We will consider Psalm 22:3 from two different versions. King James says, But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. The New American Standard Bible reads, Yet Thou art holy, O Thou who art enthroned upon the praises of Israel.
Inhabitest, to be enthroned, the Hebrew word means to sit down; it is talking about the weight of the glory of God resting upon us.
In Hebrews 13:15 we read about offering to the Lord our praises, the sacrifice of the fruit of our lips. With such sacrifice God is wellpleased. We come to give the Lord praise and worship.
Anything you can think or imagine from the Scriptures can be established in your mind and will be very valuable to you.
As you praise the Lord, imagine that you are building the habitation in which God wants to dwell. When you offer up praises, you are offering to Him the sacrifices He accepts as pleasing to Him. When you offer up worship and praise to the Lord, you are creating, in the Spirit, the throne on which He chooses to sit. There He is enthroned upon the praises of His people.
We ought to consider our worship and praise in a service from God’s viewpoint more than from ours. Worship comes from being able to relate to God on His terms, to give Him what He wants, and to please Him.
We cannot be menpleasers. We must please God. We practice this principle in our human relationships. We do not go out of our way to be obnoxious; we try to think in terms of the other man and what he wants.
A good salesman considers what his prospective customer is thinking and what he wants. Then he proceeds to tell him that he has exactly what he wants, and soon the customer is ready to accept the transaction, because he believes that what the salesman has in mind for him is what he really wants.
We must seek to please the Lord if we are to walk with Him. Often the Lord gives a word telling us what we want, and we accept it.
Conversely, we come to the Lord and ask Him what He wants. We can find the answer in the Scriptures. For some time God has been searching for something. He is seeking worshipers, those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:24).
The Father is seeking such to worship Him, and the search goes on and on. As we begin to view it more from God’s viewpoint than from our own, we come to realize that we are not just praising the Lord to get a blessing; we are not worshiping the Lord because that is the thing to do. We are worshiping because we want to please Him. We want to give Him what He has been seeking all along.
This principle is very serious and cannot be overly stressed. If we do not realize that we come to please the Lord, we will miss everything that the worship service is to mean to us. If we come to please the Lord, we will think the way God is thinking about a situation.
If we come to touch God so that He will meet our need, we may receive something, but not very much.
The people who receive everything are those who forget themselves in their desire to relate to what God is looking for in their lives. They want to genuinely please Him, to give Him worship and praise. That is exactly the way every true worshiper must think. God thinks the same way.
In a church, people are not especially drawn to the ministries who are always looking for what they can get. They tend to stay away from them. Some may bless such a ministry, but not many relate to him.
Yet when someone wants to be a blessing and is only concerned about blessing the Body, about being used of the Lord and finding a way to meet people’s needs, people consider him a precious brother and seek ministry from him. They relate to him. God looks at it the same way.
Your thinking must be reversed, for you do not normally think God’s way. You only think selfishly of your own needs. Forget yourself and seek first the Kingdom of God. That does not mean that you seek your place in it. You are seeking for the Kingdom; you are seeking for God’s will to be done. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven, Matthew 6:10b.
Seek first the Kingdom and His righteousness, and what happens? All these things will be added unto you (Matthew 6:33), because immediately God puts His finger on you and claims you as His. When you are working for God’s interests, you project yourself into a place of forgetting yourself.
The man who gets a promotion in his company is the man who is genuinely concerned about seeing the company move ahead. Incidentally, he is also the one who gets the raises in salary. Because he is taking care of the company’s interests, the company takes care of his.
That is the way it works. When we have learned the truth of this principle, we will realize that God wants people to worship and praise Him, and we will determine to be those people.
You may have thought that God primarily wanted you to work hard at one of the projects involved in sending the Gospel to the world, that He was trying to get a lot of free labor out of you. No, that is just incidental; it really is not the big issue. He is looking for a worshiper.
If you do not worship much, but you work hard, then you had better take a new look at your life, because much of it is not as important as you think. You are not in the Body of Christ to salve your ego. This is not an ego trip. You are to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. Then you will become His precious son, m oving and ministering, doing His will in the earth.
As we are faithful in a few things, He will make us rulers over many (Matthew 25:21). We do not seek to walk with God because we are looking for the easy route. We want our lives to please the Lord. We desire whatever He wants.
If He sees that He can trust us because we are looking after His interests, He will give us a commission. If He puts us over ten cities, those ten cities will glorify God. We move in to do it, because our delight is to please Him.
When you worship the Lord, give Him everything within your heart. He is enthroned upon the praises of His people. You create the throne from which He is pleased to rule.
The Lordship of Jesus Christ is inevitably tied in with real living worship. Because He is Lord, you worship Him, you recognize His authority; you magnify and praise Him; you surrender all your life and all your interests to Him; and He is enthroned upon the praise and worship you give Him.
It is not the sound you make but the spirit behind it that is important. You can worship and praise and sing, and still never really focus on the Lord. You can get into a rut if you are not careful. You have to project your spirit to see the Lord and to worship Him and to know what you are doing.
Worship services are successful when they magnify the Lord. The main emphasis should not be our need and what we ought to be doing. We do not come to church to magnify our need; we come to worship, to bless the Lord, to give Him what He wants. Then the services are very effective in meeting our need too. The Lord smiles on us. He is enthroned upon our praises.
For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Philippians 3:3.
Circumcision seals God’s people. God does that for the worshiper: He circumcises his heart.
Is there something in your life that you want to be rid of? You can either struggle with it, fight it, and intensify your focus on it, until you make yourself heartsick trying to overcome it; or you can become a worshiper, and God will circumcise your heart and cut the defilement away.
Enthrone Him on your praises and worship, and watch what He does for you in return. He is looking for worshipers; and when He gets one, He works him over and makes him His son. Praise Him until your praise has formed a beautiful, mystical, golden throne upon which He is enthroned in your life. A worshiper never lives alone. If God inhabits his praises, a worshiper always has someone with him.