Worship As It Is In Heaven: Worship That Engages Every Believer and Establishes God's Kingdom on Earth
By John Dickson and Chuck D. Pierce
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About this ebook
John Dickson
John Dickson (PhD, Macquarie University) serves as the Jean Kvamme Distinguished Professor of Biblical Evangelism and Distinguished Scholar in Public Christianity at Wheaton College. A speaker, historian, and media presenter, John is the author of more than 20 books, two of which became television documentaries. He also cohosted the documentary For the Love of God: How the Church is Better and Worse Than you Ever Imagined. He is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney, a Visiting Academic in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University (2016-2021), and Distinguished Fellow in Public Christianity at Ridley College Melbourne. John presents Australia’s no.1 religion podcast, Undeceptions, exploring aspects of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that are either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten.
Read more from John Dickson
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Book preview
Worship As It Is In Heaven - John Dickson
HEAVEN
1
What Happens When We Worship
You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel.
PSALM 22:3, NASB
The Essence of Worship
I am a worship leader, but first I am a worshiper: whether the music is playing or not, whether the circumstances are favorable or not, and whether I feel in the mood
or not. Matt Redman, in his book The Unquenchable Worshipper, describes what we should be like as worshipers of our God:
Enter the unquenchable worshipper. This world is full of fragile loves—love that abandons, love that fades, love that divorces, love that is self-seeking. But the unquenchable worshipper is different. From a heart so amazed by God and His wonders burns a love that will not be extinguished. It survives any situation and lives through any circumstance. It will not allow itself to be quenched, for that would heap insult on the love it lives in response to.¹
Matt gives us the essence of our relationship with God: unquenchable worship. God has saved us, empowered us and given us purpose in life. We are His worshipers. Nothing can dissuade us from our worship; it is our communion with God, and He loves the time we spend with Him.
Just as our individual worship is the essence of our personal relationship with God, our corporate worship is the essence of our collective relationship to God as Christ’s betrothed bride here on earth. When we worship corporately before the Lord, we become more than just a collection of individuals. We become something greater. This phenomenon is called synergism,
which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as conditions such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects.
²
Together we demonstrate the combined passion and fire of many individual worshipers and become greater than just the sum of our individual parts. Because of this it is important that we guard our personal times with the Lord and never let the fire go out, so that when we come together we can enter into the power that corporate worship is supposed to be. In our book The Worship Warrior, we enumerated several unique things that occur when we worship corporately:
An increase of strength. One can put 1,000 to flight, but two can put 10,000 to flight (see Deut. 32:30). This is a valuable principle of multiplication.
The power of agreement. Jesus told us, Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven
(Matt. 18:19, NASB). This is the power of agreement that increases the effectiveness of our prayers. The word agree
means to come into harmony with. It actually means we make the same sound on earth that is coming from heaven. Therefore, our sounds are in harmony.
The Lord’s presence. We have a special promise from Jesus that He, Himself, will show up when we gather together in His name. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst
(Matt. 18:20, NASB). When we come together, He is there with us.³
Another picture the Lord gives us is that together we become the Body of Christ. Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it
(1 Cor. 12:27, NASB). He is the head; we are the body. This image should become evident in our corporate worship. What the head is thinking, the Body should respond to in its worship. If the Lord is celebrating, His body should be celebrating. If He is warring, we should be warring. This is how it is in heaven: a sea of individual worshipers who, when joined together, synergistically bring forth the awesome experiences we read about in the book of Revelation. Whatever God is doing, His worshipers in heaven respond to it in their worship.
In heaven their corporate worship plays a central role in God’s ruling process. The same is true of our corporate worship here on earth, but many have not understood this aspect of worship.
What Takes Place When We Worship
God Is Enthroned
Psalm 22:3 tells us that God enthrones Himself on our praises. All of us are familiar with that Scripture, and I, like many others, always get a picture of God coming down during our worship and snuggling into the big overstuffed easy chair of our praises. I love this picture. I know how God loves us and loves to visit us when we praise Him, but one day I began to think of some of the pictures of thrones that I had seen—none of them looked like an overstuffed easy chair. As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t look comfortable at all. They were usually sturdy, straight-backed chairs whose function was not comfort. Then I began to think about what the function of a throne was.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says a throne is the chair of state of a sovereign or high dignitary.
⁴ A throne represents sovereignty and royal power: it is a seat of authority. It is a place where edicts are decreed, laws are made, orders are issued, proclamations are declared, commissions are awarded and rewards are given. It is the place where sovereigns do business.
The word enthroned
is from the Hebrew word yashab, which means to sit down as judge.⁵ What David understood, that much of the Church today does not, is that God chooses the atmosphere of our praises on which to establish His throne of authority. It is on our praises that God sits as judge.
For many this comes as a bit of a surprise. The word most associated with worship in our day has been intimacy,
not authority.
As we will see in chapter 9, God associates both of those words, intimacy
and authority,
with worship. It is we who have separated the two. We tend to let God handle that authority
end of things by Himself, while we concentrate on giving Him our hearts of adoration in worship. But Psalm 149:6 tells us that God wants us to not only have the high praises of God in our mouths, but at the same time have a two-edged sword in our hands. This psalm says it is our honor to have a part in the enforcement of His authority through our worship as well as release our hearts in adoration to Him. Cindy Jacobs wrote in her book Possessing the Gates of Your Enemy, "We are enforcers of His