Living a Life of Worship // Worship as a Way of Life, Part 2

Sometimes we keep our faith and our day-to-day lives in separate boxes. But it turns out that “worship” is something that brings them back together again. Worship does just happen once a week when we sing a few songs. Worship as things turn out, was always meant to be, a way of life.

 

Connecting Inside and Out

Well, this is the second message in a series that I’ve called, "Living a Life of Worship". Something that we love to do and it seems to come naturally to us, is to have a disconnect between our faith in Christ and our lives. I mean, Sunday you may go to church – this kind of sacred zone – and we go there and we sing songs and we worship. "O God, You are so wonderful and I love You so much and I exalt You above all. Lord, I worship You and praise You and all of that stuff". Brilliant! Great! We are going to talk about that later on today in the programme. But then on Monday morning we go back to work – the same old, same old – back in the groove.

Mum is maybe getting the kids off to school or maybe rushing out the door to work, dad’s on the train or in the car or on the bus doing the commute. Or perhaps you’re unemployed or retired or whatever, sitting at home alone and that thing that we call "worship" that happened back there on Sunday morning, it can seem a million miles away. Somehow it’s not connected to the reality of life. It was great while it lasted but now it’s back down to earth with a thud – it’s Monday morning!

Ever felt like that, that there’s some disconnect between faith and life? Worship is that thing that happens over there but back in the real world it’s hard, you know; it’s tough. It’s the grind; it’s the pressure; it’s the issues to deal with; it’s the compromises people make. Well, you’re not alone because in the West many Christ followers experience that. The fact that faith and worship and all that stuff over here, is somehow in a separate box from life over there.

In the East, in Asia and places like Africa</place />, people’s upbringing in culture means that their spirituality is a lot more connected to their lives – but not in the West. Anyway, wherever or whatever, it’s important that we understand what worship is all about. It’s not just something we put in a box and take out on Sundays. Worship is a way of life – that’s the name of this series, "Worship as a Way of Life". When we understand what worship is in God’s heart, then all of a sudden life and spirituality become inseparable.

Last week we began to look at the fact that the New Testament talks about two different forms of worship. One verse where they both appear is Luke, chapter 4 and verse 8. Grab your Bible. Jesus had been out in the desert; the Holy Spirit had let Him out in the desert for forty days of fasting, so by the end of it He was weakened; He was starved; He was at a low point. This was part of God’s plan, in fact, next year we will be doing a whole four week series on this wilderness passage in Like chapter 4.

Today I just want to look briefly at the second temptation because at the end of the forty days the devil comes along and tempts Jesus. And this second temptation is a grand delusion. If you have a Bible, open it up at Luke, chapter 4 beginning at verse 5. This is what it says:

The devil led Him up to a high place and showed Him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to Jesus, “I will give You all their authority and splendour for it has been given to me and I can give it to anyone I want, so if You worship me, it will all be yours. Jesus answered, “It is written, worship the Lord, your God and serve Him only.”

Here is a standard temptation of the devil - look at this wonderful world that I have control of. You don’t have to look very far to see what an influence the devil has. I mean, Jesus called him the prince of the air. "What are you doing," says the devil, "in this wilderness for God? Look, just worship me and all this can be yours." Yea, right! Listen to what the devil says to Jesus – "so if you worship me, it will all be yours."

Now the Greek word that’s used here for the word "worship" is "proskuneo" - it’s the word from which we get "prostrate", so to prostrate ourselves; to lie down; to bow down; to kiss someone’s hand; to fall down on our knees, face down and worship. That’s the sort of worship I guess we do on Sunday morning in church. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 28, talks about worshipping God with awe and reverence – it’s a heart of worship – it’s expressing our allegiance and our gratefulness and our awe and reverence and wonder of God, by singing songs of worship and bowing down to Him.

The devil says to Jesus, "Now bow down to me as You would to God." But look at Jesus’ reply! Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.”

Jesus here is quoting the Old Testament – Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 13 and there are two verbs in this sentence – worship and serve. Now the word "worship", the English word, is the same word as the devil used – the Greek "proskuneo" – "to bow down". But then the second verb – (Verbs are "doing" words) the second verb is and "serve" Him only. Now, this word is "latreuo" – it’s the Greek word from which we get the word "lateral" or "outwards".

This word is used a number of times in the New Testament and it’s variously translated either as "serving" or "worshipping". "Latreuo" means to render religious service or homage, to worship, to perform sacred services, to offer gifts, so it’s a "doing" word. It’s about worshipping God through serving Him. For Jesus the answer went beyond simply bowing down to God or in this case, as the devil wanted, to the devil – it included who Jesus served.

