Good morning. Welcome to The Edge. My name is Brandi, and we are so glad that you’ve joined us as we continue on our journey through the spiritual disciplines, which is a series called The Blueprint. It’s an exploration of the spiritual disciplines or the habits that we as Christians can implement as a way of living more intentionally in God’s presence and purpose for our lives.
Psalm 16:11 says:
11 You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence (NIV).
And, boy, could we all use a little more joy in our lives. I think it’s so good to remember that these habits or rhythms that we’ve been talking about are not meant to be burdensome. It’s not something that’s meant to add clutter to our lives or a larger to-do list, but, rather, these are rhythms that will help us to cultivate the life that our souls are really longing for — a life that is deeply connected to our creator and his purpose for us. And the benefits of walking these out are exponential.
I’m so super excited today. I can almost barely hide my excitement because today, we’re going to get to cover a spiritual discipline that is deeply personal for me, and it’s the subject of worship — more specifically, worship through praise as a spiritual discipline. You know, oftentimes in the church world, we’ll hear the words worship and praise synonymously or interchangeably, but they are not synonymous, although they do complement each other really well.
Praise is really just a way that we can express worship. It’s a form of worship expressed, but worship really is a posture of the heart. In the most broad sense, the word worship means to value, to ascribe value or to adore, to magnify something, and to come under submission to something, and to serve. You know, in the Old Testament, we see the word worship over and over again, and the most common word for worship in the Old Testament really translated on a basic level to “bow,” to “bow.” So when we see that word in the Old Testament, it’s a really good thing to just picture in your mind actually physically bowing. It was a way that they could show physically what was taking place in the heart.
And then in the New Testament, it’s this beautiful progression toward something so much more relational and so much more intimate because, in the New Testament, when we see that word worship, it literally translates to “kiss,” to “kiss.” But it doesn’t lose that reverence and that servanthood because it more accurately is a picture of like kissing the hand of a master, and so it’s still this worshipful posture of the heart. In fact, all of the disciplines that we’ve been walking through are meant to be a form of worship expressed.
If these practices aren’t worship, then really they’re just religious practices, and, you know, Jesus did not come and live a sinless life and take on our punishment and die for us and be raised again to bring us into a place where we could just be really religious people with a big to-do list. He died for us so that he could be in relationship with us, and from that place, we could live this abundant life on mission and full of purpose.
So how can we practice this praise as a form of worship? You know, you’ll see most organized churches believe in this collective singing type of worship, so much so that it is one of the few things that is enfolded in most Sunday morning services, and we here at The Edge place a very high value on praise through our song time. And that’s a good thing because it’s very close to God’s heart. In fact, over and over again in the Bible, Old Testament and New, he prescribes our praise both individually and collectively, and just like everything that God commands, we come to find out that it’s going to be something that’s actually really good for us.
The discipline of praise is extremely personal for me because, just like so many times in the Bible, when people were liberated from times of oppression simply by opening their mouth and declaring God’s praises, that has happened for me. Not just once, but over and over again, and I know he’ll do it for you too. Psalm 95:1–2 says:
1 Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song (NIV).
Don’t you just love that it says, “Come, let us sing for joy?” Not sing because you have joy. So it’s not this reflective kind of thing; it’s actually something that we do for joy. It’s like a prescription. We already talked about needing a little more joy in our lives. Why don’t we try opening our mouth and letting the praise come out and watch that joy begin to well up?
You know, the Bible says that God inhabits the praise of his people. So we see that “In his presence there’s fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11, ESV), and we see that we’re supposed to “sing for joy,” and we see that God inhabits the praise of his people. So there’s this link, there’s this link between our praises and his presence, and when we are deeply connected to his presence, the joy comes because that is what we’re meant for.
