Why Do We Worship?

After visiting Pipeline.Church for worship, somebody said, "Pastor Jeff, why do you have the volume up in here?" I said, "We want to bring it up so that you can only hear you and not everyone around you for your benefit."

The idea is we want to sing out and shout out to the Lord with joyful celebration. Here's one of the things that you need to know that marks the people of God: God's people celebrate with passion. That's a good thing.

For those of you who are here today and hearing this, and you grew up in a tradition where God's people were solemn and somber, and very serious, and there was no playing around, you got on the wrong train. Because when God's people celebrate, they celebrate well, and they celebrate loud, and they celebrate joyfully.

There are literally places that God installed into the children of Israel and their rhythms of lifetimes to just party. He says, "I want you to celebrate for days on end."

Why do we celebrate with passion? Because it's the call of God on our lives to say, "Everyone in the world needs to know that you serve the Living God who spoke breath, and life, and truth, and energy, and everything into this world."

Why do we do we sing at church? It's because it positions our heart appropriately.

Why is it so important? Because we need to be reminded of whose we are and what we are because God's people celebrate with passion. We do it loudly and without shame. There's a couple of key elements to worship that I want to just bring out for you.

The first one is joy. There are moments, and you can read through the Psalms where you might not find and be in the middle of joy. You might be in the pain, you might be in the struggle, you might be in the suffering, and those are okay. One of the elements of worship for us when it's pointed at God is joy. How do you express the joy of your salvation? We do that through worship to declare God's goodness and faithfulness.

What about the other one? Gratitude. This was an original piece of what worship was about.

"God, my praise goes up to you. I'm aiming at you. This is praise for you, at you, about you holy-centered on you. This is not so that I can be glorified. This is so that you can be glorified." When we worship somebody's like, "Pastor Jeff, why do we raise our hands? I see some people in church raising their hands. What is that?"

The idea is sometimes we just have to surrender. God, it's all you. It's all you.

Psalm 95:3 says this, "For the Lord is a great God, a great King above all Gods who?" That's something we got to keep in our heads. Why do we celebrate? Why do we shout joyfully? Why are we a joyful people? Because the Lord is a great God. He's the great King among Gods.

Every bit of what we know in creation, the power that creation wields reflects the glory of God. He is supreme over it all.

A friend of mine, we have a group of guys that we do a Bible study with, and one of our elders, he sends us little, screenshots of books that he's reading and little snippets he'll carve out, and this was yesterday's, "The love of the world hinders men from knowing its maker though He made the world solely to make Himself known." That's a good one.

This is how I had written it before I read that. "Those who know God observe His creation and see the fingerprints of the creator wherever they go, which leads them to worship, but those who do do not know God, merely see the beauty of creation and miss the entire point of its existence."

Everything that you see should roll into praise. Every time you see the goodness of God, it should roll into praise to celebrate His goodness, His faithfulness, His righteousness.

We have to realize that worship flows from a life that's surrendered to God. When we're worshiping with everything we have, when we are surrendered to the work and the will of God, worship just comes out of us. When we realize that this is not about us, it's not for us.

Here's what the Psalmist said, "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 He watches over the flock under His care."

Here's the idea, there's something in here that declares that my life must be submitted to God as savior, creator, all giver and all sovereign in my life. The posture of my worship: come let us worship and bow down. There's something about saying, "I'm not worthy. Let me get down. You take control." There's something about that. We have to acknowledge God as our maker. I get down, I kneel before Him. Why? Because He is God.

See, listening to God is urgent and it's required. It's urgent and it's required. If only you would listen to His voice today, not tomorrow, right now. Listening to God is urgent. It's something that you can't put off.

God has provided a place of rest. I still go back to the section of scripture that I quote almost every day of my life. "Be still, and know that I am God." Here's the hard part. We get so caught up in the middle of the struggle that we miss out on the reward that He has planned.

We get so caught up in the pain or what we see right around us in the moment situations, and the people, and the relationships, and we get all of this and it becomes a swirling crazy piece of how this world works and this must be it and this must be all that we're going to see and we get off the train.

He says, "All of this was built so I could take you where I want to show you rest, I want to give you rest, but because you choose to out God on a regular basis, you'll never know what it looks like."

Now, I don't know your situation, well, I know some of your situations, but I know there's probably somebody reading this who's like - you're not just hanging on to the bottom of the rope - you're like fingernails on the very end threads of the rope.

God says, "Hey, I've got you. I want to give you rest I want to give you rest. The problem is it may not look like you see it or think it, it may not come across you like I'm providing, you may not see the big picture, you may not understand." But that's why worship comes from a surrendered heart because when I decide, at the end of my day that I'm going to hold on for everything I've got because he's giving me strength and I surrender who I am and what I am to Him.

I give Him glory because of who He is not because of the situation I'm in.

"Well, i God would just get me out of this situation, then I could worship Him freely." Yes, it's easy when you're living in the good, but He says, "But your praise is real when you can look at the face of your enemy and declare the goodness of God." That's the God we serve.

This psalm, challenging. Yes, come sing loud songs, shout joyfully. The other portion of that He says, "No, and don't forget. Here's why, because I got this. Learn from the past and surrender your life to me, and then tell the world about my greatness." Everything in this world is for His glory and the good of the world around us.