HEART & POSTURE OF WORSHIP
(5-minute read)
Modern technology makes it possible to produce high quality worship in churches. Skilled music arrangement and worship hermeneutic are tools that help worship leaders better engage congregants and elicit their response. Good publicity can increase participation in collective worship. But no matter how deeply satisfying and pleasing to our senses these experiences are, true worship goes beyond the worship atmosphere, music and rituals. God does not become more real because we loop a few refrains or linger on a few choruses during worship. No matter how many praise songs we sing, or how moving the lyrics, singing worship songs is not the same as worshipping God. In reality, true worship is activated in all the big and small, seen and unseen moments of daily life.
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” (Romans 12:1-2, The Message).
So what did Jesus say about true worship? The Lord raised this point when He was approached by a group of hypercritical Pharisees and religious scholars who commented that His disciples did not wash their hands before eating (Matthew 15:7-11). It was the custom of the day to do so - probably in the interest of promoting personal hygiene when people habitually had communal meals. Jesus immediately called out these self-appointed moral police for being hypocritical because He knew that these were the same people who had openly disregarded God’s command to honour parents by claiming that their resources were ‘devoted to God’ and therefore, they were justified in withholding the support that their parents needed (Matthew 15:5).
‘“These people honour Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. They worship Me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”’ (Matthew 15:8-9).
To unpack what Jesus said, ‘in vain’ means in futility and having no impact. The Lord was pointing out their unnecessary emphasis on the correctness of outward behaviour, asserting instead that, ‘What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.’ (Matthew 15:11).
Jesus was not suggesting that we should speak in an overly-cautious, overly-polite and ingratiating way that makes little connection and displays even less humility. But that true worship involves a heart of devotion and a posture of surrender.
HEART OF DEVOTION
It is one thing to serenade God with songs and uplifted hands, it is another to truly worship Him. Jesus calls any worship that is full of pomp, spectacle and vanity but lacked true obedience to God hypocrisy. This is not to say that singing praise songs is meaningless but that we should use them as reminders to align our lives with God’s Word so that we can continue to experience spiritual growth, transformation, and a deeper connection with Him.
Another way to look at worship is to think “worth ship”, or the worthiness of God and to elevate Him more and more in the choices and decisions we make. In contrast, the Pharisees and religious leaders followed draconian rules of conduct to cover up their lack of true obedience to God’s commands. Their emphasis on outward compliance over inner conversion of the heart sharply contradicts biblical teachings to ‘turn from godless living and sinful pleasures and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age,’ (Titus 2:11-12). Look closely at the contrast between ‘godless living’ and ‘godly lives’ and consider what that looks like for you.
A heart that is devoted to God desires to please and honour Him by regulating our external actions and internal thinking. It is not divided into many parts that strive to please different people for different reasons. It does not cause us to be conflicted between our private belief and our public behaviour.
It has been said that we can become a saved soul but continue to live a wasted life. This can happen when we do not yield to God’s teachings and warnings. When we are fully conscious of God’s Word, it even guards our hearts at night even when we sleep (Psalm 16:7).
Psalm 86:11 offers a worthy prayer, “Teach me Your ways, O Lord, that I may live according to Your truth! Grant me purity of heart, so that I may honour You.”
POSTURE OF SURRENDER
To surrender involves a willingness to disclose, to be fully known and fully submitted to a safe God. It should be clear to believers that surrendering to God does not involve emotional numbing, visual imaginations or any attempts to connect with our ‘inner self’. Rather, we surrender to God out of a deep sense of gratitude because He is good and did not hold back His love while we were still sinners.
A surrendered posture allows God to dismantle the walls of self-defense that impede our growth and interfere with learning from Him what healthy boundaries are.
It is a posture that draws us to stand in God’s Light and find complete safety even while our faults and merits are fully visible to Him (1 John 1:5).
The surrendered posture also enables us to detect sin in and around us because submitting closer to God makes the enemy flee from tempting us to sin (James 4:7).
Most of all, in this posture, we are more ready for deeper renewal in our knowledge of God.
On another level, each time we share a meal and do life with someone, when we point a loved one to Jesus, when we pray for others, when we commit to a task or project with professional excellence, or when we read His Word and reflect on how it bears fruit in our own life, we are also assuming a posture of worship to God.
In summary, true worship turns our ordinary lives into worthy godly missions, beyond a life of self-determination and self-gratification.
This is a summary and reflection based on a virtual BIR Session held on 15 April 2024.
