What does worship mean for you? When you hear the word “worship”, what comes to your mind? Is it the act of singing? Is there a certain style of music that comes to your mind? Maybe, does the thought of some type of action like raising hands, dancing, kneeling, shouting come to your mind? Or is it a more lofty Gregorian chant or large cathedrals image that you get? Whatever you notice coming to the forefront of you mind when you think of worship, I would like you acknowledge that, take it off the shelf of your mind, and examine it a bit. I believe that worship is actually one of the most central and important topics to our Christian life. And it permeates through every fiber of our beings.
I think if a few years back you would have asked me this same question about worship, I would have thought about some very intimate times of personal times of playing guitar and singing what was on my heart as cries to God. I think I would have thought of some times of singing praises to God that truly impacted me. However, when I actually sat down to think about questions such as, “what is worship” or “give glory to God”, I really didn’t know how to answer how to define it. It seems like a simple, fundamental idea, but it’s actually very hard to pinpoint. I remember sitting down with my high school mentor who was also my youth pastor and we talked about these phrases. And I remember that he gave me the first definition of worship that I can remember. He said that worship was “ascribing worth to whom Worth is due.” To this day, I still remember that conversation and this first definition he gave me.
In fact, when I did some more research on my own, I found out that the actual root of the word “worship” comes from the combination of the words “worth” and “ship”. This means to ascribe or declare the worth of something. Or, to ascribe worth to whom worth is due. To put it in other words, it is to value something as most significant in our lives. Whatever we value most, whatever we order our lives around, whatever we can’t stop thinking about… this is what we worship.
We all worship something. This may be family, our loved ones, status, money, power, recognition, you name it. We were created to worship. That is how we are hardwired. So, when we speak about worship, we are talking about our core desires and values. If these core values are not aligned, our whole lives can easily spin out of line. We were made to place God at the center of our lives, and from this everything was meant to fall into order. But, we all know what happened in the garden with Adam and Eve when that spun out of wack. Then, the whole redemptive story comes into play where God relentlessly pursues his creation out of love. It culminates in Christ’s atoning sacrifice on our behalf allowing us to enter into a relationship with God.
God is the only one who is worthy of having the most prominent place in our lives. He alone is infinite, righteous, all-powerful God. And Christ has saved us from our sin by taking the penalty that we deserved for our sin. What can we do but offer Christ everything? When we value, cherish, and treasure Christ above all else in accordance with a true understanding of who He is as revealed in His word, any and all response to this is… worship.
True worship
Heart
First, I want to highlight the importance of worshiping God from the heart. God does not desire outward expressions of worship if they are not coming from our heart. In Matthew 15:8-9 Jesus says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me.” Jesus considers worship completely vain and utterly worthless, amounting to nothing if it is not from the heart. You can do as many good deeds as you would like, you can raise your hands in worship, or attend as many church functions and gatherings, but this will still amount to nothing in God’s eyes if it is not done from a heart that is in love with Jesus. In Psalm 51 it says “sacrifices and burnt offerings you have not accepted….” (look up)
A little while ago, I visited a mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. And at the mosque, our tour guide was telling us a bit about the Islam religion. He said they believe that there is one angel on each of your shoulders. One is counting up the good deeds and the other counting up the bad deeds. And when you come to the end of your life, your deeds will be measured in a balance and whichever one outweighs the other determines whether you will go to heaven or hell. He explained that there are five calls to prayer throughout the day, and in order to receive the most amount of points, you actually have to physically enter a mosque and pray during each one of those times. Every time you pray at a mosque, you receive 27 points. However, if you pray at home instead of at the mosque, you will only receive 1 point. He went on to say, that it’s actually not that hard at all. He said the first prayer in the morning only takes about 5 minutes, and the mid day prayer is about 10, the evening prayer is maybe 30minutes. But, it’s very easy to just get it done. This just seemed completely absurd to me!
This reminded me how this type of act is purely out of obligation. Their heart is not truly in it. But, God does not want mere acts! He wants our hearts.
Mind
True worship of God needs to be accurately based on who God is as revealed in His Word. If we don’t worship God in a way that reflects the truth of who he actually is, then we are just worshiping someone we made up—not the real God of the universe. And that certainly would not be pleasing to God. Jesus says in John 4:23-24, “true worshippers must worship the Father in spirit and truth.” What does this mean? I think this means that God desires worshippers who have a correct mental grasp of who He is—he wants us to worship Him in truth. This is why our muslim tour guide friend, even if he desired to worship God from the heart, would not be worshiping God in truth.
