What is Worship - An Introduction

Humans have an impulse to worship, much like eating and drinking, and we’re driven on the most prime human level to ascribe ultimate value and worth to an object. Typically we worship something or someone beyond ourselves, whether it’s in a football stadium, a science lab, at a rock concert or in a church building.

Who we worship

Who or what do we worship? This is important because we start to reflect or mirror the image of that which we worship. Just look around at people in the front row of a rock concert, many people dress like and act in the same way as the lead singer of the band.

As Christians we believe in and worship a creator God, his Son Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit and we believe he is the only one truly worthy of worship. Christians believe that we are most content, at peace and most fully alive when we worship God and we believe that everything else in our Christian faith should flow from that place of relationship with him.

So worship is about a relationship with God and as we get to know him through reading the Bible, talking and listening to him in prayer and other disciplines like singing songs at ENC. We are amazed at his character and we want to show him ultimate worth and value and praise him for who he is and thank him for what he has done for us.

Why we worship

It is God who seeks us because he has revealed himself to us and longs to have relationship with every person on the earth. Worship is the human response to that divine initiative. God is showing his loving character to everyone through the second chance we have in Jesus Christ his son and worship is primarily a response to that, all consuming love that God is, has and shows.

How we respond

Our response is best described by Scripture and Romans 12:1-2 puts it succinctly. Below is the wonderfully crafted Message translation which describes how we respond in worship to this amazing love-relationship God wants with us.

1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Worship is about giving over to God everything we have in our lives for his fame and glory, putting him first and honouring him above all other things, saying “you first God”.

Ultimately, worship is about a lifestyle that honours God in all that we do, both privately and publicly. We respond in ways like song, prayer and action so that our lifestyle copies and honours God’s character and that’s why Irenaeus of Lyons said, ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’ - this is the best worship we can give God, living fully in and for him, pointing to the Lord in everything we do.

Practical ways of attempting this

Live the week believing you are precious to God, he really does want to speak to you and you are a child of the Lord. Explore ways to really believe this fact, like reading Wild at Heart, (if you’re a man) or Captivating, (if you’re a woman), both by John Eldredge,
Really try to listen for God’s voice and obey what you think he is saying, however ‘wacky’ it might sound, (after all Joshua must have looked rather weird walking around a high city wall whilst blowing a trumpet, but it worked!) - this will cultivate an attitude of “I can and will hear from God”, it’s basically practising the presence of God daily,
Prepare for 4mation, network meetings and gatherings by settling down before them and giving God some time to get into focus to give to and receive from him,
Enter church 10 minutes early, lift up prayers of adoration to God in the venue, think about his greatness, glory and character and thank him for what he has done in your life during the past week,
Invite God again into your time there, pray for the gathering and the venue to be filled with the Holy Spirit, pray for people like the speaker, leader, God Squad and worship band.
When you see various people coming into the gathering pray for them silently in your head,
Try different expressions of worship and think of new ways that will keep relationship with God fresh. Have a go at silence, speaking out praise to God, painting your worship, dancing, lying down, or re-writing your favourite psalm in contemporary language,
Have a positive attitude when going into a worship time, saying to yourself, “I will meet with the Lord”. This is cultivating holy dependency, which is relying on God, looking forward to and expecting him to act and move. It allows him to teach you things and change your character a little, making you more like him,
Deal with distractions during any worship time. If there is a noise outside your house, learn to shut it out or move elsewhere; if children are running around at church, bless them with a prayer and thank God for their energy. Just try to relax during whatever is happening,
Practise humility in times of worship. Some of the biggest barriers we have in praise and adoration times are our own perceived thoughts of what worship should be. Whatever band the church can muster, however good the music, prayer, speaking or art is, however, colourful, loud, quiet, symphonic or unharmonious the praises are, ultimately worship is not about us and our personal preferences, it’s about giving God the rightful place and dethroning us from first place. Worship should involve a willingness to let God dwell in us richly and he can’t do that when we put our own agenda as the first priority of worship,
Even when we don’t feel like worshipping learn to give it to God anyway. Attempt to offer ourselves in the hard times as well as the good times as this shows we are really trying to give God everything, all of the time and not just when it feels good to us. It’s about putting God first again in a constant, ongoing lifestyle of worship, which means attempting show God honour in every part of our lives, whether it’s work, church, home life or simply driving a car from A to B.

