Worship

What kind of worship are you offering to God on a regular basis? Are you focused on worship or on yourself? Most people in the religious world focus on themselves during worship instead of on God. They are more interested in their own emotions than they are with offering praise to God. 

“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

John 4:23, 24

“And Jesus answered him, “It is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”

Luke 4:8

There are terms to describe this distinction between worship types, it’s referred to as “vertical worship” (Where worship goes “up” to God) or “horizontal worship” (where worship moves laterally from person to person or stays within the self). Vertical worship places the focus on God and on serving Him in the worship. This is noble and preferable to horizontal worship which places the focus on the individual, on all the members of the church and how everyone is feeling emotionally about worship. Vertical worship tends to be primarily preferred by conservatives, (including radicals) while horizontal worship seems to be primarily preferred by liberals (also including radicals).

Worship is a service, and as such it should be directed towards God and not ourselves.

The only time it seems fit to observe yourself during worship is during communion. We enter the house of God not to increase our own emotions, but to present worship and service to the Lord. 

Key point: This service does not always have to include enjoyment on our part. For years Christians have shoved down the throats of their children this idea of enjoying worship. This is absurd – “enjoyment” is an emotion and God never commands us to have specific emotions. While there may be times where worship is enjoyable, it is not a requirement. God commands action not emotion, this cannot be stated enough. 

Did we mention that worship is not about you? It has everything to do with God, and almost nothing to do with us. 

We as human beings will have our humanity and our nature infuse worship. We as humans get bored, and therefore we will occasionally become bored in worship – boredom is a feeling, an emotion. There will be instances when we will not feel like worshiping just like there are days when we don’t feel like going to work. We will dislike certain hymns (the ones the song leader will choose to lead every single Sunday without fail). 

Men must sing when they don’t feel like it. 

We must pray when we are not emotional.

We must worship despite how we are feeling at the time. 

To suggest that we need to be in a certain emotional state in order to worship properly is dogma and propaganda that exists both in liberal and in conservative circles. Emotion should be cast aside and ignored as a requisite for worship. What does the Lord require of you? To worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). That is all the Word of God says. To say we must feel a certain way for worship to be acceptable is an addition to the Word of God, a despicable power move by theoretical Christians (Deuteronomy 4:2; Revelation 22:18-19; Proverbs 30:6).

Another popular tactic used by individuals attempting to rationalize their emotional hysteria is this: “But my emotions make worship better”.

Make it better for who? For you or for God? The answer is simple, emotions make us feel better and have nothing to do with God. Take a restaurant for example: imagine you are going out to eat and you sit down in a restaurant and look over a menu. A waiter comes and takes your order: you order steak and baked potato, nothing more and nothing less. 20 minutes later the waiter comes back with a steak that has been smothered in a strawberry sauce and your potato is stuffed with mushrooms. You say to the waiter, “Hey, what happened to my order? I asked for steak and potato and that is all”. To which the waiter replies, “Well I just really like strawberry sauce on steak and mushrooms in my potato, it makes it better and I just like it”. 

Do you see the problem here. The opinion of the server should not influence what he delivers to the table. Yet so many religious people do the same when it comes to worship. God listed in His word or left examples of what he wants in worship, yet we (the servers) decide to add what we think will make it better. When it comes to giving service to God, to focus should be on Him and never on ourselves. 

The same emotionalistic tactic is applied to musical instruments in worship, clapping and hand-raising.

People are doing what makes them feel good and they do not care about focusing on God. This is proven by the fact that no one ever fact checks their own behavior with scripture. Take the hand-raising example – you have one main instance in scripture where the idea of lifting holy hands comes from, and it is in 1 Timothy 2:8. The first question should be “What does it mean to lift holy hands? Do I lift one hand or two? Where do I place my hands? How were hands raised in the 1st century when 1 Timothy was written?” 

But none of those questions are asked because people are solely interested in doing whatever increases their own emotions while disregarding the principles of God. If Those individuals truly cared about raising hands for God’s sake, they would be neck deep in the scripture trying to find out what it truly means to “lift holy hands”. But instead they just do whatever they see fit, usually after seeing some other religious person raise their hands in a way they liked. This is a learned behavior that has little to do with scripture and much to do with emotionalism and socialization. Avoid doing anything for emotional reasons – that is not the way of men.

This is all not to say that we must mechanically walk through the various rituals and traditions of worship while having our minds far away from God, that would be equally wrong.

We would be honoring God with our lips while our hearts would be far from Him (Matthew 15:8-9; Isaiah 29:13). But also understand that the word “heart” that is used in scripture is not speaking about emotion. If you open your selected Hebrew study tool (BibleHub.com is recommended) you will find that the word translates “heart” in Isaiah 29:13 originally meant “Mind”, “attention”, “inner man” or “will”. Also in Matthew 15:8-9, even the Greek word translated as “heart” actually meant  “mind”, “character”, “inner self”, “will” or “intention”. 

Do any of these definitions sound emotional to you? No. Each definition is all about the mindset of a man. The masculine man concentrates his mind, attention, will and inner self towards God in worship. If we are participating in horizontal worship and concerned about our own emotions, then our attention is not on God – that is the end of the story. To suggest horizontal worship is anything else but emotionalism masquerading as spirituality is simply an attempt to justify one’s own behavior. 

Mantra

Worship is only for God, and it is only about God. 

Application

Purge the idea that worship is about you from your mind. Worship is about God.You go to a restaurant to be served food; how would you feel if the servers only cared about himself, how he was feeling, and how he was doing relative to the other waiters? You would be upset, because you are there to be served, and this fact has nothing to do with the servers besides the fact that they are the media through which that service comes. When it comes to worship, we are the server. We are providing God with worship, we should not be concerned with how we are feeling. Rather we should be concerned about whether or not our worship is done in spirit and truth.

We worship in spirit and truth, not emotion and truth, and not truth and emotion.

Spirit. Truth. With these we Worship God. We worship truthfully and with presence of mind, not thinking about food, sex or work. This is difficult and do not let any Christian tell you otherwise. It is becoming more and more difficult to keep our minds centered., in worship because our minds are conditioned to modern life with it’s constant distractions. The world itself is even a distraction and this is a tool of an enemy to keep us occupied in parts of life that do not matter. 

The ability to focus is rare, and should be practiced if we are to distill thoughts when we enter into the House of God. Once the thoughts of the world are purged, we must turn our complete focus to God. We are serving God, not being emotionally served by the worship service – this is the key point.

Tactic I – Prime the Mind

1. Detach by taking all thoughts and writing them down. Observe them objectively. Your mind can be calmed simply by writing down everything you are thinking.
2. Once the mind is calmed, orient it in the direction of God. Start saying that you are about to enter the presence of God for worship on the first day of the week.
3. Prime the mind by listening to small spiritual snippets online or by listening to hymns. 
4. Be prepared and in the mindset to worship God before you even enter the assembly. You do not want to have to waste the first several minutes of Sunday morning worship by having to get into the right mindset.

Enter into worship with a reduced sense of self. 

Increase your presence of mind but direct your thoughts away from your own life, and instead direct them onto the life of Christ and onto God Himself. 

Always remember that you are here to serve, not to be served.

The worship is about God and not about man. 

Crush your ego. 

Cast aside your emotionalism. 

Reject self centered worship. 

Conduct yourself like Men.