Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. I want my unbelieving friends to see my worship, and I want them to think, now, that, that must be a God worth knowing. I want fellow believers to see my worship, especially those who know when I'm going through a hard time, and I want them to say, now, that must be a God worth trusting. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.
As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Here's an important but perhaps difficult question to answer. What does your worship expression tell others about God's value to you? For David, he adored God so much that it produced one of the most passionate, even undignified expressions of worship found in the Bible. Today, Pastor J.D.
shows us how genuine worship puts God's worth and our gratitude on display, but also how our pride often keeps us from genuinely expressing that worship outwardly. Remember, if you've missed any part of this Life of David teaching series, you can always catch up at jdgreer.com. Now let's jump back into 1 Samuel chapter 6.
Here's Pastor J.D. Verse 20. And David returned to bless his household. But Michael, the daughter of Saul, came out to meet David and said, Oh, how the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself the day before the eyes of his servants and his female servants, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself. In other words, David, you look like a fool. Your behavior doesn't befit a king. You're acting more like somebody from the peasant class, we're royal.
That's not how we're supposed to act. Verse 21, David said to Michael, no, it was before the Lord who chose me above your father and above all his house to appoint me as a prince over Israel, the people of the Lord, and I will make Mary before the Lord. Indeed, I will make myself even more contemptible.
Some translations say undignified there. I will make myself even more undignified than this, and I will be abased in your eyes, but by those female servants of whom you have spoken by them, they'll actually hold me in honor for what I'm doing. David said, Michael, God chose me when I was nothing.
And now that I'm something, I'm going to show everybody else that it's not because of something special about me, it's because of something special that God has done for me. Y'all remember Michael was King Saul's daughter. Her dad's problem, you remember, was that he always cared about what everybody else thought about him. And sadly, Michael has taken on that trait from her daddy, which kids often do. She's only thinking about what everybody else is thinking about her and David.
For her, it is all about appearances. David says, I don't care what people think about me. In fact, I don't want them to think about me at all. I want them to think about him. And by the way, he says to Michael, as for those female servants in whose eyes you seem to be so worried about my reputation, when they see my exuberance before the Lord, when they see that I'm nothing before the Lord and that he is my everything, then they're going to see that there really is no difference in them and me.
They'll forget that I'm a king and they're peasants. And they will learn that they have the same access to God that I do. They have the same treasure in him that I do. They got the same promises in him I do. They can hope in him like I do. And that'll bring them the same joy that I have.
And they'll learn to thank God for me. In his words to Michael, David gives us the essence of worship. Here's my favorite short definition of worship. Worship means putting the worthiness of God on display. In fact, we get the word worship in English from worth plus ship. When you are worshiping, you are declaring the quality of worthiness in something to other people. You're worshiping it showing this is worthy.
So here is my question for you. What is your worship? Tell others about the value of God to you. Do they see your joy in him?
Can they see how valuable he is to you? Y'all listen, I ain't trying to judge anybody. But if when we are in here singing about him, you come in late and then stand there with a board look on your face and a coffee cup in your hands, mumbling through the words and looking down every few minutes to check your phone, what does that say to others about the worthiness of God to you? I know what you're saying. I hear you. You're like, pastor, I'm just not that expressive of a person.
I ain't like those people up there on stage. I understand. Of course you should not be yourself in worship. And I'll buy that as long as it will be true that if I walked up to you and handed you an envelope with a million dollars in it, that your response would be, well, praise God.
Thank you. If that would legitimately be your response to getting a million dollars, then I suppose it might be appropriate for you to respond that way in worship. But if not, maybe you need to ask yourself if getting a million dollars feels more significant to you than your salvation. Jesus once had a woman who came in to him while he was eating and she began to weep and wash Jesus' feet with her hair. And all the religious bystanders are objecting and they say, oh, that's so inappropriate. That's undignified.
Real proper women don't do that. You remember Jesus' response? Those who are forgiven much love much. The reason she loves me a lot is because she knows what she's forgiven of. And the reason you're not on your knees doing this is because you have no concept of what you're forgiven of.
Is it possible that the reason you are not more expressive in worship is that the extent of God's forgiveness of you and the value of your possession of him has never really captured you? Now, again, I get it. I get it. You're like, pastor, here's where that breaks down. I love my kids even more than I'd love a million dollars, but I don't spontaneously scream every time somebody mentions their name.
And that's fair. I mean, somebody, if you come up and say one of my daughter's names, you come up and say Allie to me. I don't scream hallelujah.
Didn't she go? I don't do that. I get that. Our deep passion and our emotion for our kids has a huge range of expressions. And our worship can be like that also. But don't you think sometimes, sometimes in some places like David's doing here, that if you really love something, we would see that exuberance on display?
