an offering, all the ordinary stuff falls in the category of worship. You are cooking dinner for your family that is worship, if you are doing it for God. You are taking out the garbage, and you say, "God I'm taking this out for You"--I know that I'm going out to extremes here, but I think God cares in whatever we do. I don't think there is any task in our life that's so menial that God is not concerned about, cares about, or that He doesn't enjoy what we do for Him.
I think God wants to change our lives in such a way that we have a lifestyle of worship. This lifestyle is not only for the times when we are giving God our undivided attention, such as during a church service. It is for all we do. We can focus our minds and our hearts upon Him, such as singing or reading or in other ways where we focus on giving God our attention. We can give God our affection. But there are also the times where we are doing the things that we are doing. If we do it for to give glory to God, that is worship.
Going to work can be an act of worship. Taking care of your family can be an act of worship. Babysitting your grandchildren can be an act of worship. Anything you do...going fishing can be an act of worship. Anything that you do, if it's for God and unto the Lord, it is an act of worship. We need to see that if it's done onto to Him.
There is another thing that happens in worship; we are set free. That is because, if we are doing it for Him, then we can release a lot of our expectations of people. Have you ever heard someone say, "Do you know how much I sacrificed for you" and they go through this whole list in what they did for you? Well, obviously they did it with an expectation, they didn't do it unto Him.
If you do everything onto Him, it frees you from the expectations of people. That does not say they should respond in a certain way, but it is to say this: therefore I'm set free because I know I did this onto God and even if they don't respond to it, it doesn't matter because He responded and He liked it. He enjoyed it and therefore I can finish my day, and I can say I loved Him a little bit more and I got to know Him a little bit better. There is freedom in that.
What do you worship? What is in your life that has your attention? What is it that has your affection and that has your abilities? Is it God? If it is not God, then you want to change it. Why? because if anything in our life, anything in our life that has our attention that has our affection and that has our abilities, anything in our life beside God, that is an idol. If we are worshipping idols, God says, "I want to be the One you worship. Do you have any idols in your life?
The way you check it out is by asking yourself what you are giving your attention to. What has your heart? What has your affection? If you would stick your mind into neutral, where would it gravitate to? What would my your begin to think about? If it is not God, or things related to Him, maybe you have an idol.
You can also check it out whether or not you spend your time and how you spend your money. Pull out and look at your calendar--your calendar is like your theological document. You look at it and say, "Oh, this is how I'm spending my time." it reveals how you see God.
Look at your checkbook. How do you spend your money? The way that a person spends their money and their time, pretty much tells you where the idols are in their life.
God says you should not have any other gods. God is to be our object of our affection, our attention and our abilities. God created us for a reason, He created us in order to love us. But on the flip side, He created us for His pleasure and we are to love Him back.
Let's close in prayer. Are there any idols you need to confess and repent of right now? If there are, this is the time to confess to God. Just say, "God forgive me." Your idol can be your job, your career, it can be sex, it can be another person. Take those things now and begin to lay them at the feet of God and offer up these things to Him. Now offer your life up to Him. God wants you to love Him with all your heart, your soul, your mind and your strength. Everything you do in this life can be done for the Glory of God. That is what the bible says...if you eat or drink, anything fits in that category, do to the Gory of God. He deserves our worship.
Let's pray:
Lord, we do ask you to forgive us for the idols we have in our lives. We renounce them, and lay them at your feet. And Lord, we want You to be enthroned in our life. Lord, we want you to teach us this week, how we can do that.[Previous Article] [Next Article]Lord, may we wake up and say, "I have a new boss today"--that boss being You, Lord., Help us to just start working for You. And we are going to do it for You, Lord. And we are going to do it in such a way to give You the Glory and gives You honor.
We are just going to surrender ourselves to You today--let You be our new boss. Lord, I pray that You give us the strength and the discipline everyday this week, that we will spend the time with You and focus our hearts upon You.
Lord, I ask You to remove any wall, any barrier, any hinders that keeps us from receiving love, so we can express our love to You. Lord, we are passionate about so many things and Lord let us be passionate about You. Lord, we want You to be our first and most important passion. Help us to get to that place on a daily basis in earth of our lives. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.