Restoring Worship

Having trouble getting past the ceiling with your worship?

I have to be honest and say that there have been times when I felt like my prayers and worship were going nowhere but to the wall. Worship is my lifeline... its my release... its my strength and if I dont have that, I feel completely... incomplete. Some of you probably know what I mean. Teachers teach, preachers preach, singers sing, artists.. well they art (who knows what they do), builders build, worshippers worship. This is who these people are. Worship has always been my passion since I discovered what it was and the power and accessibility that is given to us through it. This is why when I find myself struggling to get God's attention its time for immediate action. I dont think I can live without worship and guess what, God doesn't want me to.

Worship is not only something that moves me. Worship moves God. It is not a request, it is mandated by God. An no it is not a selfish move to demand worship when you are the biggest and most amazing thing in the universe. I like what Tommy Tenney said... "God has this crazy idea that church is supposed to be all about Him."


Picture this... God's people have been in exile and captivity in Babylon. For years they have been out of their comfort zone and have been in a place where they could not receive a word from God. (man that'll preach huh?) They have lost their ability to worship because they have no idea what true worship is. Surely the old timers remember what it was like to see the tangible presence of God. They knew what it was like to receive assurance that they were in the presence of YHWH. They must have been miserable to have lost that.


Well now the exile is over and slowly the people are being released to go back to their home, to the land of their promise. The first thing God does is send Zerrubabel to rebuild the foundations. The foundation of their physical lives, the structure that would hold their homes, the temple, the shops. The foundation of the city had to be built before anything else could be. Guess what was second... you got it WORSHIP. God sent this man named Ezra to restore worship. Worship is the foundation of our spiritual lives. If God was gonna have a people, they were gonna be worshippers. They had been away from the teaching of God's word for so long, they had no idea how to worship. But Ezra uncovered this major problem that would hinder these people from being able to worship God properly. They were married to something that God had told them to stay away from.


God had instructed them not to marry outside of the holy race but they did anyway. They were living in direct disobedience to God, so even if Ezra instructed them how to worship, their worship would only get ceiling high. Long story short... Ezra demanded that they DIVORCE their wives. They had to divorce the thing that had taken precedence over God. Not just a seperation... a divorce. Can you imagine how hard this must have been? These people loved their wives and had built families and lives with these women. How could they just divorce the people they had fallen in love with?


Here's the hard part. Our disobedience has consequences. Maybe if you are experiencing a worship drought its because you're married to something that God can't live with. We all know how it happens... we develop strong relationships with things in our lives and then we are virtually married to them. There's no way we can ever see ourselves living without them. Problem is... while we nurture that relatonship, we neglect our "first love". Whats the first thing to go when we find new "stuff"? Our face time with God. If you're a singer then can you ever remember singing to Jesus, all by yourself, just because...? Musicians... remember going to the basement all by yourself and playing just because you wanted God to hear? Wanna restore worship? Get a divorce from your habits... from your mentalities... from your thoughts... from your sin. A seperation won't cut it. God expects extreme measures when dealing with sin.

Ezra 9:6

"O my God I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift my face to you, my God, because our sins are higher than our heads."