Where Right Worship Starts

There is only one way that you are going to worship God with real, fervent, soul-pulsing worship.  And that is if you see something in God that is so beautiful it takes your breath away.  That is what worship is.  So how do you see this?  Let me tell you the two routes misguided people often take.  The first route is the manufactured route.  It even comes with a formula: only music that you like + lyrics that mention God in vague and general ways + lead singers that sound good and dominate + just enough light to know there are people around you but not enough to see them well = manufactured worship.  This is a performance-oriented event that plays on easily-manipulated emotions.  

The second route is when you find people worshiping on mountain tops or on a scenic beach with a nice sunset.  It is more natural, and therefore doesn’t have the tincture of manipulation.  Such places are clearly the handiwork of God and awesome displays of his power.  Is this a wrong place to worship?  The setting isn’t the problem.  The problem is the focus.  

Imagine someone was writing a biography of a war hero.  There were many exploits of courage, sacrifice, strength and wise strategy to write about.  But imagine all of the attention was given to his process of gun cleaning.  To be sure a well-oiled and operational gun is important.  But we all see the problem.  The real story is being missed by focusing on the tool.  As nice and useful as that tool is, the focus is wrong.  In the same way, worship must not be driven by music or focused on creation.  Those are tools and glimpses of his power.  You need the right focus.  

What does our focus need to be on?  We need to see God, not just his creations.  We need to see his beauty, his person, his attributes and his character.  Theology proceeds worship, and deeper theology leads to higher worship.  

Therefore, let me take you to one of the most important passages for this in the Old Testament.  Amazingly it is also one of them most neglected passages.  The passage is Exodus 34:6-7. Here is what it says:

Exodus 34:6–7 Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; 7 who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” 

Why is this passage so important? One way to see its importance is to hear the value the Biblical authors saw in it by the way it is quoted so often. It is repeated two more times in the Pentateuch (Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9-10), two times in Psalms (103; 145), four times in the prophets (Jeremiah 32:18-19; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2, Nahum 1:3), and at least once in the histories (Nehemiah 9:17). There is no way to miss its importance. 

But the second way to see its importance is to see how God describes this event.  Remember that Moses had requested the highest and most supreme request, “Show me your glory.” (Exodus 33:18).  God knew that Moses could not handle this and said “No man can see me and live!”  However, God was going to show Moses what he needed even more.  God said, “I myself will make all my goodness pass before you…”  Think about that.  “All my goodness.”  What we have here is the ultimate summary statement from God himself about God himself.  We have what is most important to our worship: the beauty, person, attributes and character of God.  

While every word is important to go over, I want to focus on one feature of this description.  I want you to take note of the primacy of God’s handling of sin in this description.  It is dominant.  There are at least 9 separate words and statements about God, and 6 out of the 9 have to do with how God handles a sinful people.  This is so huge for how we think about God, and our worship of him.  The biggest issue that should dominate our worship of God is how he has responded to and solves the problem of our sin against him.  This is why staring at sunsets does not normally produce truly biblical worship.  People staring at sunsets are not normally thinking about how God conquers our sin or how he treats us in our sin.  Nor does that happen by swaying to great music with lyrics that could be easily transferred to any twangy country love song.   God’s goodness is best seen in how he has dealt with our sin problem so that he could bring us to himself. 

This issue is expanded by the conflicting nature of forgiveness.  The statement begins with words of grace that culminate in an all-encompassing forgiveness of “iniquity, transgression, and sin.”  Yet the next statement says that he will not leave the guilty unpunished.  So which is it?  But It isn’t a question of which.  The goodness of God is that it is both.  While there are many people who will get only justice, for many others God combines justice and forgiveness.  This is how good God is.  He is so good that he can both forgive and see to it that every sin is punished.  How is this possible?  The gospel is how it is possible.  It was first pictured in Old Testament shadows when people would lay their hands on a lamb or goat and that animal would be punished in their place.  It was temporary and insufficient because the blood of bulls and goats can’t forgive sin.  But it was a visual that God was punishing sin while still providing forgiveness.  The ultimate fulfillment of this is Jesus Christ.  He can be punished fully, and his blood can forgive fully.  Which means that through him our sins are punished, AND we can be forgiven.  We are guilty, but when we are united to Jesus he takes our sin and death.  We die with him and rise with him because we are united to him.  As Romans 3:26b says, “so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

Your worship depends upon seeing all the goodness of God, and all of the goodness of God was stated in the Old Testament, and is now seen in Jesus and him crucified.  As you see this more clearly, your worship will flow more freely.