"What is Worship?" Week 2

In Week 2 of our What Is Worship? series, Pastor Jake looked at how worship honors God’s presence, expresses our gratitude, and transforms us from the inside out. From biblical expressions of praise to the way God shapes our hearts, this message invites us to engage Him with sincerity and joy.

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Manna Church Stafford Podcast, where we're all about equipping God's people to change their world. We're thankful you're here, and we're praying that this message encourages you to love God, love others, and love the world more fervently than before. Now, let's get to it.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

God, we love you. Be praised in this place, God. Be praised here, Lord. We're in a series on worship. We're trying to define, like, what is worship? What is it? We talk about that that word, we use it like a noun all the time. I'm going to worship, like a place. We call this, there's even a sign out there, it says this is the worship center here. Can I just tell you, this is the worship center? Right here. Right here. If you could, if you could get a picture of that, if you could understand that, get a revelation of that, that you are supposed to be a living temple for his praise. In fact, we don't call this place the sanctuary for that reason, because this is the sanctuary. And so when we come in, when we come in and we we do this together, just just I want you to get that idea. Just if I could drill it into your head. Man, this is the worship center. All worship flows from here, not from a place. This place doesn't have any monopoly. This is a this is a high school, y'all. A man, any place can be a worship center if I am there. Because I'm going to lift up the high praises of Jesus and everything I say and everything I do and everything I think. Always, all the time. Y'all, can we thank the worship team for leading us this morning? Yeah. We appreciate you guys. Seriously, thank you so much. You guys can go ahead and have your seats. We are um, like I said, we're in this series. We're defining what worship is. And we're just gonna we're gonna dig into it a little bit more. We're gonna keep keep our hearts in that same posture. Not doing announcements, we're just just gonna discuss this and try to get this revelation. Last week I defined it for us as a posture of our heart that can have expression in every single facet of our life. And of course, that expression always must be directed towards God. Every time we talked about how Abraham showed us what worship is in the first mention of worship in Genesis chapter 22, where he gave everything. He gave his most precious thing, his son, even. He brought his son Isaac up to the mountain, and he was willing to offer him as a sacrifice on the altar as God had commanded him. He wasn't gonna hold anything back. That's the first mention we have of worship. It says he literally bowed down before God. That's what worship was. And God blessed him for that posture of his heart that wasn't gonna hold anything back, even the thing that was most precious to him. It's literally the gospel. You see the gospel message in Genesis chapter 22. And we we see this echoed in the New Testament in Romans, where Paul talks to us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1. He says, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. That sanctuary, that temple. Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. That's what worship is in the New Testament. We talked some more again. This is last week. We stripped away all the superfluous additions we make to worship. We just got down to like, what does the Bible teach about worship? What's the Bible say worship is? First mention, New Testament, what's it talk about? In fact, I said something that might have felt a little bit provocative when I first mentioned it, because maybe you haven't thought about it that way. I explained that many of the examples that we see in the New Testament, in fact, all the examples we see of people worshiping Jesus, doesn't look like this when Jesus was here. Didn't look like people standing in rows, singing songs, and somebody standing up and preaching at them. Didn't look like that in the New Testament. It looked like them bowing down and praising him and saying, Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. So I asked the question, does that mean we're doing it wrong? I said that because I want the word to drive and frame how we do worship here as a church. The word has to be the foundation. We don't want to get, let culture drive us so far away from the true meaning of what it is that we miss it. But but we do need to realize we live in culture. And so culture does have a lot of influence on how we worship. It's the the context. It doesn't dictate what is or isn't worship. God does. It would be foolish, though, of us to think that culture doesn't in some way influence us to express worship. Because worship happens here. This is where worship begins and where it flows out of, but it's expressed here, it's expressed here, it's expressed here. Worship is expressed externally, but it starts here. And maybe when you we're talking about worship, this is kind of a new idea to you. Maybe you're new to church, maybe you're new to this church, maybe this context of church is new to you. And so, you know, listen, the thing is, culture does kind of drive us. And if you grew up in a different culture, this may have felt a little bit strange. If you grew up, for instance, in a church of Christ, they don't do instruments during worship. It's only a cappella. That's one of the cultural things that they do. If you grew up in a liturgical kind of a tradition, I mean, man, some groups they even speak a different language. They use Latin during their worship service, right? Music, instrument, drums on stage would be completely different, right? It wouldn't land. Maybe you grew up in a Baptist kind of an expression. And and a pastor, you know, wearing this, somebody wearing a hat in church, you're like, what is that? That might feel strange to you. Everybody dresses and wears their Sunday best, they wear a tie. Man, I went into a Baptist church and we were moving here from Hawaii, and the first church we went to, I felt super awkward because I wasn't dressed nice enough. I was used to going to