Allen Jackson - Things Forgotten and Remembered - Part 2
Well, worship is about another dimension. It's not grounded in time and space. It has little to do with how I feel or whether I want to or whether it's pleasing to me. We are worshiping, as I have said, an eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient God. We have been granted the privilege of coming into his presence with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. That's an invitation that was extended to us at tremendous sacrifice. And we wanna become a people who put worship back into the center of our existence, not back into a part of our public worship services. Our lives are an expression of worship of something. It says, "Out of the abundance of our heart, our mouth speaks".
I can do this. If you will listen to our words, our casual words, our excited words, you will hear what we truly value. And if you follow that with where you expend your discretionary resources, you will find the passions of our lives. Worship. Luke 19. It's the triumphal entry. Jesus is coming into Jerusalem. It said, "He came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives". If you visit Jerusalem today, they call it the Pilgrims Path, the Palm Sunday Path. It's at least the traditional location, but there was a road down the Mount of Olives. It says, "The whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: 'Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!' 'Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!'"
With loud voices in a disruptive fashion. "Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, 'Teacher, rebuke your disciples!'" The Pharisees, the most trained, the most theologically astute, those with the best preparation. "Shut your disciples down. It's inappropriate". I don't think we should ever imagine there's going to be unanimous opinions about worship. It begins with an attitude of our heart. And Jesus said something that is intriguing to me. He said, "I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out".
I believe that. I believe if the disciples had been struck mute, the rocks would have spoken up. I'm quite confident that all of heaven was stirred the day Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The one time that there was something of a broad widespread affirmation of who Jesus was as he entered the city of the King. He'll ultimately rule and reign on planet earth from the city of Jerusalem. And Jesus said, "You shut them up and the rocks will take up the slack". It's worth noting only the disciples were worshiping. There were many quiet skeptics.
So I wanna pose the question, into which group are you? Are you willing to be a person who worships the Lord? And I'm not talking about a song service just yet. Are you one of the quiet skeptics? The appropriateness of worship. Jesus said the stones would provide it if the people were unwilling. It's an idea that is a subtle thread through Scripture. I brought you just one example. In Isaiah 55, it says, "My word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. You'll go out in joy and be led forth in peace; and the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all of the trees will clap their hands".
I happen to enjoy worshiping the Lord outdoors. There's few things that are as refreshing or renewing to me as to be able to take a walk through the fields or in the midst of the trees. They remind me that there's an Almighty God, a Creator God. I'm amazed at them. How they pump the water to the top of those trees, so the leaves stay green. I did the science, I can explain that. It's still an amazing thing to me. In Luke 8, it was kind of a fun reminder to me, Jesus is in the boat with his disciples and the storm has blown up and the fishermen think they're gonna drown. So they wake the carpenter. That's backwards.
"And Jesus says to them, 'Where is your faith?' And in fear and amazement, they ask one another, 'Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.'" There's a dimension to our lives that is greater than what we can do physically. Jesus commanded the wind and the waves. He said, "If you don't use your physical abilities to give honor to the Lord, the rocks will do it". Folks, we are so separated from a spiritual life. We've traded Bible studies for spiritually authentic lives. We've traded knowledge and information for the recognition of the presence of the Spirit of God. We have traded cultural approval for a desire to see the presence and the power of God demonstrated in our midst. There's been too much forgotten. We need to begin to cultivate once again, a greater dimensional life.
So let's worship. I'm gonna wrap it up with this segment. I just brought you some samples from Scripture. Then I'm gonna give us a little place to practice. Truth separated from experience always remains in the area of a doubt. I'm most interested in the application of the truth we say we believe, or I would go to the university. I could have tenure and better holidays. In Psalm 103 and verse 1, it says, "Praise the Lord, O my soul; and all my inmost being, praise his holy name".
You see, worship begins in our inner being. It starts within us, at the core of our person. It doesn't begin with our soulish self. Worship doesn't really emanate from our mind and our emotions. So oftentimes our thoughts and our emotions are contrary to acknowledging God because we're unhappy or we're uncomfortable or we're in an unpleasant place or we feel anxiety or we're worried. And the last thing we wanna do is use our voice or our thoughts or turn our hearts and our mind and our emotions towards acknowledging God. "Praise the Lord, O my soul". Your soul is your mind and your will and your emotions. "Forget not all his benefits".
David is talking to himself, "I will not forget the benefits of my Creator. He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases. He redeems my life from the pit and he crowns me with love and compassion. He satisfies my desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's". I enjoy that fifth verse. "God will satisfy my desires with good things". It doesn't necessarily mean he gives me all the good things I want, but he will help my desires change so that the good things of God will bring satisfaction to me.
