(The Worship Series, part 1)
What do you think of when you hear the word worship? Most people think of singing. This is why we have worship songs, not worship poems. Worship leaders lead others in singing, not painting. When we say, “The worship was good today,” we’re usually referring to the songs, not the sermon.
It’s not wrong to think of singing as worship—it can and often does involve singing. But it reaches far beyond. Worship does not always mean singing, any more than singing is always worship. There are a thousand things more than singing that can be worship. In a church service, listening to the sermon, giving to the offering, and taking Communion are just as much worship as singing and praying. Creating a work of art can be an act of worship; so can doing a household chore or task at work. Just about anything can be an act of worship if we view it as such and offer it to God. We need to stop drawing so many lines between sacred and secular, between everyday and Sunday. Every day is holy. Every breath is a gift. We must learn to recognize God’s truth and grace everywhere they are found and respond accordingly.
These words from “The Heart of Worship” come to mind: “I’ll bring You more than a song / For a song in itself / Is not what You have required / You search much deeper within / Through the way things appear / You’re looking into my heart / I’m coming back to the heart of worship / And it’s all about You / It’s all about You, Jesus.”1
Amen. It truly is all about Him. And God wants so much more than our songs. Yes, He loves to hear us sing His praise, but even more, He wants our hearts. As Samuel told Saul, “Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22 ESV).
Worship involves a deeper kind of sacrifice and offering. Psalm 51:17 (ESV) tells us, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” We must humbly acknowledge our weakness, our sinfulness, and our desperate need for God and let Him fill our hearts so we can carry His grace to others. We must give up our sins and let God replace them with His holiness. Worship also involves surrender. It means yielding our desires and plans to God’s will. He is honored when we offer Him the broken pieces of our lives.
So what is worship? It is our response to what we see of God. Worship is giving God the glory He deserves. It means recognizing His worth, putting weight on His presence, and standing in awe of His majesty. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth expounds on this: “Worship is a believer’s response to God’s revelation of Himself. It is expressing wonder, awe, and gratitude for the worthiness, the greatness, and the goodness of our Lord. It is the appropriate response to God’s person, His provision, His power, His promises, and His plan.”2
the worship He seeks
God desires worship that is holy, humble, heartfelt, and habitual.
Holy
The Lord wants worship that flows from those who are pure and cleansed from sin. Psalm 24:3–4 (ESV) says, “Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.” The Lord hates hypocritical worship. He wants our hearts to be devoted to Him, not distracted and divided by other loves. He does not want us to worship and adore Him while harboring idols and hiding sins. Since purity of heart can only be attained by the blood of Jesus, we must ask Him to cleanse our hearts so we can offer Him the worship He desires.
Humble
True worship comes from a heart on its knees. It is characterized by holy boldness, the honor and love children feel toward a good father. We approach God with a kind of fear, but the only reason we can come to Him at all is because of His love. Worship involves acknowledging that He is God and we are not. He is our Creator, and we are His creatures. He is our Father, and we are His children. He is our Redeemer, and we are those He has saved. He is so much higher than us. This is why the writer of Hebrews exhorts us to “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (12:28b-29 ESV).
Heartfelt
A few years ago, I heard a sermon where the pastor reminded us that when it comes to singing praise to God, it’s not about talent. It’s about the heart. I know I can think of musical expressions of praise that may have lacked talent, but emanated from a sincere heart and were therefore beautiful outpourings of worship. We are to give Him our best, but we can only give the best of what we have. So pour your heart into worship regardless of whether you think you are talented or not.
Habitual
Worship isn’t supposed to be something we only do once a week at church. Instead, it’s to be a state we live in that breathes the peace and power of God’s presence into our daily lives.
True worship isn’t man-made; it starts with God and flows back to Him. Which means we can’t make it happen, because it begins and ends with God. We can create an atmosphere that lends itself to worship, but we cannot make God move. We can prepare our hearts for worship by jettisoning thoughts that distract, but we cannot take the credit for a heart of worship.3 The Holy Spirit is the one who inspires us to worship in the first place.