Extra Resources to assist you

Books
For the Audience of One - Mike Pilavachi
The Air I Breathe - Worship as a Way of Life - Louie Giglio
Facedown - Matt Redman

CDs
United We Stand - Hillsong United
Our God Saves - Paul Baloche
Arriving - Chris Tomlin
We Cry Out - Jesus Culture

What is Worship - An Intermediate Response

Who we worship

In the introduction it was suggested that worship is about a relationship with God and one of the main sources of understanding God in this relationship is to read about him and his character in the Holy Scriptures. Our response in worship comes from our belief in what is written in the Bible. For example, we believe when it says in the Scriptures that God is Sovereign, that he is the ruler, the creator of all things and we come to show honour to such an amazing King above all other Kings in our worship. We also believe the Bible when it describes God’s character (his faithfulness, his compassion, his purity etc.) and we choose to honour him by paying tribute to his wonderful, praiseworthy and true characteristics by declaring that they are true and we show this primarily in our lifestyle and actions by copying his praiseworthy characteristics.

Why we worship

Scripture is full of examples of God’s efforts to initiate, restore and maintain fellowship with us. One of the most succinct and obvious is 1 John 4:19, ‘We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first’. (The Message). Worship is primarily a response to the already, all-consuming love that God has for us.

If worship is a response and is not dependent on our initiative, then it’s not about putting on a show for God, or trying to impress him with how hard we work at worshipping, it’s about being ourselves, offering him ourselves, ‘warts and all’, giving him more than a song and giving him our lives through a worship lifestyle, both in public and private times of adoration.

When we look at it like this we are amazed at how wonderful God is in comparison to ourselves and joy can fill our heart that the God of the universe wants to befriend us. And, much like in a human relationship, when we are joyful or when our heart has been warmed by something good, we celebrate it in normally characteristic human ways, like speaking out words of love, acting it out or even singing it out so that others can see and hear our joy.

A Biblical example of this: if you look at Elisabeth in Luke’s Gospel John, her unborn child is leaping in her womb as he is full of the Holy spirit and she bursts out into song as a reflection of her joy for being pregnant.

It’s about giving to God our lives as a way of saying, “wow, you’re amazing, here I am change me so that I might be like your amazing self”. So if worship is about giving something back to God (that being our lives) it has an element of sacrifice in it.

In fact worship should cost us something. Look at 2 Chronicles 7 and the building of Solomon’s temple. In this passage it cost Solomon financial sacrifice to show others his worship of the Lord, but as Romans 12:1-2 shows it can cost us something in our every day lives.

It’s saying I choose to live in a sacred way, a godly way, putting this King of Kings over my life, that he may govern my actions as I attempt to be like him, in purity and honesty. He becomes our centre, our start and our end of life in all that we do.

Songs, prayers and Sunday gatherings are all part of this lifestyle, but only a part, they make up some of our worship and they spring from the overflow of a life already given over to the worship of God. However, worship should exist in our work, play, church, marriage, parenting, every part of life so that we are not boxing the Lord into just a Sunday. Our pursuit of fun and our understanding of sorrow, our thought life, the use of our physical bodies all comes under God’s authority and therefore worship of him. That’s whole worship, gaining wholeness in God as we wholly focus on him throughout our lives.

How we respond

Worship is also about obedience. In the sermon on the mount for example, Jesus calls us to act out a different lifestyle, a way that is counter-cultural, contrary to how the world is living. He echoes this message in John 14:15, when he says ‘if you love me you’ll obey my commandments’.

Obedience mustn’t come out of a sense of duty, it needs to come from the initial response of joy and amazement to God’s love that has already been shown to us. So obedience in a worship lifestyle is shown in every part of our lives, whether through menial tasks or public declarations of adoration. Ultimately it springs out of a massive overflow of our love for Jesus because we’re amazed at how wonderful and beautiful he and his actions are. Richard Foster in his book The Celebration of Discipline says, “if worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship”.

So every day, sacrificial, obedient worship is ‘normal living’ worship. Foster calls this holy expectancy. He puts it thus, ‘because Brother Lawrence (the author of The Practice of the Presence of God’) experienced the presence of God in the kitchen he knew he would meet God in the Mass as well.’

It’s about punctuating each minute with inward whisperings of adoration, praise and thanksgiving regardless of what you’re doing. This is hard work but we can attempt it nonetheless and, if we came on a Sunday with this level of holy expectancy just think how different our gatherings at ENC could be!

As we begin a journey in worship we begin with a heart response to the amazing things God has done for us. We praise his name, his character, we thank him for the cross and resurrection, for redemption and for the Holy Spirit. As we mature a little we add to this and we begin to see that worship starts with sacrifice, the sacrifice of our lives and then we observe that it ends in obedience and ultimately this leads to service.

As we become more like God by obeying his ways, his character rubs off on us and we start to see the world through his eyes. Our hearts become soft and we move from a place of contemplative worship to active adoration, ‘out there, doing it worship’ if you like and all for the glory of God, fully alive in him.

Mike Pilavachi in his book ‘For the Audience of One’ says, We worship first then service comes as a result of this relationship with God, when God has our hearts our hands will surely follow.

Ultimately worship should lead us to experience and join in with the Missio Dei, or the very nature of God who is on a mission. Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God and if we are becoming more like God it is clear that we copy him and turn outward and do the long arm outreach Jon and Jo offer us in our high, wide, deep and long slogan.

For more on obedience, service and mission in worship go to Worship Central’s website and read Tim Hughes writing on this subject - http://www.worshipcentral.org/blog/worshipcentral/tim-hughes/obedient-to-gods-call

Practical ways of attempting this

Cultivate a lifestyle of worship, buy CDs of praise music and listen to them everywhere. The songs are based on Scripture and so you are simply meditating on the Word of God and allowing it to soak into your everyday life. (Philippians 4:8-9),
Attempt new ways of responding to God in your prayer times and daily Bible readings. Just like in any relationship, communication and intimacy can wane. Try prayer walking, singing out prayers, blogging, journaling, attend a Freedom in Christ course so that you’re really attempting to give every part of your life over to God, just think of it as a Spiritual MOT. (For more on prayer read Foster’s Celebration of Discipline or John Eldredge’s Walking with God),
Respond to the whisperings of God in your life, whether it’s telling the Barista in Starbucks about Jesus, or giving a homeless person a meal, you are extending your idea and lifestyle of worship,
Think of ways to get stuck in to something that is service, whether it’s CAP, visiting the prison or becoming a Street Pastor. This again will stretch a concept of worship and hopefully stop anyone getting stale as it teaches us the full extent of worship going from sacrifice into obedience, followed by service,
Carry on practising humility, putting God first in times of worship with other people,
Practise the points in the introduction.

Extra Resources to assist you

Books
Celebration of Discipline - Richard Foster
Worship - Graham Kendrick

CDs
Everlasting God - Brenton Brown
Painting the Invisible - Vicky Beeching
We Shall Not Be Shaken - Matt Redman

What is Worship - Deeper Level

So a working definition of worship could be - the ascribing ultimate value and worth (the reason) to a person, place or thing, (the object of worship) by focusing on all activities of the human spectrum (the action) on that object’s value and honour (the result).

The former Archbishop of Canterbury WIlliam Temple took this further and suggested worship was, ‘to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God’. This sums up the reality that a worship lifestyle is about sacrifice, obedience and service.

Who we Worship

Worship centres around the Imago Dei, the image of God. Imago Dei refers most fundamentally to two things: firstly, to God's own self-expression through humankind; and secondly, to God's love for humankind (John 3:16,17). This likeness to God and the love of God that we explore in and through our relationship with him draws us to our knees in what Matt Redman describes as ‘facedown’ worship.

To explore this facedown worship more we must look at the word worship. The English word worship basically means showing worth to something, but looking at the original Greek in the Bible we see a better definition for us to understand. In fact there are seven words for worship in Greek, five of these occur only once in the Bible, another occurs three times, but the main one, that being proskyneo, appears fifty one times, and therefore suggests its importance to God and to his people.

Proskyneo literally means to ‘come towards (in a bowing gesture) to kiss the hand’ and it denotes both the external act of prostrating oneself in worship and the corresponding inward attitude of reverence and humility. Worship is at heart a person laid down, prostrate before God, in submission and in humility claiming no rights, making no more selfish demands, but living fully, richly and wholly to God and by his power. This can’t happen overnight and it is more or less a lifetime’s work, but the good news is we have a person to copy in Jesus, who throughout the New Testament offered up all areas of life to God in worship.

Why we worship

A. W. Tozer suggests that ‘true worship is to be so personally and hopelessly in love with God that the idea of a transfer of affection never even remotely exists’. i.e. we’re so in awe of God, so besotted by him and what he has done for us that we are blind to even the most attractive alternative.

Why is this so important? We are God’s self-expression, his image, therefore we must do what God does in the second part of our Imago Dei description, love others. For us to have a conscious recognition of having been made in the image of God means that we need to be aware of being that part of the creation through whom God's plans and purposes best can be expressed and actualised; humans, in this way, can interact creatively with the rest of creation and so we need to realise that nothing else in this created order is comparable to God and when we worship we offer him our love in amazement of his glory and are therefore not easily enticed away by anything else in creation that is given to us as an alternative.

The moral implications of the doctrine of Imago Dei are apparent in the fact that, if humans are to love God, then humans must love other humans whom God has created (cf. John 13:35), as each of us are an expression of God. This leads us to understanding more of God as Trinity, the very essence of God in community, loving each other.

He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit eternally dwelling as one God. The early Church Fathers called this the perichoresis, or the mutual indwelling, the circular relationship of the triune God and is the ultimate description of intimacy and community, as suggested in John 17:21, ’hat all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’

Such is the fellowship in the Godhead that the Father and the Son not only embrace each other, but they also enter into each other, permeate each other, and dwell in each other. One in being, they are also always one in the intimacy of their friendship. The devotion of themselves to each other in the Spirit by the Father and the Son has content. Not only does the procession of the Spirit from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Father express their mutual love, as they breathe after each other, but also it gives each to the other. In the procession of the Spirit from the Father, the Father gives himself to the Son; in the procession of the Spirit from the Son to the Father, the Son gives himself to the Father, for the procession of the Spirit, like the begetting of the Son, is the going forth of the being of the Father to the Son and the going forth of the being of the Son to the Father as Holy Spirit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perichoresis

This has huge significance to our worship and how we value our private and corporate times of adoration at Exeter Network Church as this perichoretic God decided to create man and woman in their own image and likeness. We are God’s image bearers and are therefore made to reflect God’s love, goodness, power, rule and authority into the created order and then to reflect all of creation’s praise back up to God as the articulate, intelligent head of creation here on earth.

As children of God we are called therefore to be the lead worshippers in the whole of creation, declaring on behalf of the world how great the creator God is in all of his majesty, described to us throughout the whole Bible. So, for example the psalms tell us the trees clap their hands for joy in worship to God. It’s probably a noise they make in unison with the wind as it rushes through them, but we can articulate this even more in our worship, through things like song, prayer and action and it’s our duty to do this so that every created thing can hear and be part of the declaration of how good God actually is.

This is done best when we fill our vision with God and nothing else, i.e. we leave less and less room for other distractions that the world puts in front of us (highlighting Tozer’s point).

How do we respond

As I said earlier, we can respond through a life that is sacrificial, obedient and willing to serve and only then will we have a full and real experience of worship, done in the power of God, through the power of God and for the glory of God, or to put it succinctly, worship that is in spirit and in truth, (John 4:24).

Corporate Worship - However, the Imago Dei doctrine suggests that if humans are to love God, then humans must love other humans whom God has created. Reading Revelation 4 and 5, we see communities worshipping God together. When we worship as a family we are the people of God celebrating the victory of God, singing the songs of praise to him with one voice and one heart on behalf of creation. That is why songs are a good way of reflecting our heart and mind because they bring our praises to the Lord as one voice, showing our affection to him in unison, whether we’re 10 or 10, 000 people.

Therefore for worship to be truly effective we, as the Imago Dei, must foster right relationships with each other. This is paramount, just look at Matthew 5:23-24 or 1 John 4:20-2, ‘If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won't love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can't see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people.’ (The Message)

It is so important to have a healthy corporate worship life as a church tends to breathe through its worship ‘system’. The vitality of ENC is fundamentally linked to its devotion to God and that is why we place so much value on high voltage worship. Soul Survivor Church say that worship is ‘the’ thing as far as they’re concerned, everything else flows from that ‘facedown’ place. As a unified voice, we need to learn to practise humility more than ever so that we find our security not in the form, but rather in the experience of our worship so that everyone is loving God by loving each other and this ultimately commands a blessing as the psalms tell us.

Looking at perichoresis we see a perfect community, upon which to model our church. Community is important in our worship and we experience spiritual rejuvenation that is not possible through personal and private devotion. Personal worship of God is essential as well, but must work alongside the corporate times of devotion.

Corporate worship therefore provides a time and a place for God to show his glory and that in itself can reveal the Missio Dei to the world. Time and again, Soul Survivor church regale stories of people coming to the Lord during a time of worship because such is the passion and love for God in the people amassed at one of their festivals, Jesus is made known to the unbeliever.

Parts of the wider church have often struggled in their relationship with secular culture and have separated itself from the rest of the world creating a sacred / secular divide. Occasionally we see these worlds touch when a Christian artist releases a song into the mainstream charts or a film, or a secular song influences church music, but on the whole church and the world rarely mix.

However, the biblical world view suggests that there is only one world, a sacred world that God created and declared to be good. The church exists within this one world which is now fallen, both celebrating its beauty and challenging its brokenness.

Our mission is to declare the glory of God, by articulating him in ways a broken world can understand. Trent Vineyard do this well and over the years many unchurched people have come to know God through their understanding of this one world view. One simple way in which they do this is by getting rid of ‘christianese’ (Christian jargon) in many of their songs and we too try to have this one world understanding at ENC. That is why, for example we try to explain what is going on in our gatherings so that people who don’t regularly attend church can comprehend what is going on.

We worship God not when we reject culture completely nor when we embrace it without thinking, we worship God when we engage the culture we are in and become kingdom seed in areas that need him more, such as the arts, government, education and family. This ties nicely into our Romans 12. 1 - 2 passage from The Message.

Personal Worship - Worship is about intimacy, which should be a real adventure. It has a corporate element to it because we are a part of the human race, part of ENC and part of a 4mation group, but also it must have a personal dimension as well, because it is about personal choice to come personally and intimately before God and play our part in the showing of worth to him and this must be cultivated in the private space we carve out with God. Just look at how many times Jesus went off to be alone with God in the New Testament. Matt Redman suggests the revealing of God in personal times of worship is the fuel of our worship of God and you can’t adore him without feeding on the word of God personally and opening up your heart, mind and soul to allow God to reveal himself to you.

The Bible is the main way of revealing the Lord to us, as it allows us to be mindful of him, thinking of him and his ways and it reveals God to us.

This ultimately builds a Godly character in us and his attributes such as integrity, humility, courage, faithfulness and wisdom begin to be fostered in our every day life. Horace Mann said ‘reputation is what men and women think of you - character is what God knows of you,’ and worshipping in spirit and in truth happens when we allow God to shape us and build his character in us, taking away our selfish human and broken character. This must be started in our own personal devotional times. However, personal worship involves other disciplines such as prayer, solitude, silence, study and meditation and these have been covered by other people on the website, so please do explore their writings.

So to conclude, worship is a deliberate and disciplined adventure in reality (William Sperry); it involves the opening of ourselves to the Spirit and truth of God. It makes personal preference irrelevant, it involves a willingness to let God change us into his likeness and it leads us from sacrifice of oneself, through obedience of his truth into service of the Lord proclaiming the mission of God to anyone that needs to hear it by publicly and privately showing adoration to the One true living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Hope you found this helpful and I trust that as we worship God together we learn more of his greatness, majesty and love in our worship times at ENC.

Extra Resources to assist you
Worship God - Ernest B Gentile
Worship (Chapter 51) Systematic Theology - Wayne Gruden
The Message of Mission - Howard Peskett & Vinoth Ramachandra
The Message of the Trinity - Brian Edgar
Cafe Theology - Mike Lloyd