Going after God (3) through Worship: An affair of the Heart
- Rev Norman Cameron
As we have explored this great subject of pursuing God we have seen that
just as we have a physical thirst that needs to be satisfied with a physical
drink, and we have a physical hunger that needs to be satisfied with physical
food so we have also been created with a spiritual
thirst and a spiritual hunger - a longing for the transcendent, and our souls
are only fully satisfied as we go after God. God’s
word is the bread of life for us. Man does
not live on physical bread alone, we need spiritual food and we have it in
God’s word. We will find it hard to go after God if we do not eat from the
bread of life.
This paralleling of the physical and the spiritual is no coincidence – it
is I believe the way that we have been made by God. The physical and the
spiritual are meant to work together and complement each other. You have heard
of holistic medicine which tries to treat the whole person – physically,
emotionally and spiritually – well the Bible presents a holistic theology of the person which we should
not ignore. God has designed life in such a way that what makes sense in the
physical part of our being has a parallel in the spiritual. This makes sense
for God is the God of both.
Today we are looking at going
after God through worship. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the
well – a woman who had a bit of a reputation – a conversation developed about
worship but Jesus tied it into her personal life and relationships. She had had
five husbands and was currently living with someone else. But then she meets
Jesus - a seventh man who points to a
deep thirst and hunger and appetite within her and he implies that that deep
ache within her would not be satisfied by mere human relationships, and goodness
me she had had so many - but that desire
could be met by Jesus, and through Jesus in the proper worship of God.
He said in effect You need the bread of life and the water of
life and love of life that I can offer. You cannot satisfy spiritual appetites
with physical things – even relationships – no, you need to get to know God and
you do that through knowing me. In short you need to fall in love with God and
learn to worship him in spirit and in truth. Jn.4:24 says God is spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth. This
is Jesus’ key statement on worship. He says these
are the kind of worshippers that the Father seeks, those who will worship him
in spirit and in truth.
Now that is an interesting phrase. What did Jesus mean by it? Eugene
Peterson’s translation in the Message is – “This
is the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and
honestly themselves before him in their worship. Those who worship him must do
it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration.”
Or if I could put it another way, if we are to really go after God then
true worshippers are those who worship God inwardly, from the heart. When we
worship God from the heart it is real, it is authentic, it means something. It
truly engages with God. It is an affair of the heart. It is about being in love
with God for Christianity is not about religion it is about a relationship and
if we do not see this we completely misunderstand Christianity. Christian
worship is not so much about a place as the person and what is going on in
their lives. As Jesus said “A time is
coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in
A. The Core of true worship
is having a heart after God
If you were to sit and read through the Bible at one sitting and your
brain was like a computer which logged the occurrence of certain words you
would find that a number of words recurred many times. One of those words, and
in fact one of the most important, especially in the OT, is the word heart. In the Bible the heart represents
the centre of our being. It represents the essence of the person. Today we use
it similarly – we say his heart was not in the job, if you lose the heart you
lose the will and the desire. We say she captured his heart – if you have the
heart you have the person. For those of us who have been in love, and I suspect
that is probably all of us, when someone captures your heart they capture the
whole person.
I want to suggest that when Jesus talks about true worshippers
worshipping in spirit and truth then he is talking about people who have a heart after God, or who have fallen in
love with God. After the appetite for drink and food, probably the next
strongest appetite we have is the appetite for love – to love and be loved. We
are not just talking about romantic love – we are talking much more broadly – and
I believe that God has created a desire in each person to love God. Because of
sin it is often suppressed or ignored but it is there.
A key verse on worship in the Bible is in Isaiah 29:13 which says “These people come near to me with their
mouths and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their
worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men.” In other words
worship in Isaiah’s time was about religion, ritual, and rules, but there was
no reality, no relationship with God - the heart was not in it and thus it was
empty worship. If we are to go after God the heart needs to be right.
Psalm 119:10 says “I seek you with
all my heart”. Proverbs 3:5 says “Trust
in the Lord with all your heart”, Proverbs 4:23 says “Above all else guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life.”
Jeremiah has many references to the necessity of the heart being right before
God. In Jer.24:7 God says “I will give them
a heart to know me, that I am the Lord.”; Jer.29:13 says “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
Ezekiel 36:26 God promises his people - “I
will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you
your heart of stone and put a new spirit in you.” Romans 10:10 says “It is with your heart that you believe and are justified.” Jesus
said “you must love the Lord your God
with all your heart”, and “where your
treasure is there your heart will be also.” To worship God in a right way
the heart needs to be engaged. John Piper says “When feelings for God are dead worship is dead”.
When God softens our heart, opens our ears to hear, our eyes to see, and
we receive Jesus Christ as Lord we are born again and we start to go after God
in earnest. Before that God was an idea, maybe a point of information, but now
he is a real person that you want to know. We discover that we are worshipping
creatures and just as we saw that the more we read of God’s word the more we
want to read it once we start to really worship God the more we want to worship
him. Not only is it true to say we are what we eat but we are what we worship
also.
True worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth – in other words
the heart must be right. True worship is an affair of the heart. It is
authentic, it is real, it means something to you. It is about being able to say
with Peter in 1 Peter 1:9 “Though you
have not seen Jesus, you love him; and even though you do not see him now you
believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.” The
core of true worship is having a heart after God and you cannot go after God
without this.
Now I want to ask if going after God involves true worship – worship in
spirit and in truth, or worship form the heart - then how can we learn to
worship properly? If the heart is right and is going in a godward direction what
practical things do we need to do to keep it going in that direction. Psalm 46
is helpful here and I want us to see that
B. the Practice of True
Worship involves at least three things
- Contemplation
Psalm 46 has a lot going on in it, it has a lot of action and noise – we
have the earth giving way, we have mountains falling into the sea, waters
roaring and foaming, mountains quaking, wars raging and then in v.10 we have
these words “Be still and know that I am
God…”. All around is in upheaval and the psalmist urges us to just be still.
In worshipping God, in going after God it helps to be still, even when the
world is raging around you because in stillness we learn to hear the voice of
God and we learn to gain perspective. It seems to me that God prefers to speak
in stillness, calmness and quietness. God usually whispers, rather than shouts.
When he shouts you know you are in big trouble!
One of the hardest things that we find as people is to be still, to do
nothing. We long to fill the air around us with noise and our society is a
noisy one. Stillness and solitude are rare commodities and we reach the stage
where we are scared of silence. We are sacred because it seems so unknown to us
but perhaps we are also sacred because we become confronted with our true
selves and we have been running away. Maybe we are scared that when we still
ourselves and look within we will discover there is nothing there, we are
empty. We are a mile wide and an inch deep But that is good – to discover that
you are empty in your soul - for then you can start to fill it with God.
If we are serious about going after God through worship we need to carve
out time to be alone with God and quiet before him. A little time each day is
good and sometimes we should plan for an extended time. It is beneficial once or twice a year to have
an extended time, a whole morning or a day to spend time alone with God, in reading
his word, in prayer, in meditating – wasting
time with God as someone has put it. We will be surprised at the value of
this. God will speak to you as he has never spoken before. As an old proverb
has it “Muddy water, let stand becomes
clear.”
You may say I am too busy to carve out such extended time and you are
right – you are too busy. We make time for the most important things in our
lives. I have yet to meet a person who was too busy to eat or sleep. We need
these things to function properly physically and so it is spiritually. We need
to create space in our lives to be still and engage with God who is waiting for
us. Be still and know that I am God.
2. Adoration But as we
contemplate we come to the second movement which is adoration. As we see
ourselves for who we are, as we see God for who he is and we exalt his name – “I will be exalted among the nations.” As
we still ourselves and contemplate God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit we adore
him for who he is. As we reflect on God’s love for us in Christ we learn to
appreciate him more. When we exalt God it is not that we make him higher than
he is, but our appreciation of him grows. John Piper talks about “gladly reflecting back to God the radiance
of his worth”. We are like mirrors reflecting God’s glory back to him.
True adoration is more than singing songs on a Sunday morning. True
adoration again is about the heart being right. It is about humility. As we go
after God we find that we are humbled. James 4:8,10 says “draw near to God and he will draw near to you, humble yourselves before
the Lord and he will lift you up.” There is an interesting cycle here – as
we draw near to God we are humbled as we see his glory, and as we are humbled
we exalt him more and as he is exalted he lifts us up and he raises our self
esteem. We become what we worship. There is a lovely verse in Deut. 27:18-19
where God calls
As we go after God we bless him, but he also blesses us and fills us
with joy and honour. We find our deepest joy and satisfaction in him – man’s
chief end is to glorify God by enjoying him forever. The more we adore God the
more we glorify him and the more joy he, and we, receive.
God will be exalted and he wants that exaltation and adoration to be out
of love for him. We are to be serious about our worship, we ought to give God
the best of our worship. But as we have said worship is not just about what we
do on a Sunday – and worship is not just a slow song. Which leads to the third
point about going after God through worship, it is about contemplation,
adoration and …
3. Habitation. V.11 says “The Lord almighty is with us the God of
Jacob is our fortress.” In our worship we get to the point where God is
with us, he is making his home in our hearts. There needs to be a seamless join
between God’s Spirit and our spirit, there needs to be a seamless join between what
we are in church and what we are outside of church, there needs to be a
seamless join between the spiritual and the secular. In God’s eyes there is
nothing secular – all of life is his. If we are going after God seriously then
no area of our lives is God free and all we do is to the glory of God for the
Lord almighty is with us.
This has great implications of course. For God to make his home with us
involves us in being obedient to him. Worship is about obedience as well
as humility. Listen to what Jesus says in John 14:23 “If anyone loves me he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him
and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
Real true worship is about obedience to God. It is about obeying the
Father’s will, and that is what it means to live with the Father in his home.
God is in all of life and we take him wherever we go. We will explore this some
other morning for it is a big subject.
When we worship God aright we recognize that as we move around in our
day God is with us. We are hedged about with God and by God and we have a peace
that passes understanding.
If we are to go after God in worship then the heart must be right – the
Father is looking for those who will worship him in spirit and in truth. True
worship involves contemplation, adoration, habitation. May God help us in a
busy, noisy, war filled world to go after him in the right way for his glory
and for our good.