Worshiping Like a Warrior | Mark Pemberton | Life of David Part 7

Well, hey, for those of you I haven't had the opportunity to meet,

my name is Mark. I am the discipleship minister here at Northside as of about three months ago.

I oversee a lot of our community group life, a lot of our adult ministries.

So if you ever have any questions about community groups and what are those

and how do they work and how do I get involved in one, I would love to have

that conversation with you.

Well, this morning, I have the privilege once again of diving back into the life of David with you.

And as you can see, we're doing things a little bit differently.

We are starting with the sermon, and there's a reason for that.

Today, we're going to be talking about what it means to worship like David.

To worship like David. And we're not just going to talk about worship.

We're going to have an opportunity to step in to worship, because I don't know

if you're aware, but worship is not what we do just to get warmed up for the sermon.

I know many of you might feel that way, but that is not the case.

Worship is powerful. Worship is warfare.

And David, well, David worshiped like a warrior. What do you think of when you hear that word worship?

It's kind of one of those words that has a different meaning for each individual,

right? Like art or music.

Someone loves country music. Another person loves death metal and is like,

hey, check out this music I found.

I don't know what that is, but it ain't music, right? Worship is just kind of one of those words.

Maybe you hear the word worship and you think, is that where we're trapped in

like a dimly lit room and forcibly encouraged to sing songs that we don't really

know with people that we kind of smile at on a Sunday morning? Is that what worship is?

Or maybe you hear the word worship and you think of a Catholic mass that you

attended as a child. Or maybe you hear the word worship and you think of an

old horn hymnal tucked into the back of a church pew.

So to try to simplify it a bit, here is a straightforward working definition

of worship that we're going to use this morning.

Worship is responding to who God is and all that he has done with all that we are.

I'm going to say that again. Worship is responding to who God is and all that

he has done with all of us.

Not some of us, not part of us, not the cleaned up version of us or the Sunday

morning version of us, but with all of us.

So we're going to look at what the Bible has to say about worship.

But something you need to be aware of about your Bible in case you weren't aware

is that it has been translated into our English language from the original biblical

languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

And this is important because in that translation process, sometimes the words

that we see on the pages maybe lose their original potency that the author intended.

Take the word love, for example.

Most of you know that there in the Greek, there are four different unique,

distinct words for love, but in English, there's just love, right?

So I can love my wife, but I can also love a juicy 20-ounce ribeye steak.

Okay, now hopefully I don't look at my wife like a piece of meat.

You see how some things get lost in translation. How many of you are going to

have steak for lunch today?

No, I'm free, just in case you were wondering.

See, our English Bibles are beautiful, but they have condensed some things.

Another word that has been condensed is the word praise.

Praise. There are seven distinct, unique Hebrew words for praise,

but in English, we just have the one.

Now, if you miss that, you miss the depth of what David did with his lyre and

with his harp and with his voice and with his life.

Here's why this is important. These seven Hebrew words for praise are found

all throughout a book in your Bible called Psalms, and many of which were written

by none other than David.

That's right. You see, David didn't worship like a king. David worshiped like

a kid who couldn't believe that God had picked him.

He laid down his crown and he picked up a tambourine.

Can I get an amen, Velma? Hallelujah.

That's right. I should have had you queued up with it. I apologize.

There it is. Now, why did he do that? It's because he knew that God's presence

belonged at the center of everything.

That's why last week, Nathan talked about how David has finally now stepped into his role as king.

And one of his very first acts as king, well, two things he did was he made

Jerusalem the capital city of Israel, but he also decided to move the Ark of

the Covenant to the city of Jerusalem.

The Ark of the Covenant was a sacred article that reminded the Israelites of

God's covenant with them.

That's why David, as that Ark was being brought into the city in 2 Samuel 6, danced.

And took off his royal robes and jumped around like no king had any business

doing because worship just oozed out of him.

David was a poet who loved using his words to bring to life the affection that

he had for his heavenly father.

And that's basically what the Psalms are. They're a collection of prayers and

poems and hymns that focus the worshiper's attention on God in praise and adoration.

They were used as the hymnal of the early church.

And in fact, it's where we get most of the inspiration for our modern worship songs today.

Now, each of these seven Hebrew words for praise, like I mentioned earlier,

that we're going to see throughout the Psalms, they have distinct,

important, practical applications for us when it comes to having a biblical

understanding of worship.

Now, we don't have time to cover all seven words. Somebody say amen.

But we are going to dig into four of those Hebrew words for praise today.

But first, before we get there, I want to acknowledge that we're all at a different

place in our journey with God.

We all come from different religious backgrounds. We come from different cultural backgrounds.

And that's not something that should divide us, but that's something that we should celebrate.

When I think of the word worship, I think of a little sugarcane town that I

grew up in, in Charedze, Zimbabwe.

The church that I grew up in, Tredzi Church of Christ, the church where my dad

preached on most Sundays, was probably, you could describe it as much more conservative

in its praise practices.

We would sing from hymnals. How many of you grew up singing from hymnals?

Okay, several of you. So I tried my best as a kid following along,

trying to figure out which line we were on at any given time.

And then we're never singing verse three for whatever reason.

We're just, that's skipped historically. These were before the days of that

magical device known as the overhead projector.

And in the early days, the church that I grew up in was made up primarily of

European Zimbabweans, farmers and their families.

And when it came to worship, they just weren't a very expressive bunch.

They were really good people, loved the Lord, did wonderful things for the Lord.

Just might have been a party going on inside, but there wasn't much happening on the outside.

So on the one hand, I had this sort of rigid, reserved worship upbringing.

However, during that same season of life, I was also exposed to a very different

environment of praise and worship.

Every so often, my dad would be invited to preach at one of the churches that

our mission had founded, typically rural churches in more remote areas with native Zimbabweans.

And every time dad would go and preach at one of these churches,

it was always a family venture.

And so we'd get up and we'd do the song and dance. But these worship services

were loud and animated and joy-filled and would sometimes last well over an hour.

There was singing, there was dancing, shouts of praise.

There always seemed to be some African lady with a whistle just going to town, just in the corners.

Yep, she gets it, right? It was just so incredibly different to what I was used

to. And I remember as that awkward white kid, just like trying to keep time

and like sing the songs and do the dance. And I'm like, this is so weird.

I don't even know what we're singing about. But at the same time,

something about it just felt so right.

And it turns out that what I was feeling, what I was experiencing wasn't unique

to a packed village church in Tredzi, Zimbabwe.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was joining in a tradition of worship

and praise that God's people have been practicing for thousands of years.

I was participating in these words of praise because here's the thing.

Worship isn't about your personality.

As much as it's about your posture. It's not about volume.

It's about value. Real worship doesn't start with sound.

It starts with a heart that is surrendered to God.

So here's my encouragement to you today, whether or not you would consider yourself a worshiper.

Meaning someone who, the type of person who engages with and sings praise and

worship songs, I want to encourage you to lean in today to what God might have

to say to you through these words, because who knows,

they might just begin to transform the way that you worship. Sound good?

Does this sound good? All right, here we go. The first word,

Hebrew word for praise is the word yadah. Everyone say yadah.

Yadah means to revere or worship with extended hands.

Can also mean to throw a stone or an arrow.

Twice in the Old Testament, yadah is used to describe the throwing of a stone

or an arrow. In the Psalms, however, it's this idea of God's people coming together

and praising him through the lifting of hands.

Okay, I could feel some of the internal eye rolls as I was saying that.

You're thinking, great, preacher wants me to hold hands with Jesus.

Sorry, high-fiving God is not my thing, man.

Listen, I get it. Remember what I said at the beginning of the message.

We're all at a different place in our journey with God.

We come from different backgrounds. I'm not asking you to throw your hands up

in the car the next time K-Love or your local Christian radio station comes

on, because that's a bad idea for multiple reasons.

I just want you to consider what God's word has to say about it.

What that means for you is between you and God. Psalm 67, verse 3.

Psalms 67:3

May the peoples yadah you, God.

May all the peoples yadah you. May they worship you with extended hands.

When you stop to think about it is there a more

natural human response to being excited than throwing

our hands up in the air doesn't matter if it's a touchdown that your favorite

team scored or a goal or a basket or finding out that you just got that promotion

or the moment you realized your kid is finally potty trained right yes the hands

go up in the air no one taught us to do that it's just something that we've

done instinctively since we can remember.