That's all David is saying. Let me give you twin worship principles that you need to hold intention. If you like one of these, you're not going to like the other one. But they're both true.
You got to hold them in tension. Number one, different cultures and different personalities have different ways of expressing emotion. And that's okay. Different cultures and different traditions have different ways of expressing emotion and reverence and worship.
And that's okay. I've learned this most as we've tried to make strides in becoming a multi-ethnic church. Now, as you know, pursuing multi-ethnicity is a whole lot bigger than just worship style. But worship is one area where our church has learned a ton from various cultures being involved.
For example, we got a lot of you that are here from traditional Southern Baptist background. When you guys are really into it in church, you tend to sing with a lot of gusto. Not a lot of movement in your worship, but there's plenty of volume, especially when we bring out those old hymns. Oh man, you start belting it out. And if y'all get totally into it, I mean into it, you might even like, like lift one arm like this. Like you're trying to ask a question or something. And if you're, if you're experiencing full on revival, you'll sway back and forth a little with both arms bent at 90 degrees right here at the elbows.
It's like you're carrying this gigantic invisible microwave oven. And when I preach, if I say something you like, you let out a punctuated staccato, amen. Now mixed in among you is a sizable number of people who grew up in churches that were a bit more, shall we say, loquacious with their sermon feedback. I don't know if y'all remember Chuck and Yolanda Reed. They came out of the African-American church. Chuck Reed was on our staff for several years, and then he left a couple of years ago to go out and plant a church. Chuck and Yolanda loved to help me out when I was preaching. If I said something she liked, Yolanda would not let out a quick amen.
She'd talk back to me in complete sentences with verbs and adverbs and sometimes questions I wasn't sure if I was supposed to answer or not. Our Latino members combine all this sanctified enthusiasm with what can only be called a supernatural endurance. I mean for them, anything less than two hours of singing cannot legitimately be called worship.
I'm serious. First time I attended a service at our Summit in Espanol campus, I missed lunch with my family. And I think maybe dinner too. When it comes to boisterous worship though, y'all, I have yet to find a group that puts more body and soul into singing than this group of Duke college students that came to our church who had grown up in South Korea. First time I saw them worshiping, y'all, I honestly thought somebody was going to get hurt. They were not singing the songs. They were yelling the songs. Sometimes they're looking down, stomping with the beat while we were singing. Several of them look like they were trying to give God a high five while we were in the middle of worship, you know.
And then, but then here was the deal. When I got up to preach, it was like somebody flipped a switch. These passionate worshipers became stone silent the entire time that I preached. Honestly, I was a little discouraged. I thought maybe I just wasn't connecting with them.
So I finally just asked them. I'm like, y'all are so fun to watch when you're singing. But during the sermons, you just sit there with no response.
Am I just not connecting with you? And then look back at me and he said, oh no, pastor, we love your preaching as much as we love the music. But in our culture, it's impolite to talk when the pastor is speaking. Sitting silently is how we show respect for the word of God and how we show respect for your preaching. I know a missionary of ours in Tokyo who says about the Japanese Christians there, he says, if you look at their faces, they're extremely expressive, but everything they do in church is in a whisper. And when you ask them why, they say, we want to express our hearts to God by our emotions, but we also want not to distract others from doing the same.
So here's the question, which of these is the correct biblical way to worship? Amen. Amen, right?
What is wrong is when we elevate our preferences and we make them normative. Remember what God said to Samuel earlier in 1 Samuel, don't judge the outside Samuel, man looks on the outside, I look on the heart. I grew up in a church with some of the godliest people I've ever known.
Many of them lived the most sacrificial lives, they were people of integrity, they were people of deep prayer, they were people who brought others to Jesus consistently, they were just quieter and less expressive, but I know people who would look at them self-righteously and say, well, they're just not filled with the Spirit. Y'all sit, when did being filled with the Spirit become synonymous with a worship style? Man looks on the outside, but God looks on the heart, so stop taking the mantle of judgment on yourself. That's one of the two worship principles. If you like that one, get ready.
Here's the other one. You got to hold these intentions because they're both true. All worship should have elements of passion and self-forgetfulness. Y'all remember undignified is the word David used in 2 Samuel 6 22.
The word there implies self-forgetfulness. What David said is when I worship, I'm not going to think about what people are thinking about me, I'm going to think about what they're thinking about God. It's true that we all do things differently, but the corresponding truth is that all worship should contain elements of passion and self-forgetful expressiveness. We can see that displayed, y'all, in the one praise book, the one book we have, song book in the Bible called the Psalms. Now, warning, this is about to make some of you super uncomfortable. More than 20 times in Scripture, we are encouraged, yay, even commanded, to raise our hands in worship.
