Worship in Truth
ICS Daily Devotions

Psalms 42:1-2 (Amplified) As the deer pants [longingly] for the water brooks, So my soul pants [longingly] for You, O God. 2 My soul (my life, my inner self) thirsts for God, for the living God. When will I come and see the face of God?

We are essentially a three-part being, comprising of body, soul and spirit. The spirit man in us longs for God and to worship Him. Every man longs to worship something even before they are saved, but for believers, we have found the real Saviour who longs to have a relationship with us. God reached out to us in love through His son and we should respond in love through worship.

First, we need to be comfortable in the presence of the Heavenly Father. There are two kinds of presence: the omnipresence of God and the manifested presence of God. God is omnipresent, so He is present wherever we are. On the other hand, we can also find a strong or manifested presence of God in our midst when we minister to Him, and He in turns ministers to us. Since God created us to have fellowship with Him, we should expect Him to speak to us and minister to us when we enter into His presence through worship and the teaching or preaching of the Word. We need to be conscious in our minds and our hearts that we can encounter Him whenever we meet with Him daily and also as a corporate body of believers.

Second, how we worship in truth depends on how much truth we know or have revelation of. In John 8:32, it says that “the truth will set you free” but the original Greek actually reads “the truth you know will set you free”. For example, when we are first born again, we may know very little about what has happened to us, but what we know is that we are born again, so we can praise God for our salvation. We would also know that we have the imputed righteousness of God, which is something unattainable with our own strength, but is purely a gift of righteousness. It is something we should be eternally grateful for, and so we worship in this truth. However, as time goes by, we will (and should) know more about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, our authority in Christ, and being blessed with all the spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ, so we can praise God all the more with these revelations!

In other words, our revelation of the truth is progressive, and therefore our growth in worship is also progressive. So, as a worshipper, we adore God for who He is (not for what He has done, which is praise), and we do it by communing directly with Him using the revelation of God we have as our guide and purpose for doing so.

Sermon Series: ICS Worship Culture