One of the challenges we have in contemporary Christendom is we desire ungodly things, and we wanna use our faith for those to be satisfied. What we truly need is the transformation of what we desire. The greatest desire of our hearts as parents and grandparents should be for our children to be righteous and holy and upright. There's not a lot of cultural affirmation of that perspective. Psalm 150, it's the last chapter in this lengthy collection of Psalms or words for oftentimes public praise and worship. "Praise the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power: praise him for his surpassing greatness".
Why would you worship the Lord? How do you worship the Lord? Stop and think about the heavens and the earth that he created. Think about his acts of power that you're aware of, that you know of. Think about his surpassing greatness. He's not like us. He's truly just. He's faithful, even when we're unfaithful. Take the attributes of the character of God that you know, that he's a God of love and mercy and justice. And thank him for that. He's not mean-spirited. He's not unfair. The gods of Roman and Greek mythology toy with humanity. They have all the same frailty and flaws that we know in our own carnal selves. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob does not. He's a great God. He's a merciful God.
See, corporate worship, I don't believe should ever be the greatest expression of worship in our lives. I think the greatest expressions of worship in our lives are the private times in our life. We're not in the midst of the community. Our public worship, if it's more than a reflection of who we are when we're not together publicly, there's something in it that's hollow. You know, we say so often, "Well, I don't like that. I don't worship in that style". Stop. We should worship the Lord if all we had was a kazoo.
Some years ago, we were invited to do a pastors conference in East Africa and there were hundreds of pastors that had come from multiple nations and it was very obvious that they didn't have great resources. They were staying in conditions that we wouldn't have considered acceptable for our kids at camp, and they loved to sing. They worshiped the Lord with an enthusiasm that we don't begin to duplicate. And I remember standing watching 'em worship, and the bass player didn't have all the strings on the bass, and they had a small drum set, but there were no heads on the drums. They could have cared less. They had a rare privilege of being together and they worshiped the Lord.
I gave you just some examples. Some of us that think it should be quiet and sedate. I don't think there's a singular way to worship the Lord. Sometimes I worship the Lord very quietly and sometimes I like to worship the Lord way out loud. I've got an old rickety diesel tractor. It makes so much noise. I love it because I can get on and you can't hear me. If I put a bush hog behind it and crank up the RPMs, I can shout as loud as I want, you'll have no clue. And when I need to get close to the Lord, I will get on the tractor. I'll mow grass that doesn't need mowing. I need to talk to the Lord. But Ezra 3, "With praise and thanksgiving they sang to the Lord: 'He's good; his love to Israel endures forever.' And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the Lord".
Psalm 95, "Let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation". You know, some of us say, "Well, I'm introverted, I'm not..." Okay, you'll get extroverted about the right set of things. Take an introvert to a UT ball game, if they're a UT fan. They will find a voice. And I'm amazed at what we will do. You'll park 5 miles away, pay too much to park your car in somebody's yard, you'll find your way to the stadium and find that the seat you paid for is this wide. It's very highly possible that a majority of the people sitting around you are in some form of inebriation and you will call that a delightful day. And then you not only sit in traffic to get out of parking, you'll sit in traffic all the way back home, without complaint. It's a privilege. You wouldn't miss it. We lose our balance if somebody is seated in the chair we prefer when we come to church.
Psalm 63, "I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands". Psalm 141:2, "May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting of my hands be like the evening sacrifice". Does lifting your hands mean you're praising the Lord? No, you can lift your hands and be thinking ungodly thoughts. You can lift your hands and be 1,000 miles away from the Lord. But there are times and places where, prompted by the Spirit of God, it's appropriate to engage with the Lord. Again, it's more my practice when I'm not in the group, because whether you perceive me to be worshiping or not is not nearly as important as God's perception of me.
I want Almighty God to know that the intent of my life is to worship him. And that's not just when the music plays, it's how we conduct business. Do we do it with integrity? When we give our word, do we keep it? Do we practice deception and immorality? Do we engage in ungodliness in what we look at and what we listen to? Or do we maintain the desire to worship the Lord with our lives? You see, worship extends from a personal decision, a determination to exalt the Lord, to give honor and praise to almighty God. It's an attitude within us that affects behavior. It's not a behavior that drives our attitudes. It's the acknowledgement that there is someone worthy of worship, worthy of our submission.
Because in worshiping, I will gladly say, "I submit to you," that there is someone of significance and power to whom I have decided it is worth yielding my will and my emotion and all that I am to him. That's not about a band that plays. Again, we have almost lost sight of worship. There's some fun places I like to go to worship. I can worship the Lord in a grocery store, and I don't mean in a way that draws attention to me, but I can go stand in the cookie aisle, and I mean it. I can't eat as many of them as I used to. I used to have metabolism like a furnace. Now, it seems more like a candle. But that's another topic. But I can walk through the grocery store and say, "God, you are so good to us".
