I wanna speak to you tonight on the subject the glory of worship. The Glory of Worship. And I want you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 145, Psalm 145. And we're gonna walk through this passage and just take several verses at a time. We'll read a few verses and then I'll talk about them for a little bit. And I want us to learn some things from King David of Israel who wrote these words from his own personal life and testimony about his worship experience with God and how he worshiped God as we see described in these words. And we believe that he penned these words while he was serving as the King of Israel. And it is the first Psalm in the final section of Psalms leading all the way to the last one, which is Psalm 150. And yet being the first Psalm of the last section of Psalms, it is the last Psalm penned by David in the Book of Psalms. And do you know that in the Book of Psalms, there are 75 Psalms that are attributed to David? That's one half of the Book of Psalms written by David, the King of Israel. Something interesting about Psalm 145 from a literary perspective. We know of course the Old Testament was written in the Hebrew language, so David wrote these words in Hebrew. But it's called an acrostic because each of the sections of Psalm 145, the first word of each section in Hebrew begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And it follows the order of the Hebrew alphabet consecutively, starting with alef and then bet. And it goes down the list of the Hebrew alphabetical characters. So it's a literary masterpiece really, but even more than its beautiful structure as its patterned after the sequential flow of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, is the content about worship that we read in David's word. So what I wanna do is just look at the first three verses, and then that'll get us into this passage of Scripture together. He says, "I will extol you, my God, O King; and I will bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable." Now, here he is, the King of Israel, and yet in verse one that opens this Psalm, the King of Israel is acknowledging the King of the universe. And this is something that every king, every leader of government, and every leader of any kind needs to be careful to always do is to acknowledge, I may have a certain degree of authority, but ultimately there is only one true King of the universe and that is Almighty God. And that's what he acknowledges there in verse one. And in these opening verses, he begins to talk about his commitment to praising God, to worshiping God. He says in verses one and two, "I'm going to extol You." And the word extol means to lavish praise upon. He says, "I'm going to extol You, I'm going to bless Your name, and I'm going to praise Your name." So he uses words that are interchangeable, all of which have to do with worship. So from the get go in this chapter, we have the heart of a worshiper on full display. And you know this aspect of David's spiritual life is a part of every one of the Psalms that he wrote. He was a man who was a worshiper. He worshiped God in good times. He worshiped God in bad times. So I want you to look at the frequency of his commitment to worship. For instance, he says in verse two, "I will praise You every day." But when you look back in verse one, he says, "I'm gonna bless Your name forever and ever." And then in verse two, he says, "I will praise Your name forever and ever." So to say I'm going to praise you every day but I'm going to praise you and bless you forever and ever, that covers both aspects of our concept of time as God's children. He saying here, "I'm gonna praise You every day of this earthly life. But when this earthly life is over, I'm gonna praise Your name forever and ever and ever." So what he saying here is that worship is gonna be my way of life. And I think this is something that we ought to take to heart because have we not been guilty many times of reducing worship to one day of the week? Worship is something we do in a sanctuary or a house of worship, a church. You know, where we sing songs and the pastor preaches. And that's worship, especially if we engage with our God and proclaim His goodness. That's certainly worship and we're for that, right? But he says here, "Lord, I'm gonna praise You and bless You every day." This isn't a one day a week thing. This is a 24/7 opportunity. And he's taking his schedule and saying, "Lord, my life is devoted to You, worshiping and praising You anytime I get the opportunity." And then he's saying, "It won't end when I die. My life will be spent in heaven. My eternity is going to be spent worshiping You." So, you know, I've often wondered for people who do not engage with God in worship, for people who've not made worship the focus, the preoccupation of their lives, and they may even be believers, what happens when you get to heaven and you realize that you're going to spend eternity in one unending time of worship around God's throne? Now, there won't be the different things we're divided over in worship down here when we we're up there. But won't it be great to think that we will worship Him forever and ever and ever? Worship in the meantime needs to be our way of life. It should be the posture of our heart, it