Worship 102: The Root Of Worship

I could write another whole article about what I think worship is, or I could just tell you this: Love God and love others. Unfortunately, I talked to the publisher, and he can’t enlarge the font size big enough to make “Love God and love others” fill up the entire page, so you will have to read my article again. My sincere apologies.

Seriously though, Jesus describes in Matthew 22:37-39, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.” So, if you had any doubts before, this IS the “greatest commandment”—this IS the most important thing we can possibly do as human beings! And so it follows that this should be the root of all we do, including worship.

So let’s take apart “worship” and put it back together, so to speak.

Why do we worship God? We already figured out that we worship Him because we love Him.

So what exactly IS worship? Well, I guess worship is anything we do that we do because we love God.

Read that again! Despite being a tongue twister, that still seems a lot easier than what most people think when they try to define worship. What’s the deal? I think the deal is that it’s just not as complicated as we can sometimes make it out to be. There are different forms of worship, different ways we worship God, and over these people will continue to debate, churches will continue to separate, ministries will strive to stay “relevant”, and on and on. But in the midst of this diversification of worship styles (which I will surely address in a future article) we may have lost track of the fact that the root of worship, what worship actually IS, is something very important, something very permanent, and something very simple: love God. You see, there are a few specific instructions in the Bible about how we should show God that we love Him—how we should worship—that further define that word (for a future article). But, outside of those Biblical instructions, whichever style or form of worshiping God one chooses to adopt, in terms of corporate worship, personal preferences for style, and so on, is simply still just a style.

To clarify, say for instance that you decide to worship at a charismatic church. My first suggestion for you would be to not assume that you have found the “right” way to worship, rather to assume that you have found the way that suits you best. (Don’t get me wrong; I’m trying not to be relativistic. Indeed, some denominations or styles of worship may be more correct than others in terms of Biblical truth, but I would go so far as to say that none is perfect—every one of them has something wrong somewhere… that is indeed my entire reasoning for trying to get back to the basics here!) So, moving on from there, my next suggestion would be to ask yourself, “Is this the style of worshiping God that helps me love Him, and learn to love Him better?” Because if not, you can still call it worship, but it’s not really.

I can’t say it enough! I think we may have lost track of what worship is, because there seems to be so many choices, most claiming to be the right one, but they are all choices about style, not choices about the root of worship! Here is my final “pearl of wisdom”—it reminds me of eating Chinese food. See, the point of eating Chinese food is… to eat Chinese food. But you can choose between several ways of eating the food. Some would choose to eat it with a fork. Some “offbeat” people maybe with a spoon. Those who can will probably eat it with chopsticks. And in some parts of the world they will eat with their hands. But the reason behind all those different ways of eating the Chinese food is, again, to eat the food! If the person loses track of that goal, that reason, he will just start clicking his chopsticks around in the air. Soon, everybody will start clicking their chopsticks around in the air and it will become the normal thing to do. And then, after a period of time, most people will be clicking their chopsticks, stabbing the air with their forks and spoons, and waving their hands in the air (oops), and it will be a nice show of “air-eating”, but they forgot that the whole point of their various motions what to eat the Chinese food in the best way suited to them. And they will starve, because the important part was the eating part, not the “how to eat it” part.

If you would like to discuss this further, or if this doesn’t seem to make any sense, you can always write me at dan@realworship.com or see our website at www.realworship.com and I would love to hear from you! Now please, go and love God, and do everything you do out of your love for God and others, and in doing so, live a life of worship! God bless!