The Heart of Worship

G'day. Thanks for joining the Heights Church podcast today. We hope you enjoy our message.

If you are in the Sydney area, be sure to join us at the Heights Church at Goldstone

Road, Hornstone Heights, Sydney, Australia.

I'm going to be reading from Psalm 95, if you want to find that in your Bible, or just look behind me.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come before Him with thanksgiving, and exult Him with music and song.

For the Lord is the great God, and the great King above all gods.

In his hands are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him.

The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands form the dry land.

Come, let us bow and worship. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker, for he is our God.

And we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.

Today, if only you would hear his voice. Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah.

As you did that day at Massah in the wilderness, where your ancestors tested me.

They tried me, they thought they had seen what I did. For forty years I was

angry with that generation.

They said, they are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.

So I declared on oath in my anger that they shall never enter my rest.

I don't know whether you're an anniversary person or not. You're an anniversary

person. Every guy should say yes.

I don't know whether you've ever forgotten an anniversary. We don't want to

see a show of names or anything like that, a show of hands.

But really what happens with anniversaries, it seems strange,

doesn't it, that you start off, you have your honeymoon period,

so you go through the honeymoon and everyone likes, I had a girl one time that

was in tears, I mentioned before, where it was our one month anniversary going out and I forgot it.

And next thing you know, I was getting severely chastised that I forgot our

one month anniversary of going out.

But you go through your honeymoon period where the first anniversary of your

wedding, you're all excited.

But then if you ever noticed that it starts to go something like paper.

So you go through your honeymoon period, then you get to the paper,

what's papers, like a note or a little card saying happy anniversary hunt or something like that.

But then it goes through as you go further and further and further and further

along, it goes to gold and to diamond and something significant.

It seems amazing to me is that probably when you first start,

you have more disposable income.

So it should eventually get to paper rather than get to gold where you're retiring

and you go, how am I ever going to afford any of this stuff that happens?

But the reason why it goes from something small to something incredibly large

is because as your knowledge and as your relationship grows,

the intimacy of your relationship grows, the uniqueness of the relationship

that you share grows and grows and grows, well then obviously there is more to celebrate.

There's more to remember.

There's more times of love and compassion that you show for us.

In other words, the inner drive that you have for each other grows and grows

and it governs your action and your adoration.

You see where I'm going to?

That as we grow in our intimacy with Jesus, as we grow in our relationship with

God, as we connect together and our heart gets stronger and more affectionate for our Lord,

then what happens is that anniversary, that.

Worship of God grows. So as our expression of love and our worship of God,

our intimate knowledge of him, our uniqueness in our relationship of our Lord,

something inside of us says, I have to worship.

It drives us to action. It drives us to express our love in a particular way.

John Piper says this, worship is first and foremost an experience of the heart.

Prayer without heart is vain. Songs without heart are vain.

Confession and creeds and liturgies and sermons that don't come from the heart

are empty and worthless in God's eyes.

Pretty heavy statement from John Piper.

Worship is a humble, heartfelt expression of praise and thankfulness in service to our God.

If you look up Romans chapter 12, it says, therefore, present your bodies as

Romans 12 · chapter mention

a living sacrifice, which is a holy and acceptable service or your sacrifice to God.

When we gather as one people, what we do here at the highs, it's our heartfelt

expression to God and outworking of service to him and for each other.

You're not just on a roster.

You're not just serving the coffee. You're not just doing the morning tea.

You're not just doing the grounds or doing clean.

You are serving each other in what you do.

And that goes with even when you get up, when we have a get to know your time,

when you walk up to somebody you don't even know and you welcome them,

It's an act of service, it's an act of welcoming one another into the presence

of gathering together in worship.

On a side note, it's really important to understand that if you ask somebody

back in Jesus' day about worship and prayer and Bible reading,

their response would be expressed in corporate terms.

It's not expressed in personal terms. They corporately gathered together.

Worship was done corporately in sacrifice and prayer.

They came together before God with corporate reading of the scriptures.

It was the way that they heard the Old Testament.

They didn't have an iPhone, but they just read it themselves.

They came together to read it together.

And even though we've taken certain passages individually, like Romans 12,

it's not expressed that way.

It's a corporate gathering together. And that's what we do here, obviously.

We can worship God from the heart individually. Of course we can do that.

We can sit on top of a mountain and praise God.

