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What Is The Chief End of Man? Man’s Chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy Him forever!
That is the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Apply that to your life. Do you glorify God in all you do? Do you enjoy being with him? We attribute worship to what we love.
Today we most commonly think of Christian Worship as only one thing; Sunday morning church service. We have had a change over the last twenty years, like never before, in how the Sunday morning worship service is going to be acted out. We have seen churches split apart over the style of music used in the worship services. We are now seeing a new kind of service, and churches for that matter, that is modeled after what some believe to be the book of Acts model.
But is Sunday morning the only time we are to worship God? Do we worship him in our daily lives and work? Do we give our all to honor him? Lets explore worship and see what it really is.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind (Luke 10:27)
What Do You Worship
Not everyone that says they worship God actually worships Him. We see so many people today that go to church only show up there because they get a good feeling from the experience or out of duty to someone (maybe to God maybe grandma). They go to a church but do not actually worship the God they go to see. How do we determine this? Look at the divorce rate or the teen pregnancy rate or the drug and alcohol abuse rate in the church at large. For every pastor that gets caught with drugs or porn there are ten more that have not been.
So what does this have to do with worship?
Look at the verse above. We worship what we love. We pour or affection into what we love. One of the reasons I say the Church in America has become a laughing stock is because we love the world and all it has to offer and we put God and Jesus on the back burner. When we say yes to Christ we begin a discipleship where we learn from him. If we do not love Him then how can we learn anything from Him?
Let’s go back for a minute. If you came to this lens from the Spiritual Disciplines lens then you know that I asked you to read the 23rd Psalm during the week. Verse 1-3 says:
1The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. (KJV)
How are you going to let someone lead you if you do not love them? How can you read this and worship him for leading you if you do not love him? in verse 4 it says, “thy rod and thy staff comfort me.” How can you say that if you are trying to buck the system and lead yourself.
Worship is about love, we will worship and need what we love and we will shun and deny what we do not.
I think that Jesus makes it pretty clear during his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 that worship is not tied to a specific time or a specific place, but that it is a continual thing. So while we can, should, and do worship in specific places at specific times – like our Sunday morning services – we are not to confine or limit it to just that. We are to worship continuously as part of our lifestyle.
And worship is not something done only by Christians – everyone is a worshiper whether they think they are or not. Like you said, it is about who and/or what we love. Look at the football fan who spends an entire day and over $100 down at the stadium ten weeks a year, and lives and dies by the results of last week’s game (I’ve got a post coming on my blog about this real soon) or this year’s season – they are worshiping. Show me someone who says they are not a worshiper. Give me ten minutes with their checkbook register and their calendar. That is all I need to show them what they are worshiping. Good post.