3 Ways to Become a Worshiper!

Hebrews 12:28-29  Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe,   for our God is a consuming fire.

Awe is defined as an “overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear. It’s produced by something or someone that is grand or extremely powerful.”

Sometimes this is problematic because we so often don’t see God as the Almighty God. Our minds have a hard time imagining how big God is so we perceive Him to be small to help us understand. This habit alone forces our worship to be just as small. We have to come to a place where we can see God for who He really is. The God who is bigger than every circumstance in this world. One of the ways I gain a better perspective of God is by looking at creation. When I look around at all that He created and how we are all made to function with one another, I am amazed and in awe of what He has done. Take a moment this evening and just watch the sun go down, gaze at the stars and see the amazing thing God has done just by speaking it out loud.

Sometimes my mind goes wild trying to imagine how all of this works! Yours too??? Can you just imagine? A light-year is 5.88 trillion miles long, and the furthest thing we have measured so far is 13 billion light-years away. Somewhere in the midst of all of that is a spiral galaxy called the Milky Way, which is made up of hundreds of billions of stars. One of those stars is our sun, and one of the planets circling our sun is Earth and two of the more than six billion people on this planet are you and I. Yet, the universe that so easily blows our minds is nothing more than a speck to God. Whew! Mindblowing!!!

In other words, God created the cosmos without lifting a finger. And when he created the heavens, He did it all without a DIY kit, an existing photo, a template, a diagram, or Google! God was creating in the truest sense of the word, speaking the world into existence out of absolutely nothing.

Worship is a verb; it’s something you do. Worship isn’t something you watch despite what you see from many people who attend church. We often see a stage with lights and chairs facing it, and receive worship guides with an outline of the service or what we can call a “show.” We tend to think every part of church is put on for us.

But BOOM!!! Here is a wake-up call for all believers. Worship is not a spectator sport. It is a participation activity every day of our lives. It isn’t something we attend, like a sporting event or a concert. Worship is something we enter into with everything we have!

Oh, wait! Are you thinking to yourself “that’s not my personality?” Well, believe it or not, we all can lose ourselves in worship the same way we do when we attend a concert or a sporting event. We all scream and get really passionate when our team makes a great play or a band plays our favorite song. Those are all great acts of worship, only to a not-so-great god. We know how to worship with abandonment but for some reason, we make it hard to worship the one and only true God with abandonment.

The Bible has so many examples of how to worship with abandonment. Here are just a few:

Shout to God! * Clap your hands! * Lift up your hands! * Stand in awe! * Bow down! * Dance before Him! * Make a loud noise!

Psalm 100: 1-2  1 Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.

2 Worship the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Psalm 149:3  3 Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with tambourine and harp.

When you come to know who God is and you embrace what He’s done, your only reasonable response is to worship. When we realize that it is a privilege and honor just to be in His presence, we will then worship with abandonment and lose ourselves in the presence of God.

So here’s the last thought!

True worship is a whole-life response to God’s greatness and glory. The only fitting response to all He has done is to give back to Him all that we are. Worship is not determined by what we say but by how we LIVE.

All of us leave a trail with our actions and at the end of that trail sits a throne. We can’t get to the throne by talking about what’s there. We get there when we follow the trail and find where we put our passion, energy, time, and money. At the end of the day, you may get to the throne and find your job sitting there or may your brand new car. Perhaps you follow the trail of your achievements and social media and find yourself sitting on that throne.

Well, maybe you believe you ARE a worshiper of God. You listen to worship music sometimes, go to church a few times a month, and even go to a small group every now and then. When you look at all the bread crumbs on your trail, and you follow them - the passions, the energy, the time -- you get to the throne of your life and realize: ”I am a great worshipper. But the thing I worship is me.” Ouch!

We worship what we find most valuable, and it’s usually not what we tell people we worship. Worship is not found in our words but in our way of life. That will tell us the story of who and what we worship.

Jesus said it best: Matthew 6:21 - For where your treasure is there your heart will be also.

Today we have a great opportunity to follow our treasures and evaluate the object of our worship, the god

sitting on our throne. I don’t know about you, but I want to do whatever I can to make sure that the throne of my life reflects the One and only Living God. One day our time on earth is going to be through and when that time comes we are going to stand face to face with a Holy God. I want to be able to say that He was on the throne of my life.