church in my flip-flops. Not how they do worship in that Baptist church. It was way different. But man, the culture when I was in Hawaii, the worship team up there, they had a halal team, the hula team. So they'd be doing hula during worship. Kid you not? It was awesome. And every Sunday, the the pastor, even though he was like the whitest dude you would ever meet, the the locals, they would make him a lay and they would put it on him every Sunday because that was their tradition. It was a cultural thing to honor him. And so he would preach with a really nice handmade lay every single Sunday. It's just different. And you could be in a non-denominational background and you can see that it looks different depending on where you're at. Sometimes services are short, sometimes services go for like two hours. Sometimes expression is super, super high and all over the place, and sometimes expression is just like right here. Overseas. If you're in an underground church, do you think their worship service looks like this? You think it looks the same? It doesn't. It looks way different. They're not gonna have drums and be driving that music out the speakers because they don't want someone to come in and take them all to jail. That doesn't mean that they're ashamed of worship. They're just trying to not do something that would needlessly expose them to harm. And I've been in some of those places with some of our ministry partners where we've got to be careful how we do the worship service there. Culture does have an influence. There are even different examples of how the worship context changes based on what we see in the Bible, based on the era that we're in. We talked about Abraham and how when he worshiped, it was going up to a mountain, taking a sacrifice, and bowing down. That's what worship looked like. Then you fast forward a little bit, and you've got the Hebrew people in the desert, and God describes everything that He wants them to do. He wants them to set up these tents, they're gonna wear special clothes, they're gonna go into this room and do this during this season and during this specific period. It was worship, but it looked a little different. You fast forward a little bit further. They did that for decades, for hundreds of years, actually. Then you fast forward a little bit further when they've got their own territory, they've got their own land, their context changes again, and they build this magnificent physical temple that they can go to and they can worship God in. And there's gold and there's silver and there's all kinds of people that are specifically ministering there. There's a massive bowl that's held up by by uh twelve bulls that they've arranged, metal bulls, right? And it's full of water. It was a different type of a context. And then you get to the New Testament. Worship starts to look a little bit different. In fact, kind of we're getting closer to how we do it here in Acts chapter 2, verse 42, when the church kind of explodes after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the Holy Spirit falls, it says they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship. So they had teaching, they had fellowship to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. You skip down to verse 46. It says, day by day, attending the temple together, breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. So they were praising, there was teaching, there was fellowship, there was food. A little bit closer to how we do it here. It doesn't even stop there, though. Worship continues to evolve. Sarah mentioned it. In Revelation, there's a picture of worship, what it's going to look like in the future, and what it looks like based on where Jesus is right now, ruling and reigning from. Worship in heaven looks different. There's different kinds of creatures even engaging in worship. Cherubim and Seraphim, the elders are taking their crowns, they're casting them down before his throne, crying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord. It looks different. Here's what I want you to understand. Here's the point that I'm trying to make. I know I'm I'm taking a long time. There is diversity in form based on the era, based on the location, based on the geopolitical landscape. The function never changes, though. The object never changes. So we can have lots of diversity in what it might look like, and culture does kind of shape that sometimes. But the object of our worship, the function of what worship does, never, never changes. And so, what I want to do for the rest of this message and a little bit next week, what I want to do is I want to come up with some cultural guidelines. Help you guys understand what it looks like when we worship here. And I want to also hopefully break down some cultural limitations that you might feel based on a background you came from, based on an understanding you might have of what the Bible teaches. I want to break down some of those so you feel a release and a liberty to fully worship God in whatever way he's moving you, as long as it aligns with Scripture. And so, what I want to pull out is what is acceptable versus non-acceptable worship. And this week we're just going to talk about what acceptable worship looks like in the Word. In the Bible, it's going to be our basis. So what's it look like here? Like right here, when we get together and we do worship. Because, you know, I'll give you an example. Like I'm a dad all the time. I'm never not a dad. But there are times where I'm like really focused on being dad. You know? I'm a husband. I'm never not a husband. But there are times where that's that's like all I'm doing is just being a husband to my wife. Worship, we are living sacrifices. We're always worshiping God all the time. But what does it look like when I'm just locked in? That's the only thing I'm doing right now. Not worrying about any of these other distractions, I'm just worshiping. What does that look like? When we gather corporately. 