Our singing and our praising the Lord has gone through several phases. God certainly is not a God of ruts. If there is anything that tends to deteriorate, it is the spirit of worship through sameness. The greatest worshipers of all time were men like David, and he was continually giving himself to the invention of musical instruments for worship (I Chronicles 23:5). It is very easy to get into a rut in worship: you can sing the same songs, in the same way, with the same leaders. The real goal of a worship leader is to provoke you into a fresh presentation of yourself to the Lord, so that every time you lift your hands or open your mouth in worship, you experience something real in meeting God.
That fresh awareness is very difficult to maintain because we are constituted in such a way that the flesh is always seeking a way to do things by habit without awareness. You can drive from one place to another; and if the road is familiar to you, you do not even think about what highway it is, what crooks and turns there are, where you turn on or off the highway, or where you are going. You do it by habit. In the days of the horse and buggy, people did the same thing; they could lie back and snooze and let the horse find his way back home all by himself.
We like to do things without giving any attention to them. We quickly become creatures of habit who do the right thing without any expenditure of consciousness upon it. However, everything about God lends itself to just the opposite: There must continuously be that within your heart which is seeking in some way to know Him. Every time you worship, you are seeking to know Him. You have not seen Him; you do not have an image of Him. But all religion seeks to make an acceptable image whereby they can escape the reality of knowing Him—whether it is a crucifix hanging on a wall, or a picture, or a song that portrays some aspect of the Lord. It becomes very easy for us to lock God into a habit. This is where worship fails most of the time. You know the songs to sing, but do you meet God in them?
You say, “Oh, yes, the first time I sang that song I really met God.”
What about the hundredth time you sang that song? Were you still meeting God? Or have you made a habit, a rut of it? I think that you can even so order your spirit, or your soul, that you can get blessings just as you would throw a switch or push a button; but that may not be the meeting with God that you need. You may know that you need certain vitamins, and so you get out those vitamins and take them. But it is one thing for you to know what you need; it is another thing for God to know what you need and to meet that need in a fresh meeting with you. That is why God is always doing things differently.
We are preparing a book on the many attributes of God, which I am believing can be a way of worship. In no way do we ever want to paint a picture of God that will lock us in again. But we want to go to the promises of what He said He will be to us, the ways that He can reveal Himself. Our God is a fortress; our God is a shield.
“The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge; my savior, Thou dost save me from violence.” II Samuel 22:2b–3.
“I love Thee, O Lord, my strength.” The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies. Psalm 18:1–3.
But Thou, O Lord, art a shield about me, my glory, and the One who lifts my head. Psalm 3:3.
The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in Him, and I am helped; therefore my heart exults, and with my song I shall thank Him. Psalm 28:7.
We can picture our God as a shield, and then put the Scriptures with it. We can all open that book to a certain page; and as we worship, we will be focusing upon something that God wants to be to us right at that moment. We need this because our worship is not just words; it is the awareness of the Lord that the words and what we do must present.
Perhaps I worship differently than some of you, because I abandoned a lot of congregational worship years ago. I realized that the worship services were interfering with my worship. I know this is real to some of you also. The songs are good; they are a good exercise of a mutual fellowship and faith that you are expressing toward God. But worship, in its purity, should be you standing in His presence, and you escorting someone else into His presence. When I lead worship services, I never feel that I am leading a worship service. I always feel that I am leading people into the presence of the Lord.
We will soon see another real breakthrough into deeper worship. Worship, and waiting on the Lord, are actually the most difficult things to do. They seem to be passive activities that do not require much attention; but in reality, the opposite is true. You are never more actively focused than when you are waiting on the Lord in a proper way. It is never a passive waiting for something to come to you. Rather, you are approaching God with a focus.
Just to be open is to be like a radar antenna, which goes around in circles trying to pick up something that is on the horizon and to determine how close it is and what it is. So the human spirit and the human soul can be like radar that picks up everything. But there are a lot of things moving around out there—a lot of spirits, a lot of things to listen to. There are countless TV signals, radio signals, shortwaves, etc.; the air is full of them. But if you want to hear a particular one you have to dial into it, tune into it, with a fine focus.