It’s not only about what we do in our hearts, it’s about what we do with our hands - inside and outside. Jesus said it again. You can read it in Luke chapter 10, verse 27. He answered:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.

In other words, with the stuff that’s going on inside you and then with your strength, which is what you do inside and outside. You know something, if what we believe on the inside isn’t reflected in how we live on the outside, what we believe on the inside will die. In James, chapter 2, verse 26:

Faith without works is dead.

If we exalt God in our hearts but not in our lives, by the way we think and act and treat other people, it doesn’t work.

One of the Psalms talks about having "clean hands and a pure heart". In fact this linking of inside worship and outside doing worship - "proskuneo" on the one hand, "latreuo" on the other – "bowing down" worship and "living out" worship – is something that happens over and over and over again in God’s Word – you just can’t separate the two.

 

Hidden Places

The heart is where everything begins – that hidden place, deep inside. The Bible talks a lot about the heart, in fact it mentions it five hundred and forty one times! – over and over again. Jesus talked a lot about the heart. He said, “From the overflow of the heart the man speaks.” He said, "adultery and murder and all that stuff, begins in the heart" – it starts on the inside and then works its way outside.

So the heart is incredibly important when it comes to worship. It’s that hidden place, deep inside where we live and laugh and cry and think our deepest and most secret thoughts. Let me ask you – in that place do you worship God? This is "proskuneo" worship; this is bowing our lives down. In your heart, have you bowed down your life to God? In your heart, is He exalted above all things?

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew, chapter 8, verse 5:

Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.

The heart though is a deceptive place. A.W. Tozer in his book, "The Pursuit of God", writes it this way. “The self is the opaque veil over our hearts that hides the face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience and never by mere instruction. As well, try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our "self-sins" to the cross for judgement. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pilot.”

You see, worship of the heart is bringing ourselves before God, just as we are and allowing Him to discern the thoughts and the attentions of our hearts. And the question for each one of us is this, "who reigns in our hearts, me or Christ – myself or Jesus?" And if Christ, am I prepared in my heart to suffer for His sake? Am I prepared to take up my cross? Am I prepared to let certain things go for Him? Because when we so lay down our lives and our hearts through faith in Christ – when we decide deep on our hearts, to take a "Christ above all position, once and for all" – Christ above my selfish ambitions – Christ above the desires of my flesh – Christ above comfort and future and hopes and dreams and everything else that I want – Christ first, through faith in Him. When we decide that then He makes our hearts pure. And then this point that Tozer is making becomes our experience; the very words of Christ become our reality.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.

And we will see God with the eyes of our soul – gaze upon Him – and when we do we can only respond the way the twenty four elders do in the Book of Revelation. “The twenty four elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns down before the throne and say, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power for You created all things and by Your will they were created and have their being.”

We are talking here about complete surrender of our hearts; that secret hidden place; that place that only we and God Himself may inhabit. When we surrender in that place, our lives to Christ, no matter what the cost, that, my friend, is worship. "Proskuneo" - bowing down our all to Him.

So many people try to live out a "me" centred Christianity – get a revelation – there is no such thing! "I am my own little tin-pot god," just doesn’t cut the mustard, when we have gazed upon Christ with the eyes of our soul. Like the elders, if we want to worship God, we have to take off our crowns and cast them down before Him at His feet and cry from deep within our hearts, "You alone are worthy, my Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power and I worship You."

How much of our prayer life is worship? How much time do we spend simply resting in His presence and glorifying Him in our hearts? This is the birthplace of worship in our lives. The Spirit in our experience brings the reality of a relationship with God Himself through Christ, to life in our hearts. It is the place of true and complete surrender. It is the place of complete sacrifice of self. It is the place where we take up our cross and utter, “Lord, not my will but let Your will be done”. Painful and glorious, loss and gain, hunger and filling. “It is written, “Worship the Lord your God alone.”

Let me ask you gently, but quite directly, have you come to that place in your life or have you been there and perhaps drifted off? Let me pray with you a prayer that A.W. Tozer wrote in his book, "The Pursuit of God". “O God, I have tasted Your goodness and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am so painfully conscience of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire, O God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – I want to want You alone. I long to be filled with longing, I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Your glory, I pray, so that I may know You indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “rise up My love, My fair one, and come away, then give me the grace to rise and follow You, up from this misty lowland where I have wandered for so long. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.