should be the focus of our thoughts, and it should come from the words of our lips. So our heart, our thoughts, our lips, all synchronize to worship the God, number one, who created us, and number two, who has saved us and redeemed us by the blood of Christ. Many of you have probably heard me mention that I read Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost for His Highest." And one of the classic statements that he has made about worship is this. Oswald Chambers wrote, "Worship is giving God the best that He has given you." And that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? That worship is our way of returning to God the best that He's given to us. He's given us time. We return it to Him in an act of worship. He's given us intellect. We engage our intellect and use it as an act of worship. He's given us relationships. We surrender those relationships and integrate worshiping Him through those relationships. He's given us food to eat. And you know what we ought to do every time we eat? God, I worship and praise You for giving me this provision. It's giving God the best that He has given to us. That's what worship is. So in verse three, he writes, "Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable." So he says there, "Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised," which tells me that in this verse, we're to understand him to say that God is to be praised in a way that is proportionate to His greatness. God is great, but he follows it up and says, "And because He is great, He is greatly to be praised." So the question of how much should we worship God, it just depends on how deserving we believe He is. And if we believe He's great, then our worship should be great. We should worship Him by assigning to Him His greatness. The last phrase, though, in verse number three says if you wanna know how great He is, well, David tells us His greatness is actually unsearchable. Now, I don't know how your Bible translates unsearchable, but unsearchable, however it's translated, means beyond our ability to comprehend. And that's certainly true because who can really comprehend the greatness of God? The New Living Translation puts it this way. "No one can measure His greatness." And we would all say amen to that, 'cause nobody can truly fathom the vastness and greatness of Almighty God. It defies our ability to comprehend. And that pretty much says it all. And when you think about it, how great would a God be who could be comprehended and grasped by finite human beings? The fact that His greatness is beyond our ability to truly get our arms around is yet another reason why He is worthy of our worship. So these are just the first three verses, setting the stage for the verses that follow about the glory of worshiping God. Now, what I want us to do is to pick up in verse four. I'm gonna go ahead and read through verse seven. "One generation shall praise You and praise Your works to another. They shall declare Your mighty acts." Then David says, "I will meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty, and on Your wondrous works. Men shall speak of the might of Your awesome acts, and I will declare Your greatness. They shall utter the memory of Your great goodness and shall sing of Your righteousness." So when we look at those verses, beginning the fourth verse, it's interesting there's a pattern here. For instance, in verse four, David describes what others are gonna do as they praise God. And he follows it up in verse five and says, "And this is what I'm gonna do to praise God." And that same pattern is packaged into verse six. What others will do to praise God followed up by what David said he's going to do to praise God. And then verse seven reverts back to what others are gonna do to praise God. And when we look at this, he's acknowledging, yes, there will be other people who worship God, but no one can worship God for me. I'm gonna worship God because I have a relationship with Him, because I understand Him to be who He says He is, and I've experienced Him in my life. So worship is not something that we can just passively be disengaged in as we watch everybody else around us do it. He says people all over the world are gonna proclaim the greatness of God. But he says, "They're not going to do it without me joining in. I am going to take my part in that." Now look in verse four again, where he says there, "One generation shall praise Your works to another and shall declare Your mighty acts." You know, I really love that verse because in that verse, David is, in what he's written, he's letting us know through his time of worship that he understands that God's plan is for faith to be handed on from generation to generation to generation. There's a succession in faith. Faith doesn't stop with one generation. Faith is continued from one generation to the next, and then that generation to the next. And this is one of the reasons why I love being in a church where there are multiple generations represented. It's not just older people and it's not just a bunch of young people, but I love being in a church where you can look out across the worship center when we're all able to gather. And of course, I know that even though not everyone who's a part of our church can be in the worship