This is something I shared with our youth recently and thought it might help others too. Worship is a topic that is very close to my heart. It is something that I am passionate about and enjoy doing. I have been involved in leading in “praise and worship” teams for some time now but I have always felt that the importance of worship has been undervalued.
I am convinced that there is so much more to worship than the times of musical worship we seem to box it into during our Sunday morning services. Or the worship moments of response that we set aside at our “prayer and worship” evenings. These are important elements of worship, yes, but not all that the term encompasses. And so I have spent a lot of time researching what the term worship really means and why it’s so important to anyone who calls them-self a christian.
Created to worship
In the beginning, God created people, Adam and Eve, man and woman, in his image. We were created to be like him, to be in relationship with him, walking with him in the garden of Eden.
“I have made them for my glory…It was I who created them”. (Isaiah 43:7)
Our primary purpose on this Earth is to love God, honour him and glorify him through obedience to his perfect plan for our lives.
The best definition that I have heard for worship is from Webster’s dictionary; To worship is to honour with extravagant love and extreme submission.
It’s to honour God by loving him with all we have and submitting all that we are to his commands and his purpose. Notice the use of the words “extravagant” and “extreme”! Worship isn’t a small, half-hearted effort. It isn’t just about singing songs to God in dedicated “worship” times (although this is one way we express worship and these times are important). Worship is a lifestyle of honour, praise and obedience.
But some time after their creation, Adam and Eve decided that rather than living in God’s plan for their lives, they were going to do things their own way. And the truth is, because we aren’t perfect either, we often decide that we know better than God and try and do things our own way too, often screwing up and making a ton of mistakes along the way! We end up hurting others and most of the time ourselves too.
Worship is simply that process of us coming back to the God who created us, loving him as we were designed to and re-committing ourselves to follow the plan He has for our lives, rather than our own.
The Greatest Commandment
When Jesus was asked “what is the greatest commandment” – what is the greatest thing that we need to do as human beings on this planet – he answered to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30). To love God with all we have (extravagant love) and to submit our heart, soul, mind and strength to him (extreme submission). He answered with the command to worship God – the purpose for which we were created!
This is what a lifestyle of worship looks like. It’s a reminder that everything comes from God and so everything must be offered back to God. In all things we do, God must be first – loving God must come first.
In Luke 14, Jesus says “If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else”. Jesus isn’t actually telling us to hate everyone – instead he is using a technique called hyperbole, which essentially just means an exaggeration to make a point that is not meant to be taken literally. He is making the point that we must love God so much, so enthusiastically, so vastly, that our love for others looks tiny in comparison, even when it’s not.
For example, I love my husband incredibly, more than anybody else on this planet, so much so that I would do anything for him. But this command reminds me that I must love God way more than even this – I must be willing to do absolutely anything he asks, and go anywhere he leads. And if my husband, or anything else, is taking the place where God should be, is sitting on the throne of my heart, then I need to go back to this fundamental truth and realign my priorities. Because the truth is that God is love. And unless we first love him, our love for everyone else is incomplete.
A Life of Submission
1. Heart
Jesus then tells us that to love God with all, we must submit our hearts to him. I think he records this first as it is the most important of the three – Proverbs 4:23 tells us to guard our hearts above everything else because everything we do flows from it. Our heart (according to the bible) is the part of us that wants, that desires. It’s where our passions, our likes and our dislikes come from. Jesus is saying that to live as the worshippers we were designed to be, we must choose to align our desires with God’s.
Love what he loves. Hate what he hates. Celebrate what he celebrates. Reject what he rejects.
For us to love God with all our heart, we must love peace, joy, freedom, and generosity. We must hate persecution, inequality, famine, injustice. Love what brings life, what builds people up, encourages and supports them. Hate what destroys life, what tears people down, makes people feel insignificant, worthless and unloved. The things that God loves, as well as the things that God hates, are all in the bible – we don’t have too look far (*)!
