Worship

How do we worship?
Ask your group to write a list of the things they and their friends ‘worship’, e.g. TV, sport, fashion, money and pop groups.

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What do they do to show their ‘worship’ for these objects and people? (Consider merchandise, clothing, and season tickets, particularly for football)
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What do they see others ‘worship’? (Money, power, technology)

Suggest that we can tell what people’s priorities are by what they worship, and how much they value something by how much they are willing to give for it.

Key point: Our priorities will influence and affect how we spend our time and make decisions.

Music -

The Bible

Now let’s look at the biblical words. In both Hebrew and Greek, there are two major kinds of words for worship. The first kind means to bow down, to kneel, to put one’s face down as an act of respect and submission. Our body language is saying, I will do whatever you want me to. I am ready to listen to your instructions and I am willing to obey. The other kind of biblical word means to serve. Roughly half of the time these words are translated as worship, and the other half as serve. It carries the idea of doing something for God — making a sacrifice or carrying out his instructions.

Of course, word meanings don’t prove what worship is, but they do illustrate three kinds of worship. There is

worship that involves speaking, and worship that involves listening, and a worship that involves doing.

There is a worship that expresses the heart, and worship that involves the mind, and a worship that involves the body. There is a worship that is giving praise upward, a worship that is receiving instructions from above, and a worship that carries out instruction in the world around us.

We need all three types of worship. Some people focus primarily on speaking or singing praise to God. Praise is good, but if all we do is praise God, without ever listening to what he says, we have to ask whether we believe the words we are saying. If he is really all wise and all loving, then we need to be attentive to what he is telling us, because he is worth listening to.

Similarly, all talk and no action does not show God the respect he deserves. Actions speak louder than words, and if our behaviour isn’t changed by God, then our actions are saying that God isn’t important — he’s a nice idea, but not relevant to our day-to-day lives. When we really believe that God is worthy of every praise, then we will be willing to listen and to change the way we live in response to such a worthy God. We will trust him and seek him and want to please him as much as we can. Worship should affect our behaviour.

Questions?

1. Do we want to please God?

2. Do we see worship as simply singing songs?

3. How can worship affect our behaviour?

Responding to God

Worship is a response to God. We can’t know God’s worth, much less declare it, unless God reveals himself to us. So God initiates worship by revealing himself to us. Then we respond, and the proper response is worship. The more we grasp his greatness, his power, his love, his character, the more we understand his worthiness, the better we can declare his worth – the better we can worship.

Our worship is a response to what God has revealed himself to be, not only in who he is, but also in what he has done and is doing and will do in the future. Worship includes all our responses to God – including a response with our mind, such as our belief in God’s worthiness, our emotions, such as love and trust, and our actions and our words. Our heart expresses itself in words and songs; our mind is active when we want to learn what God wants us to do, and our bodies and strength are involved when we obey and when we serve.

Both Old Testament and New Testament tell us that our relationship with God should involve our heart, mind, soul, and strength. It involves all that we are. Worship involves heart, mind, soul and strength, too.

Now is our chance to respond to God….

Community or Alone

We can worship God all by ourselves. But it is also something we do together. God has revealed himself not just to me, but to many people. God puts us in a community, he reveals himself to a community and through a community, and the community together responds to him in worship, in declaring that he is worth all honour and praise.

I just want to point something out here. Something I believe is important. When we sing in church it is simply singing songs to God - part of our worship. So we don’t have a worship leader, we have a song leader.

The Early Church

Acts 2 tells us how worship was done among the people who saw Jesus’ example and followed it. “Those who accepted his message were baptised, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (vv. 41-42). This is their response to God, their devotion, their worship: they accepted the message — they believed, they were repentant, they were baptised — and they devoted themselves to

* being taught,
* sharing with one another,
* breaking bread, and
* prayer.

Luke is giving a summary description, not a formula for worship services.

“Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people” (vv. 46-47). They worshipped in the temple, and they worshipped in their homes. They praised God, they were happy, and they were sincere.

When we examine worship customs, we need to distinguish between what is required, what is permissible, and what is helpful. Few things are required, and few things are forbidden. The many things in between are permissible – if they are done for the glory of God. Luke doesn’t tell us much more about worship. To learn more about worship, we turn next to the writings of Paul.

Paul is a primary source for what first-century churches did and how they operated. But Paul says very little about worship. Words for worship are found only a few times in Paul’s letters. He doesn’t tell us how we should worship. Perhaps that is because Paul sees worship as something we are to do all the time. John Piper expressed it in this way: “What we find in the New Testament, perhaps to our amazement, is an utterly stunning degree of indifference to worship as an outward ritual, and an utterly radical intensification of worship as an inward experience of the heart…. The very epistles that are written to help the church be what it ought to be in this age [are] almost totally devoid of…explicit teaching on the specifics of corporate worship”

In these verses, preaching the gospel is an act of worship. Paul was not a Levite, but he had a priestly duty, and that was to worship with all his heart by preaching. In our worship services today, the sermon is just as much a part of the worship as the songs are. Whenever the gospel is preached, worship is being done. God’s greatness is being proclaimed. Worship is in the listening, too, as people seek to learn what God wants us to be doing. A worshipful attitude toward God is one that respectfully listens to what he may be saying to us.

Every act of obedience is an act of worship. It declares that God has worth. And whenever we share the gospel with someone, we are declaring God’s worth. We are engaging in the priestly service of preaching the gospel, the worship of being a witness to God’s grace. We tell what a great thing God has done in Jesus Christ, and how that has been good news in our life. We are declaring his worth. We are giving worship in everyday life. We don’t have to wait for a church service.

What is worship?
Worship can be defined as adoration. Christians would say that all humankind feels drawn to worship because we were created to worship God.

The first time the word worship is mentioned in the Bible is in Genesis 22 when Abraham is asked by God to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Read up to verse 18 and make the point that God’s request was not cruelty, simply part of his plan to test Abraham and see if he was prepared to obey God in everything.

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How can Abraham’s actions be seen as a good illustration of true worship?
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Does worship have to include surrender?
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What would you find impossible to surrender as an act of worship?
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What do you find easy to worship?

Bible bit
Read Romans 12:1 and ask the group:
* What does it mean to ‘offer your body as a living sacrifice’?
* Is worship something that must involve music?
* If not, why is it so central to our church services and why do the Psalms so often encourage us to ’sing to the Lord’?
* What, if anything, is special about musical worship?

Activity
Give each young person paper and pens and ask them to draw a pie chart of their day, giving time to each activity such as sleeping, eating, walking to school etc. Discuss how they could potentially use each activity and each time of day to worship God.

Key point: Worship is not limited to certain activities, days or times. God doesn’t only want our worship on our lips but on our hearts. Our worship should be done daily in every part of our lives. The proper response to worship is not emotion but action.

To analyse our worship practice, we need to ask these questions:
* Does it glorify God? That is one major purpose of worship.
* Does it build up the body of Christ? That is another major purpose.
* And third, does it help us be what God wants us to be in the world? Does it have practical results in our lives?