Worship

What is Worship?

Beholding the One who is most lovely.

Worship, as a spiritual discipline, is the intentional practice of recognizing who God truly is and responding to him with reverence, love, trust, and obedience. It is also about who God is and who you are in relation to Him. It is not primarily a music style, or a Sunday morning experience, or an emotional state you try to manufacture. Those things can certainly serve worship, but they are not worship in and of itself.

Dallas Willard defines it simply as "acknowledging the greatness and beauty of God." Richard Foster puts it similarly but adds an important aspect. He calls worship, "the human response to the divine initiative." Meaning God moves first. Always. Put this way, worship as a spiritual discipline is our answer to what He’s already done. It is the foundation in which every other discipline begins.

We become what we worship. The Psalms are built on this idea; Paul articulates it in 2 Corinthians 3:18…We are being transformed into the image of whatever we fix our gaze on. The reality is, everyday we point our worship at something or someone. We are often unaware that it is happening, but it is. Everyone is worshiping something. So the question is whether what you're orienting your life around is actually worth your worship. Worship, as a spiritual discipline, is to remind yourself of this truth and reorient your worship to the only one who is actually worthy of it. Every human heart ultimately orients itself around someone or something that becomes its highest love, trust, or allegiance. Every time we deliberately turn our attention and worship toward God, we are training ourselves to see correctly. Worship does something to us that nothing else can, it reorders our loves. Not through willpower or behavior modification, but through encounter. Whenever we genuinely behold God's holiness and love, the Spirit is at work transforming us, even when the change is slower than we can see.

Where Do We See Worship in Scripture?

Jesus quotes Psalm 22 from the cross. He sings a hymn with his disciples before walking into Gethsemane (Matthew 26:30). He begins the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) by reminding Himself of God’s worthiness ("hallowed be your name"), teaching us that the first movement of prayer is recognizing who you're talking to. At the center of everything Jesus did was a continual orientation toward the Father. "I only do what I see the Father doing" (John 5:19). That's a statement of a life cultivated by the intentional practice of recognizing who God is and who He was in relation to Him.

John 4 is also worth sitting with here. Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that the Father is seeking worshippers who worship "in spirit and in truth." (John 4:23) Not in the right building, not with the right liturgy, not with the right emotional temperature, but rather in alignment with reality. In truth about who God is, in spirit, worship empowered by the Spirit and flowing from the heart rather than mere external performance. Foster points out that this is the passage that blows up every attempt to reduce worship to a location or a style. Jesus is systematically dismantling her categories, and ours.

How Do I Worship?

The best starting point David Mathis offers is deceptively simple: show up before you feel like it.

Show up before you feel like it.

Worship as a discipline means you don't wait for the emotion to arrive before you engage. You engage, and you trust the emotion to follow. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. But you show up anyway.

Start with your mouth before your heart catches up.

Pick a short doxology, a creed, a pre-written prayer, or even just a single line of Scripture that declares something true about God. Say it out loud. Every morning for a week. This isn’t a magic formula, just a deliberate act of reorientation. You are reminding yourself, before the day gets loud, what is actually true.

Bring your body into it.

Richard Foster is insistent on this and it's worth taking seriously. Worship involves more than your mind. Kneel if you're able. Open your hands. Stand. Your body isn't just along for the ride, it actually helps move your soul. Pick a physical posture and practice it. Notice how often a simple physical act will lead your soul before it even feels ready.

Find one song and actually listen to it.

Not as background noise. Sit with it. Follow the lyrics. Ask what they're claiming about God. David Mathis calls this "receiving the gift of song" rather than consuming it.