You must understand that there are many facets to your being. Your will is a part of your soul, of your mind, of your emotions, a part of your spirit, and is probably the only thing that transcends all of them.
With the set of your will, you can control your emotions. With your will set upon God, you would find your spirit engaging in worship beyond what you are consciously able to do.
The more I study the Scriptures, the more impressed I am that real worship is beyond what you are intelligent enough to perform. God knew that in His greatness and in your limitation to adequately worship Him, He would have to provide a means of grace whereby you could worship.
He is not asking that you understand worship, but that you will to worship Him. Therefore He provides the Holy Spirit for us, that He can make intercession for us according to the will of God with groanings which cannot be uttered (Romans 8:26).
The Holy Spirit is not only a medium by which you pray beyond your understanding or beyond what you are able to utter, but He also enables you to give worship and thanks to God beyond your capacity to do so.
In the simple operation of tongues, one who speaks in tongues gives thanks well, according to I Corinthians 14. Oh, to be able to give thanks well, without being at a loss for words when you come before the great and magnificent person of our Lord, to be able to give thanks to Him and adore Him.
So many of the things that the Holy Spirit does enable us to by-pass the mind, for the carnal mind is enmity against God, not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be (Romans 8:7); and bring us to a place where there can be a renewing of our minds.
A day of worship is before us, and this worship is requiring, from our level, that our will be set on God. God Himself works in that will which is set upon Him. It is God who works in you to will, and He strengthens and sustains your will in the purpose that He has set before your life, and in the doing of it. We want to worship the Lord and so we first set our will.
When the Word says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” the will is involved in that. When David said, “My heart is fixed, O God; my heart is fixed on Thee” (Psalm 57:7), he meant that his will, the focus of all that he was, was fixed upon God.
If we used the word “focus” instead of “will” we would have a better understanding of what is meant. There are many individuals who are scatterbrains, completely scattered in their thinking. They hop from one thing to another. In their conversation, they leapfrog from one subject to another, because their minds are quite scattered.
God helps us to organize and coordinate everything within us so that one facet of our personality is not warring against and crossing out other facets of our personality. When there is a civil war going on within us, the flesh is warring against the Spirit and we cannot do the things that we would, for all our energies are expended in an inner conflict.
The man who is a true worshiper has focused everything on God. He has not catered to the physical desires so much that they disrupt him, control and dominate him so that he cannot worship.
He has so set his heart on God that the doubts and the fears, the awareness of the circumstances round about him do not wash out his focus on the Lord. A worshiper worships regardless of where you put him or what you do to him, because his heart is fixed on God.
It is difficult to set your focus completely on the Lord, but if you try, and keep working at it, you’ll be amazed at what you can do.
A little struggle and effort is required in fixing your heart totally upon the Lord. When the mind wanders or distractions come, don’t fight them; just will them to go away. Make the decision, “I won’t have them. I am going to serve the Lord and worship Him.” Set your heart upon the Lord and then begin to worship Him.
One of the greatest things to help you in that is to love Him. Think of the will along with love, and the results can be tremendous. If you really love someone and focus on him, you break through to mental bonds and awareness that you do not have otherwise.
Often people who are in an accident or in great danger find later that someone hundreds of miles away—a mother, a wife, a husband, a brother, a sister who is very close to them —suddenly had a picture flash before them of what was happening.
At a person’s death, a loved one thousands of miles away sometimes wakens, knowing that his loved one has died.
The close bonds of love make a connection in the mind that science cannot explain.… Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. That love seems to be the connecting link. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. I Corinthians 2:9, 10a.
The worshiper who worships with his heart fixed on God and with love flowing out to the Lord has established the link between him and God by which can come perception, revelation, and good things beyond what otherwise could enter into his heart or imagination.
At that moment he has also opened the door to a relationship that is very effective. When a man is focused upon the Lord and worships Him, it is very easy for him to be on his face before the presence of the Lord in great reverence and humility, in meekness and in submission. These seem to be part of worship.
Is it natural for you to worship, for you to feel humble and meek, for you to feel the adoring dedication and submission? If these feelings exist in your heart, what do they bring about?
If you are meek, you are going to inherit the earth. Just be a meek worshiper. Humble yourself before the Lord and He will exalt you. Submit yourself to the Lord and you can resist the devil and he will flee from you (James 4:7).
You are in a position to get almost anything you want from God when you are one of those humble worshipers at the feet of the Lord.
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:3. Why are they poor? Because they are men-pleasers? Because the fear of man is upon them? No, they don’t fear anyone. They are poor in spirit because they bow before the Lord, with no arrogance in their spirit. Then God turns around and gives them the whole Kingdom. The worshiper possesses everything.
The Lord told the Samaritan woman that the worshiper is what God has been looking for (John 4:23). God’s eye roves to and fro throughout the whole earth. He is looking for those who will worship Him.
Someone who really worships the Lord can never remain defeated very long.
Above everything else Satan tries to cut a person off from worshiping in his spirit. If Satan succeeds in preventing a person from worshiping in his spirit, he can lay some degree of bondage upon that individual no matter who he is.
If he restrains your worship, he has restrained every part of your being. If young people can maintain their wholehearted worship, they will go on to having all their goals fulfilled.
When a man is alive to God in his worship, he starts dying to other things. The work of the cross is done in a person’s life at the throne of God. It is when you are worshiping before God that it is accomplished; that is the place of effectiveness.
After Paul was caught up to heaven and saw things not even lawful to utter, then the work of the cross began, then he said, “I am crucified to the world and it is crucified to me. I am dead to it.”