God is that way too. You tune into Him. You enter His presence with rejoicing, with thanksgiving.
I will praise the name of God with song, and shall magnify Him with thanksgiving. And it will please the Lord better than an ox or a young bull with horns and hoofs. The humble have seen it and are glad; you who seek God, let your heart revive. Psalm 69:30–32.
You “clean up your act,” inasmuch as you refuse to enter into His presence with rebellion, with withdrawal, with that which draws back out of self-condemnation. You enter before God with an honesty because you know that He knows exactly everything about you (Psalm 139). You come before Him to lay before Him your need, with no excuses; for you know that He has made a provision for that need (Hebrews 4:13–16). So you worship Him by the blood of the Lamb, by the Word that He has spoken.
So much of worship is based upon the Scriptures that give us access to God. Worship is not a struggle into His presence. Worship is a faith that stands in His presence because He has made a living way of access for us to do so (Hebrews 10:19–22). Worship becomes bold, but very reverent. It is never flippant.
You simply know that God loves you, and that He has made it possible for you to have access to Him; and you come and stand in His presence. All of your other responsibilities you race to finish, because you want to stand in His presence and you want to love Him.
There is a worship of God, a worship of the Lord Jesus Christ, that must come now, because we are not going to have oneness in one another’s hearts with any significant awareness until we have it first in the heart of the Lord.
Ninety or ninety-five percent of the Kingdom of God is oneness with the Lord. The other five or ten percent is our oneness with each other. Don’t ever distort this fact by thinking, “Oh, we have to live in one another’s hearts! That’s what it is all about.” That is just the secondary thing. The first is that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit will be one with us. Then we can be one with each other. We have heard this again and again.
If you do not have the worship with the Lord, you do not have any significant oneness with one another either. Breaking your bonds becomes a pointless effort if it is not designed primarily to heighten your awareness of your oneness with the Lord, and to come into His presence, to be totally, completely given to that, and then to be one with each other.
What is the purpose of our experiences of devastation? Our devastation experiences begin to end when bonds are broken. And the purpose of devastation in your life is accomplished when oneness with the Lord is attained. We are concerned about breaking bonds; yet the whole purpose of breaking a bond is accomplished quickly if you are wanting to break that bond in order to have a closer walk with the Lord.
Since the revelation first came on the breaking of wrong bonding, we have reached in to break bonds with one another because we want a real oneness. But in the breaking of bonds, you have to come to the place where you break those bonds with the realization that you are not going to have a walk with God yourself if you are dependent upon another person to go talk to the Lord and get the Word. We are to be interdependent yes, but not dependent. Your worship, your faith, your revelation, your perception of the Lord will begin to increase when you realize that God’s ultimate purpose is to bring each of us to stand in His presence, and to worship Him (John 4:23–24).
Do you see that many times you have used your music and your worship period as a “fill-in” before the Word, a time to dump distractions? That is important; but then when you finally have dumped the distractions so that you can listen to the Word, you still have not had the period of worship where you stand in His presence alone. This is something we will have to see develop in worship with each one of us.
We are the true circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Philippians 3:3.
The scope of the circumcision experience was not to be a negative thing; circumcision of heart does not just involve what you cut away. God had in mind something entirely different. The cutting away means nothing unless it is the sign that you are under a covenant and a relationship to the Lord (Genesis 17:10–11; Deuteronomy 10:14–16, 20–21). That is what circumcision was in the Old Testament. And when it became a ritual, then God said, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision availeth anything, but a new creation, but faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6; 6:15). What I can cut loose from your flesh life will not accomplish anything unless you are going to worship God in the Spirit and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh.
