Worship is more than songs we sing when we gather on Sunday. Worship deepens our relationship, realigns our perspective, builds our faith, right sizes the battles we face and puts God in his rightful place in our hearts and minds.
Worship as Warfare
We’re going to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart. We’re going to talk about worship. As a worship leader, there’s so much that burns in me about what worship is and what it does and the significance of it, especially in our relationship in that sacred space and that holy ground connection between us and God.
As you grow, as you lean into and nurture that relationship, I want you to rethink and rediscover what role worship plays. And I’m not talking just about singing. There’s something powerful and profound and miraculous about us lifting our voices to God.
And as a worship leader, certainly that’s a place that that happens uniquely, but it’s not just that, but we are going to focus a little bit on that, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be with melody. It’s about our heart posture. It’s about proclaiming who He is. We’re going to talk about worship as warfare and what that looks like and what that means.
Worship is an interesting thing that, in the course of my life as a believer, has morphed. I got saved in the early 80s and through the 90s especially, worship itself became huge. Some would argue that people began to worship worship itself.
The worship movement and new music came, and it was really powerful and really life giving. But it also created, just like in the church with celebrity pastors, celebrity worship, this following the worship culture as it were.
That doesn’t mean the movement was bad, by any stretch, it just means as people, we tend to want to elevate certain things. Just as a side note, as we grow in our intimacy with Him, we want to constantly check ourselves and not move into that place where we allow what we do for God, the role and the place, and the seat that He should be in, and that can happen.
Our service, our worship, our study, our pastors, all of those things can become idols. The very thing that we think we’re doing for the Lord replaces Him. This isn’t what I want to focus everything on today. But I do think it’s important to shed light on this so that we don’t, in our zealousness and excitement over something, distort the purpose and the power and God’s heart for us.
We are talking about what is the purpose of worship in the context of warfare and how do we appropriate the gift of worship in our lives personally, and then in the lives of our family and the ministries that we’re a part of. God doesn’t need our worship. He’s not an insecure egomaniac who demands our attention and our affection.
We worship because of who He is. And worship, oddly enough, in many ways is for us. In Psalm 51:16-17, David says, “For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart.” It’s not about the act of worship.
If it was just about worship, then God would’ve accepted Saul’s worship, and would’ve accepted Cane’s offering, but it’s about our hearts. It’s about positioning ourselves. It’s about dependence. What does worship do? It reorients us. It moves us past focusing on ourselves or focusing on circumstance or focusing on the things that maybe are apparent in the natural. It realigns ourselves on Him.
It allows us to acknowledge who God is, where He is seated and His character. It’s a reminder that He is good. The magnitude of His love for us, it pulls us back to, “You are good. You do love me.” Then it brings us to a posture of dependence and through all of that, then it routes us in confidence in who we are and who He is and allows us to stand and be, and do the things that He’s called us to, with Him with complete freedom and authority.
This is something that we lose sight of, that we forget, that we tend to overlook. When we face difficulty, when we face challenging things in our life… and life is challenging, things are difficult, we do come against opposition, spiritual opposition, things that war against us, and that can even come from our own flesh and our own hearts.
Worship is a powerful and significant tool. Because when we come into God’s presence, we start looking at Him, we declare who He is. We start singing songs of thankfulness. We start declaring His goodness, especially when we’re not feeling those things. It moves and shifts us back to where we belong and shifts Him back to where He belongs in our hearts and our minds.
What does your worship look like? Take a moment and ask yourself that question. Is worship reserved for Sunday mornings when you’re with a group of people and there’s a band on stage or a guy with a guitar on stage and you sing then? What does it look like even when you do that?
I’m not talking about any weird expectation of pressure of what the outward expression of your worship is. As a worship leader, I’ve led in a very broad range of context, from super conservative environments to very charismatic environments, places where raising your hands was a big deal, to places where there’s dancing and flags in all manner of crazy, from very conservative liturgical environments, to living rooms, retreats and places where worship goes for an hour and or more and is spontaneous, to places where it’s very structured and there’s three songs.
But regardless it’s not about the expression. This is more holy than this or this is more than this. No, there’s power for God’s people when they worship Him, and when they orient themselves to Him, whether it’s a culturally super free environment or maybe a more conservative environment, it’s not necessarily more powerful in either place.
I’ve seen miraculous things happen in hearts and minds of God’s people in the context of them surrendering themselves and worshiping. There’s something super powerful that happens corporately when we worship as a people. But there’s also something critical that happens personally, when we worship as an individual son or an individual daughter, in the privacy of our home or our car, when we close the curtains and we fall on our faces before Him.
Maybe you dance, maybe you sing, maybe you yell, maybe you cry, whatever it is, but you pour yourself out in worship, posture yourself spiritually. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness.
We position ourselves and we draw a line in the sand for the enemy, because what happens when we worship is we finally get to that place and we go, “No, this is who we are. This is who He is. The God of the universe is in control. I am His and you don’t have any right.”