But so often, we get this backward. We sing when we feel like it. In fact, most of us will use music as kind of something that’s more like self-soothing. We use it in more indulgent ways. So oftentimes — let’s say we’re sad — then we want to have sort of a melancholy playlist. Let’s say we need to get pumped up for a workout or a big event or something. Well, then we turn on the anthems, right? We use music to soothe ourselves, and that’s okay; music is a gift, and it connects us to our emotions, and most people are moved by music, so that’s okay. But when we talk about praise as a form of worship, that is an entirely different thing than just singing or just music because when we praise, we are not singing for ourselves. We are singing to him.
So the object is not us. The object is him, and the great thing is regardless of our mood or our feelings or our circumstances, his worthiness never changes, and so our praise never has to decrease. Scripture says to sing a new song — it says that over and over again — and I love that because I used to think that meant we had to like come up with new songs all the time, and hey, I love new songs, I truly do, but the thing is, you could say the same declaration or proclamation to God over and over again. If you have a song you just really love, you can sing it over and over again, and it’s still singing a new song to him. Because listen, we don’t know what each day is going to bring, and every day that we step into, we have a different set of circumstances. We have different levels of faith and doubt, and our circumstances can change. That diagnosis can come, that money can dwindle, despair can set in, frustration can set in, and when we offer our praise, we’re stepping into that place and we are singing a new song, and, believe me, it is music to his ears — literally. What we worship is what we become, and remember: The goal of us walking out these spiritual disciplines is to become like Jesus.
The other day, it was interesting, I was walking just quickly. I work, you know, remotely, upstairs most of the time and my kids are on the main floor, they’re all doing school, and Neil’s on the main floor. It’s just a lot of people on their computers doing their thing and so a lot of people, but it’s pretty quiet. Everyone’s in their zone. And I just happened to walk downstairs, grab a quick bite, and I was just going to jet right back upstairs, and my daughter — without even like looking up, she’s looking at her school stuff — just kind of blurts out casually, “I love you, mom,” as she sees me turning the corner to walk up the stairs. This actually isn’t an unusual thing; we sprinkle the “I love you’s” throughout the day all the time. But something hit me in this moment where she just kind of unsolicited just offers up this “I love you,” this teenage girl who doesn’t have to say that.
And it just really hit me as I went walking up and down the stairs. It hit me that like I’ve spent a lifetime nurturing this child, trying my best to show her love and protect her and raise her, and really, what else would be music to my ears than hearing my loved ones say that they love me? What really, I mean, honestly, what would like crown me with joy more than an unsolicited “I love you” from the children that have my heart? And when I thought about that, I thought, My gosh, what must it feel like to our Father, when his children will pause what they’re doing, will stop everything, and whether you say it quickly, or whether you sing a whole song service, when you will stop and open your mouth and declare that you know who God is, that you know whose you are, declaring his goodness? Can you just imagine how precious that is to him?
See, our worship is so extremely valuable to God in a way that we can’t even conceive because — I want you to think about this — God is God. Like he has everything. Everything is his. He created everything, but yet he chose to give his prize creation — us, people, humans — he chose to give us free will because he knows that it’s not an actual, real, authentic, loving relationship if we didn’t have freedom in the matter to choose it back. So understand that when we turn back toward God in any moment and let him know, “Hey, I am yours. I know who you are. Thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your faithfulness. Thank you for your worthiness. I’m yours. I’m here. I remember you.” When we do that, we are taking our steps back toward home, and remember: We can never ever offer him affection that he did not already give us.
In other words, we can never think, even when we’re offering him praise, that this is something that we initiated. Just like any more than my own children, who I’ve raised, can learn to turn to me and say, “I love you.” They’re only learning to say something, and the older they get, they’re learning the depth of what love even means so they can reclaim it over and over again and it means something more and more the older that they get. But they’re really only learning to grow in this love that’s already been given to them. How much more are we learning to love God back? God is love, and he made us for his love. He made us in love and for his love. So when we turn back to him with affection, we are only returning affection that is fully already on us.
