Another is tender worship. In John 4:24, God is a spirit a spirit, they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit. I must let my inner man open out and engage with God, have to make a decision to pour my heart out to Him. Now for many people whose emotions have been shut down, that takes some challenge. Sometimes we need to be healed or delivered or released so our inner man can flow towards God, not just sing songs and enjoy an atmosphere, but allow our spirit by faith to connect with the one who loves us. There's a woman in the Bible, I think in Luke, Chapter 7 and she had an alabaster box. She came in, and the Bible says she loved much because she was forgiven much, and she probably had a very broken life and Jesus had forgiven her and touched her. She comes in, there she is, she doesn't worry about anyone else. She's extravagantly loving Jesus, and Jesus commended her and said that what she did will be rehearsed for generations. The half-hearted worship was never recorded for generations. In fact God says He doesn't like the half-hearted thing. They come there with their lips but their heart's far from Me, He said I'm not into that at all.
God wants passionate worship, passionate worship, passionate fervent worship and we have to learn to do that, have to learn to speak words of love and words of affection for Him, speak in tongues, speak in the language God's given and let your heart flow to connect with God, not just sing songs and have a service. Connect and love Him. It's a person we're loving. We need to express that love. He wants to enjoy the relationship with us. Another way we can develop that expressive love for God is by meditating. Meditating's one of the most powerful ways that you can open your inner man to connect fully with God. You take the word of God and you begin to picture it and use your imagination to see scripture, to see the stories of men encountering Jesus, to look into it and allow your heart and emotions to feel the truth. When you do it, you begin to connect with God and you become touched and changed.
Over this last week I've seen people encounter God and He's stepped in as they did exactly that, just opened their life to meditate and allow their imagination to go into the word of God, and they began to encounter God. The most wonderful thing to see people weep and hear God speak to them, and God touched them and set them free. See, that's something we do. Now of course everything is competing for your time, so if you're going to love God with all your heart and soul and mind, you have to take time to let your mind be trained to focus on God. It's a discipline. Most people can't sit still for just a few minutes. It's a discipline for my mind to remain connected to and focussed on the Lord, until I begin to engage Him and there's a life flow comes. So the strong praise breaks the heaviness and control of your body and your soul's heaviness. The tender worship and affection expressed, you begin to connect with Him but as you begin to meditate you become conscious of Him and you start to experience loving Him. It's the most wonderful, wonderful thing to just experience loving God and most people don't do it. They're too busy. They close their eyes and see bad pictures, so we've got to paint those pictures out with the blood of Jesus and allow our heart to focus and connect with God.
You need the experience of God, not just knowing about Him, and as you begin to discipline and allow your life, train your life to picture truth, you can take scriptures - you could take this one with the Prodigal Son, and begin to just meditate on it and begin to put yourself in the picture, see it and imagine what that must have been like. Begin to look for the details in it, ask the Holy Spirit who reveals Jesus to reveal the heart of God in that story, and then see yourself like that son going to the father. It's extraordinary how scripture, as we meditate in it, can just come alive and begin to engage God. It's wonderful. I've been in some of these scriptures then just began to weep. I could feel what that man felt and see, so if we're going to love God whole-heartedly I must train my mind to focus for periods of time and meditate so I can engage with God. What you focus on, you open yourself to. We live in a culture which is full of technical wizards really, all sorts of wizardly, but here's the problem. It dilutes your capacity to imagine and to see and to connect in a very real way with God.