Of course we can do that. But we have the unique experience coming to the heights

and gathering together where we corporately worship him and bring glory to him

and ascribe greatness to our Lord.

Our Lord deserves all our worship. Therefore, we sing.

We can see that in Ephesians chapter 5 and Colossians chapter 3.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention Colossians 3 · chapter mention

We sing in response to his majesty.

We're seeing praises to him. And if,

I'm not saying if you couldn't worship this morning, let me say it,

like it was awesome, awesome time where our team led us to a point where we

can corporately express. We can join together in chorus.

We gather and we encourage one another, even if it's out of tune.

If you're standing next to me, you need to have the blessing of God because I'm out of tune.

And you might think the same, although I wouldn't tell the person next to you that they're at you.

We're to speak to one another through songs, and it's meant to enhance our worship

together, so we sing together.

That's what happens when we get here. We hear God's word, and it's a response

to his authority. So we sing in response to his majesty, and we hear God's words,

and we have a response to his authority. We sit under the authority of God's word.

Therefore, we want to hear what he has to say.

We want to hear what he has said to his people. We want to hear specifically

what God is saying through his spirit to you.

And so we wait and we prepare in expectation of what God is going to say to us.

Hopefully, when you come here, you have gone through the point in your life

where you're preparing your heart for what God has got to say.

And you're listening for what he's got to say. So we come together to gain a

greater understanding of who God is and what he has done to each other as we model,

as we submit under God's word, as we encourage and sometimes as we rebuke and

admonish in love from God's word.

So we sing and we hear God's word and then we pray in response to his sovereignty.

We recognize that he is sovereign and in control of absolutely everything.

So as God speaks to us through his word, we respond to him in prayer.

We pray for one another as our father in heaven, as we pray for each other in times of everything.

We pray for everything at all times. And we pray together.

We also give, don't we, in response to his goodness.

It's a reminder of the fact that God has blessed us with all that we have.

And as a result, we voluntarily desire to give to God.

And so we give for the service of others and the ministry of others.

And people at this church give incredibly, absolutely testimony of how you care

for other people through God.

Then we connect together in an old term called fellowship as a response of our oneness in Christ.

Agents of God's grace, we enter into a community with each other and we share

our lives together, we go closer together, and our Lord.

We don't only do it here as we gather, but we also do it in our connect groups.

So you see, first and foremost, worship is a response to who God is.

He is sovereign, He is good, we have a oneness in Him, He has authority,

in His majesty we worship and we gather together.

Let me say this, is that we just don't worship when we're here.

We worship individually as well, don't we?

What we do here needs to be a microcosm of our lives and our heart as Christians every day.

Our life should be worship. So therefore, in our life, we should sing songs.

Probably maybe for me with the window up so we don't disturb the traffic.

But my life should be that I grant God authority in my life for change.

I should recognize, as I pray, his sovereignty.

I should give out of the goodness of my heart for all things, all the time.

And I should seek and desire to have a oneness with others, and not just myself.

It should be part of my life.

It's a sacrifice that we make, and it emanates from the Holy Spirit who has

given to us to bring about that unity.

Yet so sadly, isn't it? It's sad that the arguments about worship that can and

do at times divide churches are all about us.

It's about what's relevant to us.

And it's determined by what we believe is relevant to us.

And if that's the case, I think we've missed the boat on what worship is.

If our main point of our argument about worship and the worship service is whether

we are getting the most out of our music or whether the set readings or prayers

are appeasing to us or whether we need certain songs or whatever we do.

And if the church is divided over style and content, we have missed the boat

about what worship actually is.

Because worship is about what pleases God, not what pleases me.

And if I've fallen into consumerism, quite frankly, shame on me.

And don't get me wrong, it's hard to engage in corporate worship if you don't

culturally or generationally or personally connect with anything.

It's hard to do that, but it's a problem, and it's also a danger.

And I know myself that I can be so consumed by my ability to connect that I

forget that worship is about Jesus and what pleases Him.

It's about God and bringing glory to Him.

So what is worship? Here we go, Psalm 95. The text tells us what it is.

It's probably about the most well-used text in the category of worship to inform

us about what corporate worship is.

So if you've got your device or you've got the Bible in front of you,

look up Psalm 95 and we're going to go through that.

It tells us what we need to know. It tells us what worship is.

It tells us what worship isn't. and tells us how we can worship and how we can connect with God.

So we're going to start off Psalm 95, 1 to 5.

Come, let us sing of joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of salvation.

Let us come before him with thanksgiving. Let us hold him with music and song.

For the Lord God is great, the great King above all gods.

In his hand is depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him.

The sea is his, for he has made it, for his hands formed the dry land.

See, within Psalm 95 is in a block of Psalms called the Praise Psalms.

It's a call for the people of Israel to come and worship God.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. As one author put it,

worship is an act of ascribing ultimate value to something.

It's a way in which that energizes and engages your whole person,

your whole being, our mind, our will, and our emotions all come together as we bring worship to God.

So therefore, we sing with great joy.

We see that call that happens in verse 1, this emotional language, isn't it?

Sing and shout and extol in the music and the arts.

And in verse 6, we're told not just to worship with our emotions,

but we use language of submission and volition, come and kneel down and bow to him.

And in verse 8, we have language of reason and thinking where we're hearing,

where we're listening to what God says in a language of understanding and thinking.

In other words, your whole body, your whole person needs to be engaged,

just like Romans 12 talks about. Let us bring ourselves before him,

our body before him, our minds before him, everything before him.

Put it before him so that we can worship.

The flip side of that is that you can actually get too involved in the different aspects of it.

So you could go to a service and experience great emotion and weep and aesthetically

have this great emotional experience,

but if it doesn't change the fundamental way in which you live or the character

of your life or the patterns of your life,

or if worship doesn't affirm and attest and confirm who God is,

in your mind and your heart, it's really not worship,

even if you emotionally kind of get down to it.

I don't often quote, because I don't necessarily agree with everything John

MacArthur holds, but he has got it right in the area of worship.

He says, music and liturgy can assist or express our worshiping heart,

but they cannot make a non-worshipping heart into a worshiping one.

The danger is that they can give a non-worshipping heart the sense of having worshipped.

So the crucial factor in worship in the church is not the form of worship,

but the state of the heart of the saints.

If our corporate worship isn't

an expression of our individual worshipping lives, it's unacceptable.

If you think that you can live in a way, any way you want, and then go to church

on a Sunday morning and turn on worship with the saints, you are wrong.

That's from John MacArthur.

So in looking at Psalm 95, we understand that worshipping is from the heart,

whether it's an expression of your emotion, whether it's an expression of your

mind, whether it's an expression of your action and your will.

Why should we worship? Well, we worship because God is worthy of our worship.

Worship is an expression of thankfulness that I've spoke about before,

that we have our salvation and our walk with God.

The psalm tells us that in our gathering to worship God, we come joyfully and

thankfully and enthusiastically giving praise for what he has done and for who he is.

It's the expression of thankfulness of our heart, of what he has done for us in our lives.

He has saved us from a life separate from him.

Someone has spoken of what do we play in church or what type of music do we

play or how do we sit as a congregation.

It says this, it says, you who sit in the congregation are actors.

The people up the front are prompters. God is the audience and we are performing before God.

It is our hearts and our attitudes and our motivation on display.

It is why and how are the reasons that we have come together.

And that's what God looks at.

But sometimes we forget that, and I think in my heart that it's my activity

that God looks at, that I have come,

that I sing, that I give money, and somehow we think that God is pleased with what I do.

But God cuts through all of that and says, man looks at the outward appearance,

but God looks at the heart.

And so many times throughout the Bible, we see a heart on display that is not

big stuff that's going on.

In fact, most of the time, God highlights the very small things,

the widow that can only give that small amount, and yet it comes totally from

her heart, or the person that wants to give back all that's due for everybody,

but their heart's not in it,

or the person who prays silently by themselves for others and in confession,

or the person that stands on the side of the street that shouts aloud so that everybody can hear.

It's the heart that matters, not what we can do or what we do.

So that should prevent us from wanting to go big, but it also should rebuke

us if people go big in reflection of their heart.

So many times have I heard it said, and in reflection of people when they're

looking at people who are going

big in the church, big stuff gathering together, that is just all show.

Who am I to look at someone's heart? Who are you to look at someone's heart?

Because only God sees the heart. And I've got to worry about where my heart is or not.

So that's the first thing. But the other thing is that we need to come before

God in humility. That's part of worship.

Not only coming before God with a heart that is for him, but also in humility.

We come before him knowing who we are and who God is.

And we don't try to replace God and make ourselves God.

