When the word “worship” is mentioned, what comes to mind first? For me, I think of singing songs at church on Sunday morning, and I have a feeling that this is what most of you guys thought of as well.
Now, I want you to picture what that looks like. What song is playing? Are there people in the seats around you singing? How are you worshiping? Some people put their hands up, some sway side to side, and some just stand there. No matter what you are doing, this is what most people would say “worship” is.
But what if I told you that there is a much bigger spectrum to worship than just singing? In fact, singing is a very small part of worship. I feel like there is so much to learn about what worship is, how people worshiped in the Bible, and how we are supposed to worship, so I want to take time and learn all about it, and share my findings with you guys. This includes questions I have about worship, like if there is a “right” and “wrong” way to worship. Buckle in and take some time exploring worshiping throughout the Bible with me!
What is worship?
If we are going technically, worship is defined as “the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity”. Already, I am noticing that it says absolutely nothing specific about singing. Worshiping is an action done to show that you love someone or something and find it worthy of praise.
Worship isn’t specific to just God, though. You can worship people, objects, and even ideas! I wrote all about the different idols in Idolatry and My Week without Music, so definitely take some time to read all about that. Some things that I see worshiped most often in our world are money, celebrities, and ourselves, although there are so many other things. However, the Ten Commandments tells us that “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God.” (Exodus 20:3-5a). These two commandments make it clear that our worship should be directed towards God and God alone.
When it comes to specifically worshiping, there are a lot of things that you can do. Since worship is showing adoration and praise, there is a big spectrum. This includes singing, but it also can include things like praying, serving, and even just glorifying God in everyday activities. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1). You can even worship by sacrificing things such as your time, money, and energy to the Lord and growing His kingdom. So many people think that worshiping is confined to just singing songs to God on Sunday morning, but worshiping and praising the Lord is something that we can be doing every moment of the day!
Why do we worship?
Worship is something that we see all throughout both the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, it is seen a lot through animal sacrifice and psalms of praise. “I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation.” (Psalm 18:1-2)
The countless sacrifices of the firstborn animals in the tabernacle, incense burnt in the Tabernacle, and psalms of joy and pain written by many authors (including David), are all different ways that people worshiped God in the Old Testament. The reason for all of these is because throughout history, these people believed that God was worthy of this worship and praise, and were obedient to the commandments of God that wrote out the details of animal sacrifices.
Once Jesus came, the laws became unneeded because of Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, but that didn’t mean that people stopped worshiping! There are multiple examples of worship in the New Testament, especially after the establishment of multiple churches. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Colossians 3:16-17). Similar to how worship services are run in the present day, many early churches would come together and sing praises and hymns to God.
Even though worship looked very different in the Old Testament compared to the New Testament, and both to today, they all were true forms of worship. It is less about what you do, and more about why you are doing it. Ultimately, our reason for worship should be to glorify God and praise him, because we believe that He is worthy of that praise and glory.
Is there a wrong way to worship?
“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:24).
When John writes about worshiping in “spirit and truth”, he is describing the correct heart attitude for worshiping. The spirit part means that we are focused on the spiritual realm and how our worship is glorifying God, and less concerned about what we are physically doing in the moment. Worshiping in truth means that we are worshiping with our heart inclined to the Lord in selfless ways. If we sing on Sunday mornings with the focus of wanting people to think we sound or look good, we are not worshiping in truth.
If you are thinking that you can only worship through certain songs, or through certain things, then that is a wrong mindset. The only way that you can worship “wrong” is when your heart's not in it. For some people, it means having selfish motives for worshiping, like glorifying yourself and preserving your own image. For me, I struggle with going through the motions. Some Sunday mornings, I feel like I am just singing because that is what everyone else is doing, and some prayers feel very mundane and rehearsed, like it’s not coming from the heart. God doesn’t want to see us forced to worship; that is why He gave us free will! He only delights in our worship when it is solely done to bring glory and attention to our heavenly Father.
Worship through song
For me, I have always had questions about worshiping music. I have been a part of a few different denominations of churches throughout my life so far, and it is very interesting to see the different ways that people worship. At one church, everybody stands up straight and sings, with little to no movement. However, at another church, I see people swaying to the music, lifting their arms up, and clapping to the beat. In addition, some churches play softer hymns, while other services have adopted more modern Christian music styles. This made me wonder, Is there a right and wrong way to sing to God?
This takes us back to the last section, because the only wrong way to do it is to do it with a wrong heart attitude! God made every person different, which means that we will all react to worship in different ways. I know that some people move to the beat and get into the rhythm of the music so they can more genuinely praise God, while other people need to stay still and just focus on the words so that they don’t get distracted by other things around them. It took me some time to figure out where I landed when it came to personal worship styles, and I have become very comfortable with the way I worship. I like to move, because I have a passion for music, so standing still feels unnatural to me. (In addition, I feel joy when I am able to proclaim the goodness of God, and my body wants to express that joy through a little bounce in my step) I was told once to try closing my eyes and imagining singing right to God sitting on a throne in the clouds, and it really helped me. Now, I worship with my eyes closed, so I can focus on who I am worshiping, instead of wondering what people around me think. I like to put my hands out in front of me a bit, because it reminds me that I am surrendering myself and my wants to God. All these little things I have picked up over the years, and they really help me to understand what I am singing and why I am singing these lyrics.
One thing that I will warn you of that I have fallen into the trap of before is emotional worship. I say this because it can be hard to separate emotions stemming from music and emotions centered around your worship. As I have stated, I love music, and it is not irregular for me to get emotional to certain songs. I used to think that the more emotional I got during worship, the “better” it was. This can be dangerous because it is easy to feel an emotional high during worship, and then have it fade immediately to lukewarm faith because we were building a foundation on emotions instead of God, our rock.
However, there is a balance. Don’t become so afraid of your worship being ill-centered that you refrain from any emotion in your worship. In fact, we are encouraged to exclaim our praises to God with joy and excitement! “Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre!” (Psalm 149:3). Other times, conviction can hit us during worship, often when we realize that we alone cannot measure up to receive the goodness of God, due to our sinful nature. Worshiping without any emotion ever may show a lack of passion or love for God, and it is possible that it can indicate a feeling of duty to worship instead of being excited to be privileged enough to openly worship our God.
This can be a hard line to navigate, but I feel like this is one thing about worship that has recently been going under the radar, and can hinder our true and delightful worship to God. Some people struggle with it a lot, while some people may never have noticed this hindering their worship.
I know that I just threw a lot at you, but I never realized how much there was to worship until I started researching. I hope you guys learned from it, and are interested to learn more. There is so much that I didn’t even get to cover, and other things that I haven’t even looked into yet! I am linking one of my main sources for this post at the bottom, because I am going to encourage you to pick something about worship that you learned about here and take a deeper dive into it and how it can affect your personal worship towards the Lord.
In addition, I am going to challenge you all with this: take the next 24 hours and examine how you worship God in your everyday life. Maybe you are good at worshiping God through serving your family throughout the day, or maybe you take time every morning to sing praises to the Lord before going to work. Find things in your daily routine that you can do to the glory of God, and add new things that will allow you to give glory to God in doing it. I feel like there is so much that we talked about, which honestly makes my head spin thinking about it, but it is always fascinating to start studying a topic, and then realizing how much more there is to it than you thought. Even thinking about the complexities of worship makes me understand just how amazing the Bible is! I love seeing how things like this can just be more proof to how amazing and awesome our God is.
https://learn.gcs.edu/mod/page/view.php?id=4256#:~:text=Both%20Old%20Testament%20and%20New,says%20something%20about%20his%20worthiness.
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