1 Corinthians 14, it kind of talks about this. It says, What, brothers, when you come together, when you come together and worship, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. So I want you to look at that real quick. Notice it doesn't say, what then when you come together, the pastor comes with something and you sit and listen to it. It doesn't say, what then, when you come together, Sarah has a song to sing. And that's good. Well, it doesn't, it doesn't say that. It says, each one. When you come together, each one brings something. Every single one of us, when we get together corporately, we bring something. Worship, it's it's participation. You're not just here to consume, you're here to participate. You're gonna contribute. It's not for spectating or evaluating if the songs are good or if the preaching is compelling, right? That's not necessarily what it's for. It's for you to bring something, and it's for the building up of the corporate body and for the praise of Jesus. Most people they walk into church and you think you probably a lot of us thought this today. What am I gonna get out of this today? It's probably easier for me because I do have to bring something every week, right? I do think that. Like, man, God, like what is it you're gonna put into me today? What is it you're gonna minister to my soul with today? But but it's pretty easy for me to think, what am I bringing today? And I would say that's a that should be a consistent posture that all of us have. What am I bringing in to worship this morning? What does that even look like? Verse 40 skips down. We're gonna talk about some of the stuff in between here, but but as he's talking about worship in this context corporately, he gives some examples because the church at Corinth, they were getting a little bit a little bit out of control, and he goes on in verse 40, he says, All things should be done decently and in order. So, what does order look like here? What model do we follow when we get together in worship? I think it's good to articulate it and define it a little bit for us. The first thing is this. Number one, we honor God's presence. You're always gonna find that here. Whenever we come together, we're always going to honor God's presence. We start it before we we ever sing a song. We're all preparing, like leading up into this. Our worship team's preparing, they're arranging the songs to make sure that the songs are honoring God, that the songs are leading us to a place. I have a teaching team that we're meeting and we're working on the word to make sure that it honors what scripture teaches, that we're honoring the presence of God. We have uh a time of preparation here where we all just come together. And if you want to join us, you are welcome, by the way, to join us at any point. 9:15. We come in and we prepare ourselves to worship Jesus. We prepare ourselves for his presence. We invite him to do whatever he wants. And listen, make no mistake, his presence is already here. Okay? Like his presence is here, his presence is here. What we're doing is increasing our awareness of it, and we're submitting to what it is he wants to do. So we're getting ourselves ready for what his presence is doing. And the presence of God is a person, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and worship, it's that posture where we acknowledge God's presence. And man, worship always had to do with getting close to God's presence. God always wants to be close to his people. In Eden, the very beginning, God's walking with Adam in the cool of the day in the garden. You look in Exodus, when God tells them to build a temple, he says, Build a temple, build a sanctuary that I may dwell with you. He wanted to be with him. That's where worship is happening. And now you look now. Jesus comes, lives a perfect life, dies, a terrible death, cleanses all of us from sin if we accept that. And then the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, comes and takes up residence inside us because he wants to be with us. It's worship. He's always wanting to be close. So we're not inviting him into the room necessarily. Sometimes we say that just to get our heads in the right spot. We're really just turning our attention towards him. The second thing that we do, I'm gonna camp on this for a minute, is we we express our gratitude, our adoration, and our belief in him. So there's lots of ways we do that. Sometimes that happens through teaching. We're expressing our belief in him. I'm expressing what we believe about the Word of God, what we believe about the person of Jesus and the person of the Holy Spirit. I'm expressing that, and hopefully you're getting something out of it. We have testimony, we have prayers, and then we have we have musical expression. So I want to talk a little bit about the musical expression a little bit more. I'm gonna unpack that some. Because there are some songs that kind of hit. You guys know that, right? During worship, you can feel it. There's some songs that, man, they just land like, oh, that got me. My eyeballs are even starting to sweat a little bit. Oh, that's good. Right? And there are other songs that don't. Sometimes it's because you know the songs. It's you've worshiped that song before, so it's easy for your brain to kind of get out of the way, so that way your spirit can just worship. It's like when you're driving someplace you've driven a hundred times, you don't have to think about it, you just go there. You don't have to listen to Siri tell you what to do. You know how to get there. Sometimes in worship, when there's songs that you already know, it's just easy for you to go there. Sometimes it's because songs have good theology, and your soul recognizes that, even if you don't, your soul does, and it's like, man, there's just a flow there. And there are other times where songs have really bad theology and they don't hit. There's this one song, I try not to beat up, mercy me, but there's this group, there's this song that comes on the radio. Every time it's got a great beat. But when it plays, I'm like, ugh. I cringe. There's this line that says, There are days I lose the battle. Grace says that it doesn't matter. I'm like, oh, when I lose the battle, it matters. That's what put Jesus on the cross. It mattered enough that he came to earth and died for it. Right? But so so like when I'm listening to that song, it just takes me out of worship moment. It's bad theology. Or it's at least expressed poorly. Sometimes there's different orientations of songs that can put you in a different place. There are songs that we sing as prayers to God. Prayers with music, you know? Holy forever. That's a great song. Hear your people sing holy to the King of Kings. Holy. Just sing it to God, right?

