What is Worship
Worship is something that is given. If worship is given, it means that 2 parties are involved, a giver and a receiver. The receiver in this case is the almighty God, we humans are the giver. We are the ones that do the worship, in other words, we carry out the ‘action’ of worship while God ‘reacts’ to our worship. The reaction of God to our Worship is called ‘pleasure’.
Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
If all things are created for the pleasure of God, it means that all things can give Him pleasure. Remember that God’s reaction to worship is ‘pleasure’.
So whatever will give God pleasure is ‘worship’. In other words, Worship is simply anything done by God’s creatures that will give Him pleasure. This means that as a Christian you can worship God all your life.
If you live your entire life for the pleasure of God, then you have worshipped Him with your life. You can worship him with creative gifts like singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, speaking words of adoration but you can also worship Him with the job you do, the friends you keep, the house that you live in, the clothes you were, in fact, every single thing you do.
How can you worship Him with everything you do? It’s simple! What is the final reason you do everything you do? Why are you working? You want to make money. Why do you want to make money? Do you want to use the money to bless lives? To expand the gospel? To partner with ministers of the gospel? That is what determines if your work is worship. Why are you having fun? You want to ease out your tension. Cool! After you are relaxed and energetic what would you do with the remaining time you have? Is it something that will affect the gospel? That is what will determine whether the fun you were having is worship or not.
Anything at all that you do that gives God pleasure directly or indirectly is Worship. Now, not just what you do gives God pleasure, how you do it can also be worship.
Types of Worship
The beautiful thing about concepts, terms, definitions & classifications is that they help us get a clearer grasp of things we already know. This in turn helps us to get more effective results from them or apply them more appropriately. It doesn’t mean we didn’t know them before, but knowing the terms, the classifications and so on helps us have more organised thoughts. The more organised our thoughts are concerning a subject, the more productive those subjects can be to us.
So now we are talking about types of worship. From my experience, there are two types of worship:
1. Lifestyle Worship
2. Devotional Worship.
Devotional Worship can be divided into 2:
1. Personal Devotional Worship
2. Congregational Devotional Worship
Devotional Worship
Devotional Worship is the kind that you deliberately ‘devote’ time to engage in. It is you setting apart 1 hour of your time to worship God. it could even be just a few minutes of meditating on the beauty of God during break at work. The distinctive factor is that you dedicate a particular time wholly to worship. It’s not like you are working & at the same time trying to worship. You aren’t doing anything simultaneously with it. When you are the only one involved in this it is ‘Personal Devotional Worship’. When it’s you & some other Christians, it becomes ‘Congregational’. So what we have in the church is congregational devotional worship.
Lifestyle Worship
Lifestyle Worship is the kind of Worship you give to God with your entire time & life. It’s simply having Christ & His kingdom as the end goal of everything you do. It is you walking and singing to God. It’s also shown when you display the excellence of Christ at your work, your skill or your daily living. It is being proud of Jesus and making people see Jesus in everything you do.
In Matt. 5:16 Jesus said:
let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
So this is what happens:
1. When you shine at anything you do, boldly identifying with Jesus
2. People attribute your ‘shining’ with God
3. God in heaven is glorified.
Him being glorified is worship. So, you have worshipped Him with your life by shining.
Worship as Admiration
Which lady doesn’t like to be called beautiful? Even the Most Beautiful Girl in the World wants to be told that “she is beautiful”. It’s not that she isn’t aware, after all the entire world has given her the crown.
When I first met my wife & I told her she is beautiful, I used to be shocked at her response of shock. I would be like “DIdn’t you know? Can’t you see yourself in the mirror” How will someone not know that they are rich? Can’t they see their bank statement? Over time, I understood that I had to re-affirm those things. I have to say it over and over it’s not like a certificate that you have & you have it for life. It’s like food, so you need to keep on giving it. After all, nobody eats the food for one year in one day. No matter how much you eat today, you still have to eat tomorrow.
This is how it is with God. He is God, but He wants us to say it. He wants us to admire Him and that gives Him pleasure. I said earlier that anything you that gives God pleasure is worship. One of those things is admiration. How much do you admire God? How often do you tell Him? The ways of telling Him are not cast in stone, you can be creative with it. You can tell Him in songs, but it’s not limited to that. If you choose to do it in songs then let the whole of your heart be in it. Sing as best as you can, if it is not as melodious as you want, don’t worry, just make sure you are putting in the whole of your being in it. Sing your own melody, don’t use others to judge. There’s a melody only you can give to God, that is why He created us differently. He wants all kinds of melodies.
If you can choose to dance, dance your best. Forget about your environment, imagine it’s only you & God. You don’t have to fashion your steps based on the names people have called them. Just move your body the way you can. See, even God can help you dance. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you dance & you’ll see what will happen. Dance itself is spiritual.
If you want to shout, shout.
If you want to do what nobody else has done, do it.
Make sure you admire God & you express your admiration in the best way possible.
Do it every day, just like you eat every day.
