My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.
But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
(Ps 22:1-3 KJV)
Throughout my evangelical and pentecostal life, I've heard verse 3 above quoted many times. The application of the verse has generally been this: When we praise and worship God, He is actually right there in our praise. He inhabits our praise. And so we get the idea that either when we're alone or in a gathering of the saints, worshiping God together, God 'comes down' or manifests Himself in our praises.
I was listening to a tape of a sermon from an old pastor of mine in the late 90's, "Pastor Mark," and he gave a somewhat lengthy talk on this at the beginning of the hour long sermon. He spent about 18 minutes on this. At the time (back in the 90's), this gave me a whole new view of this.
My quick summary of his words would be to say that we don't praise and worship God for the purpose of "bringing Him down to us" or to cause Him to come to us. As people who have been joined to the Lord (1 Cor 6:17), He doesn't inhabit our praises. He inhabits us!
When we worship Him and praise Him, sometimes we may feel or experience wonderful things (and we may not!). If we do feel or experience things, it's not that He has come down to us, but rather that Christ in us is coming out of us, so to speak. In other words, Christ is in us, and He may manifest Himself through us in various ways... prophecy, praise, exhortation, word of knowledge, tongues, healing... or in other ways such as feelings of peace, comfort, joy, calmness, etc. While this particular list of the ways He may manifest Himself is small, I want to say again that there also may be absolutely no extra sensation or feeling, or manifestation. And that's quite OK! The overall point is that God inhabits us and we're not praising Him in order to get Him to do something that He's already done, which is that He has already come to be with us and in us!
I've made the tape into an mp3, and below you will find a link to the part in which Mark gives this exhortation. There are many little nuggets in this, so feel free to give it a listen. I edited it down to 17 minutes, and just less than 3MB.
As always... my purpose and hope here is to edify and bring encouragement. If you don't agree with any of what I've said or what's in the audio, that's quite ok with me!