Parents, you might have to think back to when your kids were younger or even grandparents now.

Is there a better feeling than walking through the door of your house and a

three, four, five, six, seven-year-old kid comes running up to you yelling,

mommy, daddy, with her hands raised in the air?

That is the greatest feeling. We love that. We eat that up.

And in the same way, I firmly believe that our heavenly father loves it when

we lift our hands to him in worship.

Maybe the thought of doing so feels completely unnatural, feels strange.

Well, fortunately for you, Christian comedian Tim Hawkins has some tips that

I think are going to help. Check this out.

But hey, if you're not used to going to hand raising church,

you want to go and join us, feel free to join us, but don't feel like you got to join right in, okay?

Start slow. We got a lot of different hand raises that we use.

We actually have names for our hand raises.

So I'm going to walk you through real quick, okay, what they are,

just to let you know. Say you're at my church, music is rocking.

Start slow. Hands in the pockets, little elbow flap. You're fine.

Very subtle. Get warmed up. Get your heart rate up. When you're warmed up,

start with the first one. Ready? Carry the TV.

Carry the TV. That's our first one. Very subtle.

Go to big screen. Big screen, a little wider.

Next one's, my fish was this big. My fish was this big. If you're a liar and

you go out there, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Jesus loves you. Grace,

Next one's Hold My Baby. Hold My Baby. Got Dueling Light Bulbs.

That's our next one, Dueling Light Bulbs.

Got Goal Post. Everybody knows Goal Post. Throw in a Heartburn.

A lot of people like to do Heartburn. Double Heartburn, right back to Goal Post.

What's my favorite? Mufasa. Mufasa, that's my favorite.

The Circle of Light. Tim, can you go higher? Yes, you can.

You take one hand, go a bunch of different stuff. Pointer, hatchet, schoolroom.

Release the doves, give the Lord a high five, press it out. A lot of women like

to wash the window, wash the window.

And when you're comfortable there, go for the big three. Village people,

Rocky touchdown. There you go. There's your big three. Now you have no excuse, right?

Yes. Amen. I love that video.

Tim used to come and do his act at our church in Ohio.

And I had a t-shirt with all the different hand motions on it.

And I lost it. I wanted to wear it today.

It's good to make fun of ourselves every now and then. All joking aside though,

there is something so powerful when we allow our passion for God and his attributes

and his faithfulness to override our own self-consciousness and we begin to

lift our hands in worship as an expression of heartfelt praise and trust in our Heavenly Father.

It's as if we're lifting our very heart to him in that moment.

Maybe it starts a little elbow flap, right? Get your heart rate up.

Maybe it's an all-out touchdown situation. Who knows? Maybe Yadah will become

a part of how you respond to who God is and all that he has done with all that you are.

The second Hebrew word for praise that I want to look at is the word halal. Everyone say halal.

Halal is where we get the word hallelujah, right?

It means to boast, to rave, to shine, to celebrate, to be clamorously foolish.

Psalm 149 verse 3, let them halal his name with dancing and make music to him with timbrel and harp.

Psalms 149:3

The context of this particular psalm is tens of thousands of Israelites all

coming together with this spontaneous combustion of praise and it's loud and

it's animated and there's dancing and celebration.

Some definitions of halal say to act madly before the Lord.

When I think of a lull, I think of my nine-year-old daughter, Avery.

I love watching her worship. In fact, she comes with me on Sunday mornings early,

mostly because I buy her breakfast.

And so we were stopping by Royal Farms and we're on the way here.

And I was like, Ava, what's worship?

She's like, well, it's like dancing and singing and stuff. And I'm like,

yeah, why is it important that we worship?

And it was so interesting, her perspective. She goes, it's just really fun.

And God loves it. When was the last time you felt that about worship,

about singing song? And this is just really fun.

And my heavenly father, he loves it. But I love watching her worship because

she will yell out the words.

It's more like a chant than singing, honestly.

She'll stand on the chairs in the worship center. She'll dance in the aisles.

And she doesn't give a rip what anyone else is doing or is thinking because

she is praising God with everything that she has.

I mean, it was that type of praise, this halal, that led King David to dance

in the streets before the Lord.