unknown 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

There's some songs that are testimonial. You're we're singing about the activities of God in the earth. There's a song that you see when big actions happened, like when God delivered the Israelites out of Egypt. There's a whole psalm that was written and we put it to music. It's an old song. Talking about the Lord's triumph gloriously, the horse and the rider thrown into the sea. Some of you have probably sang it back in like the 80s or 90s. Amazing Grace, that's another one. If I were to sing that, you know that song. Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind, but now I see. Like, man, I'm testifying of the goodness of God. My soul is worshiping him in that moment. And then there are other songs, they're they're more they're more confessional. We're making statements about God. We're like telling ourselves what to do. There's a song Oceans, and I will call upon your name and keep my eyes above the waves, like you're telling your soul to orient your heart towards God. When oceans rise, my soul will rest in your embrace, for I am yours and you are mine. You're just confessing some things. And all those songs, when you get them right, when you know them sometimes, it's just easier for you to worship. And so that's some of the reasons that we sing, some of the songs that we sing. We don't always put them in buckets. We try to make sure that there are more songs that are oriented vertically and not necessarily always oriented. To each other and just to us talking to ourselves. We don't want to do that too much because we always have to explain it. Because it's easy for us to take our eyes off of God as we're singing about our soul and think more about our soul. We want to think about God even as we're singing about our soul. 1 Corinthians 14, 15, it talks about this. It says, What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also. Both things happen at the same time. I will sing with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. Okay, you don't just check your brain at the door when we come into worship. And what we say about God, it's got to make sense. Like if I were to give somebody a compliment, and the compliment was so dissonant from who they are, they'd be like, oh, that was nice of you to say it, I think. But it just kind of doesn't land. You know? Like an easy one for me to pick on is you're like, hey Jake, you have great hair. Love your hair. It's like, that's just not true of me. Maybe one at one point in my life it was, but right now it ain't true. And so we gotta say things in our in our worship, in our music about God that are true of God. And if we don't, we feel a dissonance. Like, that's just not true. What about the actions during worship, though? This is the one I think we need to understand. What about how some people they're super expressive and some people just they're just not? What's right? What's wrong? In fact, there are entire denominations that are like off the wall expressive. And entire denominations that are like stand, sing, let somebody sing, sit down, take communion. Right? So much diversity. So I want to just take some time here. I want to coach you on what the Bible teaches, on these expressions of praise. Worship and praise, we can kind of use them interchangeably. And I'm gonna explain them, not so you feel like you have to do all these things, but so you have an understanding of why other people do them, so that way you don't look at them and say, Why are they doing that? Why is that person raising their hands? I when I first went to church as a kid and I saw the people raising their hands, I'm like, what is going on? The worship leader, um, she was a pastor's wife, name it's Patty Phipps. She would take her shoes off, man, she would dance. I'm like, gosh, her feet probably like they're on the stage. That's weird. That's ugh. All I could think about were her feet and how like odd it was that her feet were on the stage. Like, you if you don't have context, you don't understand if it's worship or if it isn't. And there's probably been some times where you've been in circumstances, maybe even here, where you're like, what is going on? So I want to help us not give a checklist, but but give give some some liberty, if I sh, if I could say that. Just give you liberty to know like what is it, what is it the word teaches about praise? So praise is about God, worship is to God, so when we do it right, we are praising about God to Him. All right, so what's the Word say? I'm gonna give you a Psalm here, Psalm 150. It's the last psalm, the last psalm in the book of Psalms we've got here. This is what it says. There's 13 commands to praise God in this psalm. It says, starts off, praise the Lord, exclamation point. Praise the Lord. It's an imperative, a command to us. Praise God in his sanctuary. What was the sanctuary then? It was a tent, then it was a temple. Now what's a sanctuary? Praise God in his sanctuary. Tell yourself that. Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in his mighty heavens. We see that happening in Revelation. Praise him for his mighty deeds. Talk about the things he's done. Testify just a little bit. Praise him according to his excellent greatness. Talk about his attributes, his grace, his amazing grace. How sweet the sound. Praise him with the trumpet sound. Okay, we got some brass instruments. Praise him with the lute and the harp. Praise him with the tambourine. We got the drums back there. Let's go. Praise him with the dance. Should I dance, JL? No. I'm gonna get in trouble if I start dancing up here. Praise him with strings and pipe. Praise him with sounding cymbals. And then he doubles down. Praise him with loud clashing symbols. Ah, the drums are too loud. I don't know. Psalms 150 says, praise him with loud clashing symbols. Then it closes. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Y'all, if you have breath in your lungs, praise the Lord. And the word praise, we we translate the word praise, but there are actually nine different expressions of praise in the Bible. I'm gonna go through them really quick here that kind of give you what that word means. Because what does it mean to praise something? Just say words? I'll give you some. First one, barak. This means to kneel and bless God as an act of adoration. That's praise. When people do that, you might get uncomfortable. You're like, ooh, that's weird. They're kneeling. Well, one of the translations of that word is to kneel. How dare we get uncomfortable when someone praises God in that way? Right? Let's just give them liberty to do that. That's great. They may feel that that's what the Holy Spirit's telling them to do. Yadah, and that that, by the way, that's in Psalm 95.6, if you want to reference. That's that word. Yada. This is to throw out, to worship with an extended hand, to just Lord, praise you, praise you, God. That's in Psalms 63:4. Then there is the dance to Karar, right? Karar, that's in 2 Samuel. Then our root word for hallelujah, halal. We say this all the time. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. It means to rave about, to boast, to celebrate, to be clamorously foolish, literally to spin like a top. Halal to Yah. Yahweh. Spin like a top to Yahweh. The form might change. There's diversity. The function never does. The function of worshiping Yahweh never changes. How about this one? To Shabbok. To shout a command. Jesus! Be praised, God! Glory to your name, God. Yes, Jesus. Yes. Sometimes it happens. It's okay. Shout. Psalm 145, 4. That's where that is. It's a qua. We do this all the time. Clap hands. We just clap. That's praising God. I say, hey, can we just give Jesus a praise? Can we do that right now? Let's praise him. Yes. You're doing something biblical right now. You're not giving, like, you're not doing it for my confidence. We're doing something that's in the Bible. We're taquing, praising God. Just giving him praise. How about this one? To Tauda. This is the same root as yada to throw out, but it literally means an extension of the hands in adoration. Psalms 50, 14. Oh, Lord, I adore you, God. I adore you. I adore you. To Zamar, to touch strings, play an instrument in worship. We do that a lot. I like that. And then there's this other one. It's kind of weird. It's Tehila. Don't get it confused with Tequila. Tehilah. Alright? And when you tehilah, we actually Tehila today. You guys didn't even know it. Y'all were Tehila ing today. If that's a word, Tehila ing. I don't know if I can do that. When Sarah said, Can you just sing a song to the Lord? It means to do a spontaneous, extemporaneous song. That's the word that's used in Revelation. When John the Revelator is writing and he's talking about worship, he's using Tehila. So those are those are just some of the expressions. And we're we we have liberty here to do, they're all acceptable forms of worship to God. Every single one of them. So again, I don't want you to mistake it and be like, well, if I'm not gonna tahilah, then I guess I can't worship. That's not what I'm saying. It's not a checklist, all right? It's not some of you like, I gotta do this, I gotta, I gotta Shabbok, I gotta halal, I gotta da da da da da da da, right? Bunch of words I don't even know. I'm just trying to praise. It I just want there to be liberty here. These are acceptable. And so if God says it's acceptable, we need to uh to posture our hearts in a way that we say, yeah, that's acceptable. I'm good with that. Whatever my culture or context or tradition is, I'm okay with that. Because God defines what worship is, not us. It's funny. That this message, I preached a part of it before, a year one of our church. And our church at that point probably wouldn't even recognize it when it comes to worship then versus now. We had a bunch of introverts who would worship like this. I felt like an oddball raising my hands. And again, I'm I'm not I'm not necessarily trying to get us to look a certain way. I just want us to be biblical and feel liberty to be biblical. And I think we've moved so far. I'm so proud of you guys, of our