Over the last twenty years worship has become a prominent subject in the church. There are thousands of recordings as well as books and teaching materials on the subject. In the last ten years especially, we have seen worship music popularized by contemporary Christian musicians, each one putting a modern sound to worship music and breaking us out of tradition to help us sing a new song. The books and teaching materials available have helped us understand what worship is, dissecting the terminology and unfolding the numerous types of praise and worship found in the Bible. With all of this, the church seems to have gotten better at worshiping, but in our learning how to do it, have we learned how to live it? I fear that we have fallen in love with the act of worship rather than the object of our worship. I believe we have built a house of worship larger than we have the foundation for.
We often quote John 4:23, but I am concerned we are missing the truth, or reality Jesus spoke of regarding our worship. The truth of worship also seems to be the part of the scripture people most misunderstand or misrepresent. One definition of the word ‘truth’ says, “That which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence.” The Amplified Bible also uses the word ‘reality’ in this verse. A definition for ‘reality’ says, “All of your experiences that determine how things appear to you”. We must ask ourselves and answer the following questions. Have we actually experienced God, the object of our worship, so that we see Him as He really is in His divinity such that we derive our ultimate meaning and value of existence? Do we really live in perpetual worship to God? Do we consider worshiping God to be our life’s blood rather than something done at a certain time on a particular day of the week and that is set to music?
God told spoke to the Israelites constantly throughout the Old Testament saying, “You shall know, understand, and recognize that I am the Lord.” If we truly know, understand, and recognize Jehovah is God, the result can only be a lifestyle of worship. No one will have to solicit us to worship, especially in the setting of our typical Sunday worship services. It is our true, authentic worship that will begin a chain reaction, or ‘cause and effect’ type of result. True, authentic worship will continuously bring us into true alignment with God. This alignment is really righteousness—the righteousness of Christ, which is conformity to the divine will in purpose, thought, and action. This is what we are called to as sons of God, and our worship of Him is the avenue for reaching the destination. And with our true alignment with the Father comes true evangelism to the world. Our alignment and conformity to God causes us to be an accurate representation of Him to the world as a display and testimony of Who He is. Rather than telling about His love, we are a tangible, living display of it to those who do not know Him. The world is waiting for this display. “All of creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.” (Romans 8:19)
We must be careful about how we qualify our worship. Recognizing God as Who He is constitutes worship. In the contemporary church, music seems to be synonymous with worship. However, just because music presided in the first twenty minutes of a church meeting does not necessarily mean that we recognized God. Radio stations play music 24 hours a day, but is God being recognized as a result? To clarify, we can worship in song and we can worship in dance, just as we can worship in feeding the hungry. The lifestyle of worship comes when we recognize God in everything—what we do, what we say, and even in what we see. I see Who God is when I look at the stars, or the moon, or the trees, or even the strangest of animals in His creation. He is without limits and we can begin to recognize that in His creation.
It is perfectly acceptable to love to worship God, and we should love it. It would not be authentic if it were drudgery to us. And though we receive a benefit from worshiping God, it is imperative we remember we worship not for our own enjoyment, but for the Father’s enjoyment. God inhabits the praises of His people. We cannot make it our habitation also. God will not share His glory with any thing or any man. So long as we inhabit our own worship, God will not, and cannot by His very nature, dwell in it. We also must examine the sound of our worship. What does it resemble—God or man? The worship in our hearts and the praise on our lips should not be our own sound. But let it be God’s sound—the sound like “the shout of a vast throng, like the boom of many pounding waves, and like the roar of terrific and mighty peals of thunder, exclaiming, Hallelujah! For now the Lord our God the Omnipotent reigns!” (Revelation 19:6). Let our entire lives, even our bodies, be an instrument of worship, making a heavenly sound. This sound is the sound that will shake the atmosphere around us and create an open heaven where angels can ascend and descend in our midst!
