Worship Is Not All About Us.
How many times have you attended a church service and yet came and went unchanged? This happens to us all the time, including me. We go to hear a sermon that includes a few intriguing ideas that make us feel good. We listen to a prayer, or two if we're lucky, where we bring our needs to God. We sing a few songs that hopefully generate a personal emotional response and attend our present needs. And then on the way home evaluate the experience as if our consumption was the center of the whole experience. And therein lies the problem.

Worship is not all about us. It's actually about God. It's about seeing God for who he is in contrast with ourselves. It's about elevating his name, receiving his grace, and recommitting our lives to him. It's about recentering our lives around God and not him centering around us or our issues. In worship, we recenter remembering he is God, and we are not. Worship is not about God meeting our needs at all, even though he is eager to do so when we come to worship him. David's secret in his most challenging moments was spending the time in worship of God. It was here that he time after time encountered the majesty, power, and love of God. It was his place to refresh, recommit, and reenergize his leadership and bring himself low to his high God.

What can we learn from David about worship?
There is so much we can learn from David about worship just read the Psalms regularly. In fact, reading a Psalm every day would be good for your worship. In them, we see David's transparency with God and some of his most personal and private journal musings. In them, we also see how in this worship his heart moved from despair to hope through open emotional conversations. And in them, we see that David practiced devotions in the morning and at night before he slept, so his day was bracketed by worship that elevated God and de-elevated himself.

Worship is exposure of self to God. In worship, God doesn't change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But in worship, we do change as we spend time in his presence. In worship, we learn to trust more, love more, and be less. Be intentional in practicing real worship rather than going through the motions: Sundays and every day.