THE “WORTH-SHIP” OF GOD

The English word “worship” (from the old English “weorthscipe”) is derived from the word “worth” which means “value” and the native English suffix “-ship” which means “condition”.  “Worship” asks the question, “What is the condition of value?” or, put simply, worship ascribes or declares value. Worship is the willful submission of our body (position) and our soul and spirit (attitude) to a loving God, bring Him worth and openly declaring His value!

When we worship God we declare His value, His worth to us.  There is a direct relationship between the value we place on God, what God is worth to us, and our worship of God, for our worship is a reflection of His value to us.  So, what is God worth to us?  How do we discover the value of God?  The answer to these questions we find in a verse of scripture written by the Apostle John as a riddle:

“We loved Him because He first loved us.”

Love is the ultimate expression of value; the more we love something the more “worth” or value the item has to us.  So our love for God becomes a measurement of His worth to us.  But here in this verse we see that our love for God is predicated on His love for us; “we love Him because He first loved us.”  The question changes from God’s worth to us, to our worth to Him.  This passage demonstrates a “Beholding and Becoming Principle”, whatever we Behold we Become.  When the Holy Spirit quickens (reveals) an attribute of God to us, there is always an element of impartation which begins to form that same attribute in us.  The word “love” in these passages is from the Greek word “agapao” which means to love passionately, willfully, sacrificially, with strong affection, to fulfill one’s joy in the object loved.  So what are we worth to God that He passionately, willfully and joyfully loves us? “For God so loved the world... it is so hard for us to phantom this: We are worth the life of His Son!  God the Father sent Jesus into the world to redeem us and restore us to fellowship with Himself, so that we might worship Him.  Our worship is worth infinitely more to God than anything in the rest of creation for He gave what He valued more than all of creation for it.  I can’t explain why the sincere worship from redeemed human hearts is worth so much to God.  I can only tell you what it’s worth... The Precious Blood of Jesus! 

So then, what is our Father worth to us?   What value will we declare in our worship?  How much love for God will we express in our worship to God?  Will we offer God “agapao” or is God’s worth to us of a lesser value? Will we give our heart to God or to lover’s less passionate... less wild?  Selah!  (1 Jn. 4:19 NKJV, Jn. 3:16)

OPENLY DECLARING HIS VALUE

PARTAKING OF CHRIST

“For we have become partakers of Christ” (Heb. 3:14). The Christian life is not an imitation of Christ, it is a participation in Christ. Exceedingly great and precious promises have been given to us “that through these we may be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). We must transcend the natural realm, immersing ourselves in the supernatural nature dwelling within. We must experience the power of this indwelling life, the resurrected Christ-life, and, relinquishing our own Self-life, become ever more fully possessed of His divine life. In a word, we desperately need Transformation, the metamorphosis of sin stained spiritual cripples into beacons of radiant light reflecting the holy nature of Christ to a world drowning in sin’s darkness. Transformation is the regenerating life process of “Crucify – Renew – Transform”, which completes the sanctification process of the Holy Spirit as the believer grows into Christlikeness.

The Kingdom Lifestyle, the crucified life, begins in submission to the Lordship of Christ, presenting our body as a living sacrifice and dying daily to Self’s self-serving interests. “Wants” reside deep within the human condition, within the human nature. This unregenerated nature, Self, is, ultimately, the real enemy for it is where our “wanter” lives. My disposition to sin is my claim to my right to my Self. I am my own god. I am not holy or likely to be; I am doomed to failure because “Self” rules, and Self has a lot of worldly wants. The moral transition on my part is to recognize my need and yield my will to the Lord, allowing the Holy Spirit to form Christ in me. Without holiness, without Christ formed in us, no man shall see God. This is the crucified life, the submitting of our Self to death on the cross of Christ that His life, His very nature, might rise up within us and reign. This is a death march we all must make, death by a thousand nails as we visit the cross repeatedly, nailing bits and pieces of Self to the cross.

The Kingdom Mindset, the renewed mind, means what our mind expresses and reflects is patterned after our inner spiritual nature, the DNA of the Godhead. We must willfully and continually Seek... with practical striving, and Set... with inward impulse and disposition, our mind on things above, thinking the Kingdom as a mindset, the focus of our thoughts. As we make God and His Kingdom the center and focus of our mind’s preoccupation we are able to strip away the strongholds of our old thought life, they simply lose their power and strength. We begin to submerge ourselves in our new spiritual nature reflecting the mind of Christ. Eventually we become so much like Him in thought, feelings, and desires that we begin to reproduce the life He lived, inward change manifesting outward... walking in the Spirit!

Transformation, the sanctification process of the Holy Spirit, grows believers into Christlikeness. To access and immerse ourselves in Christ’s supernatural indwelling nature and experience the out flowing power of His resurrected life, something must die, something must be refocused... and someone must be willing. These are not independent   but interdependent processes, operating in tandem and stimulating one another. Much like a nuclear chain reaction, submission and death fuels mental renewal which in turn fuels more submission and death, and so on, growing us exponentially into the likeness of Christ.

“There is another kind of life which science as yet has taken little cognizance.  It obeys the same laws.  It builds up an organism into its own form.  It is the Christ-life.  As the bird-life builds up a bird, the image of itself, so the Christ-life builds up a Christ, the image of Himself, in the inward nature of man...According to the great law of conformity to type, this fashioning takes a specific form.  It is that of the Artist who fashions.  And all through life this wonderful, mystical, glorious, yet perfectly definite process goes on “until Christ be formed in it” (Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World).

SOMETHING MUST DIE

SOMETHING MUST BE REFOCUSED

SOMEONE MUST BE WILLING

WHERE IS THE GOD OF ELIJAH?

