Worship:
Intimacy with God

By John Wimber
Vineyard founder

Worship, the act of freely giving love to God, forms and informs every activity of the Christian's life.

Many people who visit Vineyard Christian Fellowships around the country remark on the depth and rich quality of our worship. This has not come about by chance; we have a well thought out philosophy that guides why and how we worship God. In this article I will communicate that philosophy.

To understand how we worship God, it is helpful to learn about our fellowship's history, which goes back to 1977. At that time my wife, Carol, was leading a small group of people in a home meeting that evolved into the Anaheim Vineyard. I'll let her describe what happened at that time.

"We began worship with nothing but a sense of calling from the Lord to a deeper relationship with Him. Before we started meeting in a small home church setting in 1977, the Holy Spirit had been working in my heart, creating a tremendous hunger for God.

"One day as I was praying, the word "worship" appeared in my mind like a newspaper headline. I had never thought much about that word before. As an evangelical Christian I had always assumed the entire Sunday morning gathering was "worship" - and, in a sense, I was correct. But in a different sense there were particular elements of the service that were especially devoted to worship and not to teaching, announcements, musical presentations, and all the other activities that are part of a typical Sunday morning gathering. I had to admit that I wasn't sure which part of the service was supposes to be worship.

"After we started to meet in our home gathering, I noticed times during the meeting - usually when we sang - in which I experienced God deeply. We sang songs, but mostly songs about worship or testimonies from one Christian to another. But occasionally we sang a song personally and intimately to Jesus, with lyrics like "Jesus, I love you." Those types of songs both stirred and fed the hunger for God within me.

"About this time I began asking our music leader why some songs seemed to spark something in us and others didn't. As we talked about worship, we realized that often we would sing about worship yet we never actually worshiped - except when we accidentally stumbled onto intimate songs like "I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice." Thus we began to see a difference between songs about Jesus and songs to Jesus.

"Now, during this time when we were stumbling around corporately in worship, many of us were also worshiping at home alone. During these solitary times we were not necessarily singing, but we were bowing down, kneeling, lifting hands, and praying spontaneously in the Spirit - sometimes with spoken prayers, sometimes with non-verbalized prayers, and even prayers without words at all. We noticed that as our individual worship life deepened, when we came together there was a greater hunger toward God. So we learned that what happens when we are alone with the Lord determines how intimate and deep the worship will be when we come together.

"About that time we realized our worship blessed God, that it was for God alone and not just a vehicle of preparation for the pastor's sermon. This was an exciting revelation. After learning about the central place of worship in our meetings, there were many instances in which all we did was worship God for an hour or two.

"At this time we also discovered that singing was not the only way to worship God. Because the word worship means literally to bow down, it is important that our bodies are involved in what our spirits are saying. In Scripture this is accomplished through bowing our heads, lifting our hands, kneeling, and even lying prostrate before God.

"A result of our worshiping and blessing God is being blessed by Him. We don't worship God in order to get blessed, but we are blessed as we worship Him. He visits His people with manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

"Thus worship has a twofold aspect: communication with God through the basic means of singing and praying, and communication from God through teaching and preaching the word, prophecy, exhortation, etc. We lift Him up and exalt Him, and as a result are drawn into His presence where He speaks to us."

Definition of Worship

Probably the most significant lesson that Carol and the early Vineyard Fellowship learned was that worship is the act of freely giving love to God. Indeed, in Psalm 18:1 we read, "I love you, O Lord, my strength." Worship is also an expression of awe, submission, and respect toward God: Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song (Ps. 95:1-2). Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, praise His name; proclaim His salvation day after day. Declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous deeds among all peoples (Ps. 96:1-3). Our heart's desire should be to worship God; we have been designed by God for this purpose. If we don't worship God we'll worship something or someone else.

But how should we worship God? There are various ways described in the Old and New Testaments: 

Next Week: In the Vineyard we see five basic phases of worship, phases through which leaders attempt to lead the congregation. Understanding these phases is helpful in our experience of God. Keep in mind that as we pass through these phases we are headed toward one goal: intimacy with God.

Used by permission from Vineyard Music Group, 
P.O. Box 68025, Anaheim, CA. 92817-0825