Yesterday evening the topic at Mack was Worship: God Transforms, the penultimate in the Mapping the Infinite series. The idea of “worship” is one that seems very strange to most people today, conjuring up images of wearing strange clothes and funny hats, whilst singing songs so sycophantic that they’d put Uriah Heep to shame. And what kind of egomaniac must God be if he wants us to make all that song and dance about him?
Someone asked this exact question in a discussion on the soon-to-be-closed Doctor Who Forum. Because we were thinking about this in church, and since my response on the Forum will soon be deleted, here’s the explanation I gave of what worship involves:
“Worship” involves the recognition of the worth of something. We tend to think of “worship” in the sense of singing hymns or songs, or bowing down in front of statues, or grovelling obsequiance, but this is a rather limited and misleading understanding of worship.
In the broad sense, everything we do is worship. Everything we do is motivated by considering certain things to be “worthy”. For example, we Doctor Who fans “worship” Doctor Who in the sense that we devote time, money and effort to this television show, because we think it is worth watching and discussing and so on.
The question for each of us is not whether you will worship, but what will you worship. You might worship pleasure, or family, or achievement, or liberty, or beauty, or whatever. All of those things have their place, of course. But whatever is most fundamentally important to you is your god, in the general sense.
If you believe the God of the Bible to be infinitely and wonderfully loving, to be the mysterious being where goodness, beauty and truth are one, to have become human to make himself known, died to save us and conquered death to bring us life, and will one day transform the cosmos, then praising God is an entirely natural response, like enthusing over a beautiful sunset or getting excited about a Steven Moffat episode of Doctor Who.
More broadly, worshipping God doesn’t just mean singing songs or going to church services – though if God really is as amazing as Christians believe, then that’s something worth singing about, and worth getting together to celebrate. Rather, worship means living life in a way that puts God first, that shows that he is what matters most to you above anything else.
Worshipping God doesn’t mean that you consider everything else worthless, of course. Putting God first gives proper place to everything else. Christians should enjoy the pleasures of the physical world as gifts from God. We’re able to enjoy creation all the more because God created it and gives it as a gift to us. But worshipping God means believing that loving and knowing and following God is better than anything else, and so it’s worth sacrificing these lesser things for the sake of God if a conflict arises.
Worship takes place in the whole fabric of life, from working diligently, to small acts of kindness, to life-changing decisions. Worship is a whole life enjoyed and lived in gratitude and praise to God.