I like to do this practice sometimes: Occasionally, I will say out loud to God this phrase — and I wonder if you might want to practice this too — I’ll say, “God, I love you too. I love you too.” And I know that sounds really weird because, you know, I can’t hear him audibly, but I want to remind myself and him that I know that he doesn’t even have the ability to reject my love. So there’s no risk in saying it to him, but I also want him to know that I know that he already sings that love over me. And that’s not just a pretty way to say it; It’s actually scriptural, and way back in the Old Testament in Zephaniah 3:17, it says:
17 God takes great delight in you. He will calm you with his love and he will rejoice over you with singing (a paraphrase of the NIV).
Man, the magnitude of what this verse means — I just, I wish we could really get this, and I really believe that when we’re in heaven and we see him and he’s fully known to us, we’re really going to have the full picture of what this first means. But I got just a glimpse, I got just a glimpse a couple of years ago of what this looks like, and it has helped me picture God in a more personal and personable way, and I want to share it with you.
I think it was a couple of years ago; I was able to give a message on Father’s Day, and because of that, I was just kind of looking up different scriptures that kind of depict God in his fatherly characteristics. And so I came upon this passage, and it struck me so hard because it says, “God will take great delight in us. He will calm us with his love and he rejoices over us with singing.” And so I started picking apart this verse, and I started studying it in its original language, and I was so struck by what I learned because that word rejoice, it’s rhinnah — R H I N N A H — and it literally means “to be so violently overcome with emotion that you are spinning around in circles, singing and shouting declarations and proclamations.”
And why that hit me so personally, especially around Father’s Day, was because I had just, that year, my grandpa had passed away unexpectedly — it just totally came out of nowhere. He had a heart attack, and we just got the text and that was that. And he was a man full of emotion, a family man for sure, and one thing I can tell you about him is that when I would go to see him when I was young — we always had to go to the car dealership because that’s where he worked — and every single time, I don’t have a single memory of him without him doing this, when he would see me, he would grab me and pick me up and spin me around while he laughed and would sing a special song, a silly song that he made up just for me.
So when I read that verse and realize that it’s a picture of rejoicing, like spinning in circles, singing and violently overcome with this gigantic emotion, suddenly God became more real to me — I could picture it. And so now, so many times when I turned to him in praise or in prayer, I picture that that is how he is running toward us, and that is how he’s running toward you. And we have never said “I love you” to him that he didn’t already say first. 1 John 4:19:
19 We love because he first loved us (NIV).
And you know what? The results of praise are astounding. You know, if you start going to the gym to work out, I’m told that there are certain exercises you can do to like, I don’t know, make gains. The guys are probably laughing right now. But I guess there’s certain exercises you can do that, you know, your muscles will just kind of blow up and become more obvious, quicker, you know, with less effort. Well, I kind of feel that way about the discipline of praise because the results of praise for so many examples in the Bible are just, they’re astounding and they’re like instant.
So let me just read to you just a few examples of just things, things that happen when people have opened their mouth collectively to praise God. We see walls breaking down. We see convictions of sin, a spirit of unity, enemies defeated and confused, prisoners set free, others coming to know him, a reversal of depression, anxiety lifting, perspective imparted, revelation received, intimacy with the Father progressing, and, best of all, knowing that we have his pleasure. Knowing that we have something that we can offer him.
Boy, I would love to just have a series and just talk individually about these different results of different efforts of praise, but instead, I’m going to end these last few minutes addressing something very personal. Some of you have already heard this from my mouth before, but it’s just a smidge of my testimony about why I get really passionate about this particular subject. So if you are listening right now and you are going through, let’s say apathy, you’re going through a time where you’re feeling very distant from God, frustrated, and even probably more importantly, a time of oppression or a time of intense doubt, you’re the one I really, really, really want to talk to right now, because that was me a handful of years ago.
