Celebration of Praise concl?

Shout for joy To the Lord, all the earth.

Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.

Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.

For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

When we worship God, we celebrate his supreme worthiness. The word “worship” comes from an old Anglo-Saxon term “worth-ship”. So when we worship, we are proclaiming the worthiness of God’s character.

That being said, it occurs to me that we often turn worship inside out. Rather than coming before the Lord with hearts full of praise and thanksgiving, we come to a worship service with a list of demands.

We want the service to be enjoyable and interesting. We want it to make us feel good, or uplifted, or spiritually nourished. And if the worship service doesn’t succeed in doing these things, we cast thumbs down on it. We say “That wasn’t a very good worship service because it didn’t meet my needs.”

Can you see how a perspective like that turns the whole concept of worship on its head? The key question in worship is not “What’s in it for me?” It’s “What’s in it for God?”

And that’s a question that we need to continually keep before us as we worship: What’s in it for you, God?