And when his wife, Michal, the daughter of Saul, criticized him for it, he said this.

He said, I'm willing to look even more foolish than this, to be humiliated in my own eyes.

David, a man after God's own heart, was willing to look clamorously foolish

for the sake of bringing his praise, bringing his halal before his creator.

In fact, the entire book of Psalms is summed up in Psalm 150.

Let everything that has breath halal the Lord.

Now, we're not talking about some fake, forced, just trying to fit in expression

of praise as a means of getting attention.

We're talking about letting our passion for God put to death our self-consciousness.

You don't need to be wild to worship, but you do need to stop worrying about

what everyone else is thinking.

Now, you might be thinking, okay, Mark, so you want me dancing in the aisles

during worship? You want me swinging from the chandelier?

Well, no, not necessarily. And I'm just going to say, if like David,

you strip down to your undergarments and start running around and worshiping,

there's a good chance that you're going to get tased by a member of our security team. Okay?

So just keep that in mind.

No, I think what this means is that God wants our full attention to.

He wants our eyes so fixed on him that all of the other distractions fade away.

I love the way that author and apologist C.S. Lewis described the perfect worship service.

He said it this way. He said, as long as you notice and have to count the steps,

then you're not yet dancing, but you're only learning to dance.

He says a good shoe is a shoe that you don't notice.

Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes

or light or print or spelling. And here's the part I don't want you to miss.

Lewis said the perfect church service would be one that we were almost unaware

of because our attention would have been on God.

Imagine how different our worship services would look if we kept our focus solely on God,

not worried about who's around us, not worried about how loud the music is,

Not worried about when the next lyric slide has come up or not worried about

how many times we're going to sing the bridge or not worried about if we're

going to make it to kick off when fall runs around.

We wouldn't go out to lunch and say, hey, how was the worship today?

Because that'd be the wrong question. We go out to lunch and look at each other

and say, how was your worship today?

How was my worship today? No one else can give God your affection, only you can.

And when you do, you feel the presence of God in a fresh way.

So perhaps this week, for the very first time, Halal would describe how you

respond to who God is and all that he has done with all that you are.

The third word for praise that I want to examine this morning is the word Shabak.

Everyone say Shabbok. To address in a loud tone. To shout.

To commend glory and triumph.

Shabbok is the idea of God's people coming together and their voices culminate with one another.

And there's this explosion of volume. It is a shout of praise.

But the thing about Shabbok is that it's not something you do so much as it's

something that is done to you.

Something that comes out of you. It's almost like an involuntary response.

Now, I'm still getting to know the area and I'm still getting to know our church.

How many of you are University of Virginia fans when it comes to sports?

Okay, I was way off on this illustration then. How many of you are Virginia Tech fans?

I should have gone with them then. You should have won a national championship

recently. What can I say? Okay, think about it like this.

Shabak looks like UVA fans in 2019.

Okay, you remember this? The year that they won it all. Okay.

For the first time in the program's history, which surprised me greatly when

I read that on Wikipedia, by the way, 113 years with no national championship,

113 years of season after season going, this is the year. This year's going to happen.

Okay. We'll get them next year. Well, this is the, oh, we'll get them next year.

And then 2018 came around. Things were looking good, right?

First round, 16th seed, they lose. Heartbreaking.

And they come back in 2019 and they win it all. Check out this reaction.

One word to go. The fourth and final Hebrew word for praise that I want to look

at today is the word tawdah.

Tawdah is an extension of the hand. Thanksgiving, a sacrifice of praise.

Thanksgiving is the part I don't want you to miss. Thanksgiving for things not yet received.

When we tawdah, we are thanking God not only for what he has done,

but for what we believe that he will do. It is a praise of faith,

putting your trust in God and praising him with expectation.

In Psalm 56, David had been seized by Israelites' enemy, the Philistines, at a place called Gath.

And he was captured. And in the direst of circumstances, David penned these

words in Psalm 56, verses 11 and 12.

Psalms 56:11

He said, in God I have put my trust. I will not be afraid.

What can man do to me? Vows made to you are binding upon me, O God.

I will render tauda to you. Captured by the enemy.

