Unlocking the Heavens: Release the Supernatural Power of Your Worship (15 page)

We are living in the last days, and the “fullness of the Gentiles” (Romans 11:25) is upon the Church. The Lord is raising up a people out of every tribe, tongue, kindred, and nation. According to Revelation 5:9-10, this remnant of believers shall stand before the throne of the Lamb singing new songs and playing instruments as they collectively worship Jesus after the order of David’s tabernacle. In these last days, the Church must grasp the key of David—the key of worship—as never before. This is the key that unlocks the heavens. Believers need a baptism of discernment so they can sense the present season and understand what to do as demonic activity increases throughout the world and Church.

Worship is so much more than a Sunday morning event—it is a weapon of spiritual warfare and a key to the end-time harvest!

Chapter 13

BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created
(R
EVELATION
4:11 KJV)
.

W
ith an understanding of the spiritual dynamics of worship and the emergence of the tabernacle of David in the last days, we are ready to look at the kind of worship God likes and at why it is so important to be concerned with His particular taste more than with our own. With all of the modern worship wars that debate style and taste, many Christians have never taken the time to gain insight from the Word concerning the kind of worship God Himself enjoys. The purpose of the believer’s life is to bring the Lord pleasure! “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Revelation 4:11 KJV). We should be more concerned with what the King desires and enjoys than with what we desire and enjoy. Worship is not about us. It is about Him.

When we make worship an earthbound, horizontal experience only, we remove power from worship. Worship should be primarily vertical in its expression. The purpose of worship is the connecting of earth with the heavens—deep calling unto deep. As was the cross, true worship is like a crucible, a place or situation in which different elements interact to produce something new.

Jesus said when He was asked about the most important commandment in the Scripture:

The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these
(Mark 12:29-31 NRSV).

In other words, our vertical position of worship, which expresses our love for God, directly affects our horizontal position in life, which is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. God has told His children, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33 NRSV). Prayer and worship make the transaction possible; they bring Heaven down to earth.

DAY AND NIGHT WORSHIP

To discover what and how God desires worship, we must look to the tabernacle of David. As we have learned, David’s tent was characterized by worship through songs and instruments, day and night. The tabernacle of David was a place of unceasing prayer, praise, and proclamation, and any study of the book of Psalms should penetrate far beyond the theological truths to include the realm of psalms as music. Most of the psalms in the book of Psalms were birthed in David’s tent.

In the headers of the psalms, the names of three individuals appear consistently: Heman, Asaph, Jeduthun. First Chronicles chapters 15 and 16 identify these three men as the main directors of the Levitical ensembles. Heman was the lead singer. Asaph was the choir director. Jeduthun, also referred to as Ethan, was the musical director, the man who was in charge of the musical instruments. Each of them had his place in the tabernacle based on his specific anointing.

According to First Chronicles 16, Heman and Jeduthun were the leaders who were responsible for the sounding of the trumpets and cymbals and for the playing of the other instruments for sacred songs:

Every morning and evening they offered burnt offerings on the altar of burnt offerings, following the rules written in the Teachings of the Lord, which he had given Israel. With them were Heman and Jeduthun and other Levites. They were chosen by name to sing praises to the Lord because his love continues forever. Heman and Jeduthun also had the job of playing the trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments when songs were sung to God…
(1 Chronicles 16:40-42 NCV).

The notation under the title of Psalm 88 attributes its authorship not to David, but rather to Heman the Ezrahite, calling it “a psalm of the sons of Korah.” The name
Heman
means “faithful” in Hebrew.

Appropriate for someone who gathered the people to worship, the name
Asaph
means “God has gathered” in Hebrew. Twelve psalms (Psalm 50 and Psalms 73-83) carry the name
Asaph
at the beginning, and this can mean either that Asaph wrote them (or transcribed them for King David) or that they belong to a collection under his name and would have been performed in a certain style.

Skilled musicians and some lovers of music have noticed that certain songs seem to have more power in specific keys. Likewise, certain songs have different degrees of anointing based on the instruments or the vocalists involved. David understood this instinctively. He had a sense of sound, and he knew how to create it for particular situations or needs. He demonstrated this knowledge when his skillful harp-playing calmed the evil spirits that tormented King Saul: “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23 KJV). The sound of the harp music soothed Saul’s spirit and repelled the demonic spirit that had assaulted him.

So we see that David had a unique understanding about the power of music, worship, and sound, and we can learn much from him.

POWER OF SOUND

Within the Body of Christ, little is understood about the power of sound. That is why I say that we need to “break the sound barrier” within the Church. Sound matters to God—specifically, the musical sounds attached to the worship of God.

David understood something about the power of a song when he used certain styles of music to produce a specific sound. As I have already noted in Chapter 12, the songs we know as the psalms carry notations that indicate what kinds of musical sounds best match with the words to make them pleasing to God.