It is of utmost importance that we worship God for who He actually is. As John Piper put it, “If we worship an idol of our own creation, we are not really worshiping God.” And there is no way for us to know who God is apart from sitting with the God of the Bible and reading His Word. It is also extremely important to make sure we are interpreting and understanding the various aspects of God’s Word correctly. This is where turning to respected commentaries and people who have studied God’s Word in more depth can be very helpful.
Whole-Bodied
True worship involves not only our heart and our mind, but also our whole bodies. Romans 12:1 says, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” It is our spiritual worship to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
What does it mean to offer our bodies as a “living sacrifice”? This terminology refers back to the Israelite’s sacrificial system of offering sacrifices to God as atonement for sin. However, Paul specifies “living” sacrifices. God wants every part of the lives that we live to be a sacrifice to Him. As John Piper put it, “Let every act of your body in living be an act of worship. That is, let every act of our living body be a demonstration that God is your treasure. Let every act of your living body show that Christ is more precious to you than anything else. Let every act of your living body be a death to all that dishonors Christ.”
How does it look like to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to God? I think Paul gives a perfect example of this when he says, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” (Phil. 3:8) He no longer places any value or worth in his outer circumstances, but completely on the fact that he has Christ. This means suffering physical, bodily hardship for the sake of Christ. This means being more enamored with Christ than in what type of clothes we wear, car we drive, house we live in, things we have… and letting this be so true in our hearts that it is made visible through our actions and the way we live our lives. When we do this, we show to the ones around us that we value Christ more than world things. This is our spiritual worship.
Second, we are to present our bodies as “holy and acceptable to God”. This is extremely important. All of us who have come to faith in Christ have effectively put to death our sinful bodies (Gal. 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ”), we have been buried with Christ (Rom. 6:4). So, we must live in a completely different way than we did before. Romans goes on to say, “Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.” (Rom. 6:12-13) This is exactly what Paul is talking about in Romans 12 when he says that we ought to offer our bodies to God as a holy sacrifice. Since we have died to our old sinful habits and ways of life, and we know that those are the ways of darkness, how could we ever go on living in such a way? Our lives must look radically different than they did before we came to Christ. We must use the very members of our body as instruments for righteousness—do to things that are pleasing to God. Darkness has no part in light. Ephesians 5:7-10 says, “do not be partakers with them; for you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.” This exact same exhortation can be found in Gal. 5:16 “walk by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” and then it goes on to describe the exact deeds of the flesh (v.19-21) as apposed to the deeds of the Spirit (22-24). I could go on and on with examples from the Scripture that God wants us to live in our bodies in a way that is holy and acceptable to God. This is crucial to true worship of God. We can not worship God in a way that is pleasing to Him if our lives our still entangled in sinful habits of life.
Overflow of Worship
We’ve talked about the importance of our inner worship, specifically what is going on in our hearts and in our mind the way we live. But, what exactly does this worship look like in terms of outer expression?
Here are six way worship can look like:
- Spoken praise to God. Worship is praising God for who He is and what He has done in our lives through our conversations with others—this may be in a Sunday service, small group setting, or even on on one. It is also worship when we repent of evil deeds.
- Acts of service and love. Worship is when we love and sacrifice ourselves for others in a way that shows the supreme value of God. (Heb. 13:15-16)
- Physical expressions of joy in God. Worship is dancing and raising our hands in praise and kneeling in submission an adoration. When we are overjoyed with the incredible life-altering things God has done in our lives, how can keep still? We must raise our hands in worship or jump for joy.
- Lifting our voices in praise. Worship is praising God through singing and musical and artistic expression.
- Giving our money and time. Worship is when we choose to give God the first of our income through tithing as well as giving our time in doing Kingdom work.
- Enjoying being with God. Worship may simply look like going on a walk in nature and enjoying God’s creation. It may be sitting alone in a small room dedicated to meeting with God. It may look like falling asleep while conscious of being in God’s loving arms. Maybe it looks like singing worship music in the car.
Worship is everything that overflows out of us in speech and conduct when we are enamored with who Christ is and treasure Him above everything else.
When Moses returns from the top of mount Saini after spending 40 days and nights with God writing down the Law, his face was glowing….
How can we better be enamored with Christ then by spending time with Him.
The goal of this blog is to consciously refocus our worship on Christ. This starts from being enthralled with who He is and coming to a deeper understanding of Him. This starts with falling deeper in love with Christ and spending time with Him. My desire with this blog is to foster a deeper adoration for Christ and inspire us to true worship. My hope is that this would then overflow into exuberant personal and corporate praise of God through the words of our mouth, through song, and the way we live our daily lives.
