What is Worship?
Worship, it’s a word that I seem to hear used in a wide variety of contexts and often with little clarity given as to what it means. It is a word that many Christians might use in a sentence such as “I am going to church to worship.” or “We will now have a time of worship” or perhaps “That CD is in our praise and worship section.” or even “That girl is a worship leader at my church.” At a glance this might not seem out of place, especially to those of us who have been bumming around churches long enough to know what it is that people are getting at when they say these things. But do we actually understand what worship is and how we worship God?
A quick flip through my copy of Webster’s English Dictionary (I know it’s Australia and I should be using a Macquarie Dictionary but whatever) tells me that worship is:
(n)a religious reverence or homage; an act or ceremony of showing reverence; adoration.
This notion of worship held by many says that worship is something religious I do to show how amazed I am with God. It appears to me that it is from this understanding of worship that we associate attending church as ‘worship’ or singing as ‘a time of worship’, that is I go to church and sing to show God how amazed I am at him and what he has done.
But if we are Christians it is of prime importance that we turn to the Bible in order to understand how God describes worship. A quick flick through the New Bible Dictionary tells me that while there is an extensive vocabulary of worship in the Bible, the essential concept is ‘service’. In fact the word that the Bible uses as worship is the same word that originally referred to the work that was done by slaves or hired servants.
Slaves and servants were paid for and then had to work accordingly. Likewise for us:
But … you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, Romans 6:22
If we are God’s slaves then our service of him is to be twenty-four seven. Worshipping God is not something that we do for a couple of hours on a Sunday or any other time I happen to feel like it, it is our life.
Now that we have established what it means to worship God and when we are to worship God we must answer the question: How do we worship God? Again the answer lies in the Bible:
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. Romans 12:1
What is the way that Christians are to worship God? By surrendering our lives to him and living under his authority. We are to look at how God tells us we are to live and to do it.
Some may say ‘I like to worship God in my own way’ and describe the various ways they please God such as: yoga, dancing or getting in tune with nature. But if you are ignoring how God has said he is to be worshipped then you are ignoring God and doing no better than someone who claims not to worship God. The idea of god that exists in your head cannot save you, only God who has revealed himself in the Bible can.
But you may say I worship God by going to church, helping the poor or singing. Some of these may indeed match up with how Christians are meant to be living their lives but if you refuse to submit your entire life to Christ then you are not worshipping God, no matter how well you may scrub up on the outside. If you are still in rebellion against God then you cannot worship him.
Getting back to our use of the word worship, if Christian worship is submitting our entire lives to God, then why do we use it as a synonym for singing or going to church? Yes I am worshipping God while doing these things but no more or less than at any other time.
[Lachlan Orr]
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