Worship Defined

I have been thinking a lot lately about the quality of my worship. When I begin to think about one aspect of something it usually leads to a process which causes me to think about all other aspects of the same thing. So, as I thought about the quality of my worship I had to go on to think about the concept of worship as a whole.
Worship can be directed at anything or anyone, and often is. We as humans were created to worship, and if we are not properly directed to the truly deserving object of worship we will fill that need by giving ourselves to something completely incapable of accepting it. Worship, in its truest form, is voluntary. It is a gift to be accepted, and cannot be coerced or it is not worship. In the same way worship based on addiction is not truly worship. Worship is given without thought of what we will get in return. These same qualities should mean that worship can only be offered to a sentient being, yet it is one of our greatest human failings that we offer it to simple objects of our desire with the thought that we will somehow be compensated.
So in the end our worship becomes more about us than it does about anything else. It becomes a means to satisfy our own need instead of the gift it was intended to be.
I am reminded of the first line of a book titled “The Purpose Driven Life”, by Rick Warren.
No matter if you like the book itself the first line is so applicable that you cannot help but wonder what else he’s going to say after that.
The very first sentence of chapter one states this:
“It’s not about you.”
And that is the essence of Worship properly directed.
My problem with my worship began when I unconsciously began to treat it as a form of entertainment.
I ostensibly come to share my love of the risen, living Lord, Jesus Christ, with others of the same belief.
The reality of my presence there became something entirely different, and wrong.
I came to realize that I was sitting there waiting for everything to penetrate the walls of my discontent. I offered nothing. I refused to accept any responsibility for my worship.
We are called in scripture to “present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God which is your spiritual service of worship.” (Romans 12:1).
Worship is a sacrifice, and I am considered an acceptable sacrifice, therefore, all of my life is an acceptable sacrifice of worship.
He wants it all, the good and the bad. He wants our sin and our bitterness as well as our happiness. Christ says that He will take our burdens for a reason. He wishes us to be able to reach a point in our living worship; worship that occurs in every moment of our lives, in which we can reach that level of joy that occurs when we focus exclusively on Him.
The worship service is not meant to entertain. It is not even meant to educate.
The worship service is a place in which we can corporately offer sacrifice together.
The musicians offer their sacrifice with the music they play. That is what musicians have to offer Him as a result of the gifts He has blessed them with. That’s what our gifts are for.
The rest of the body joins in that sacrifice.
The pastor offers his or her sacrifice in the message they bring. The sermon is his sacrifice to God, and it is not my place to criticize it unless it is contrary to scripture. To sit there and say, “so and so really needs to hear this”, is merely a pretense to avoid applying our convictions to our own lives. Search for the meaning that applies to you instead, and live by example for other eyes to see. It is not my place to apply His word to someone else. I am not the Holy Spirit for anyone’s life.
If you do not think you are “getting enough” from the sermon remember that you have a responsibility in worship. You yourself are obligated to dig into the Word to establish and maintain the proper relationship with Christ. It is not up to anyone else to spoon feed you. It is for you to be discerning. In the book of Acts when the people of Berea heard the gospel for the first time they took time to study the scriptures before they accepted (Acts 17:11). They thought about what they were going to believe.
Others fulfill their sacrifice in other ways and with other gifts.
I was attending a worship service at my brother’s church several years ago. There was a young man there who was an usher. His name was Robert. He appeared to have cerebral palsy, or a similar condition, that affected his ability to walk normally. When he walked he looked as though he might fall over with each step, he was overjoyed to be there. Everyone he saw got a hug whether he knew them or not, including myself.
After the service began the time came to collect the offering, and the ushers came forward.
To my surprise one of them was Robert. He held an offering plate in his hand as he came forward. He still looked like he might fall over as he walked, but as I watched I realized his steps were as sure as mine ever were. He was not bitter over what I saw as a disability. In fact I never saw him without a smile on his face.
I never saw or talked to him again, but I have never forgotten him. His sacrifice was complete and undiluted. It was as though it was a natural extension of his life.
His worship was what he did, and my opinion of his ability meant nothing because he was there to offer his worship to God regardless of anyone else’s sense of “rightness”, or “perfection”. His act of worship was pure and whole and to this day it puts mine to shame.