And we certainly don't place anything upon God other than our confession. our heart.

The word worship refers to expressing and giving to God worth,

worthiness or worth and honor.

And most of the time in Hebrew language, it means to position ourselves or to

place ourselves lower than God, not above God.

Look at verses six and seven. Come, let us bow down and worship.

Let us kneel before the Lord, our maker, for he is God.

And we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.

So the Jews recognize the awesomeness of God, the holies of holies and the Ark

of the Covenant. We see that in ceremony as well.

We worship Jesus Christ the same way as God's only son, that what he has done

for us on the cross, we place before him ourselves in humility.

We learn a lot as we're going to speak about in a second as we go for Isaiah 13.

That when we come before God, we should recognize I'm a man of unclean lips

and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the glory of

God and I'm not even worthy to raise my eyes to him.

And yet he has touched me in his goodness and his kindness with a coal that

has set me clean, the coal of the altar of sacrifice.

So now I can raise my eyes to God, recognizing who I am and what he has done

for me. And I do that in humility.

I mean, that's how people recognize greatness. You know, we see that in religious

services, people laying flat on the ground, common practice.

We see that in different religions, in Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism,

people laying flat on the ground.

But nothing compares to the awesomeness of the one who is from God.

Jesus Christ, the angels bow down to him. His followers bow down to him.

All creation in worship will declare that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And even those who don't recognize him as Lord will eventually bow their knee to him.

So when we come here and when we gather together, it's all about acknowledging

God and his greatness and proclaiming Jesus as Lord, who he is and what he has done.

That's why people come to church. That's why it's profound time that we gather here.

Just don't think that we just all arrive here on Sunday morning because the

coffee is good because I'm not on coffee.

And if Emma's on coffee, you'll notice the beautiful picture.

Coffee art that happens. But when I'm on it, you just get coffee,

milk. So it can't be for the coffee that you just come here for.

It can't be just for the conversation, even though the morning tea is like next level.

What happens is this, we come because we want to praise God together.

We want to bring him glory. We want to worship him together.

Our response should be to worship, But it's not just from our mouth.

What's supposed to happen is that as we come in connection with God,

like Isaiah did, he looked at God.

The angels and the seraph around him couldn't even look at him,

couldn't tread on the ground.

They stopped any kind of interaction they could have because they can't have

any interaction with such a worthy God.

And Isaiah says, you know, I'm a sinner and I live among sinners.

And yet my eyes are seen the glory of God and he recognizes the forgiveness of God.

And what's his response to that? Oh, I'll sing another song.

No, his response to that is what God calls him to do.

And that is God says, who am I going to send to proclaim the good news that

forgiveness can be yours?

That although you're a sinner and although you live in a world that has unclean lips,

your eyes have seen the glory of God who is going to go and tell people about

that great forgiveness that great salvation that you have brought and Isaiah says what,

send me I'm it I put my hand up.

Our response to God is our obedience and in service to him. Look at 7 verses 7 to 11.

Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in Meribah,

as you did in Massah in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me.

Though they had seen what I did for 40 years, I was angry with that generation.

I said, they are peoples whose hearts go astray and they have not known my way.

So I declare my oath in anger to them. They will never enter my rest.

It's interesting in Hebrew language that the word obey is not separate from

the word for worship, that obey and hear are the same as well.

So there is no separation where you hear and you obey.

If you're hearing, you're obeying.

And it's the same with me and my heart. Look at Hebrews where it says this,

Through Jesus, therefore, let us continue offering sacrifice of praise,

the fruit of lips that profess his name, but don't forget to do good and to share with others,

for with such sacrifices, God is pleased.

It's great, isn't it? What a great psalm. It's not just about let's all come

together and let's all sing songs, let's all give, let's all pray,

let's all hear God's word, let's go out and have morning tea and great fellowship together.

No, it's about a reflection of how we see God, and it's a reflection that should

be evident to everybody that comes by our pathway into our church and into your

life, that your life is a life of worship.

And people know that by not only by what you say, what they hear or what they

see from your heart, but how you display that in action,

how you don't forget to do good, how you share with others.

So as we come together to worship, our lips give him praise.

As we sing, as we read, and as we hear his word explained, we have a humble

heart that comes before him and a heart that responds rightly before God in obedience to him,

because we don't forget to do good and to share with others.

Because with such sacrifices, living sacrifices, as Romans talks about, God is pleased.