The Approach to Worship

There is a need and desire for worship that is rooted deeply within every living being. The remarkable William Jennings Bryan once said, “Man is a religious being; the heart instinctively seeks for a God. Whether he worships on the banks of the Ganges, prays with his face upturned to the sun, kneels toward Mecca or, regarding all space as a temple, communes with the heavenly father according to the Christian creed, man is essentially devout.”

Though the term worship has more recently been diminished within our Christian culture to a genre of music or an action led from a stage, it is truly far more precious. At its root, worship is the prostrating of oneself, stemming from the Greek, “Proskyneō”, which indicates a physical act that postures one in complete surrender to another. This is not simply a musical gesture, but a daily activity.

In the Gospel of John chapter four, Jesus speaks to the subject of worship in a conversation that addresses the topic more than any other single passage throughout the rest of Scripture. And, of all the areas where he could have spoken to this theme, it was not to John the Baptist nor Nicodemus, the blind man nor the lame man, but it was the woman at the well with whom Jesus shared these powerful truths about worship. Here in this encounter, I believe we learn about the approach to worship.

I believe that the first lesson we learn from Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well is that worship is not about our preference, but about His pleasure.

The woman at the well represents the life of someone who has lived for herself and is still found wanting more. She represents the kind of person who has trusted her own instincts and hoped for the best, but has been disappointed, let down, and dealt the worst. Five husbands and a boyfriend later and she continues to seek meaning and purpose for her life in all the wrong places. Jesus makes it clear to her that true worship begins with placing the Father at the center of our affection, attention, and adoration.

On three occasions, Jesus refers to the Father and thereby emphasizes that He is the object of our worship and the One whom we seek to please when we worship. In verse 21, “you will worship the Father” and in verse 23, “true worshipers shall worship the Father … for the Father seeks such to worship Him.” This repeated emphasis on the Father expresses that it is the Father who is the absolute object of our adoration and affection. Matthew 4:10 records the words of Jesus to Satan during the Temptation in the wilderness: “It is written, you shall worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shall you serve.”

Though the Samaritans had established their own form of worship at Mount Gerizim and the Jews were often merely following the traditions of men, Jesus tells us that meaningful worship is not the kind that happens based on our human efforts to make appropriate sacrifices, but based on the action of our hearts that places the Father at the center of our attention.

There is a very human tendency to do worship our way, but we always lose when we limit God to our personal preferences and limited perspective. As Emmanuel College Campus Pastor, Chris Maxwell, has said, “If you like everything about the church service, then it probably wasn’t really for God; it was for you.” In Romans 1:25, Paul writes, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served something created instead of the Creator who is forever praised.” I pause to wonder how often we have allowed our personal preferences to transcend the priority of the Father in our worship.

Whenever anything or anybody besides the Father, including ourselves or our ideology, sits on the throne of our worship, have we not exchanged truth for a lie?

Worship is never about us; it is always about Him! C.S. Lewis stated that “the perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.” I wonder when was the last time that our attention in our worship service was so fixed on Father God that nothing else distracted us or stole our undivided attention? May we seek to place the Father at the center of our attention, affection, and adoration as we live in daily surrender, our hearts and lives laid prostrate before the Lord as a spiritual act of worship.

In the next installment of this series, I will go further into the story where we will discover this truth:

Worship is not about a place; it’s about posture and priorities.