I once read a book in which the writer used an exercise to help him concentrate more fully on God and His will for his life. He imagined that God Himself was in the air he was breathing. He imagined that the essence of God filled his lungs. I tried to imagine the same thing. To think of the possibility of allowing God to fill me so completely as to be completely dependent on Him to sustain me physically as well as spiritually.
It follows logically that if I “breathe God” then the words I speak with the essence of God should naturally be in praise of Him or, at the very least, express His will for me in some way. It occurs more often than not, unfortunately, that my words are my own, with little enough thought given to what God intends.
There is an element of choice in the worship we offer that centers around the words “can” and “will”.
To say “I can” implies that I have the ability to do something.
To say “I will” implies that I choose to apply that ability.
And somewhere between the two lies the word “should” that implies the knowledge of what would be appropriate in my own worship.
God gives us a choice in our worship. I have a choice in my own worship, but none in the manner that others worship, and therefore no qualifications to judge theirs. If someone sings too loud or off key it doesn’t matter. Neither the quality of my voice nor the style of music is the issue.
The only valid concern in worship is the quality of my sacrifice.
When a child cries in worship we grow irritated at how it “disturbs the flow” if the child goes on too long without the parent taking them out. But if our worship is “not about us”, and we truly seek to focus on Christ, we should be able to continue in our worship. Do any of us honestly believe that God is offended by the cry of a baby? Would He demand that we require a parent to leave a worship service, because a baby was crying in just the way he or she was created to do?
Did David worship God any less during his fight with Goliath? Or Noah as he built the ark amidst the jeering crowd? How much easier should it be then for us to focus on God during worship with only a child’s cry in the background?
Why do you think Christ asks for your burdens? He asks because they are a part of you, and as such are important to Him. Your cries of frustration and pain are important to Him. He wants to take them from us in order to allow us the opportunity to worship Him fully.
We were created to worship Him. When we worship we are doing what we were created for.
We need to worship as though we know it is the one thing we were made to do.You might think since we were made for it that it would be the easiest thing on earth, and you would be right; this is how it should be. That is how we were in our original created state as humans. Before the Fall our human nature was to be fully focused on God.
After the apple was eaten our focus shifted to ourselves, and this is the reason our worship is now considered a sacrifice. True worship requires me to make a conscious effort to turn my back on the mirror, and pursue my original nature and purpose. It requires me to focus on the specific person of God rather than leaving my attention hanging for the next pretty bauble to capture me.
Instead of thinking about what we are not getting in our worship experience, we should be asking what God is not getting. Only I know what I am holding back from Him.
What are your expectations in worship? Remember that it is not your expectations that matter here, but His. Even though I may be there involved in a group, the act of my worship is still dependent on my individual personal relationship with Christ. When I am sitting there in worship it should be as though Christ is sitting in a chair directly in front of me, the complete focus of all my senses. Even though I am there with others I am still alone in the sacrifice of worship. I still have the choice of what I give Him.

Our God is not a “beggar” King longing for the scraps and crumbs that we leave at the table of our worship. His existence does not depend on whether we believe in Him or not. He wants it all, and in the context of worship that is “not about me” what He receives should be all that is me. If He is truly all sufficient, as we believers so often profess, then He is worthy of our complete attention.
We live in a world that demands that we pursue our individual desires at any cost. The cost we pay is usually the death of relationships that fall by the wayside when our pursuit of happiness becomes too frantic, and we find ourselves alone amidst the crowd of others doing the same thing. Then we blame God for our problem never realizing that if we had truly understood that it was never about us, it wouldn’t have happened.
We must deal with the truth in worship if it is to be true worship. God wrote the Truth on our hearts so we would always have access to what He offers, but we do everything we can to deny that truth. We wish to live as we choose and in avoiding His truth we live a lie and we become the masters of our own deception.
When we come before Him in worship the lie is more visible than at any other time, and so we deflect our lack of true worship with criticism of someone else’s worship rather than recognize the deficiencies of our own.
Worship is a result of relationship, and the quality of one directly affects the quality of the other.
I once heard a quote that I think sums this all up very nicely. From a man named Peter Forsyth:
“The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom, but its master.”
My worship identifies my master to everyone else, and He remains my master whether I am in church or not.
My greatest need is to let down the walls and actively seek Him.
Because it was never meant that He should come to me.
The choice for relationship with Him, and therefore my worship of Him, has always been mine.
©Dan Bode 2008