Worship has to involve several things. You do not come in the flesh to flaunt your flesh before God. In the Old Testament, all worship involved the presentation of a sacrifice that had to die vicariously for the worshiper. When we come before the altar of the Lord, it is by the blood of Jesus Christ that we present ourselves, that the flesh will not be arrogant or parade in His presence, but it will die. Yet by the same token, because we do not come wrongly, but correctly, we can stand there and give God the sacrifices of praise which He said are well-pleasing unto Him (Hebrews 13:15). Two things are involved: you present yourself a living sacrifice, and you present the praises that are due Him (Romans 12:1; I Chronicles 16:29).
At the beginning, our worship was good because it had no organized focus; it had no words. Ultimately, we had to find an expression of words and music and songs that came; but in that we lost something of our ability to come before the Lord without words and just be aware of Him and adore Him. Some of the great worship that came was singing in the Spirit in “more or less a harmony.” People would sing along within one chord with no rhythm. They would sing to the Lord in one way or another; some would quote Scriptures. But God met them in it. In time it got so that anybody could do it—it became a form. Then we shifted to something else, and that became a form. Then we shifted to something else, and that, too, became a form.
When a way of worship becomes a habit, sooner or later people want to drop it because it has lost its life. But they are the ones at fault; they made a habit out of the way of worship and lost its life; they lost the awareness of the Lord in it.
When that occurs, then someone has to invent something new. If we are not careful, we will get to the place where we are like an old-order church, waiting for some new Babylonian jingle or novelty to come along that we can all sing for half a dozen services before we go on to the next innovation of somebody’s imagination. Nobody meets God in that; at best they are blessing themselves, or opening some simple little channel by which they know how to be blessed. People can fall into that. They know it is good, so they come and stick their finger in the socket and they get a little blessing. Anybody can stick his finger in a socket; but it takes faith and real worshipers to meet God.
God is so concerned about this that Christ said, “The Father has been seeking those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23–24). There are many things that we look for from God, but we should remember that the most important part of the service is where we come and give God what He is looking for.
A service has missed its point when you wish you could crawl off in a corner someplace by yourself because you are being distracted from the Lord. Have you ever been in a worship service where you felt you would like to get away from it so that you could meet with God? That is our fault. We have made a habit out of what should have been a meeting with God.
This is the burden of my heart concerning worship. It is not criticism; rather, it is an analysis that you need to know. What are we doing with our worship? Where are we going? Let’s believe the Lord to write new psalms, or to pick a phrase out of a Psalm to sing. We used to have psalms, but people conformed to a rut in that also. Either their psalm was an epic which went on and on forever, like Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey; or else it was a time when people got to singing folk songs to you. After a while worship became a matter of somebody doing his thing in front of an audience. Then worship becomes a performance, and it should not be that.
Time and time again I have said, “Let the people worship. Go back to singing in the Spirit; that will break them through.” This is much more preferable if people are not meeting God anyway, because in that worship—where you have no words, no music, no lyrics, all you are doing is standing there, opening your heart—the chances are that there will be some moments when your spirit will really open up to God and find Him. Some cry of your heart will come out because it is not being stifled or suppressed by other words and other thoughts and other ideas that everyone is supposed to think at the same time.
In a congregation, there may be some who want to cry, while others want to laugh. Some may want to repent; some may want to rejoice. Someone else may want to give thanks, while others may want to cry aloud and spare not, crying the judgments of God in the earth. But there has to be that which recognizes that God has a thousand faces. Some of those faces you want to hide from. Some of those faces draw you. Some of those faces smile upon you. And some of those faces stop you from smiling on yourself. But all of it is designed for you to know that God accepts you with the condition that He is going to change you into His own image. He has made the provision for you and He accepts you so that He can change you into His own image (Romans 8:29–30). And you stand there, knowing that worship can be the greatest arena of transformation that you have ever experienced in your life.
Can you understand what this means? With an unveiled face we behold the Lord, just as Moses did. When Moses went into the tabernacle, he took the veil off his face and talked with God. His face began to glow under that because he met God in it. When he came out, the people could not handle that, so Moses had to put the veil back over his face (Exodus 34:34–35). But Paul wrote that we, with an unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory (II Corinthians 3:18).
