Worship the Lord in liberty, with uplifted hands!

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Lift up your holy hands
Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord. Psalm 134.

Lift up your holy hands
Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord. Psalm 134.

By Robin Sam

YEARS ago when I was a newbie in our church, I remember how restless and uptight I felt when praise and worship was on. I disliked being asked to stand up to sing during the worship session. I didn’t have the faintest idea what the worship leader meant when he often said ‘Worship the Lord with liberty.’

Coming from a traditional church background, to me liberty just didn’t seem to fit in with the concept of worship. But all that changed over time when the Spirit of God ministered to me, broke my misgivings, molded me and took me through various experiences – some sweet, others bitter but mostly uplifting.

Recently, I was rereading a book and I stumbled upon some delightful insight on the importance of worshiping God with liberty. And lifting up of hands had a lot to with the act of worship. I turned to my Bible to understand why lifting up of hands means a lot in praise and worship.

King David understood that to worship God is to seek an intimate encounter with Him. When he was in the wilderness of Judah, he longed to see God’s power and glory. His soul and flesh yearned for God’s loving kindnesswhile his lips were full of praises. Naturally, David lifted up his hands towards heaven. ‘Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name’ (Psalms 63:4).

Lifting up your hands is more than a mere physical activity when it is done in Jesus’ name.

The psalmist who wrote Psalm 134 knew the power of lifting up his hands in God’s presence. ‘Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord. The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion,’ he wrote in verses 2 and 3.

In the book of Lamentations during a time of great peril to Israel, Jeremiah sought the nation to intercede for itself in the only way it knew: ‘Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.’

A grief-laden heart had to be spent and a helpless pair of hands needed to be lifted up to God in prayer for Israel’s turnaround.

Things have not changed much since. When misfortunes strike us, when the future seems bleak and when there seems to be no fresh revelation from God, that’s when we need to worship the Lord. And be sure to lift up your hands to God.

Lifting up our hands signifies complete surrender on our part; we acknowledge the sovereignty of God and His supreme power over us and our situations.

Further, in Lamentations 3:41 Jeremiah said: ‘Let us lift up our heart with (our) hands unto God in the heavens.’ Lifting up of hands along with the heart also implies total adoration of the Lord of Hosts.

The Creator and only the Creator deserves our worship. The 24 elders mentioned in Revelations 4 understood this. That’s why they prostrated themselves before Him who sits on the throne and said: ‘Thou art worthy, OLord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.’

If you doubt that uplifted hands and a heart full of praise can bring deliverance in your situation, may I urge youto look up Exodus 17:11-13 in your Bible? In the battle against Amalekites, as long as Moses’ hands were held up, the Israelites had the upper hand. When his hands relaxed, the Amalekites gained the lead. Finally, Aaron and Hur stood on either of his side to hold his hands and thus Israelites beat Amalekites fair and square.

However, lifting up hands heavenward is not just an Old Testament feature. In 1 Timothy 2:8, Paul exhorted believers everywhere to lift up ‘holy hands, without wrath and doubting.’

In the book, ‘If nobody reaches nobody gets touched’, American evangelist Don Gossett says: ‘The lifting up of holy hands in prayer, praise and worship is God’s desire for us. Man’s order in religion is often ceremonial and ritualistic, after man’s tradition. But God’s order in worship is life, liberty and the lovely lifting up of our hands.’

Is your worship like that?

Robin Sam is the founding editor of The Christian Messenger newspaper. A journalist with 16 years of experience, he has worked with The Indian Express, Sify.com and Yahoo! besides several other publications. He quit his job in 2008 to get into full-time media ministry. You can contact him at editor [at] christianmessenger [dot] in or christianmessenger [dot] in [at] gmail [dot] com

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