Sunday message · Spiritual Habits series
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Message Summary
In the second message of the Spiritual Habits series, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Psalm 95 and the habit of worship. Spiritual habits, he explains, are the rhythms of living God uses to increasingly transform and conform a person’s life to look like Jesus. Worship means different things depending on our backgrounds, and Phil remembers the worship wars of his childhood. So he borrows Tim Keller’s definition of worship: ascribing ultimate value to something or someone in a way that engages your entire being.
Psalm 95 calls us to worship with all of who we are. We worship with our emotions, singing and shouting joyfully to the rock of our salvation. We worship with our will, bowing and kneeling before the Lord our maker even when we don’t feel like it. And we worship with our reason, as the psalmist calls us to listen and consider, and as Jesus said true worshipers worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:23–24). If worship stirs our emotions but never changes the patterns of our lives, Phil says, it isn’t really worship.
What engages our whole being is rightly understanding God’s worth. The psalm gives its reasons with the word “for”: the Lord is a great God and King who holds the depths of the earth and made the sea, and he is our God, who cares for us as his flock. Phil shows a classic Antiques Roadshow clip in which a man learns that the old Navajo blanket that had been sitting on the back of a chair is a rare national treasure. The appraiser can barely breathe, and the owner is moved as he realizes he had not been living in line with the blanket’s true worth.
Worship, Phil says, begins with discovering who God is and what he has done. The word comes from worth-ship, giving God all he is worth, and the question is not what we want God to be. Many people believe in God but, like the blanket’s owner before the appraisal, are unaware of his worth. Drawing on N. T. Wright’s For All God’s Worth, Phil warns that left to ourselves we want a God who gives us what we want, a homemade god who becomes our puppet and sends no one out to heal the sick or feed the hungry.
Over lunch, a friend told him that worship is a bending of the knee inwardly as well as outwardly, and that God seeks worshipers not out of narcissism but because he knows the joy and peace we find in our identity in Christ. To build the habit, Phil suggests engaging in worship gatherings, using tools like the lyric guide in each program. Those who have done that for years can regularly pause to think about who God is and what he has done, and simply say thank you. Others may need to start by learning what the Bible says about God, because Scripture is the best appraiser of his worth. He closes hoping everyone will ascribe ultimate value to God with all that they are.
Questions about worship
Worship is ascribing ultimate value to something or someone in a way that engages your entire being, the Tim Keller definition Pastor Phil uses. For Christians, that means giving God all he is worth with our emotions, our will and our reason. Psalm 95 shows all three: singing for joy, bowing and kneeling before the Lord our Maker, and listening for his voice (Psalm 95:1–7).
The English word comes from “worth-ship”: giving God all he is worth. Pastor Phil says worship begins with discovering who God is and what he has done, not deciding what we want him to be. Like the man on Antiques Roadshow who learned his old blanket was a national treasure, many people believe in God without knowing his worth, and Scripture is the best appraiser of it.
It means worship that engages the whole person, mind as well as heart, and changes how we live. Jesus said the true worshipers “will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23). Pastor Phil ties this to Psalm 95’s call to listen and consider, and he warns that if worship stirs our emotions but never changes the patterns of our lives, it isn’t really worship.
Psalm 95 is a call to worship God with everything we are, and it gives its reasons with the word “For”: the Lord is a great God and King, the sea and the dry land are his, and “He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture” (Psalm 95:3–7). It ends with a warning not to harden our hearts as Israel did in the wilderness (95:8–11).