center during this time, I know they're out there. They're part of our family. And here's what I love about our church and many churches like ours is that we have people from newborn infants, all the way to people who, we even have a precious member, Mama Dawn Hutchison, who lives in Florida now, who I think is 103 years old now. And we have all ages in between. Look at what he says, though, in verse four. "One generation shall praise Your works to another." This is God's plan for a love for Him and a worship for Him to be multi-generational. Because what it ensures is that until the rapture, and even after that, by the way, people will be saved after the rapture, there will never be a time when God is without worshipers on the face of this earth which He created. That's what pleases Him. And in verses four through seven that we just read, something else, and I wanted to draw this to your attention because when you're studying the Bible, it's good to stop and look at, whether it's a chapter or a set of verses, it's good to look at it through thematic or topical lenses. And in verses four through seven, David lists things that believers are to acknowledge and proclaim about God. So in the first verses, he just says, "Lord, I'm gonna praise You. Lord, I'm gonna worship You. I'm gonna do it every day. I'm gonna do it for the rest of my life. I'm gonna do it forever and ever." But in these verses, he starts listing the reasons for which he's going to praise God. And this is a reminder to all of us that, you know, passages like this remind us that the attributes of God are to inform our worship. That our worship is to be focused on those qualities about God that make Him worthy of praise. So I thought what I'd do is just put up on the screen these attributes of God from verses four through seven. You don't need to worry about writing these down because they're all right there, directly drawn from the verses that we've read. But he says all of those who know God are going to praise God for His works, for His mighty acts, for His splendor and majesty, for His greatness, for His goodness, and for His righteousness. And it is lists such as this that you could actually go back to the Book of Genesis, and if you survey the entire Bible, you could build a list of all of the qualities or attributes of God. Now think about it. Number one, how long would that take you? And number two, how long would that list be to build out this list of all of the attributes of God, the characteristics of God, that make Him God? And these are the reasons for which we worship Him. And David says, as he's listing these in these verses, that when we worship God, we recite back to Him that we praise Him for His mighty works, we praise Him for His acts, we praise Him for the splendor of His majesty, we praise Him for His greatness, we tell God that we acknowledge these characteristics about Him. And that is one of the most important essences of worship. So it's a reminder to us, by the way, that our view of God determines how we worship God. Now, many times, this is a confession, not an accusation, by the way, it's a self-confession, my worship can be reduced to my life's experience, my crisis at hand, whatever I'm going through that's got me so rattled at the moment, my feelings. And when my worship is bound up just in my current experience, just in my emotional state of mind, just in what I'm processing, what it means is my worship is me-centered instead of God-centered. And in this passage of Scripture, and we're gonna see it in the rest of this chapter, there's something that we cannot miss in this. And that is that worship requires us to get outside of our own emotional state, our feelings, what we have on our thoughts, what crisis we're facing, to get out of our experience and just to focus on the things about God that remain true no matter what I'm going through and no matter whether or not I feel Him. Many times, I don't even feel Him in my life. But He is there and He remains unchanged, though my circumstances are always changing. So it is this practice of reciting to God, "Dear God, I worship You because of Your mighty acts that I've read about in Scripture, and because of the mighty things I've seen You do in my own life. Dear God, I worship You for Your majesty, that You're enthroned above the chaos and turmoil of this world. I give You praise that You abide in glory in the heavens. I worship You for Your greatness and Your goodness and Your righteousness that is untouched by sin." And when we start praising Him based upon His characteristics, who He is as God, it lifts us out of a me-focused worship and it puts our emphasis on Him. (chuckles) I hope somebody is out there, nodding your head, saying amen, because this is what God wants us to understand. So then in verse five, I want you to notice what David said he's going to do. He says, "I'm going to meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty." And then in verse six, he says in the last part of verse six, "I will declare Your greatness." Now, I like the order there. He says, "First of all, I'm gonna meditate on Your majesty. Then I'm going to declare." And I'm gonna tell you why meditation, in this sequence, precedes proclamation. You get that? It's because when you