What comes to your mind when you hear the question, “What’s your church’s worship like?” A lot of Christians today immediately think about a church’s music. For example, your church might have a worship team that consists of multiple musicians, including a guitarist, someone on the keys, a drummer, etc. With this style of worship, the song lyrics are usually projected onto a screen for the church to sing along. Or maybe your worship isn’t “contemporary” and has a more traditional vibe: piano, hymnals, a choir. When many of us think of the word worship, our minds go straight to the musical element of the church service. Worship is music!
On the other end of the spectrum, there are some Christians who have grown tired of the Sunday worship gig. Shouldn’t all of life be worship? Do we really need to go to a building with other Christians in order to worship? After all, don’t some people connect with God better in the open air, perhaps at the beach, or in the mountains, experiencing God’s presence through nature rather than simply singing about it? Worship is all of life!
How do we navigate between these two very different definitions of worship? Is a church’s worship their music, or is worship something we’re always doing, on the freeway, in the office, at the beach? We’re going to consider the Bible’s teaching on worship. As we pull back the layers of biblical data, we will discover that the world of worship in Scripture is more magnificent than Christians often imagine. During worship, a dangerous battle is taking place between the forces of good and evil.
The true God of heaven—who alone is to be worshipped—gathers us up to himself and transforms us through biblical worship. The desire to worship is so ingrained in us as God’s creation that we cannot escape it, and God uses very ordinary methods to facilitate the meeting between heaven and earth in Christian worship. This is a study about worship.
But perhaps before we begin, it will be helpful to define that word as it appears in the Old and New Testaments. There are several words used in the Bible to describe the act of praising and worshipping, but I have selected a couple to help capture the core idea behind what it means to worship. The Hebrew word hvh refers to bowing down. Picture someone humbly offering all of their allegiance to God, a bodily demonstration of submission.
In the New Testament, this is picked up by the Greek word proskuneo, a word which can be defined as “to express in attitude or gesture one’s complete dependence on or submission to a high authority figure, “(fall down and) worship, do obeisance to, prostrate oneself before, do reverence to, welcome respectfully.” At least from these two words for worship, what emerges is a picture that includes the whole person. God isn’t interested in just our lips, or our hands, or our hearts, but in the whole package. Simply put, in worship God wants all of you.
Maybe now we are better equipped to understand Paul’s words to present to God our bodies as living sacrifices. God wants all of you on the altar, and if you know what happened to the animals on the altar in the Old Testament, then you know that you don’t just stay on the altar, you’re consumed by the fire of God. As smoke, you ascend into God’s presence as a pleasing aroma. But alas, we’re getting ahead of ourselves!
Footnotes
Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., Bauer, W., & Gingrich, F. W., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 3rd. ed., 2000), 882.