We are challenging the enemy. And at that point he has to back down, because he knows what his authority is. The problem is most of us as Christians don’t or we forget. We get tossed too and fro by the enemy, by the wind, by circumstance. But when we worship, then we’re reorienting ourselves and reminding ourselves, “This is who we are. This is who God is. You don’t have any right to do this. Get behind me, Satan.”
It’s David going out in the field and saying, “Who dares defy the armies of the living God?” There was an audacity. There was this brash, “Who do you think you are?” about this kid. All of these generals, all of these seasoned battle-worn veterans and all of their strategies were paralyzed by this giant and by these armies.
But this child had the audacity and the boldness to go out and say, “Who do you think you are? Because the living God is on the throne. And we are the armies of living God. And how dare you defy Him.” It wasn’t David’s skill of that slingshot. It was his confidence in that God was in His rightful place, in his heart and his mind, that’s what defeated the enemy.
And so when we worship that pulls us to that place of just almost arrogant boldness because we know who our Dad is. One of the most powerful Scriptures in the context of this is 2 Chronicles 20, and it is really my favorite. I’m going to get my Bible out cause I’m going to read it. So I would really encourage you to take time in this chapter specifically, regularly, as a believer in your life with Jesus. It’s significant, it’s powerful.
It’s a profound demonstration of the power of worship. If you’ve studied the Old Testament for any length of time, there’s such a pattern of the worshipers, the musicians going out before the armies, singing and proclaiming who God is before the battles and before a sword is drawn. They’re declaring who He is. There’s no question that worship is powerful.
2 Chronicles 20, Judah is surrounded by their enemies. It looks hopeless and Jehoshaphat, king at the time, goes to the Lord and says, “What do we do? I’m scared.” He’s fearful. And in verse 14, the Spirit of the Lord falls on Jahaziel, a prophet. And through Jahaziel, the Lord says, “Do not be afraid or dismayed, because of this great multitude for the battle is not yours, but God’s.”
And he tells them to go down against them. The verse 17 says “You will not need to fight in this battle position yourselves, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.” I love this because at this point Jehoshaphat and all of Judah, they bow their faces to the ground and they worship God. And then Jehoshaphat does something interesting. In verse 20, he gathers the people. He encourages them and basically tells them to believe in the Lord and they’ll be established and believe in His prophets and they will prosper.
And then when he consults with the people, it says in verse 21, and he appointed those who should sing to the Lord and those who should praise the beauty of His holiness. And as they went out before the army and were saying, “Praise the Lord for His mercy endures forever.”
Now when they began to sing and to praise the Lord sent ambushes against the people of Amin, Moab and Mount Sear who had come against Judah and their enemies were defeated.” God didn’t tell them to go out and stand in worship.
God told them to March out against the army, but Jehoshaphat in his wisdom and his understanding of his God, his battle strategy wasn’t to flank on the left and attack them without arrows over here and attack him with surprise over here.
His strategy was to go out, worship the Lord, praise the beauty of His holiness. Stand still and allow God to be God. In that moment is when God defeats the enemies. There’s something so profound about worship. I want every one of you that’s listening as a believer to start engaging, to start leaning in, start examining your life of worship.
What does it look like? When do you worship? Is it just on Sunday mornings? How do you worship? How often do you worship? And I’m not talking about religious rituals. I am talking about relational engagement with the God who created us. I’m talking about that holy place of interaction between us and Him, about obedience and surrender and receiving and abandoning all that we hold onto for the sake of Him.
Because when we do that, our perspective and everything changes. And when we do that, we won’t have to fight. We won’t have to strive. We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood. When we engage in the flesh is when we get worn out. When we strive in our own strength is when we get defeated. But when we center ourselves on Him, we lock eyes with Him, we set our affection and our attention on Him, we put Him in His rightful place, then everything else falls into place.
Then the enemy is defeated. Then the weight is lifted and we’re living in freedom and victory. Remember we talked about David and his boldness and his tenacity as a child to have this crazy faith to defy the giant and the Philistines. And yet David, when he grew up after he had defeated thousands and tens of thousands and had all these victories, this man after God’s own heart, he found himself in a place where his maturity and his wisdom and his own strength became his downfall.
God forbid that we would be too mature for our own good, that we would rely on our own strength on our own works. I want to encourage you, maybe even challenge you this week, to intentionally worship in a way that you never have before. Maybe you’ve never worshiped alone apart from Sunday morning at church.
Maybe you’ve never sung by yourself in your living room with the curtains closed and danced or gotten on your face or your knees, or just proclaimed Scriptures that declare His goodness, that you just recite Psalms you recite worship, “Holy holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, who was and is, and is to come. Bless the Lord, oh my soul. And all that is within me bless His holy name and don’t forget His benefits.”
That you would do something more than what you’ve done. And as you do believe and trust that God is going to show up that He is going to show Himself strong on your behalf, that you are going to see movement in the spirit and that you are going to grow in your confidence in your faith, in your identity as a son and as a daughter.
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