What is worship?

Worship…I have been ruminating on the subject of worship recently…especially the aspect of worship in Evangelical Christianity that is expressed in music and song. What is worship? A few musings follow that are my humble aspirations to try to define that word for myself.

If we define worship as an emotion, I think I would say the emotion of worship is the state of being in of total awe of God… total awe of His great power, love, holiness, beauty—in awe of who He is. When I feel that emotion, sometimes it makes me want to weep for joy; other times I feel as if I need to lay facedown on the ground in reverence. Sometimes, it makes me feel like hiding under something because I am so acutely aware of my own smallness, sin, or neediness. Sometimes, I just feel the urge to bellow out at full volume how great my God is! Sometimes the emotion of worship makes me want to do all of these things at the same time! To experience an emotion like this is a high…it could be described as a euphoric feeling of total peace, joy, and contentment.

Worship is so much more than this, though. The fuller picture of worship defines worship as an act, or better yet, a way of life. Worship is living your life in such a way to reflect the reality of how great God is. According to Paul, it is ordering each day in the light of God’s sovereignty and omnipresence....a daily yielding of oneself in unconditional service to most precious and compelling Person in the universe.

There is a real problem when we consider worship only in the first aspect of feeling of awe and decrease the second aspect of a surrendered life. The fact is, though, that the first aspect isn’t even valid if it doesn’t produce the second. There is sometimes a tendency in our self-actualizing do-what-feels-good culture to idolize the emotion of worship instead of giving genuine and heartfelt praise to the Receiver of our worship.

Worship is, like love, both a noun and a verb—it is a state of being, but it is also an act that has to be lived out day by day. To have the first without the second is emotionalism. The second without the first is drudgery. We cannot truly perform the act of worship if we are not living in the awe of the greatness of God. Likewise our acts that show surrender to God are meaningless motions if they are not done as a response to his greatness. These two aspects are inseparable.

Let me encourage you, dear friend—come to know Him in His endless greatness…and then order you life in that knowledge. It is the way life was meant to be lived.