 

On the Outside

If on the inside we worship God in our hearts, you know, we say, "Lord, I lay down my life; I bow down; I delight in You," but then on the outside we don’t live that out. Well, that incongruity; that mismatch; what you see is not what you get, well we have a name for that, it’s called "hypocrisy".

And it is fabulous that people go to church on Sunday morning or Sunday night or whenever they do, and they worship God. They sing all of those wonderful songs – that is an awesome thing. But if then on Monday, we go to work and tear someone’s head off, that’s adulterous. I mean, that’s professing one thing and doing another. It’s like me marrying my wife and saying, "I’m going to set myself aside for her; she’s my wife", and then I go and find a mistress on the side.

You know, that’s a stressful way of living and it doesn’t work and it hurts a lot of people. Eventually, we have to resolve that incongruity - you can’t go on living like that because the tension between inside and outside is just too great. Either we have to bring our lives on the outside in line with what’s happening on the inside in our hearts, or we abandon what’s been going on in our hearts in worshipping God and we just go with the desires of our flesh on the outside – it’s as simple as that. It’s one or the other.

I remember before I came to faith in Jesus – I used to try to be someone wonderful and exciting and dynamic on the outside but on the inside, you know something, my heart was rotten? I was selfish; I didn’t care about other people and you know, ultimately, that showed. I’m a tough nut and before I came to Christ I would crawl over people; I would hurt them. I really didn’t care because it was all about "me".

Ultimately, what’s going on in our hearts shows on the outside – we can’t live two separate lives. We can’t sit there in the morning and read a Bible and pray and pretend to worship God and then go on and live a life that is so far away from God. The two just never connect.

The Apostle Paul knew that! If you’ve got a Bible open it at Romans chapter 12, beginning at verse 1. This is a really pivotal verse for me. This is what Paul writes, he says:

Therefore I urge you brothers and sisters, because of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.

Let’s unpack that! He begins by saying, "therefore". I mean, whenever you see a "therefore" in the Scriptures, it’s always pointing back to something else. And in this case, the Apostle Paul is pointing back to all that he said in the first eleven chapters of the Book of Romans. And those eleven chapters are about God’s goodness in coming to rescue us through Jesus Christ. It’s the stuff that causes us to worship Him.

If you are struggling with the fact that Jesus came to die for you; if you are struggling with the fact "am I forgiven, am I not forgiven", read the first eleven chapters of the Book of Romans and you’ll be in no doubt about God’s goodness. You read those chapters and you just want to worship and praise God for who He is and what He’s done. And so it’s the heart stuff; it’s the stuff that causes us to worship God on the inside. And so Paul says because of what He’s done in your hearts, because of that mercy that you have received deep in your heart, because of that "offer your bodies as living sacrifices."

See, in this verse Paul is making a connection between the heart and the hand. He is saying that we need to translate the worship in our hearts into action. We need to be living sacrifices. That is a gruesome picture! It’s definitely not good marketing spin. You know, people in those days knew what sacrifices were – animals were sacrificed at temples, both Jewish temples and pagan temples. But Paul says:

I urge you brothers and sisters, because of God’s mercy, because of what you have experienced of God in your hearts, now on the outside, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.

Now I like this next bit, “This is your spiritual act of worship”. See we are talking about worship but here is the word "latreuo" which is what we talked about before. Some translations us the word "service", the two concepts combine here in this Greek word "latreuo" and it’s about worshipping God through what we do.

This is where the rubber hits the road. The worship of the heart is the "proskuneo" worship that we talked about before – this is the worship about prostrating ourselves; bowing down, saying, "Lord, I worship You." It’s about what people do in churches on Sunday when they sing songs of worship and praise. It’s what we do in our quiet times on our own, as we speak to God and say, "Lord, thank You; I praise You; I worship You." That’s great – this worship, Paul is saying, because of that, now live out your worship – now "do" your worship.

When you and I treat someone kindly and gently – someone that really deserves to have their heads kicked in, that’s spiritual worship. When I deal honestly and fairly with someone, when I could have ripped them off, that’s spiritual worship – bringing the life into line with the heart, dying to all those things that we would rather do that we know aren’t God’s ways.

That’s spiritual worship – it’s being a living sacrifice. It’s hard; it’s tough; the road to follow Jesus always is – it’s a narrow road. Dying to self and living to Christ; this is worship. Worship is not off in some separate Sunday morning sacred zone – we need to worship God with our hearts and with our lives – clean hands, pure hearts.

Paul goes on to explain in the next verse what this means. “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mould anymore, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you will really know and agree with God’s good and perfect will for your life.”

What begins in our hearts as worshipping God, works its way out into our lives, living life as a life of worship.