Worship, combined with Communion, should open the door to the greatest miracle transformations in you that you have ever seen. If it does not, then you are missing it.
You say, “Well, I thought the Word would do it.”
The Word imparts to you, but at best the Word creates in you an understanding of what God has for you, of what He is doing; it creates a faith in that Word which can be tremendous, and there is great impartation with it. But the real, definite, pure act of appropriation takes place in a Communion service and in worship.
I have watched God even frown on our Communion services. We reached the place where all through the Communion, people were talking. They would come down and receive their blessing at the Communion Altar and then go back and talk. The offering, which could be one of the greatest times of giving to God, has likewise greatly deteriorated, because it has become a little break or a recess in the middle of a service when everybody can talk and carry on their conversations and their plans, instead of making it a worship to the Lord. There are things that I would like to see changed in our services. I have talked about these things many times.
Our worship should be undistracted. Whether it is the giving, whether it is the worship and singing before the Lord, whether it is the Communion, whether it is listening to the Word, there should be no other distractions. We should fix our focus on the Lord.
My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises! Awake, my glory; awake, harp and lyre, I will awaken the dawn! I will give thanks to Thee, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises to Thee among the nations. For Thy lovingkindness is great to the heavens, and Thy truth to the clouds. Be exalted above the heavens, O God; let Thy glory be above all the earth. Psalm 57:7–11.
Our services could be shorter and more effective. Do you know how long it takes to get some of you to get the cobwebs loose and all the different distractions removed? I can preach to you for an hour, and at the end of an hour you are really open. But you do not realize how many things you have had to shake off in the process. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do that before we come together? We need to have a debugging before we walk in, to get rid of the bugs in our thinking, to get rid of the distractions, and then come and stand before His presence.
When you worship the Lord, let somebody strike a chord, and all of you try to hit the key together if you can, and just stand and sing before the Lord. Sing before the Lord for ten or twenty minutes. Reach out to touch Him. But don’t strain. Instead, make it a free approach to God with all love, all sincerity, in faith.
You say, “Then when we sing songs, what should we do?”
The same thing—touch God.
Likewise, a Scripture is pointless if it has not revealed the Lord to you in some way. The Lord said, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and it is these which testify of Me” (John 5:39). I don’t know what you think you are going to find in the Scriptures, but they testify of Him. If you look carefully, He will be revealed to you. He is the Living Word; and therefore, in every Word that lives, you will find Him.
Do you feel that your worship could be greatly improved? Could it start now—a wave of it that would sweep through the land, over the seas and over the mountains, over the deserts and plains. People could break through.
We would never have needed all of the counseling, all of the ministry to people, a lot of the impartation, if devastation had not fallen upon people who had forgotten to worship.
This burden on our worship has to come to us in a way that rebukes us because we are not giving to God what He wants. How can we expect to get what we want when we do not even know what we want until we stand in His presence and give Him what He wants? How can we know what the Kingdom is until we seek it first? He is the Kingdom.
“But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you.” Matthew 6:33.
Do you realize that we need real worship leaders? In your moving in the gifts of the Spirit and also in leading a worship service, the great problem has been that it has been largely designed to exhort. The service is addressed to people. And while we may be speaking to ourselves in the midst of all of this, the whole purpose of worship is to speak to God and to approach God. If we could shift from the preacher to the priest in our worship service, it might accomplish a great deal.
How could this be done? One thing I learned a long time ago: When you stand to lead people, believe for them; have faith for them; loose them. Someone could stand and say with real faith, “O Master, we bring these people into Thy presence; we loose them into Thy presence.” Talk to God about it, and then let the people respond.
Who then will sing forth? Let someone as a seer and a priest come and say, “This is the worship that God wants.” In the Feast of Tabernacles, when the Word came the people all lifted their hands.
And all the people gathered as one man at the square which was in front of the Water Gate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel. Then Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men, women, and all who could listen with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it before the square which was in front of the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of men and women, those who could understand; and all the people were attentive to the book of the law.