Here's just a few examples. Psalm 88 9, I call for you every day, O Lord. Every day I spread out my hands to you like a child. Psalm 143 verse 8, I spread out my hands to you.
My soul thirsts for you like a man in a parched land. Psalm 28 2, hear my cry for mercy as I call to you for help as I lift my hand. Psalm 134 2, lift your hands in the sanctuary and bless the Lord. In another 14 places in the Old Testament, we see this posture modeled.
We also see that posture modeled in the New Testament. 1 Timothy 2 8, I desire, Paul says, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands. In the same way, we got multiple instances of commands to shout loud and clap your hands in worship. For example, Psalm 32 11, be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart. Psalm 35 27, let those who delight in my salvation shout for joy. Psalm 47 1, clap your hands, all ye peoples, shout unto God with the voice of triumph. Psalm 81 1, sing aloud to God our strength, shout for joy to the God of Jacob. Isaiah 12 12 6, shout and sing for joy, O Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
Zephaniah 3 14, sing aloud, O Zion, shout, O Israel, rejoice and exalt with all your heart, O Jerusalem. Now class, in English grammar, what kinds of sentences are those? Are they declarative, describing something?
Are they interrogative, asking you a question or making a suggestion? Or are they imperative? That is right, they are imperative. And what does imperative mean?
It means they are commands. Thanks for joining us today here on Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. We'll get back to our teaching on the life of David in just a moment. But we have another way for you to study one of the Bible's most important people. It's a brand new eight-part Bible study through David's Life. And it's this month's featured resource for all of our gospel partners and financial supporters. This is a great companion that expands on the teaching you'll hear on Summit Life for the next little while. And it's designed to help you dig just a bit deeper into eight key passages from David's Life. Each study features not just the scripture, but also commentary on what you're reading, followed by application questions and prayer prompts to help you truly dwell on the truth that you're working through. It's an excellent addition to your own daily quiet time or it could even be a great gift for a loved one or someone you're discipling. We'll send you a copy with your gift of $35 or more to this ministry.
To give, call us at 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. He said, but if I don't feel like it, I shouldn't do it because that's hypocritical. Since when does how you feel become a condition of whether or not you obey?
I don't know a single sincere Christian who says, yeah, I just don't feel like praying. I don't feel like being faithful to my spouse. I don't want to be a hypocrite, so I just won't do those things. You say, boy, isn't it hypocritical to do something I don't feel in my heart?
No. Here's how obedience works. Sometimes as you're obeying, when you don't feel like it, God changes your heart to desire what you're doing. In fact, in many ways, your obedience is supposed to be like a cry to God to change your heart.
In fact, here's a little secret. The posture of our bodies actually guides the emotions of our heart. That's how God designed us. Psychologists tell us that we are psychosomatic creatures, just means that our souls and our bodies are intertwined. That means when I get into a posture of surrender, like kneeling, I feel emotions of surrender. When I adopt a posture of reverence, it helps guide my heart to feel reverence.
A lot of times we think that the posture of our body is a reflection of our heart, but often the posture of our body serves as the guide, the catalyst to our heart. Furthermore, and this is important to remember, listen, the central question in worship is not what we feel like. The central question of worship is what he's worthy of. I am not expressing to you my emotional disposition. I am expressing to you his worthiness.
One of my pet peeves is when a worship leader opens up a worship service, I'm not talking about any of ours, none of ours do this, but when a worship leader opens up a worship service by saying, how you guys feeling this morning? How do I feel? I feel like a lousy, self-centered, unbelieving center. I feel defeated. I feel like I want to quit.
The point is not what do I feel like right now? The point is what is God worthy of? That's why I come to church. And I worship based off his promises, not my feelings.
Remember, worship is putting his worthship, not my emotional disposition on display. I want my unbelieving friends to see my worship. And I want them to think now that that must be a God worth knowing. I want fellow believers to see my worship, especially those who know when I'm going through a hard time. And I want them to see my hands raised and joy in my face and tears in my eyes when they know everything is going wrong in my life. And I want them to say, now that must be a God worth trusting. This God must be so amazing that he gives you joy even when everything is not going your way. I want to know this God and I want to trust him because you are proclaiming him to me when you worship. Y'all listen, I'm not trying to contradict what I said earlier about different cultures and different personalities having different ways of expressing emotion.
No one necessarily better than the others. I'm just saying that in all worship, we ought to see expressiveness and passion and sometimes you ought to look undignified. And yes, certainly there are times, I get it, to stand silently or kneel reverently and quietly before the Lord.
I mean, in Revelation, after a huge display of God's glory, it says that everybody in heaven stood quiet for a half an hour. So yeah, that is often appropriate, but we also need to take these commands to raise our hands and shout and clap and sing aloud seriously. So see someone, we go forward with these twin complimentary truths. A, different cultures and different personalities have different ways of expressing emotion and you're not the judge of anybody else. B, the complimentary truth, all gospel-based worship should have elements of passion and self-forgetfulness.
