[NORTHPOINT CHURCH VIDEO]
-for the next few weeks we’re going to be looking at what we do here at Fire & Water, and in the broader picture what we do at church in general.
-because church can be weird. If you’ve never been to church, if you’re not from that church, sometimes the things we do can seem a little, well, off.
-plus, this will hopefully help you see why we have designed Fire & Water the way we have and you can see why we push certain things and encourage people to go in a certain way.
-like last week, we talked about hanging out and games. For someone looking in, it may seem like we just want to waste time. But really, we want to help you build relationships with each other. We want to give you a chance to talk with each other, get to know one another and build friendships, or to use our WATER word, Allies.
-we want this to be an inviting place, somewhere you feel safe and you can be yourself. Somewhere you can invite a friend and they can feel safe, they can be themselves, and we can all learn a little more about God together.
-today we’re talking about praise and worship. More specifically, why we sing. Why in almost every church in the entire world people spend some time during their service singing.
-so before we begin, let’s get a couple of phrases right.
1. PRAISE
-this is a word the church has kind of taken over. We’ve had a lot of those lately. This is not a church word. Praise is something that you do probably every day and don’t think much about it.
-here is the simplest, easiest, smallest definition of praise. Letting someone else know they are doing a good job.
-that’s it, that’s all that praise is. Saying something good about someone else is praise.
-and it is so simple to do. Watch. Andy, good job leading worship tonight.
-there, I praised him, it’s that simple.
-I can even do it without saying a word. Mr. Patterson is here, he and his wife did the snacks and stuff tonight. [POINT TO HIM AND CLAP]
-and you can all join in.
-I don’t even have to make any noise. [GIVE SOMEONE THE THUMBS UP]. I just praised them. They know it, I know it, everyone here knows it.
-and that’s the key. Praise is not praise if people don’t know it’s praise. There are a lot of people that want to know God in their own way, and that’s true, to a point. Every once in a while I see people who go to church and they don’t sing, they don’t clap, they sit in the back with their arms folded and they say “I’m praising God in my own way.” It sounds mean, but I’m telling you that is simply not true. If I can’t tell you’re praising someone and the person you’re praising can’t tell you’re giving them praise, you aren’t doing it. Again, it’s that simple.
-so what we do when we get together is we praise God together. We let God know that we understand how amazing He is, even if we don’t understand the full extent of it. We let the people around us know that we think God is extraordinary. Together we let God know what we think of Him through our praise.
-in your books I’ve put a list of verses from Psalms and how they show different ways to praise God. There’s clapping, shouting, dancing, kneeling, all sorts of different ways there are to let God know that you acknowledge that He is God and praise Him for who He is.
-now, we could just show up here, play a game, then spend the next twenty minutes clapping. But what’s the fun in that? I’m sure you’ve noticed that a lot of the verses that mention praise also mention music. Think about that, we’re going to come back to that.
-but first I want to make sure we understand the other word:
2. WORSHIP
-worship is not praise, praise is not worship, but you can do both at once. It can happen.
-where praise is telling someone they’re good, worship is complete and utter devotion to something. Worship is total adoration, adoring someone or something. Worship is making that thing your world.
-if you look at the word that is used for worship in your Bible, if you were to go back and read the ancient Hebrew in the Old Testament or the Greek in the New Testament, the words they use for worship come from the same meaning. They mean either bowing in some form, bending over or kneeling, or they also mean lying on the ground completely flat in homage of a person or thing.
**Ps. 95:6-7 -> 6Come, let’s worship him and bow down. Let’s kneel before the LORD who made us, 7because He is our God and we are the people He takes care of and the sheep that He tends. (NCV)
-think about it, when do you see people kneeling? When do you see people lying as flat on the ground as possible before someone else?
-think of it like knighting. In days of yore the king would have his noble knights who were sworn to protect him. Before they would be a knight they would do what? They would take an oath, they would kneel in front of the king and swear allegiance, they would both with words and by the physical movement of bowing tell the king “my life is no longer my own, it is yours. All I do will be to serve you. All I think about, live for, train for, will be for you.”
-that is worship, giving yourself up for something else. And like praise, this doesn’t need to be God. You can worship anything. God’s just a really, really good choice.
-and this lifestyle is important to us and hopefully to you! This is why the W in WATER is worshipping, it’s not that we want you to sing music (which is good), we want you to see how living a life of worshipping God helps you grow in Him.
-so when it comes to praising God and worshipping God, these are two things you can do together. You can sing a song, using words to praise, using music like the psalms mention, but the words you give up, you say to God can be words that show how you worship Him. “I am sweetly broken, wholly surrendered.” “Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down, here I am to say that You’re my God.” “I am wholly yours.” These are all words telling God how you worship Him, how you plan to live your life the other hundred and sixty hours this week totally devoted to Him.
3. WHY MUSIC?
-because music is powerful.
-for one thing, it crosses any other language. Music is a language, you write it and “speak” it just like anything else. The difference is a line can mean many different things. You hear a melody and it makes you happy, I hear it and it makes me sad. Music has the power to do that.
-and it transcends all other languages. I can look at some dots on a page and know how to make that page sound. I can then send it to Belgium to an 8 year old girl who doesn’t speak any English and she can look at those dots and make the exact same sound.
-most of you guys have seen Lord Of The Rings, maybe even read the books (like people read), but in one of his later books Tolkien wrote about the Eru, the God figure of Lord Of The Rings named Iluvatar. And Iluvatar did not speak, everything he did was through music. He spoke to the angels through music. He spoke creation like in the Bible, but he didn’t use words, he used music. It’s an interesting concept. It would be a language that transcends all language
-music is also one of the biggest evokers of memories. Many times you can hear a song, a little melody and it takes you back to wherever you heard it.