meditate, which means to focus your thoughts on God, to pause and be given to contemplation on who God is, to fix your thoughts upon God, to remove yourself from distractions, and allow your mind to be saturated in the attributes of God that we just listed, which are just a few. He says, "It's out of that meditation in which I gain a full awareness of who God is, that I'm then emboldened to proclaim who God is, and not just to Him, but to other people." And speaking of meditation, when he says in verse five, "I'm gonna meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty," let's just press pause and talk about meditation for a minute. There's a lot of talk about meditation in our day and time. A lot of new age meditation, or a lot of transcendental meditation, a lot of what I would call demonic meditation. In fact, I am in no way against some of the stretching exercises associated with yoga, but the danger of yoga is if it's not distinguished from its origins, it can lead into an unhealthy type of meditation that is not centered in our God, the true and living God. So I wanna talk about meditation. There's a healthy meditation. And for him to mention it here in verse five, I just want you to know this is a theme that you'll find recurring through the Book of Psalms. Now, just to let you know, even though David didn't write the very first chapter in the Book of Psalms, we all, or I should say most of us, are familiar with those words, and I wanna put them on the screen where it says, "Blessed is the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight," the blessing persons delight, "is in the law of the Lord, and," look at this, in His law he does what? He meditates day and night. So the very first chapter of the Book of Psalms, it mentions meditation, that the man or woman whose life is blessed in fellowship with God will be someone who meditates on God and His Word. And then I thought I would just mention, you know, the longest chapter in the Book of Psalms is also the longest chapter in the whole Bible. It's Psalm 119. And every verse is about the Bible. Every verse is about some word that is synonymous with Scripture. But the author there writes in verse 15, "I will meditate on Your precepts and contemplate Your ways." Well, I could give you several other examples, but needless to say, meditation is hard for us. It's hard for me. Because we're living in a day and time when there are constant chimes and beeps and alerts going off on our electronic devices. I mean, we can't even sit through a church service without, I would say in any given church service, there'll be five or six different phones that start ringing and (chuckles) people start digging for their phone and don't know how to shut it off and it rings for five minutes. And it's an embarrassing thing if it's ever happened to you. But it's just, you know, there's no need. I used to get very upset about it, thinking, you know, how much effort does it take to silence your phone or to just turn it off before church starts? We're only together for an hour and 15 minutes. But I've just accepted it's a sign of the times. There's nothing we can do about it. But it's one thing for it to constantly be going off in church, but it's another thing for it to be constantly going off in our lives, on the nightstand throughout the night. And I have even found that in my own attempt to have some meditation time with God, it's hard to do it in silence because there's always something that is distracting me. And yet meditation requires us to have an undistracted focus. So if you're interested in meditating on God's Word and meditating on the Lord, it is a discipline. It means that you're going to have to be proactive to say, "I'm gonna meditate for this time." And sometimes I know I have a lot of freedom without some of the obligations of family and things. Sometimes I do like to just get away for even two days. And one thing I always do on my vacations is I go find some place. I showed a picture in a recent broadcast of a sunset up in Michigan. And I just took a moment to meditate and worship God as I watched that sun go down. These are examples of times that I try to build into my life. But a book that is considered a classic, it's called "Celebration of Discipline" by Richard Foster, he writes about the disciplines of the Christian life. And one of them is meditation. And I love what he says about meditation. He says, "What happens in meditation is that we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in our heart." I wanna read that again. Don't miss it. "What happens in meditation is that we create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in our hearts." He goes on and says, "The wonderful verse in Revelation 3:20, 'I stand at the door and knock,' was originally penned for believers, not unbelievers. We who've turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much He longs to eat with us, to commune with us." And the chapter is about meditation. So I want you to think about the importance of, and it could be that it's not possible for us to meditate every day. We can have a daily devotional time. But meditation is when we take time to really allow our minds to be saturated in reflection of Scriptures that we've read, maybe one verse