Incomplete Worship

Transcript

Good morning and Greeting’s in Jesus’ name! Welcome to this amazing new morning! I hope that the Lord has been good to you and your response to the Lord is one of worship, thankfulness, a heart that is filled with adoration and gratitude. The more we worship God, the more his presence will be revealed to us, the more his characteristics will be made known to us, the more his heart and his mind will become a personal revelation and understanding for each and every one of us. Today, my hope is that we can once again go back to our first love, our first devotion, our first desire for the Lord and his presence.

Judges 18:31 – “So Micah’s carved image was worshiped by the tribe of Dan as long as the Tabernacle of God remained at Shiloh.”

It talks about a season in the nation of Israel where there was no king and so everybody did what they pleased, everybody did whatever their hearts craved to do. Here, we see that an entire tribe of the nation of Israel is worshiping idols, worshiping a carved idol/image. At the same time, there is worship happening in Shiloh. God had ordained for worship to happen in a certain fashion, manner, constraint, and place. Yet, at this point there was worship happening in two different places. In one place worship was happening in the right way; in a godly manner, in the manner that was prescribed by the Law of Moses, and on the other side it was happening in the exact opposite manner; they are worshiping a carved image.
If you read chapters 17 and 18 of Judges, you would see a little bit of the history behind these carved image idols. It was this lady who lost her money and when her son comes to confess that he is the one who took that money, her heart as touched and she said “I am now going to give this money to the Lord”, and as a result of it, she also carved out an image, an idol in memorial of what her son did. This idol became a trap not just for this young man but for the whole tribe of Dan by the end of chapter 18.

What began as a genuine turning back to God, ended up becoming an idol in the entire nation of Israel. Now, the state of Israel is such that there is worship happening in the right manner and in the wrong manner. There is worship happening to the Lord God and there is worship happening to the carved out idols. Isn’t the same true about our lives at times where we love the Lord God and at the same time we love other people or other things, thus diluting the love that we have originally for God. The entire nation was supposed to worship God in Shiloh, in the Tabernacle, and yet there was one tribe that was missing because this tribe found carved out idols to worship, to sing, to give their adoration to.
Here is the key that I would like to leave with you today. If your worship is not 100%, if you are not giving your whole life to God, then it is actually not worship. Worship demands total surrender, it requires absolutely giving up everything that we have and everything that we are to worship and glorify God. There cannot be nine things that we do to please God, whereas there is one thing that we do to please ourselves. There cannot be ninety nine things that we do to glorify and worship and honour the Lord, where there is one thing that we have left out of the box and we are trying to use it for our own benefit and pleasure. That is not worship; that is us trying to conveniently continue to bring pleasure and happiness to our own self, when we can also parallelly, religiously sing to God and worship him in front of people. The Lord is calling us to repent of incomplete worship. Incomplete worship is untrue worship. Incomplete surrender is untrue surrender. Incomplete yielding to God is not yielding to God at all.

This morning, the Lord is calling us to repent, turn our ways, change our hearts, renew our minds and take a U-turn from incomplete worship. What is that last bit that you have to surrender before God, what is the last straw, what is the last area of your life that you are still holding back? Are you willing to trust him enough to give everything into his hands and tell him “Lord, you take it all; this is all yours, all that I am and all that I have is all yours. You give, you take it away. Blessed be your name, a 100%, from the beginning to the end. You are the alpha in my life and you are the omega. There can be nothing in between where you are not absolutely completely, 100% involved”.

“If you are praying that prayer with me right now, then your worship is going from incomplete worship to a real and a true offering and a sacrifice that is pleasing unto the Lord.”