And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. Then Ezra blessed the Lord the great God. And all the people answered, “Amen, Amen!” while lifting up their hands; then they bowed low and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Nehemiah 8:1–3, 5–6.
Paul referred to this when he said, “I would that men everywhere lift holy hands in prayer, without wrath and doubting” (I Timothy 2:8). What was he saying? You are lifting your hands; you are giving assent. You are giving your consent and your faith to the Word. You are acting upon the Word. So someone comes and says, “O Lord, we come and present Thy people to Thee”; and they lift their hands, saying, “Yea Lord, we are Thine. We stand before Thee.”
We lift our hands to worship the Lord and to appropriate His Word. Uplifted hands in prayer should signal to God our open hearts—open to His worship, His Word, His will (Kingdom Proverb).
Let the worship come. Draw one another into His presence. A worship leader is a tour guide who takes people out of all the distractions and the present scenery, and lets them just stand in His presence. If this is the day of the Parousia, we need the priesthood that can make people aware of His presence, that can lead them into His presence.
Not only are we reviving everything good of our worship; but we are also going to enter into a worship which belongs to this time of the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles. We are ready for it.
Don’t talk to the people; talk to the Lord! Come and present your brothers and sisters and yourself before the Lord. Sing a song about it.
One more thing you must remember. From the very beginning, the guidelines were very real. Someone could stand and sing, “Thy Spirit within us, O Lord, doth give praise to Thee and gives thanks well.” Then everybody would break out in tongues, singing before the Lord. You do not realize that worship is sometimes complicated by the distractions of your conscious mind. Let the Spirit of God speak. He gives thanks well; He prays well (I Corinthians 14:14–17). The Spirit within you can express it in words better than you can. When you have a mingled motivation that might cross out faith, the Holy Spirit does not. The Holy Spirit takes everything that is pure and good that God has worked within you and throws it right at the feet of the Father and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am not being arbitrary on this, but I have come to the realization that the worship has to measure up to standards. I have sat back and said, “Well, there are a thousand different ways that people can worship.” But they aren’t meeting with God in it. For a little while, therefore, I am going to say, “You’re going to worship until you come up to standards of awareness and of meeting God and of standing in His presence. Whatever you do is going to be done with a certain reality to it.”
There will be others who will stand before the people and say, “No more playing around; we are going to come before the Lord.” Worship is going to be a serious, serious thing of our heart to touch God. We are going to worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:23–24). We are going to stand in His presence. We are going to love Him. We are going to worship Him. Most of the people could have dumped their problems if they had just had some real worship when they came to the house of God.
Prayer: Lord, I and Thy servants come into Thy presence. We come to repent that we have been remiss in our worship, that we have had the fear of man in our worship, that we have had awareness of man and not awareness of Thee. Therefore, by the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ do we take cleansing and forgiveness. We stand in Thy presence with no fear of man upon us. We claim this totally. Lord, we will accept no more embarrassment when we stand in Your presence, in the midst of other people. Even if they should stand and mock us, we will not be embarrassed, for Thou art great in our sight, O Lord! Thy worship shall be in our mouths continually, all the day long—with a loud voice, with tears, with weeping, with psalms, with mourning, with rejoicing, with thanksgiving, with petitions before Thy face, but always with faith.
We loose the people, even those who cannot sing, who feel that they are one of the poorest singers. Let them sing a psalm because, O Lord, they shall give Thee the best of all. They shall break through the fear of man and break through embarrassment before men to truly sing unto Thee, O Lord. Therefore shall their song be acceptable—most acceptable—in Thy sight, O Lord.
Lord, we stand before Thee, asking, “Let Thine anointing rest afresh upon those who were appointed before Thy face to lead Thy servants in worship before Thee.” We remember the Word of the Lord that Vere Thomas was to be an apostle and prophet of worship. Above everything else, he was to lead people into worship. Lord, revive, renew, and strengthen Thy commission upon him. We remember the Word of the Lord over all those who are appointed to be apostles and prophets of worship. Above everything else, they are to lead people into worship. Lord, revive, renew, and strengthen Thy commission upon them. For the time has come for the worship of the Kingdom. It must come forth. There must be the worshipers.
