What is True Worship?

Matthew and Luke describe how the devil took Jesus to a high mountain and promised Him a high place
if He would just worship him, Satan, instead.

This was not an invitation to change styles of worship, to move from pipe organ to guitars. It was not a church ecclesiastical or corporate matter at all. It was private and personal. More importantly, it dealt with the fundamental question of ultimate allegiance: Whom do you serve?

This is where all questions about worship must properly begin. The critical issue is not the techniques of worship, or the traditions of worship. It is not even the experience of worship, but it is: Who is being worshipped, and who is worshipping.

If the heart of sinfulness is self-centeredness, the heart of all biblical religion is God-centeredness: in short, it is worship. In our fallenness, each of us constrict all there is to our own petty horizons. We think of all relationships in terms of their impact on us. Our daydreams circle around our own lives and circumstances; our goals and hopes invariably turn on our place in the universe.

Still, the demon SELF marches on. The sign that self is broken is true worship: God becomes the center, the focus of delight, the joyfully acknowledged King, the Creator, the Redeemer. In this sense, none but the transformed can truly worship, and they discover how much more transformation is still needed. So, all worship becomes an eschatological sign, a marker of what will be in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteous, when the children of God have been ‘glorified’ (Romans 8:30), and God is all in all. ~D. A. Carson

Worship in Spirit & Truth

John 4:23 But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth:

The phrase “worship in spirit” reflects that God is incorporeal and, therefore, is not ‘finally located’ in a building, not even in the Jerusalem temple. However, it is saying something even more, it says, “God is not like us, God is God.” They will worship this God who manifests Himself in the One who is, in fact, the truth, and that is Christian worship. It is not geographically bound. It is only temple related, as Jesus is the new temple.

Christian worship is foundationally God-centered. It is based on the Lamb, who is the Word made flesh, who is the true temple of God, the true sacrifice. That is the ground of our connection with the divine. In this connection, then, remember Jesus says, “The Father seeks true worshipers, and the true worshipers are those who worship in spirit and in truth.” He does not say he seeks true worship, but that He seeks true worshipers.

The big question concerning what we call worship is: What becomes of The Majesty of God in the Bible? It’s very difficult to maintain a sense of the bigness and the majesty of God if everything about the worship service is calculated to only be chummy, close, warm, touchy and feely, and “y’all come!”

From inception, worship has faced two challenges:

 Formalism that deifies external modes of ritual worship while mortifying any vital relationship with God.

 Freedom with spontaneity, which because of disarray and confusion fails to stimulate any serious encounter with the God who searches for true worshippers.

Evaluating Worship

The most common tendency restricts “worship” to what happens in a corporate setting when a number
of Christians gather together for “a service.”

As a result, the concept of worship may then be further restricted to what happens in only part of a ‘service.’ For example, “We have ‘worship’, and then we have a sermon.” We assign part of the service to a ‘worship leader’ or a ‘worship team’, and then another part to the ‘pastor’ ‘preacher’ or ‘minister’. Viewing worship only through that lens can result in Worship as having nothing to do with Christian life all through the week. It is regarded as tied only with corporate church service activity, during a designated hour or so.

Church Self-Focus

Often churches become so heavily focused on congregational worship, that we ignore the overwhelming tendency in the New Testament to associate “worship” terminology with the full range of Christian life, thought, and experience. At its worst, it narrows worship down to what we experience or do, or how we participate, or what we should sing, returning us to self-centeredness by another route.

If we’re not careful, worship is reduced to something we “rate” according to our degree of enjoyment. We draw this from our Western mindsets and the entertainment industry. We should remind ourselves that worship is a transitive verb. We don’t meet just to “experience” worship. We aim to worship God Himself!  “Worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.” This is the heart of the matter. In this area, as in so many others, we must not confuse what is central, with byproducts.

Biblical Worship

In evaluating Worship, the fact is that no questions can be responsibly answered apart from the careful articulation of biblical theology, which sorts out how the parts of the Bible hang together. Suddenly the subject of worship becomes complex. This is especially so, because the contemporary church has not disciplined itself to think in biblical-theological terms. What do YOU personally bring to worship God on Sundays, and each day of the week?