Hymn

Responsive Psalm

Introduction

Song

Prayer

Message

Song

Responsive Benediction

A talk about worship perhaps begs the question:  What is worship?   I suspect there is hardly a person here who could not share with me, if we had a chance to talk for a few minutes, a powerful thought in response to that question.  Perhaps, like me, you have a visual memory of a church where you worshipped as a child, and a sense of awe and mystery as you remember the beauty of that place.  Perhaps you have many memories of energetic singing with others, maybe clapping and lifting your hands, feeling as though the worship team was bringing you out from the frustrations and perplexities of life and ushering you to the very gates of heaven.  Maybe you’ve enjoyed a cross-cultural experience of worship, watching with wonder as believers on another continent express their love for God with words and actions you had never seen or heard before, and yet there seemed a transcendent quality about what they were doing that powerfully drew you in.   Or maybe you are from another culture, and are finding the ways we worship here to be inspiring—or perhaps puzzling.  And it wouldn’t surprise me if some of you would tell me about an experience of worship that happened in quiet and solitude, as you had your morning devotions or sat alone by the creek on a sunny day. 

The variety of worship experiences in a group of people this large is almost unfathomable.  A few of you may even be familiar with something called “worship wars,” in which we fiercely defend the worship styles and contexts that have meant the most to us by dismissing other styles and contexts (and even people for whom those other contexts are meaningful).  But this is not a message about conflict, so we won’t go any farther through that doorway just now.  I’d rather go, instead, to some worship basics on which I hope we can all agree.

The word “worship” is found with some frequency in scripture, and is used in more or less three different ways.  I say “more or less” because the three meanings are clearly interrelated.  You can’t have one for very long without the others, and all are important in the life of faith:

One use of the word translated “worship” refers to the act of adoration, homage, ascribing worth---for the Christian, to God the Trinity.  “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” we read in Psalm 95.  This same meaning of the word worship is present in proscriptions against the worship of false gods. The second commandment, in Exodus 20, reads:  “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

Another biblical use of the word “worship” appears in the first two verses of Romans 12:  “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” 

In this sense of the word, we continually offer ourselves to God, at every time and in every place.  We aren’t necessarily reciting psalms or singing worship choruses at every moment, but we acknowledge that since we belong to Christ, all of life is sacred.  What we do and say and think in the privacy of our rooms, how we choose to spend the minutes and hours of our days, how well we love those whom God has placed in our circle of acquaintance—all of these things are as much a part of our honoring Christ as what we do and say and think in our most fervent public worship. 

Beautiful worship can mean, as it sometimes does for me, practicing the organ carefully in order to help you to worship more fully in singing congregational hymns.  At the same time beautiful worship can mean loving an enemy, taking the time to listen to a hurting friend, traveling to the Gulf Coast to help a family who has lost everything.   Biblical worship is much more than just going to a place where we do stuff together.

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