Facing an unknown future, David praised the Lord for the promise of deliverance

that he hadn't even received yet.

He had faith that God would bring him through this. So even in his imprisonment,

he praised his God with expectation because faith, church, faith isn't about

what you feel, but it's about who you trust.

Who do you trust? Kind of reminds me of the scene from one of my favorite TV shows, Ted Lasso.

Any Ted Lasso fans in the room? All right. All three of you are going to love this.

So in this particular scene from Ted Lasso, Ted is opening up to his therapist

about his relationship with his father.

And he's expressed his, it's a lot of spoilers that are happening here,

but he's expressed, you know, his frustration with his dad.

And she says, you know, you told me what you hate about your dad.

And I want you to tell me something you love about your dad.

And so he tells this story from when he was in the fifth grade and he and his

entire class were supposed to be reading this chapter book for a month leading up to this.

And he has not read a single page up to this point. The very next day,

there's going to be a huge test on this book.

And Ted was super stressed out. His own words says, the night before I was anxious

as all heck and I couldn't sleep.

And my dad starts getting after me about that. And I start crying and he's like,

whoa, buddy, what's wrong? What's going on? And so I tell him what's up.

And he says, hey, don't worry about it. Okay. Just go up to your room,

lay your head on your pillow and think about something that you're really looking

forward to. So Ted said, that's what I did.

Next morning he woke up and his dad looked at him and said, Hey,

you're not going to ride your bike to school today.

I'm going to drive you. And Ted says, I'm like, all right, okay.

And on the way to school, he talks me through the entire book,

like it's a bedtime story or something, because he stayed up all night,

the whole night reading the whole thing because he didn't want his little boy

stressed out over some silly little test.

Ted says, and I wound up getting an A.

And then he kind of looks at her and he says, he's a really good dad.

I don't know what test you're facing right now.

I don't know what has you anxious or worried or worked up, but I do know that

we have a really good heavenly dad.

And I know that he doesn't sleep, that he's up right now.

And he's going to be up tonight when your head hits the pillow and you're anxious

and you're stressed out.

And he's watching and he's whispering to you, I've got you.

Just think about something you're looking forward to.

Jesus said come to me all you who are weary carry heavy burdens and I will give

you rest take my yoke upon you for it's easy and my burden is light,

Tao Da is when you throw your hands up not because you're giving up but because

you believe with all of your heart that God is about to show up.

So I'm going to share the story of the first time that this type of praise, I got to practice this.

I was on staff at Northampton in Europe, I think it was 2012.

There's a few people that were here at that church when I was there.

It was a Saturday night, and Amanda and I were getting ready to go to bed.

I got a text from one of my best friend's roommates that said my friend had

been in a motorcycle accident.

So, of course, I'm like, oh, what in the world?

What is going on? So we rushed to the hospital, and if you've seen the movie 50 first dates.

That was my friend's brain for every two minutes.

We'd talk to him. He'd wake up. What happened? What happened?

Like, you got in a motorcycle accident. You're the only person involved.

You're okay. And he would calm down.

Two minutes later, repeat the cycle. And this went on throughout the night.

We just hung out with him until he was moved back to surgery.

I went down to the waiting room with his parents. A bunch of people heading

back to their houses. I just sat there with him for a while and just talked.

But around six o'clock in the morning, I left. He was still in the operating

room and went home, got clothes on, and went to Northampton to lead that worship service that morning.

And from the stage, I didn't know what the future held.

But I know I sang the song, Great is Thy Faithfulness, that morning,

which was a really tough song to sing at that moment because I had not practiced

this element of praise. This level of my faith wasn't there yet.

But from that stage, I was saying, God, you're faithful, not knowing if at 12

o'clock when I got done, if my friend would be out of the operating room and

his brain would be healed in a different amount of way, his body would be restored,

what level of life he would have.

Come to habit, he was restored, a little bit of short-term memory issues,

just makes him a funnier friend now.

But God was faithful through that. And through my life, many different seasons

have come where that has been strengthened in me.

Sicknesses within my own family, friends, what have you. And so we're about

to sing this song, Believe For It. We've sung it many times here.

That is the posture of praise, ta-da, that we are going to do as we sing this

song. So would you stand?

We'll continue worshiping together with this song.