we're memorizing, and sometimes just meditating on God, on the Lord Jesus Christ, on the Holy Spirit, and just thinking about God. And that's really what we're talking about, thinking about God. And as we're thinking about Him, shifting our attention to conversing with Him, and then listening to Him as He responds, it's an awesome, awesome privilege to be able to do this. And I wanna submit to you in the world you and I are living in, please don't miss this, meditation is going to be a reclaimed discipline for 21st century Christians as a way to survive. Otherwise, our minds are going to be eaten away by all of the things that are constantly distracting us and shortening our attention span, most of which are very disruptive and disturbing and cause anxiety in our spirits. So meditating on God and on His Word, that's gonna be a way for us to survive as the times get even worse as we approach the end. All right, let's look in verses eight and nine now. In verse eight, David writes, "The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, Slow to anger and great in mercy. The Lord is good to all, And His tender mercies are over all His works." And so I want you to look at those verses. The Lord is gracious, full of compassion, slow to anger, great in mercy, and realize that just as when we looked at verses four through seven, we built a list of some of the attributes that David had given in those verses, I want us to do the same thing here. And you can see on the screen, just from two verses right here, here are the attributes that we can find that David assigns to God. He says gracious, full of compassion, slow to anger, great in mercy, and good to all. Isn't that interesting? Now, again, if you don't get to write all those down, they're right there tucked into those two verses. And do you realize that just here we are, nine verses into this chapter, and we have already constructed a mini volume of theology listing these attributes of God that David has woven into his own time of proclaiming God's greatness and worshiping God. This is God-focused worship. And these verses continue to build for us an increasing knowledge of God. So for instance, in our experience and in the people's lives with whom we interact who go through things that seem very unfair, things that seem unjust, many times our inclination is to question God. But when I come back to God's attributes, the ones that David has given us in these two verses, I have to say, "Okay, this is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. This is what my tears are telling me. This is what this person's pain is crying out. God is not gracious. God is not compassionate. God is not good." But I come back to His Word and I say, "Oh yes, He is." He is gracious. He is full of compassion. He is slow to anger. He is great in mercy. He is good to all. And our theology trumps our experience. Our theology is more authoritative than our feelings. Our theology overpowers the voices of doubt that we hear spoken from people whose experiences cause them to doubt that God is who He says He is. You see, worship is one of the ways that we maintain our faith. Worship is one of the ways that we hold on to the things we know to be true about God when everything around us, including many times our own sinful heart, wants us to reject and disbelieve. Worship is not just honoring to God and glorifying to God. Listen to me, worship is survival. Worship is our way to thrive and to have victory over doubt and fear and all of the other things that that battle against our faith. Oh, God is so good, isn't He? So now I want us to skip down to... Or, I want us to continue looking at verse 10. He says, "All Your work shall praise You, O Lord, and Your saints shall bless You. They shall speak of the glory of Your kingdom and talk of Your power, to make known to the sons of men His mighty acts and the glorious majesty of His kingdom." And verse 13, "Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Your dominion endures throughout all generations." So I want us to think about these verses. In this section David said in verse 10, "All Your works will praise You." So look at that. God's works. What are His works? The things He's done. Those works praise Him. Remember, Jesus said, when they were telling His disciples not to worship Him, He said, "If they don't, even the rocks will cry out." God's works praise Him. But then he said in verse 10, the second phrase is, "Your saints shall bless You." So His works praise Him and His people praise Him. Everything praises God. Now, let me ask you a question. How do God's works praise Him? How do His works praise Him? Well, when I was looking at that and studying that, I immediately thought of another one of the Psalms that David wrote. And you've heard me say this is my favorite, this is my favorite, this is my favorite. (chuckles) Well, Psalm 19 really is one of my favorites. But in Psalm 19, I wanted to put it on the screen, David wrote these words, "The heavens," what are the heavens? The skies and the stars, the sphere of the atmosphere, and even the universe beyond. He says those heavens, which are the works of God, they "proclaim the glory of God." Just by the sky being blue and the sun furnishing us with heat and the stars twinkling