God loves a harmonious noise! Take a look at this familiar picture of Heaven: “And I heard a voice from heaven, like the voice of many waters, and like the voice of loud thunder. And I heard the sound of harpists playing their harps. They sang as it were a new song before the throne, before the four living creatures, and the elders…” (Revelation 14:2-3). The volume and range of the sounds in Heaven probably rival the thundering power of Niagara Falls close up. If you have ever traveled to the base of Niagara Falls on one of those tour boats, you know that besides being very wet, it is very
loud
there. In fact, you can scream at someone next to you and they can’t hear you. The water is crashing down and the air is too full of all of the possible sound frequencies already.

It will be just as loud in Heaven or louder, but at least nobody will need to ask questions or discuss anything anymore. Every frequency of sound will be occupied with lifting up the name of God. The angels will be flying to and fro as every tribe, tongue, kindred, and nation will be praising God forever and ever.

We must understand that God is not looking for just any sound; He’s looking for
His
sound. He’s looking for the sound that originates in Heaven, reflected back to Him by his worshipping people. Whenever we can find and reproduce that sound—and I do not mean one single note but any of an endless variety of notes and styles—God moves on the earth. That is how we get a little more of Heaven on earth.

The new Heaven and new earth will in the future once again become a place filled with the sounds of joyful worship:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God
(Revelation 21:1-3 KJV).

SOUND THERAPY

Our instruments are tuned to “A-440” standard. This means that your eardrum picks up 440 pulses for the “A” note that is above middle C. The human ear cannot pick up ultra-high-frequency sounds or extra-low-frequency sounds, although such sounds can have an unseen effect on your body. If you go low enough, you can only
feel
the sound as your heart skips a beat.

Genetic scientists have been using sound to code the proteins of living cells. By assigning a musical note to each protein instead of the more traditional letters of the alphabet, they can “play” the music and make comparisons. This is from a report titled, “Your DNA Is a Song: Scientists Use Music to Code Proteins,” by John Roach in
National Geographic News
on October 21, 2005:

All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can consist of dozens to thousands of them.

Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of text letters. Clark and her colleagues assign musical notes to the different values of the amino acids in each sequence. The result is music in the form of “protein songs.”

By listening to the songs, scientists and students alike can hear the structure of a protein. And when the songs of the same protein from different species are played together, their similarities and differences are apparent to the ear.

“It’s an illustration transferred into a medium people will find more accessible than just [text] sequences,” Clark [Mary Anne Clark, a biologist at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth] said. “If you look at protein sequences, if you just read those as they are written down, recorded in a database, it’s hard to get a sense for the pattern.”

In a similar set of experiments, when human genes are assigned specific notes, they seem to be playing a melody. When the music of a typical healthy strand of DNA is played, it sounds soothing and harmonic. On the other hand, a diseased strand of DNA grows more dissonant as its signal becomes less healthy. Scientists are using this technique to help discover and predict disease developments. Here is what one researcher discovered, as reported in “A Musical Score for Disease,” by Jennifer Chu (in
Biomedicine News
, July 18, 2008):

Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School…is developing a computer program that translates protein and gene expression into music. In his acoustic translation, harmony represents good health, and discord indicates disease….

Searching for a more simplified way to represent the complex library of information inherent in gene expression, Alterovitz decided to represent those changes with music. He hopes that doctors will one day be able to use his music to detect health-related changes in gene expression early via a musical slip into discord, potentially improving a patient’s outcome.

Much as with sound therapy for the human body, God seems to be retuning the Body of Christ to the original sound of Heaven. Astronomers have even created the sounds of the universe (actually converted from X-ray signals). This brings to mind the words of one of David’s psalms:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies announce what his hands have made
.

Day after day they tell the story; night after night they tell it again. They have no speech or words; they have no voice to be heard. But their message goes out through all the world; their words go everywhere on earth…
(Psalm 19:1-4 NCV).

Think about it—Davidic worship always reappeared in every revival mentioned in the Old Testament. And every revival in world history engendered a specific sound or style of music that marked the moving of the Spirit. I believe that as the Church comes into more complete alignment with the sounds of Heaven, there will be a mighty outpouring of God’s Spirit in the earth. It appears that another revival of the sound of the tabernacle of David is being released in the earth today, and I want all of us to be part of it.

PSALMS, HYMNS, SPIRITUAL SONGS

The Church needs to break the sound barrier! There is a new sound that God desires to release in the Body of Christ right now. With the release of that new sound will come a fresh anointing that will break forth in a powerful revival.

As every worship leader prepares to lead worship, he needs to seek God about specific keys, colors, vocalists, instruments, and styles. All of these factors in combination are keys to releasing a sound that pleases the heart of God and produces a symphony between Heaven and earth. Just as we can choose to pray or sing in our native languages or we can pray or sing in tongues, so we can choose to make worshipful sounds with our own understanding or we can rely on the Holy Spirit to give us both words and tunes. When you speak out in prayerful words that are infused with the Spirit of God, you are singing a new song to Him. You are breaking off the power of old sounds, so to speak, and ushering in the heavenly sounds that bring healing and joy.

The Church needs to take worship out of the religious box and explore the sounds of the Spirit realm. Worship is not about a specific style or taste; it is about discovering what brings God pleasure. More than once in his epistles, Paul explains what authentic New Testament worship is; it consists of “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” Here are his words: