I said last week that in thinking about worship, we need to begin with the principle that our worship is only and entirely about and for God. As I noted, this statement raises an important issue: why is that OK for God to demand our worship? Having answered that question, however, there’s actually another one which we ought to address. In order to understand what it means to worship God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we need to make sure we’ve defined our terms properly. What is worship?
Monthly Archives: January 2015
Circle Dance
(Genesis 1:26-28; John 14:15-26, Galatians 4:4-7)
As I was praying and thinking about the sermon schedule for this year, I found myself being led to begin the year by preaching on worship. Ken Priddy, who leads the EPC’s task force on church revitalization, divides the ministry of the church into four areas which he calls “faith centers”—outreach, evangelism, discipleship, and worship. For a while, I was thinking about doing a series on each, but the discipleship series wasn’t coming together, and so I ended up moving in a different direction.
One of the things Ken notes, though, is that there’s an upward spiral through these areas of ministry. As we worship God, we’re motivated to reach out and share the gospel with others; as they come to faith and are drawn into the church, they become disciples of Christ and learn to worship him; and then they in turn are motivated to share the gospel, and the cycle continues. You can begin talking about that at any point, but it seems to me that worship is the critical element. Worship defines our relationship to God and God is the one who makes everything else happen. At the same time, we have to see that worship extends beyond Sunday morning. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Unless life is a form of worship, your worship has no life.” So we’re going to start by talking about worship, but with the aim of showing how worship connects into the rest of life.
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