in a midnight sky, the heavens are praising God. His works praise Him. "The skies display His craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make Him known. They speak without a sound or a word. Their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth and their words to all the world." So do you see what he's saying in Psalm 19? It really helps us interpret Psalm 145 in verse 10 when he says "All Your works praise You." It means that everything that God has created in some way is a testament to His glory. And then he followed that up and says, "But we're not just gonna let His works do the praising. We're going to let those of us who are His people do the praising." And in this passage, I don't know if you noticed. I wonder if you all can put verses 10 through 13 back on the screen from Psalm 145. In verse 11, I had kingdom underlined. In verse 12, kingdom is underlined. In verse 13, kingdom is underlined. The glory of His kingdom, the majesty of His kingdom in verse 12, and the fact that in verse 13, His kingdom is everlasting. I just wanted you to be able to see those underlined references to God's kingdom. And the kingdom of God is a mystery in many ways. It's something that Jesus spent considerable time preaching about and talking about. In fact, His parables were referred to as parables of the kingdom. The kingdom is bigger than Israel. The kingdom is bigger than the church. Israel is a part of God's kingdom. The church is a part of God's kingdom. And eventually Israel will be restored and the kingdom of God on Earth will be centered in Israel. And the saints of the church age will reign with God in His earthly kingdom. But the kingdom of God really transcends any period on the earth, any dispensation on the earth. The kingdom of God, simply refers to God's reign above all the matters and the affairs of Earth and mankind. The kingdom of God refers to God's eternal plan that has been a part of His heart from eternity in the past, that is going to unfold in the eons of eternity. The kingdom of God is really something very impossible for us to grasp in this life. But if there's one thing we do know about it, the kingdom of God means the rule of God. It means the reign of God, R-E-I-G-N. And another way to understand God's kingdom is with the word sovereignty. It means that He is all powerful, above all things in the universe, all things in all worlds, and even those worlds unseen by human eyes. He is above it all. How long will this last? Well, in verse 13, as we read a moment ago, he says, and I want you to, if you have a pen in your hand, underline the word dominion. That's how my translation has it. "Your dominion endures throughout all generations." This kingdom of God, sovereignty of God, power of God, as this translation is, God's dominion endures throughout all generations. And what this means is we're living in a time when we think we invented hard times. And no, we did not. There have been calamities and catastrophes throughout world history. And if you're a student of history, you know this. The difference is we're just getting it delivered to us in record time. And everything happening in the world can be consolidated and communicated to anybody with a phone in their hand today. That's why it is so overwhelming to us. But the fact that His kingdom endures throughout all generations means the people who've lived through chaotic times, God was Lord over all then, and we're living in chaotic times. His kingdom is one of dominion now. And there will be others, if the Lord tarries His return, who will live through even more chaotic times. Many a times, I am worried about young people and babies being born and what they'll face as they grow older. But the truth is this: (chuckles) His kingdom, His power will still be prevalent. Sovereign. It will still be fully intact no matter what goes on on Earth. So the fact that the emphasis here is on His kingdom, His powers rule, it's a reminder as We worship God that He is sovereign over the universe, amen? (chuckles) He's sovereign over planet Earth that everybody says we're killing through climate change. He's sovereign over it. He is sovereign over mankind. Yes, He is. He is sovereign over sin and evil. He is sovereign over all forces of darkness. God is above all and that's why we worship Him. So just before I have have prayer with you, I just wanna do a little wrap up, and I wanna talk about what I would call Biblical worship. And I'm gonna give you a list, a list of qualities of Biblical worship inspired by the passage that we have spent time talking about tonight, but certainly not an exhaustive list. I hope you'll jot these down because I think they're very important. And the first quality of Biblical worship is that it is God-centered. God-centered. We talked about it. It means that our worship is built upon a Biblical theology. You know what theology means? Theology is our understanding of God. We want to have a Biblical theology, not an unbiblical theology. We want a Biblically based, theologically accurate worship of Almighty God. And that means we understand Him based upon the attributes and the things assigned to Him in the Word that He's given us called the Bible. Here's something else: Christ-focused. God wants Jesus Christ to be preeminent