Where are the signs and wonders the Lord promised those who believe? I have three friends who have walked on water… but it was in their bathtub without witnesses. Sort of like our miracles today, in a word nebulous. Well, after six months of treatment and $350K God healed me. Who did? Where’s the heart-stopping wonder in that? Is God still asleep in the back of the boat, waiting for us to demonstrate our mustard seed faith?  Doesn’t He know how hungry we are for Him… well… at least to manifest His power! Does He know what He is doing, by not doing? What’s the deal? Who’s in charge anyway???

Matthew 7:7 Says “Ask and it will be given to you”, but there are twenty-six New Testament verses on the Theology of Answered Prayer, try hang gliding on just one verse and you will crash to earth real quick. “Say to this mountain, Be removed and be cast into the sea” (Matt. 21:21). Ever wonder why Jesus never moved a mountain? Read 1 Jn. 5:14-15, one of the twenty-six verses. Someone said “mountain” means an obstacle or problem in our life. Was the raging storm our Lord calmed a real storm? Was the fig tree that Jesus destroyed at its root a metaphor or a real tree? The mountain in this passage is referred to as “this mountain” in reference to the Mount of Olives (i.e., verse one). This mountain is no metaphor!  The Lord we serve is God over the physical world He created and doesn’t need our help to make His word more palatable. Mountain moving faith is here qualified with “do not doubt”, similar to Mk. 11:23. The companion passage in Matt. 17:20 further qualifies mountain moving faith while referring to the Mount of Transfiguration: “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed”, referring not to “small faith” but rather living active faith. And 1 Cor. 13:2 qualifies mountain moving faith even further as requiring “all faith”, referring not to a quantity of faith, but the completeness of that which is believed, God’s doctrine of Faith. The message in these passages is great wonders are released through fully developed living active never doubting faith. Seeing a mountain cast into the sea by a spoken command would certainly cause wonder, and not a little shock and awe, in anyone.  Is our Lord God over our mountainous problem? Our Lord is God over all things, if it’s a thing, He is sovereign over it. The point: We down size the mountain to a problem to explain why we have never seen a real mountain cast into the sea by a spoken word, and in the process we downsize God. And don’t we do the same thing with our problems. When it comes to signs and wonders, we have become people of low expectations.

“The word of the Lord was rare in those days.” Could this be another dry-spell similar to the 400 years when God chose not to speak; only now its signs and wonders… where the power displays of God are on mute? During the first century signs and wonders were common place in the church of the living God. Since then church history has seen nineteen hundred years of periodical hot-spots, when God manifests in power, only to all too quickly subside. We live in a time when people are striving hard for the power of God and maybe, just maybe, we are trying too hard to coerce God into doing what He is obliviously not ready to do? We will even lend legitimacy to goofy “revivals” and healing “ministries” on TV and the internet, which hawk and merchandise signs and wonders like carnival trinkets. This is sad but remember the attraction of a counterfeit, what makes us vulnerable and gullible, is the value of the reality, the value of the real thing!

God will pour out His Spirit in signs and wonders again in this last time. Isn’t this a precious thought that time is ending and will soon be no more, no more the restraining tick of the clock. The outpouring that begin on the day of Pentecost has barely built up steam, but it’s coming again as a gale force hurricane of the Spirit, its coming to complete God’s work here on earth. And then we will know where the dead-raising, blind-seeing, deaf-hearing, limb-fixing, demon-casting, tomb-defying God of Elijah is -- no one will even ask the question, they’ll be too busy dodging flying mountains. In the mean while, we have need of discernment and patience.

IT’S COMING!!!

COUNTING THE COST (PHILIPPIANS 3:8)

I count everything as loss compared to the priceless privilege, the overwhelming preciousness and surpassing worth, of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, of progressively becoming more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him. For His sake I have lost everything and consider it all to be mere rubbish, refuse and dregs, in order that I may gain Christ. What a standard of spiritual excellence Paul sets for the saints!!!

We know from scripture Paul’s life was filled with much affliction, adversity and suffering, for he “bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus”, “filling up in his flesh the afflictions of Christ.” He learned to be content in need and hardship, peaceful in distress, and joyful in suffering. Here he reveals his utter rejection of the world – the good life now syndrome – and Self’s desire to dominate.

In Phil 3:1-16, Paul uses himself as an example to warn the saints against misplaced confidence in or dependence on the privileges or advantages of one’s “flesh”, one’s natural life. “For whom I have suffered the loss of all things” (vs. 8) refers to the life of wealth, power, prominence, privilege and culture which Paul, as a citizen of Tarsus, gave up on the road to Damascus, to become a poor itinerant missionary. He forfeited family, prosperity, social position, security, the prestige of learning under the tutelage of the great Gamaliel at the Jewish School of Theology at Jerusalem, and the most coveted career as an up an coming Pharisee, which had been the focus, purpose and training of his entire life. He forfeited all that he had held dear for what? “That I may win Christ.” Paul appropriated into his life the perfection, the purposes, the graces and the fragrance of the Person of Christ, through daily visits to the cross, counting everything else as dung, that he might progressive gain Christ... growing in Christlikeness. His insatiable hunger for more of Christ is elaborated on in the remaining verses: “That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death.” This is the heart rendering cry of Paul, the humble vagabond still pursuing, still willing to forsake all, to give up everything of this life to gain the Pearl of Great Price, to gain the Treasure in the Field, to die to Self and submit to the Lordship of Christ... JOYFULLY! These are the willful acts of a heart in conformation, a mind in renewal, an enslaved life with a purposeful focus on God and His Kingdom. Paul was a person of one thing!

“THAT I MAY WIN CHRIST”