Worship. It seems like it should be the easiest concept for us to grasp. After all we all were created with the capacity to worship. God created us all to be able to worship freely. The ability is there, but often it is directed in the wrong direction. As humans we find ourselves worshipping other people, money, politics, possessions or even ourselves. We call home a world where worship is pointed in every direction except from where it should be.
Romans 1:25 ESV
…they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever!
Worship only works when its pointed in the right direction, when it’s vertically pointed towards God. He is looking for individuals and churches who will worship Him. Not because He needs us to, but because when we worship God we are choosing to fulfill the purpose for which we were created.
The most awesome part about this is that no one has to worship God. He allows us to choose whether we worship Him or not. When we make that choice our worship comes from the heart, not from a forced sense of obligation or fear. Each of us chooses where our worship is directed, at ourselves, towards people or possessions or towards God. Over the next week I want to spend some time on the subject of worship, because I believe it is an important function of us as individuals and as a church. So lets dive in now, and find out what is worship.
What is Worship?
Dictionary.com defines worship as
reverent honor and homage paid to God or a sacred personage, or to any object regarded as sacred.
The last part of the definition is often what gets us into trouble. “Any object regarded as sacred”. The problem is we easily can regard any object as sacred, like I mentioned earlier, we often get caught directing our worship in the wrong direction, because items, ideas and traditions often get substituted for worship towards God. Many times these are not evil or bad things, but once we set them up in place of God, and direct our worship towards them, than we begin to love them more than we love God. When we worship anything in place of God than it enslaves us. Worship of God brings freedom and joy. Worship of anything else chains us and robs our joy.
Our worship often falls short because we too often think of it as the 25 minutes Sunday morning when we sing songs and gather together. Worship is so much more than this time. Worship begins when we accept Jesus as Lord, and never ends. It’s a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, 365 day a year until the day you are called home to the Father! In short, worship is ongoing, and never ceasing. That means we have to worship with more than the songs we sing at church, but with our own words in our prayer times, with our own lives when we are at school, work or even the grocery store. Make the effort, and you will find that God is not hard to please. The effort we put into our worship means a lot to Him, when it comes from our hearts, it always pleases Him.
Worship is putting worth to someone or something. When’s the last time you thought about how much God is really worth to you?
Resonant Love 