in our lives and in our worship. He wants the person of Jesus Christ to be magnified, His Son. He wants the sinless life of Jesus and the crucifixion, the atonement, the shedding of His blood on the cross as our substitute. That is an indispensable part of worship is our focus on the cross and the resurrection. So we call it the person and work of Jesus Christ. God wants worship that is not only God-centered, but Christ-focused. And this is why in services, I love it when we sing songs about Jesus and we sing songs about the cross and we sing songs about the blood. And people like to nitpick about what style of music, this and that and the other. And my whole thing is if it is God-centered and theologically and Biblically accurate, and if it is Christ-focused, magnifying the person and work of Jesus, we need to be willing to push aside some of the stylistic preferences and just give God the glory. And then here's another quality of Biblical worship: Spirit-led worship. This is where the Holy Spirit is working in and through the worship. And our worship in our personal lives, whether it's in our devotion, our driving down the road, our sitting in a service somewhere, a worship service, our worship conforms to the purposes of the Holy Spirit. And you know what the Holy Spirit loves to do? He loves to exalt Jesus Christ. Jesus said the Spirit would glorify Jesus. He said that in John chapter 14. The Holy Spirit loves to illuminate our understanding of Scripture. The Holy Spirit has a ministry of convicting of sin, and the Holy Spirit loves to draw unbelievers into the awareness of their need for Jesus Christ. And our worship, when it's Spirit-led, leads us into each of these purposes of the Holy Spirit in one way or another. Not all at the same time, but at some point in our worship experience, those bases have to be tagged or else the Spirit of God has not been leading us. And then here's something else. I just talked about this. Biblical worship must be sovereignty proclaiming, that we worship God by proclaiming, "Hey, life is bad, this world stinks, but God rules and reigns in the heavens above. And one day every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess." That's sovereignty proclaiming worship. We magnify God above all of the sin, confusion and chaos and hurt in this world. He is still sovereign over it all. And He's sovereign over our lives. And when I worship Him privately, I acknowledge, dear God, I proclaim Your sovereignty, not just over the universe, but Your sovereignty to control everything that affects my life. That's worship. And then the last thing is life-transforming. (chuckles) Life-transforming. I really believe that it's impossible, impossible, to have a genuine worship experience with God that doesn't change my life in some way. And it's really the mark of authentic worship when I have been in God's presence, saturating my mind with His glorious attributes and qualities and letting those grip on my heart as I explain to Him, "Lord, I understand these things about You and that who You say You are is who I believe You to be," and God's Spirit draws us into an embrace, realigns the priorities of our life, convicts us of things, cleanses us, encourages us, forgives us. And I'm telling you that kind of worship, whether it is under a tree in your backyard, on a rocking chair on your front porch, or sitting in a seat in a worship center, that kind of worship is life-transforming. As I look over here to my right, the sun seems to have gone down. You probably can tell from behind me, it's gotten darker now. And I just feel such a peace right now in my spirit. And I'm talking to someone tonight, and your life seems to be falling apart and you don't know what to do. And I believe that God is inviting you, sometime before you go to bed tonight, to take what we've talked about today, to look at these verses we've talked about. And if you have to go out and walk around the block, if you have to go drive and park somewhere in a parking lot, you need to let God saturate your heart and mind, and you need to simply say, "God, I worship You. God, You are great. And I know because You are great and because You are sovereign, You can help me face what I'm facing right now, because that's who You are. You're a good and merciful God and I trust in Your mighty power today. O God, I worship You. Please come to my help." And I promise you He'll do it. Lord, I wanna thank You. I thank You for the peace that I feel in my heart right now, just letting this passage guide everything that I've been able to talk about tonight. And I thank You for all the sweet and special and wonderful times that You and I have had together. Times of worship I've had with my fellow believers where together we praise You and glorify You for all the attributes and qualities that You assigned to Yourself in Scripture. And then Lord, we say no matter how often we are tempted to doubt, when we look at Your Word and we look back at our lives, You have done too much for us to ever doubt You again. Please continue to call us into the place of worship. And Lord, as the Book said a moment ago, help us to clear out the spiritual and emotional space so that Jesus can build within our hearts a sanctuary of praise. In Jesus' name. Amen.