Worship as Imitation
What joy I feel in my heart, when I see my little daughter striking the keyboards on my laptop trying to be like me. I am happy to see another human being wanting to be like me. Nobody models their life after a failure. Everyone wants to be like the best in their disciplines. If she wants to be like me, that means I am a model, I am an idol or even a god.
But God is God. So He is the perfect one to be modelled after
Imitating God gives Him pleasure. He delights in seeing us be like Him. This imitation is not just in manifesting spiritual gifts. No!
God wants us to imitate Him in everything we do. When we speak, He wants us to speak the way He would. Let’s imagine it. God will be fluent, clear in expressing His thoughts. He wouldn’t waste people’s time by giving unnecessary details.
God will be punctual. He won’t go late for meetings. If God were an Economist, He will give every necessary fact when making a point. He won’t make conclusions on assumptions. God will be polite in meetings, He won’t speak unless permitted. God will be orderly even on clubhouse, He will not bump into discussions, He will wave and be permitted before unmuting His mic. God will be clean whether He has many cloths or not.
Worship is simple. Just being like God. Interestingly, He has given us the power to be like Him.
When we try to be like Him, we are simply saying:
1. You are my God
2. You are the perfect one
3. You are the best
4. You are my King
5. You are greater than me
6. You are my Lord
7. You are the only one worthy of emulation
You can imagine the smile on His face when you do so.
So we only don’t worship by what we say, we can say those things by our actions. And they say ‘actions speak louder than words.
What is love if it is not shown?
Instead of just saying “Lord I worship you”, let’s worship Him by being like Him.
If you will be a copycat for anything, copy God.
You can, You should.
Worship as Sacrifice
Worship is not just merely uttering words from the lips. It is pushing out words of adoration from the very core of your heart unto God, so even the one that cannot speak can Worship. You can meditate on the greatness of God and think about how good He is, that as well as Worship. Worship is simply giving devoted attention to God in admiration of who He is. Worship is deep. It involves the totality of you. By ‘the totality of you’, I mean your:
1. Spirit
2. Soul
3. Body
The 3 of them are involved in Worship. In John 4:23 – 24, Jesus makes it clear that worship involves the Spirit and it’s quite simple. Worship involves 2 parties as I said earlier. The Giver and the Receiver, there has to be a form of relationship, a platform for both of them to meet so the Worship can be given. God is a Spirit and He can only be accessed Spiritually. This is why Worship begins from your Spirit, your soul processes the admiration from your Spirit and your body utters the admiration, through your mouth (words or singing), your limbs (dancing) to any other part of the body. There is therefore a need to first establish a relationship with the receiver of worship before one can be certified as a giver of Worship.
Worship should not be casual, it is what we do consciously and deliberately with every form of skill and ability God himself has blessed us with. When we worship we are offering sacrifices. We don’t only offer objects of worship, we offer ourselves on the altar as living sacrifices. At the point of worship, we are both the ‘sacrificer’ and the sacrifice. We lay before Him, totally bowing down to His majesty, His authority and His Lordship. No wonder some people are moved to lay on the ground when they worship.
At the point of worship, nothing else matters only Jesus matters. Nothing else is beautiful only Him does. Nothing else is adorable, only Jesus is. This is when we are deep in awe of Him, where our lives are worth nothing except it has become His. These things are always true, but we devote time to express them and experience them. Worship is a moment of love, it’s a moment of absolute devotion.
Worship as Obedience
When your father or mother gives you an instruction and you carry out that instruction, you are affirming some facts:
1. You love him/her
2. They are greater than you & worthy of instructing you
3. You are willing to make them happy
As said earlier in my previous post, Worship is anything you do that gives pleasure to God. One of these things is our ‘obedience’. When God gives us instruction and we carry it out, we are simply making happy or giving Him pleasure. There are thousands of written instructions for us to do in the Bible, of course, God has enabled us to do whatever He says. There are also specific instructions He gives to us through the Holy Spirit, anytime we follow such instruction, we are acknowledging the Lordship of Jesus. It’s not only when we say the sinner’s prayer we proclaim ‘I accept you as my personal Lord and Saviour’, we proclaim it daily. In fact, the rest of Christianity after you said that prayer is simply you ‘declaring the Lordship of Jesus’. You declare it in your character, your health, finances, skill, family and anything that has to do with you.
Obedience can be you simply not taking a drink as the Holy Spirit instructed you, or reading your Bible when He asks you to.
The very last instructions Jesus gave to us while leaving the earth was:
Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. (Mark 16:15).
Preaching the gospel of Jesus is obeying this instruction. Obeying this instruction gives God pleasure. That His worship.
In essence, evangelism is a way of worshipping God. You would even notice that when you preach the Gospel, you see the beauty of God the more, the more you talk about Him, the more you love Him, the more you are able to be like Him. Because there are some ‘Godness’ you carry that will only show forth when you preach the gospel. When you preach the gospel, you will see yourself healing the sick, casting out demons and operating in the powers God has deposited in you.
Preaching the gospel is even more important these days as we approach the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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So this is the end of my series on ‘Worship. Thank you for reading so far.