Let me just cut to the chase and just put this really bluntly, okay? I'm talking to you as your pastor right now. Some of y'all need to repent of the dignity you carry yourself with in church because when we worship, you care too much about what other people are going to think about you. Let me share with you a story by permission about a discussion that took place between two of our campus pastors.
One whose name I won't use, though he told me that I could use the story. We'll just call him Pastor D. That way you can spend the rest of the time trying to figure out which of our pastors has a D in their name. The other one is Rodale, who is our Summit en Español campus pastor. Pastor D came from a Presbyterian background and by his own admission, he tends to sit through worship subdued, and that's what he's most comfortable with. Pastor Rodale said to him, he said, well, first, my background is Pentecostal, and second, I'm Hispanic, which means I have a great Latin love of emotion.
He said, that's a double whammy. So when Pastor D responded, I just don't get that passionate in worship, that's just not my style, Pastor Rodale said to him, okay, but what kind of emotion do you show in other areas of your life? And so this first campus pastor watched himself for two weeks, watching how he responded to his kids, watching how he responded to seeing his wife after traveling, watching himself after his favorite football team won a game. After observing himself for two weeks, he came back to Pastor Rodale and said that his relationship with God was the only area in his life that he really cared about in which he was not expressive and joyful. He said, quite humbly, I might add, he said, I think I've got some repenting to do in the way that I've been approaching worship.
I'm not trying to judge you, I'm not trying to make you somebody else, I'm not trying to say that you need to worship in a certain style to be a good Christian. I'm just saying something, let's worship God like David did, not by stripping down to our skivvies each time the band plays, nobody wants to see that, but by at times putting the worthiness of God and our gratefulness for our salvation on display, shout unto God with the voice of triumph and make known his salvation among the nations. Let me bring this story to a conclusion, go back to verse 19, those are the verses I told you we'd come back to. And David distributed among all the people the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins to each one, then all the people departed, each to his house. Raisin cakes were well known in Israel as an aphrodisiac, not how I think about them, but that's why it says that they all went home immediately after David gave them to them, so that when the time was right, they were.
The point? Worshiping through the gospel makes you fruitful, spiritually fertile. There's a little parable being given to us. You want to know how to produce spiritual fruit?
Get caught up in undignified worship, and that's how it'll come out in your life. I mean, just think about the analogy for a minute. When a man and woman come together to produce biological fruit, a child, when they come together, what are they thinking about? They're not thinking about the mechanics or the science of conception. If that's what you're thinking about, you've got big problems. What they're thinking about when they come together is they get caught up in a moment of loving intimacy with each other. All they're thinking about is their partner and the fruit of that is a child. How do you produce spiritual fruit in your life?
It's not because you think, joy, joy, joy, joy. No. Spiritual fruit comes naturally in your life when you get caught up in loving intimacy with Jesus. Intimate worship with Jesus makes you spiritually fruitful, which is why verse 23 says, Michael, the daughter of Saul, had no child to the day of her death. That's not a universal statement that infertility is some kind of sign of a lack of God's blessing.
No. What the author is pointing out here is that God put an end to the spiritually infertile, self-aware, non-God-focused lineage of Saul. My king, he said, is gonna come through a lineage that understands the purpose of worship, who is not afraid to put my glory on display even when it makes them undignified. My king is gonna come through a lineage who understands that I'm the most valuable thing in the universe, and he was not afraid to declare that in their worship. If we want to bring Jesus to our community, that's the kind of people we're gonna have to meet soon.
I don't know about you, but this message hit close to home for me. You may not know this, but my day job is serving as a worship leader at our home church, the Summit Church. And it's wonderful to talk about how we worship God, but I love that question that Pastor JD asked. How valuable is God to you? And have you surrendered your life to Him?
If you have questions about what that looks like, call us now at 866-335-5220 or email us at requestsatjdgrier.com. I hope you've enjoyed this new series through the life of King David, and I've got great news. Your study of David doesn't have to stop with our Summit Life broadcasts. As a companion to this series, we've created an eight-part Bible study through key parts of King David's life found in 2 Samuel.
Each week features an in-depth study of a particular passage, along with application questions and prayer prompts to help the truth of these scriptures really sink in. We'd love to send it to you as our way to say thank you for partnering with us financially, helping others hear the good news of the gospel each and every day. To give, you can call us now at 866-335-5220.
That's 866-335-5220. Or you can give online right now at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, and we're so thankful you chose to join us today. Tomorrow, we'll jump into new teaching Pastor JD titled, Who Gives and Who Receives? Don't miss it Wednesday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
