The Power of Worship #fb #dumcMY #sermon

The Power of Worship #fb #dumcMY #sermon

Pastor Sidney Mohede, 16/07/2011

Joh 4:21-24  Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.  (22)  You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.  (23)  Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  (24)  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

Pastor Sidney is preaching with an iPad. Cool.

The Samaritan woman in the above passage had a different belief system compared to Jesus. Worship is always about relationship. God is not seeking the worship (not what we do) but the worshipers.

We are created in our heart to worship Him. We are all worshipers but we may be worshipping the wrong thing. By definition, worship is attributing worth to a person or an object. In this manner, we all worship something.

Every time World Cup is here, there is a soccer mania. To some, we hold someone special dearly. When we speak about praise and worship, we don’t think about the presence of God or the thanksgiving. That may be something we say. If we are honest, we will say praise and worship are fast songs and slow songs. We have this idea of what worship is and we forget.

Jesus knows the power of worship. Pastor Sidney said no matter he is leading worship in front of 20,000 in Hillsongs church or 3,000 in DUMC or 5 in his family, there is power in it. There is power, healing in Jesus’ name.

The job of a worshipper is not on stage. Some people think it is the responsibility of the worship team to worship. We seem to think we can ask others to worship on our behalf. We may say, let those guys on stage worship God.

Who is worship for? It’s for God. We hear people saying the worship doesn’t lift them up. If it’s for God, why do we complain? When we come to the presence of God, there is only an audience of one.

How much is God worth to you?

When people own something that is very valuable, they normally treat them with care. When we have a luxury car or an iPhone, we take good care of them.

If we come to church to worship God in spirit and in truth, why do we cross our arms and treat worship as a Christian karaoke? Jesus is at the centre of our life and our church. It’s not about what we do on stage but what we do during worship.

Pastor Sidney said he doesn’t have a good picture of him on stage.  He said when he worships God, he could not care less how he looks. He reminded that we should not be so self-conscious during worship.

Worship is not a noun but a verb. When we say we worship God, what do we do to show He means so much to us?

Pastor Sidney just came back from Australia, rested 2 days before coming to Malaysia and he will be headed to Taiwan after this. His body and voice are both exhausted but he wanted to give his all to God.

Everything we have is from Him. He wrote a song semuanya dariMu and semuanya untukMu.

Consider this. If a non-believer comes into the church and sit beside us when we worship God, what would they think of our God. Do we project a God that is a nobody? Or do we project an awesome God?

Pastor Sidney hopes DUMC can be a barometer of worship and it starts not from the church but from everyone.

The Power of Understanding

We are to worship God in spirit and in truth. Truth will forever be truth regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or knowledge. Truth is absolute. For example, gravity.

Part of truth is understanding. We don’t have to understand truth for it to be truth. We can sing and belief in the song “I believe I can fly” and we will still not be able to fly. (This speaks volume about the misapplication of positive thinking.)

Our God is greater, our God is strongerOur God is Healer, awesome and power

Those words are truth because they are based on the Word of God. Faith comes from hearing the Word of God. When we speak it, there is power. When we understand what we sing / speak, there is power.

We sing “How great is our God” but do we understand the meaning of great. We use the word great loosely. When we sing about the greatness of God, the word great should be different from when we use it to describe a movie or a car. We cannot sing the song with the same understanding of a great movie / car / friend.

When we have that kind of understanding, knowledge and truth, we can come into His presence to sing. He is way too worthy for us to just sing. We are here to worship God.

A few years ago, Pastor Sidney saw a man on the street wearing a black and white t-shirt with a silhouette of Jesus on the Cross with a iPod. His first reaction is to laugh. Then he felt sad that Jesus has been reduced into a pop icon. In our life, is Jesus the centre of it all or has He been relegated to a symbol.