-you put the memory and the emotions together and you now know why we have movie soundtracks. Movie creators know that if you put music to your story you can help people remember it better and give it the proper emotion that you want. Think of what your favorite movie would be like without the music. Meh.
-did you know that when a movie is made, the soundtrack is done last? It’s always last because it has to help tie the story together.
-music helps us tie this story together, it helps us all get on the same page in praising God. Sometimes in the Traditional services they read prayers out loud together so they can all be one voice and be asking God the same thing. Guess what, they’re doing is singing a worship song without music. One of the reasons we sing praise and worship songs together is so we all get on the same page, we are all saying the same prayer to God.
-I challenge you next time, think about what you’re singing. Take it a step further, look at it and ask yourself if you can actually say that to God? It’s humbling. It makes you really think about what you believe, where you are with God. Next time think, do you really want to love God from the inside out, letting Him work inside you and it coming out so people know what you believe? When you think of God, is there really on one like Him?
-that’s why I think it’s funny to watch people sing worship songs when they don’t really want to praise or worship God. [SING LACKLUSTERLY] “Oh, happy day, happy day, you wash my sins away.” Who are you fooling? You are saying to God, speaking to the Almighty directly with others that you are thankful that He has made you whole, that He has washed your sins away and it makes you happy! Happy! [SING CRAPPY AGAIN]
-and this has been a way to praise God, to have unified prayers throughout a lot of our history.
4. PRAISE AND WORSHIP THROUGH THE AGES
-believe it or not, what we do has been going on for thousands of years.
-the first song written in the Bible, the first time it says “The people sang this” is from the Exodus story.
**Ex. 15:1a -> 1Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord: (NLT)
-and the next 18 verses are the song of how the Red Sea closed over Pharaoh and his army and God saved the Israelites.
-people sing when they are happy! People sing to remember good times! I love watching soccer games because the crowd cheers for their team by singing! There are many songs throughout the Bible in which it’s someone singing because God did something good, like when Mary tells her cousin she’s pregnant with God’s Son, she sings a song. It’s called the Magnificat.
-so here we have it written down the Hebrew people would sing when God does something good. It became a way to acknowledge God and remember what He had done, a way to teach their children the stories of God’s love.
-then Moses does something that has never been done before. He gives God a place to live. The Ark of the Covenant (the one from Indiana Jones) was used to signify where God was on earth and Moses built Him a home. It wasn’t a permanent home, it was portable, like a huge, mammoth tent. It was separated into three areas. There was just inside a tent wall, it was called the Outer Court. Here is where all the sacrifices took place, where you could be made clean, where you could learn about God.
-then there was a smaller tent inside there. It was called the Inner Court. Not everyone was allowed in there. It had a few special things like the Altar of Incense where the priests could mix the spices for the aroma of God. Only a few priests were allowed in there.
-but there was one more. In that tent there was a huge dividing curtain and behind it was a room called the Holy of Holies. That’s where the Ark went, that was God’s room. Only one priest was allowed in there and they had to be ritually purified before they could go in.
-this was the one place you could see God. This is the one “church building” for everyone, the holiest place on earth. A couple of hundred years later King David built the Temple, a permanent Tabernacle, one that wouldn’t move but it was built the same way, same rooms.
-so why is this important in Praise and Worship? Because for thousands of years this is how and where people would speak to God. And every time you entered the Temple of the Tabernacle, you had to sing.
**Ps. 100:4 -> 4I will enter His gates with thanksgiving in my heart and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His Name. (NIV)
-this is a song, one of the Psalms of David, the people would sing to enter the Temple, to come from the outside world into the Outer Court. For the people to come in and see God, they had to sing a prayer together.
-and that’s how it went every time you went further in. So the priest who would talk to God directly for the people, he would sing a song with the people to enter the Outer Court, he would get with his priest buddies and they would sing another song to enter the inner court, then when he went into the Holy of Holies himself, he would do it singing.
-it’s a pattern we have followed kind of for thousands of year, for a group of people to see God, to spend time with Him, we enter by singing.
-this is why most churches start with singing, it’s a thousands year old ritual. And King David took it further. When he built the temple, he build extra rooms inside the Outer Court’s wall where musicians would live and offer praise to God through music around the clock! Their job was to live at God’s house and constantly be singing (in shifts of course). There would always be music praising God, 24/7.
-and likewise, when you finished your time with God, when you left, you’d sing together.
-even the Last Supper, Jesus’ unofficial last worship service before His death, how does it end?
**Matt. 26:30 -> 30Then they sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives. (NLT)
-if you want some other verses, Ephesians 5:19-20 and Colossians 3:16-17 all talk about singing songs to God, praising Him in song.
-we still do it today. We were told to do it. It was modeled for us.
-the most important thing is that you do it to praise and worship God. It’s not about style, it’s not about speed or volume, it’s not even about how good you are, it has nothing to do with talent. It has to do with you willing to lift your voice with other people who believe in God and worship Him together.
-I don’t know where you are with God, but if you sang with us today, think about it, think about what you sang. Do you know who you are praising? Do you really want to give it all up and live a life that worships God in everything you say and do? These are hard questions and there are people here who would love to talk to you about it if you want to talk with us.
-but that’s part of why we do what we do, that’s why we sing, that’s why we make music for God, to praise Him and worship Him in a manner that was taught to us many, many moons ago.