If I'm sent to the grocery store to buy crackers, I need more instructions because there's 60 kinds. And if I get the wrong ones, I gotta go back. You have blessed me, thank you. I have lived places where there weren't grocery stores. How many of you have ever lost the love of Jesus in a drive through? Because you know if what you order actually shows up in that bag, you've experienced a miracle of biblical proportions. True? But do you know what a treat it is to have food prepared for you with that kind of convenience? That you can stay in your car and drive up to a speaker and someone will prepare a meal for you or your children? And then we lose the joy of the Lord because they didn't put ketchup in the bag.
Folks, worship starts with an attitude within us. Lord, thank you for a new day. Thank you for the strength. Thank you for hot water. Lord, thank you that I have clothes to wear and transportation available to me, that there's someplace I can go to work and somebody will offer me payment. God, thank you that I can go to church, that I have a Bible to read, that my children have a school to go to. Folks, worship starts within us. How far removed are we from that? We've been inundated with what we deserve, what we're entitled to, what I expect, what I think and what I feel and what I want, and it robs us of a spirit that brings worship to Almighty God. We've got to regain it. We're gonna have to come with some humility and say, God, I've had all kinds of language for this, but it is not involved, the practice of my life.
You don't have to have fancy words. Just start out saying, "God, I thank you today. You've been good to me. I believe you exist. I wanna honor you. I wanna be pleasing to you. I wanna walk uprightly before you. Put people in my path today that wanna honor you, may I recognize them". If you're more excited about being with ungodly people than you are with godly people, you need to heart check. You don't need my opinion. You work that out. We have got to bring worship back because in worship is the presence of God and the power of God. Some of the most remarkable things that Jesus did when we hear these little expressions of worship from him standing outside of Lazarus's tomb, "Father, I thank you that you hear my prayers".
And if you sent me to the cemetery to pray for somebody who'd been in there four days, I'd have taken a choir and a band and a few hundred something or others, right? Father, thank you. Lazarus, get out here. Oh, how can he speak to the wind and the waves? Because he spent a lot of time talking to the one who created them. We gotta come back to worship, folks. We have to tell the Lord we haven't been interested in him. We've pushed him to the periphery. We've forgotten. Now, here's the good news. We can remember. We can remember. We can regain, say, "Well, that's not my..." Not talking about personality or your love language, or what you like or what you think or what you... no, this is you and the Lord.
You worship to the point that when you come to the corporate gathering of the people of God, you would worship, irrespective of who is next to you or who's in which seat or where you parked or who looked at you in which way when you crossed the lobby. I brought us a psalm for worship. I thought we'd do this old school. I want to do it responsibly. The portions in bold are your assignment. If you're at home, I hope you downloaded the outline. If you're at home, you say this with us. If you're on the beach, you just be quiet. I'm kidding. You can join.
So let's stand. It's Psalm 118. I took a collection of verses from there, but it's a declaration of worship to the Lord. If worship is like a foreign concept to you, take a psalm like this and say, "I'm gonna say it out loud three times a day. I'll start with that. I'm gonna make time in my life to focus my thoughts and my attention and my energy on worshiping the Lord". If you'll start to do that, you'll find it'll begin in you to grow. When you get in your car, don't turn on the radio to listen to the news one more time. Don't listen to a song that you already know the words to. I'm not opposed to the news or music, but if you've got a little time alone, use it to worship the Lord.
If you've got mundane tasks to do, if you have grass to mow or windows to clean or laundry to fold or some mundane assignment, take that time that doesn't require a lot of intellectual horsepower, and worship the Lord. God, thank you that I have clothes to fold, that I have access to a washer and a dryer. God, thank you for transportation, for roads to drive on, for money for fuel. God, I wanna worship you. You've been good to me. You've given me breath today. I know, I gotta hush. Let's read it together. The bold parts are yours.
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good...
(His love endures forever)
Let Israel say...
(His love endures forever)
Let the house of Aaron say...
(His love endures forever)
Let those who fear the Lord say...
(His love endures forever)
In my anguish I cried to the Lord...
(And he answered by setting me free)
The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid...
(What can man do to me?)
The Lord is with me; he is my helper...
(I will look in triumph on my enemies)
I will give you thanks, for you answered me...
(You have become my salvation)
The stone the builders rejected...
(Has become the capstone)
The Lord has done this...
(And it is marvelous in our eyes)
This is the day the Lord has made...
(Let us rejoice and be glad in it)
O Lord, save us; O Lord...
(Grant us success)
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord...
(From the house of the Lord we bless you)
The Lord is God...
(And he has made his light shine upon us)
You are my God, and I will give you thanks...
(You are my God, and I will exalt you)
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good...
(His love endures forever)
Amen, God bless you.