church, just to just to let the Spirit do what He does. So all of these things really are just to give you freedom. When you feel the Lord moving you, you have liberty to do it. It's okay. We're gonna give the people around us liberty to do that, and we're gonna give our own selves liberty to do that. Because the third thing that happens when we worship, when we do it well, this is so important. And it's a distinction between good music, a TED talk, a funny story, a joke, an actual teaching of the word, and actual worship and praise to God is that there is transformation that happens. Worship actually changes us. From music, we can have dynamics in music. We can we can drive the drums, hit them harder. It's like you just start to feel it, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you leave. You maybe been to concerts where you felt that. Like, ooh, that was so big. I was hyped up. Probably didn't change your soul though. But in worship, when worship is actually happening, there's a transformation on the inside. You leave different than you were before. And in fact, I think there's so many things that happen during worship, it's difficult to capture. It's almost like you kind of get bombarded with this spiritual radiation and you don't even know what changed. There's some people that get healed spontaneously during worship. There's some people that just get filled with it with a new, a new expression of the Holy Spirit during worship. There are things, there are ideas you have that get changed during worship as you sing good theology to God, as you sing about your own soul, as you start to believe things that you should have believed before, but now you're singing them and you believe it in a different way because the Holy Spirit's like, yeah, that's right. That's right, that is true of you. You're gonna keep your eyes above the waves, yes. You're gonna call on my name, yes. Your soul will rest in my embrace, yes. You guys, worship team, come on out. We're gonna we're gonna do some of this now. We're gonna end just a little bit early here, and we're gonna sing a few songs together. I just want to give you liberty to just express this. I told you the church isn't just a teaching center, it's a training center. I don't want to give you all the plays to run and then say, okay, good luck. We want to do it here. So we're gonna take some time and we're gonna worship. And funny story, my my son, my youngest, Ezekiel, he's nine. Um we went to Fayetteville recently, and um, and it was in May, and we did a conference there. And you know, he's nine, so I'm like, eh, how much is it gonna mean to him? The first day, we go back to our hotel, just me and him talking, and he goes, Dad. Yeah, buddy. He goes, I feel closer to God. He was so serious. I was like, that's good, buddy. You know, I'm listening. I'm like, okay, I don't know what that means to him. I'm like, cool, bud. Second day, what I noticed was during worship, again, he's he's like this tall. Standing next to me, standing next to some of his other friends. He's just going like this. There's a moment during worship where he he got down on his knees. He wasn't doing it for anybody to look at him, he was just praising God, just expressing himself. And he said this to me that night. I said, Hey, so do you you still feel different? And he goes, Yeah, dad. I feel I feel like this is a safer church. I said, Safer? I'm thinking like physical safety immediately. I'm like, we got some pretty strong dudes in our church. Pretty safe. He goes, Yeah, dad, I feel like it's safer. Like I can just put my hands up whenever I want and and it and it's okay. It's like, oh, he goes, or if I feel like I need to bow down, I can actually do that. Can I encourage us? I feel like this is a safe space. Some of you might not feel like this is safe. Can we put up posture our hearts in such a way that this is a safe place for us to just express all the love and all the adoration that we have to Jesus in whatever biblical way we feel so led? Can we do that? Awesome. Can you guys stand with me? Stand with me. Lord, God, we posture our hearts towards you, Lord. The context of what we're doing, we're changing from speaking and just receiving to expressing gratitude, adoration, praise to you now, Lord. So God, we bring this offering right now. We bring this offering freely. Man, don't do this because Pastor Jake's telling you you have to. No, no, no. God loves a cheerful giver. That's not just talking about money. He loves a cheerful giver of his praise. So Lord, we we freely.

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Thank you for listening to the Mana Church Stafford Podcast. If you would like to connect with us, you can find us on the web at manastafford.church or download the Mana Church app to listen to our new episodes as they become available. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast. We would also love to meet you in person. If you are local, our services take place each Sunday at 10 a.m. We pray you have an amazing week, and we'll see you next time.