Since worship is the unforced overflow of a heart overwhelmed with joy, you don’t need to try to work up a worshipful spirit if it’s a struggle. What you need is to catch a glimpse of who God is, and worship will be a natural result.
why we worship
Now that we’ve pondered what worship is, let’s consider why we worship: because the Lord is worthy and because we were made to. Worship is our natural response to something or someone that we think is good, true, beautiful, or all of the above. As the ultimate good, true, and beautiful One and the source of all good things, the Lord is worthy of our praise. Worshiping Him is expressing wonder in the presence of beauty beyond description and truth that proves every lie a phantom and goodness without compare.
We worship because God wants us to. If you think this sounds unloving of God, you’re not alone. I found something John Piper wrote about this to be helpful:
. . . Most of us have grown up thinking that being loved means being made much of. Our whole world seems to be built on this assumption. If I love you, I make much of you. I help you feel good about yourself. It is as though a sight of the self is the secret of joy.
But we know better. Even before we come to the Bible, we know this is not so. Our happiest moments have not been self-saturated moments, but self-forgetful moments. There have been times when we stood beside the Grand Canyon, or at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, or viewed a stunning sunset over the Sahara, and for a fleeting moment felt the joy of sheer wonder. This is what we were made for. Paradise will not be a hall of mirrors. It will be a display of majesty. And it won’t be ours.
If this is true, and if Christ is the most majestic reality in the universe, then what must his love to us be? Surely not making much of us. That would not satisfy our souls. We were made for something much greater. If we are to be as happy as we can be, we must see and savor the most glorious person of all, Jesus Christ. . . . Love is the labor―whatever the cost―of helping people to be enthralled with what will satisfy them most, namely, Jesus Christ. That is how Jesus loves.4
On the other hand, some think it’s self-centered to worship God because of what He has done for us. John Ensor counters this line of thinking by saying that “this advice is nowhere encouraged or demonstrated in the Bible. Instead, what we find are multiple examples that encourage us to love God for his benefits. Psalm 103:2 goes even further: “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” . . .This is not mercenary. It is God-glorifying. . . . God is to be praised and glorified as our Father―our provider, the giver of good gifts”5 (emphasis original). So we worship God both for who He is and what He has done.
worshipers wanted
Worship is the response of our heart to what we see of God’s heart. It is to be holy, humble, heartfelt, and habitual. It begins and ends with God. We worship God for who He is and always will be, for what He has done, and for what He can and will do. Worship is where heaven meets earth—it’s a taste of the life to come and a reminder of things unseen.
This is the worship God desires. These are the worshipers He seeks. Are we among the ones He finds?
- Matt Redman, “The Heart of Worship,” © 1999 Kingsway’s Thankyou Music / PRS.
↩︎ - Nancy Leigh DeMoss (now Wolgemuth), A Place of Quiet Rest (Moody: 2000), 194. ↩︎
- An aside: if you find it hard to participate in the singing at your church because you don’t like the music, please try to exercise grace (unless, of course, you have Biblical grounds for rejecting the music at your church). Matt Merker writes about this (emphasis original),
If we refuse to sing because the music is not up to our standards, we rob God of the glory he deserves. . . . The question is, Will we set aside our preferences to sing because we are ravished by the all-consuming delight of God’s infinite beauty?
. . .Even if you don’t like the style of the music, singing is a way we “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). When your church gathers, there are dear brothers and sisters in nearby pews facing anxiety, cancer, depression, temptation, unemployment, loneliness―the list could go on. One of the ways God intends to encourage them is through your singing. In this sense, Christ has enlisted every church member to join the choir. Singing is part of your ministry.
. . .[The Lord] is sovereign, not me. He can use a song I do not like to bless his people. What a freeing truth that is to embrace.
(Matt Merker, “Help! I Don’t Like the Music at My Church”; Crossway; crossway.org/articles/help-i-dont-like-the-music-at-my- church/ ; February 27, 2021).
↩︎ - John Piper, The Passion of Jesus Christ (Wheaton, Illinois; Crossway Books, 2004), 117.
↩︎ - John Ensor, The Great Work of the Gospel (Wheaton, Illinois; Crossway Books, 2006), 180.
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