What is worship?

Question 11027.

Biblical worship is far larger than the hour we spend singing on a Sunday morning, and that single misunderstanding has probably done more damage to the church’s worship than any argument over music ever has.

When Scripture speaks about worship it reaches for words about bowing, serving, and giving God his due weight. None of those words is primarily about music. All of them are about what a whole person does with a whole life in the presence of God.

What the Bible actually means by worship

The main Hebrew word behind worship is shachah, which means to bow down or prostrate oneself. It is a body word. It describes what a subject does before a king, and what a creature does before the Creator. The posture carries the meaning: I am lower, you are higher, and I acknowledge it.

The main Greek equivalent is proskuneo, which carries the same sense of bowing before, and the New Testament adds latreuo, to serve or render religious service. So biblical worship has two strands running through it, reverence and service. One is what we feel and confess, the other is what we do about it.

Our English word helps too. Worship is worth-ship, ascribing worth. To worship God is to reckon him at his true value and then live as though that reckoning were accurate.

Biblical worship is a whole life, not an event

Paul makes this explicit in Romans 12:1, where he appeals to believers to present their bodies as a living sacrifice, which he calls their spiritual worship. The setting is not a service. It is Monday. It is the body, the ordinary physical life, offered up.

This is why I resist the language of going to worship, as though worship were a venue. We go to gather with the church for corporate worship, which is a real and irreplaceable thing, but we do not go to begin worshipping. If worship stopped at the church door on Sunday it was never biblical worship in the first place.

The Old Testament makes the same point sharply. God tells Israel through the prophets that he is sick of their festivals while their hands are full of injustice. The worship was procedurally correct and God rejected it, which should terrify anyone who thinks the forms are the substance.

Worship in spirit and truth

The Samaritan woman tried to draw Jesus into a location dispute, and he refused it. The hour is coming, he said, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Both halves matter. Spirit without truth is sincerity aimed at nothing in particular. Truth without spirit is orthodoxy with the lights off.

In spirit points to the inner person genuinely engaged, and given my conviction that we are spirit, soul and body, this is not a vague emotional category. It is the deepest part of a person, awakened by God’s Spirit, actually responding to God.

In truth points to worship shaped by what God has revealed rather than what we find moving. This is why doctrine and worship are inseparable, a connection I explore further in how doctrine and worship are connected. You cannot worship a God you have misdescribed.

Who is worship for?

It is worth saying plainly that biblical worship is directed to God and not to the congregation. The moment we start evaluating a service primarily by how it made us feel, we have quietly turned the congregation into the audience and God into the production value.

That does not mean worship has no effect on us. It has an enormous effect. We become like what we worship, which is one of the most consistent themes in Scripture and one of the most sobering. Idolaters grow deaf and blind like their idols. Those who behold the glory of the Lord are transformed into the same image.

But the benefit is a by-product, not the aim. Aim at God and you will be changed. Aim at being changed and you will get neither.

Why God requires it

Some people find the idea of a God who requires worship uncomfortable, as though it were vanity. I have addressed that objection more fully in why God requires worship, but the short answer is that God commanding worship is God commanding reality. He is not asking us to pretend he is worth more than he is.

There is also mercy in it. Human beings are worshipping creatures by construction. We will give ultimate weight to something. God directing our worship to himself is not divine neediness but rescue from the far worse masters we would otherwise choose.

And there is joy in it. Worship is the only relationship in which giving everything away leaves you fuller than you started.

Biblical worship in the Old Testament and the New

It is worth tracing how worship develops across Scripture, because the shape changes considerably while the substance does not. In the patriarchal period worship is largely altar-building and sacrifice wherever God appeared. Under Moses it becomes centralised, regulated and priestly, tied to a tabernacle and later a temple, with a calendar and a caste of mediators.

With the coming of Jesus, the location question is dissolved. He tells the woman at the well that neither this mountain nor Jerusalem will be the place, because the Father is seeking worshippers rather than a venue. Biblical worship becomes portable, and the temple imagery is transferred to the believer and to the gathered church.

This is why I resist any attempt to reconstruct temple worship in the church. We have no priesthood standing between us and God other than Jesus, no altar that requires further sacrifice, and no holy place we must approach carefully. Hebrews 10:19-22 says we have confidence to enter by his blood, and that confidence is the defining note of New Testament worship.

What biblical worship is not

It is not primarily an emotional state. Feelings come and go with sleep, health and circumstance, and a definition of worship that requires a particular feeling will leave half the congregation convinced they have failed. Some of the most genuine worship I have witnessed was offered by people who felt nothing at all and offered it anyway.

It is also not confined to what is religious in appearance. Paul tells slaves to work heartily as for the Lord, and tells the Corinthians that whether they eat or drink or whatever they do, they should do it all to the glory of God. That sentence dissolves any tidy line between sacred and secular activity.

And it is not something we generate. Worship is always a response. God speaks, acts, reveals and saves, and worship is what happens when a creature answers. That order is never reversed in Scripture, which is why a service that begins with God’s word rather than our mood is on firmer ground than it may feel.

Idolatry is the alternative

The Bible does not present a choice between worshipping and not worshipping. It presents a choice about direction. Human beings are constructed to give ultimate weight to something, and if it is not God it will be work, family, nation, comfort, reputation or self. None of those are strong enough to bear the load.

The Hebrew prophets mocked idols precisely because they could not carry what was placed on them. A god you have to nail down so it does not fall over is a poor investment. Modern idols are less wooden and no more reliable, and they exact a heavier price than a carved image ever did.

This is why biblical worship is a mercy as well as a duty. Directing our worship to the one who actually made us is the only arrangement in which the object can bear the weight. Everything else eventually cracks under it, usually at the worst possible moment.

One further thought. Biblical worship in Scripture is overwhelmingly corporate before it is individual. The Psalms are full of plural imperatives, and the temple was not designed for solitary visitors. Our instinctive framing of worship as a private matter with an optional social dimension is almost exactly the reverse of the biblical emphasis, and correcting it changes how we regard a Sunday morning.

So, now what?

Start by widening the word in your own vocabulary. When you next say worship, notice whether you mean singing. If you always do, your working definition has shrunk to about a fifth of the biblical one, and that will quietly shape how you live the rest of the week.

Then look at your Monday. Biblical worship shows up in how you work, how you spend, how you speak to people who cannot do anything for you. Paul told slaves that their ordinary labour was service rendered to the Lord, which means there is no such thing as a secular task for a believer.

And keep gathering. Private devotion and public assembly are not rivals, and the person who claims to worship better alone in a field is usually worshipping less than he thinks. What would it look like this week to reckon God at his real worth?

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering, and come into his courts! Worship the Lord in the splendour of holiness.”

Psalm 96:8-9 (ESV)