2. Soul
Secondly, we are to submit our souls to God. Our soul is the essence of who we are – Jeremiah 29:13 says “praise the lord, oh my soul. All my inmost being praise his holy name.” Jesus is instructing us that to love God with everything we have we must learn to praise God from our very core, the centre of what makes us who we are. To love God with all our soul is to love God by putting him first, at the centre of everything we do.
You can think of your soul as the part of you that makes you you – your personality, your character, the way that you act or react. It is the part of you that feels emotion. The part of you that thirsts (or doesn’t) for God. The part of you that we sometimes call our gut, that makes decisions and knows when something isn’t quite right, even before we have logically thought it through.
So how do we love God with all of our soul? Well if you think of your soul as the actions and emotions centre of who you are, it’s all about pointing our soul towards God and running those “gut” feelings or decisions through the “God filter”. When you need to make a big decision, do you turn to God first? When you are feeling emotional, is that from God or are you letting your hormones control you? Are we being guided by the Holy Spirit? Or by our feeling, anxieties or even our own selfishness? Turn to God in prayer and ask for his help.
3. Mind
Thirdly, Jesus addresses the need for us to love God with all of our mind. Romans 12:12 says “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” In the same way that to love God with all of our heart is to align our desires with him, to love him with all of our minds is to align our thoughts with his – let him transform and renew our thoughts. We must begin to think as he thinks, understand as he understands. His wisdom, his decisions, his way.
How do we renew our minds? Well Paul sets it out for us in Philippians 4:8-9. He says “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me – practice these things and the God of peace will be with you.”
It’s simple but not always easy. Paul tells us that we must set our thoughts on those things that are good, true, noble, right, lovely, admirable. Dwell on God’s word – we know that this is truth and this is a good place to start. But be careful what else you allow to influence your thoughts. Who are you surrounding yourself with? Are they Godly people, building you up, encouraging you, and speaking God’s truths over your life? Or are they tearing you down, making you feel small, insignificant and worthless?
And what are you watching on TV? What music are you listening to? What books are you reading? Are these things true, noble, right, lovely and admirable? Is their unholy language, unwholesome lifestyles promoted, violence and crime? What thoughts are you dwelling on? These verses are a very basic but helpful checklist in determining if what you are allowing into your thoughts is helping to renew your mind or may be hindering your transformation.
And there’s a promise. Romans 12:12 says that by transforming and renewing our minds we are “able to test and approve what Gods will is – his good pleasing and perfect will.” Want to know God’s plans for you? I know I do because his plans far outweigh my own. I want to love God with all of my mind because His plans succeed where mine fail.
4. Strength
The final point Jesus makes is that to live a life of worship, we must submit our strength. Or our strengths. These are our gifts, abilities, energy, time and resources. All the physical things we have, including our own bodies.
“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God, because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice – the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.” (Romans 12:1)
A lifestyle of worship, loving God with all of our heart, soul and mind is going to be a sacrifice – it will take an enormous amount of strength and determination. In Nehemiah 8:10 it tells us that the joy of the lord is our strength. The type of strength that will enable us to do this will only come from us having joy in the Lord – remembering all that our God has done for us – his love, his sacrifice. Through remembering his promises to us.
When we come to God in worship, we are remembering and re-establishing the greatest act of worship that we ever made, that initial step of becoming a Christian/“Jesus follower”. For any of you that have never made that step, it is simply coming to God and saying “I’m sorry for doing things my own way and making mistakes – Jesus please forgive me. I love you and I choose to follow your plan for my life, not my own”.
So as we approach this Easter weekend, as we celebrate the greatest act of love and service that one human being has ever carried out, let us worship him with everything we have. For worship starts with expressing extravagant love (by acknowledging the extravagant love God has for us and expressing our love for him in return), and through extreme submission, committing ourselves to his will and his way for our lives, remembering that his ways are better than our own.
Thank you Jesus for the greatest act of love and sacrifice that has ever been shown, that you came to die on a cross so that I could be saved.
Help me to love you more and more every day and submit every area of my life to the perfect plan you have for me.
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