We bless again all those who have been commissioned to lead the people in worship, that they shall be given over to that worship. They shall wholly be given to it, to lead the people of God into worship. They shall continually stand before Thy face as a priesthood that shall cause the people of God to swell in praise and adoration to Thee all the day long.
Let the sacrifices and the incense of the altar not cease before Thy face, O God. Let the sacrifice of praise and worship be a sweet incense in Thy nostrils, Lord, that Thou shalt hold us continually in remembrance as we stand in Thy presence, O Lord. This is the day of release unto us, Lord. We have passed from the fear of man. We have passed, Lord, from the day of intimidation, from the day of being ashamed to worship. We have passed from that which would even accept anything less than worship of Thee with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, all of our strength—all!
“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Deuteronomy 6:5.
I have a feeling that this is the last step, or part of it, in the “Unfolding.” This is the way to the throne. This “Unfolding” is the red carpet right to the throne of God, so that we wind up in His presence.
This is the hour of the Parousia; we are going to study to present ourselves in His presence, to stand in His presence as seers and prophets who have an awareness of His presence and who know how to present that to the people to bring them into His presence.
Forget about evangelism as we have known it. Kingdom evangelism introduces the very present One in our midst. That is what Kingdom evangelism really is.
Prepare your psalms. Say, “O Lord, I bring with me one whom I desire to escort into Thy presence. Here is Thy servant, Lord.” Be a guide of the Kingdom. Bring people into His presence. Say, “Lord, I, bring them into Thy presence that they might worship and adore Thee.”
We refuse to let our worship become a tradition when God ordained it to be a transition into His presence (Kingdom Proverb).
There will be times when you notice that your worship is coming in longer and longer sessions. But one thing you cannot do—you cannot start in the Spirit and then force it from the flesh. It has to be something that you enter into as your spirit is reaching up with real faith. When it begins to be a forced thing, then just stop because you do not want a fleshly effort. It is not a fleshly thing; it is a spiritual thing. Basically, your spirit yearns to worship.
I always notice that when people are really worshiping, revelation flows to me just as if a fountain had been opened up. Sometimes I cannot write fast enough the things that the Lord is revealing. When you stand in His presence, He starts talking.
Worship is a mood breaker. It is a spiritual level that the flack of the enemy does not reach; he does not have any guns that can pierce that. A real worshiper finds that he is free from everything that assaults him.
In this worship, you notice that everything that has been hitting you—the problems of oneness—is being healed. There is healing in His presence. In the presence of the Lord there is release. There is joy. When the joy comes, don’t let it become light and frivolous. Let it be intense, heavy, rich. It has substance to it. It is the joy of the Lord.
There is nothing as wonderful as the spiritual perception that is found in the presence of the Lord. The book of Revelation tells about the wonderful creatures that stand before the throne, full of eyes, in front and behind (Revelation 4:6–11). Everywhere they have eyes. That is the way God is making us. As seers, we can see things coming and going, sideways and every other way. The Lord is giving us the revelation to see the things that are afar off and the things that are right at hand, the things we are going through and the things we have been through. How amazing is the perception that we have when we stand in the presence of the Lord!
Our worship and waiting on the Lord should be the most focused and diligent of our life’s efforts.
Christ’s greatest work was to give us access to the Father. This access is our greatest privilege.
Without deep worship there is no oneness with God, nor for that matter with one another either.
God’s ultimate purpose is to bring us all as one in His presence, one with Him.
If you lose your awareness of the Lord, your worship of Him will become a habit and lifeless.
Don’t let God look for a worshiper any longer.
We lift our hands to worship the Lord and to appropriate His Word. Uplifted hands in prayer should signal to God our open hearts—open to His worship, His Word, His will.
In our services we talk to each other too much—we should talk to the Lord more.