I have never gone through a period of time in my whole adult life that I wasn’t in church almost every Sunday — that’s just what happens when you’re married to a pastor and raised by one. But yet, I still, even though on the outside everything seemed normal, still going to church. In fact, still reading my Bible most days, still praying most days, still doing all the things, but on the inside, the doubts, the doubts that I had about any of this being true and even worse, the doubts that I had about if God could really be good were so big in my mind that I’m telling you I could not open my mouth to sing. I could hardly listen to a sermon; it felt like static in my ears. I couldn’t concentrate when I would try to read a devotional or the Bible. If you know what I mean, then you know what I mean. It was a time of intense doubt and intense oppression, which actually led to a depression, but it was very lonely because most people on the outside did not know that this was happening. Over and over again, I watched injustices occur and people get hurt and griefs that I did not deal with, and it just kind of turned into this just junk pile in my soul, and I just struggled to believe that any of this was real, and because of my shame and embarrassment, I didn’t share it with anyone else. And this went on for months.
One day — and I remember it as clear as if it was yesterday — I was taking a walk, and I can hardly talk about this without tearing up, I was on a walk and I was listening to a sermon by Tony Evans. He is a wonderful preacher, if you ever want to listen to him, he’s got a great podcast, but I was listening to him, and he was giving a series on spiritual warfare, and he was talking about how sometimes the enemy attacks very, very personally, and he described what that attack can feel like, and it was like he was reading my mail, you know? So he had my attention, and that particular day he was going through Ephesians 6. Ephesians 6 talks through the different weapons of spiritual warfare, and he talked about how each one of those pieces of armor represented how we can kind of fight this battle that we’re in — this spiritual battle. And these weapons of warfare, he described all of them and how important they were, but he went on to say that there was only one weapon that was not defensive, but it was more of an offensive weapon, and that weapon was the sword — the sword that could cut down an enemy that was advancing your way, and that sword was the Word of God. Now, in this case, the Word was the original word rhema, and this meant the spoken Word of God, and he talked about then how the devil cannot read our minds, but he also can not stand against God’s Word being proclaimed and verbalized into the atmosphere. He talked about when we will open our mouth and proclaim God’s truths and his words that the darkness has to flee, and at this point, I was desperate.
So even though I still really didn’t know if I believed any of this, I didn’t know if I wanted to carry on in my faith journey at all. I thought to myself, I’ll give it one more chance. I’m going to take this very literally. I’m a practical person, always have been. So this was a practical tool that I had never heard before. So I did it. I started saying Scripture out loud, but more importantly, because it was more natural to me, I started singing more. I had playlists going, and I would sing, and it was awkward as anything in the beginning because I didn’t really believe anything I was singing, but I did it anyway. And once in a while, there would be a certain melody, certain chords, certain strings, certain phrases, certain lyrics, and it would get me, and it would start to soften my heart.
And suddenly, I would notice that I didn’t want to verbalize my doubts whenever there was praise music going on in the background because that felt really conflicted, and so I would withhold from saying the negative things, the things of doubt, the untruths, and I would increase the truths, and, I am not kidding you, the darkness and the doubts left me. They left me. And I still have doubts that creep in all the time to this day; I’m just plagued with doubts all the time. But I tell you what; I now know my weapon. You know that song, “This Is How I Fight My Battles?” (Surrounded [Fight My Battles] by Michael W. Smith). This is how I fight my battles. This is the most practical way I know how, and so, you guys, if we will take this seriously, particularly if you need to take your stand against the devil’s schemes and the darkness of this world, praise him. God wants his children to armor up and take their stand. The battle, remember, belongs to the Lord, and the victory is his.
So we are going to have a wonderful chance to do this together. On Wednesday night, we’re going to have a collective live time to worship together, and I can’t wait. I hope you’ll make space to be there, more details to come. But for now, I want you to talk. Here’s some discussion questions. I want you to talk about some of these things.
What is your main takeaway from today? What really struck you?
What is a song lyric that you have just been loving right now? Maybe it’s just a phrase, or maybe it’s a whole song, and I want you to talk about why. What is it about that song that’s ministering to you right now?
What are some simple ways that you could implement more praise, more of that Rhema , into your days?
Well, you guys, I can’t wait to worship with you on Wednesday night, and I can’t wait to go to battle, not just for myself but also for you. Church, we love you. We’ll see you next week.