Worship - What's It All About?

Worship – What’s it all about?

Psalm 95

Video – The gift of worship – (from floodgate productions through Worship House Media)

Slide

Worship, it is easy for us to get caught up in the ways we like to express worship and sometimes forget about

Who we worship and

why we worship and

how our worship can be pleasing to Him instead of just pleasing to us.

Our service last week got me thinking about worship.

If you weren’t here last week, about an hour before our morning service, a tree or some large branches fell on some of the power lines out here and snapped them. It was quite a light show at one point, but it knocked out our power here.

Not only that, but down the street at Palmer Park Baptist Church, their parking lot was flooded and they had to cancel their service. Their pastor and a few of their people joined us for our worship in the dark service.

So without sound boards, without video software, without amped instruments, without microphones and without lights, we joined with some brothers and sisters from another church and worshipped together.

That service was a good reminder that worship is not about our experience or how technically well everything went.

There are some people and churches that are all about the worship experience.

Now, even at Hickory Creek, we desire to provide an atmosphere that is helpful for people to worship the Lord.

But we always need to be careful

that it isn’t the experience we are worshipping,

but that it is the Lord we are worshipping.

Worship is not about us. It is all about God.

So, this week as I was thinking of these things, I began to think about what is involved in worship that is pleasing and acceptable to the Lord and if we can see in His word how we might worship and some things we might worship Him for.

I thought what better place to start, but in the Psalms which are often about worship.

So today, we are going to talk about Worship and what it is all about, and what it looks like according to God’s word.

Turn with me to Psalm 95

Slide

(p. 426)

Now as you are turning there, we need to understand that worship should only be directed to the Lord.

Jesus tells us when He is being tempted by Satan to,

’Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’ (Matthew 4:10)

We need to worship the Lord and Him only.

We know this in our heads at least, that worship needs to be all about the Lord God.

Since we already know that, today, I want to ask what it is about in terms of

what we should worship Him for and

how we should worship him

for those things so He is pleased with our worship.

Let’s see if Psalm 95 can give us some guidance with this.

Psalm 95

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;

let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.

2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving

and extol him with music and song.

3 For the LORD is the great God,

the great King above all gods.

4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,

and the mountain peaks belong to him.

5 The sea is his, for he made it,

and his hands formed the dry land.

6 Come, let us bow down in worship,

let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;

7 for he is our God

and we are the people of his pasture,

the flock under his care.

Today, if you hear his voice,

8 do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert,

9 where your fathers tested and tried me,

though they had seen what I did.

10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;

I said, "They are a people whose hearts go astray,

and they have not known my ways."

11 So I declared on oath in my anger,

"They shall never enter my rest."

In this Psalm, I see 3 things that the psalmist says are worship to the Lord.

I don’t believe this is necessarily an exhaustive list of ways to worship or of things to worship Him for, but I believe it will help us to understand better how to worship Him in ways that please Him.

First we see that

Worship is about Rejoicing

Slide

Psalm 95:1

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.

In our worship, there should be rejoicing in the Lord.

Rejoicing in the Lord is one aspect of how we are to worship the Lord.