If you want to find rebellion and everything of reaction completely removed from within you, then pursue after this worship of the Lord. Stand in the presence of the Lord where everything of this world fades into insignificance and you die to it, and it dies to you.
This will not be accomplished by standing on a lower level and trying to chop it down as you would kill a snake with a hoe. The flesh and its desires keep coming up and you can’t chop them out fast enough. You have to rise above them in the Spirit and find in the presence of God all the realities, all the promises, all the precious blessings that God gives you.
How can you know the difference between worshiping in the Spirit and worshiping with your soul?
To illustrate, let us compare it to riding in an elevator. Suppose you start at the basement and push the button for the top floor. As you go to the top, you are aware of passing each floor, though you may not have much awareness of moving.
A human being is a triune creature: body, soul, and spirit. The Scripture names them in reverse order: spirit, soul, and body (I Thessalonians 5:23). You can start in the physical, for you may not always be able to start in the spirit.
Begin by saying simply, “I love You, Lord Jesus. I love You, Lord Jesus.” Then you rise into the soul realm by bringing your emotions into it.
When you want to shift into the next level, visualize yourself going up in the elevator, and soon you will have the physical sensation of floating.
Set your will on the Lord, get the sensation of floating as you focus and begin to worship the Lord. In the physical, your lips are expressing what is coming from your spirit.
The difference between the soulish worship and spiritual worship can be illustrated by the various religions.
The pageantry, the processional, the robes of some denominations are soulish, emphasizing the pride and religious instinct of man.
The other extreme of soulish worship is that which hollers and jumps and gets very excited, without remembering what the prophecies or tongues and interpretation were about.
Because the soul is unrestrained and is closely tied in with the emotions and passions, problems of adultery and fornication often arise with worship in the soulish realm.The wildfire and fanaticism often displayed by preachers on television or radio is a form of soulishness. Soulish people may listen, but anyone who is listening for a word from God will not hear it there; all he will hear is just a superficial expression from the soulish realm. That again is the lower level.
When you reach the spirit realm, you feel as if you are gliding and out of touch even with your emotions. There is a peace, a rest, a tranquility, and yet a fierceness in your spirit that comes through a strength that is focused on the Lord.
It is in this realm that all true revelation comes, because God is a Spirit, and He communicates to people’s spirits. Unless you approach Him with your spirit, you don’t receive the answer.
God is not a soul; He is a Spirit. As like speaks unto like, and the deep calls unto the deep, likewise a man who is hollering and dancing around in the soul level will not have one revelation or one word from God coming through to him, for it is purely soulish.
Revelation comes to the realm of your spirit, not to the realm of your soul. When your spirit is one with the Lord, then your soul can interpret it.
When we are true worshipers of the Lord, then our spirits are closer to the channel of revelation than those who are moving in the realm of the soul.
A soulish blessing is fine and will inspire you for a while, but the thing that will really teach you the Word of God and give you the guidance and the leading of the Lord from day to day will be the fact that you walk with the Lord, with your spirit in tune with God.
Then you will hear the voice behind you say, “This is the way; walk ye in it.” You will also sense the checks and the hindrances the Spirit brings.
In our worship services, there is a restraint on our souls, but not upon our spirits. Our spirits are free to worship. People who come into our services with nothing but the short-lived soulish and emotional approach do not understand our liberty. Because they are not accustomed to moving in the realm of the spirit before the Lord, they feel restrained.
When you worship in your spirit, you come away with an understanding of the Lord. You set your will and come into the level where there is an awareness of the Lord, and after a while you say, “He walks with me and talks with me and I understand Him as I never have before.”
Sometimes people are concerned because they feel guilty and unworthy when they worship the Lord. There are two things that usually cause a sense of guilt. One is a sin that has only been half-repented of, so that the tree has been cut down but the roots remain; the other is that the sin was not repented of at all and consciously or unconsciously, whether we are aware of it or not, there is something that God would deal with, and we are not facing up to it and letting Him deal with it.
Self-condemnation comes through sins that are not forgiven or through sins that have been forgiven, but the repentance has not been deep enough to tear out the last roots of them.
What is the answer for someone who always feels guilty when he goes before the Lord? Get down on your knees and really repent and get the thing taken care of so there is no root of it and it is out of the way. Then come before the Lord with a clean heart and clean hands, and the sense of guilt will be gone.
Another common problem is that of feeling tired and groggy in the worship service. It is an experience that often seems to have a hypnotic quality to it, something that you cannot control.
It is important for us to understand that Satan especially hates the one activity that God desires in our walk with Him. When God heals the sick, I don’t think it bothers the devil very much. He’ll just go and make some other people sick.
There is only one thing that really bothers Satan. He knows what the Father was after when He first made man—that there be a communion and fellowship and worship coming forth; and when that starts coming, it is evidence to Satan that he is going to be defeated.
Every time you worship God, it is an indication of Satan’s defeat. When the worship comes forth, the one thing that Satan has tried to prevent is already happening.
Consequently, when people are really set to worship God, they will often find the sign of Lucifer himself, a heaviness, or hypnotic spirit of slumber coming over them.
What can be done about it? Eliminate anything physically that would contribute to it. In the first place, don’t breathe too shallowly. Breathe deeply, until the supply of oxygen has sparked you up a little. Above all else, rise above the present level. Keep raising and lowering the vibration of your spirit until you break loose from the weariness. When you thus position yourself in the Lord, the heaviness will soon lift.