Worship: Glorifying God in Everything
Let me start with a question. What is something you did yesterday, are doing today, and will do again tomorrow?
Sleep. Breathe. Eat. All true. But the one I’m after is this: worship.
Now, I know that sounds like a plug for the worship team. It isn’t. But it could be.
The theme of worship runs through the entire Bible, so we won’t have one primary passage this morning. We’ll be moving through various texts to see how the worship of God is woven all the way through the tapestry of His inspired, inerrant, perfect word.
What Is Worship?
Some of you feel like this is a no-brainer. We were just here. We sang songs. Somebody held a guitar. We raised our voices. We worshiped.
And we did. But I want us to get a much bigger, much broader understanding than singing tunes for thirty minutes once a week.
I’ll be honest — I may have bitten off more than I can chew, because this topic is enormous. So let me offer a working definition. It isn’t exhaustive, but it gives us something to stand on:
Worship is the natural response to, and supernatural engagement with, who God is and what He has done.
If you’re already checking out because this sounds heady, my goal is the opposite. I want to make this accessible, and to show you why understanding worship is so crucial — because whether you know it or not, you are a worshiper.
How Are We Worshipers?
Maybe you’re not a Christian. Maybe you’d file yourself under “not religious,” or “spiritual but not religious.” You might reasonably ask me to prove that claim.
Here are three ways.
1. We are worshipers fundamentally.
At the fundamental, rudimentary core of who we are as human beings, we are voluntarily and involuntarily worshiping. And we were made that way.
God Himself is trinitarian — one God, three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and He made us in His image. Genesis 1:26–27:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Because God within His trinitarian, communal self is perpetually pouring Himself out generously into each of the divine persons in perfect harmony and community — and because we are made in that image — we reflect Him. We cannot help but pour ourselves out.
2. We are worshipers continuously.
The scholar and author Harold Best makes this point in his book Unceasing Worship, and it reshaped how I think about all of this.
He describes worship as the continuous outpouring of all that I am, all that I do, and all that I can ever become, in light of a chosen or choosing God.
But then he makes a careful distinction that’s worth slowing down for. He says he deliberately does not claim we were created to be continuous outpourers, and he won’t say we were created to worship — because that would suggest God is somehow incomplete, needing something outside Himself to finish His sense of Himself. He’s even cautious about saying we were created for worship, because that implies worship is a capacity that can be separated out and filed into one category of our being among others.
Instead he insists on this: we were created continuously outpouring. We were made in that condition, in that instant. We are the imago Dei — the image of God. We didn’t graduate into it. We were already in the image of God the instant the Spirit breathed into our dust.
You can see that continuous nature in Genesis 2, when God places Adam — and subsequently Eve — in the garden to work the ground and keep it. As the worship pastor and author Zac Hicks observes, that phrasing is worship language, echoing the vocabulary used later of the Levitical priests.
Which means the first role we see for worshipers is gardener: taking the ground and working it to make something beautiful, to make something fruitful.
So consider this. Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing or saying or thinking — it’s perpetual worship.
From the moment you wake up, you’re worshiping. Getting out of bed. Getting ready for work. Taking care of your kids. The morning commute. Watching a movie, playing a game, having a conversation. Singing with your brothers and sisters in Christ or singing in the shower. Cooking a meal. Reading a bedtime story. Going to bed. Sleeping and dreaming.
All of it, an act of worship. You can’t help it.
We cannot stop pouring ourselves out to our families, our friends, our coworkers, even strangers. That doesn’t necessarily mean we are worshiping those people or activities — but we worship through those means and mediums.
3. We are worshipers passionately.
Whoever you are, wherever you’ve come from, whatever you’re doing, you engage in worship with passion.
Yes, we can grow dull. We can go stale. But there is always a degree and a direction in which our passion exists and travels.
For some of us that passion is most easily expressed intellectually — our minds come alive in thoughtful dialogue and compelling ideas. For others it’s emotional — our hearts are moved by powerful storytelling or stirred by the lyric of a song. For others it’s physical — a morning jog, a hard workout, something that gets us moving and leaves us satisfied.
I want to be careful here. I’m not sorting people into camps and saying you only worship intellectually, or emotionally, or physically. We are holistic beings. Because God is one — because He is united in His trinitarian self, His persons neither disconnected nor segregated — and because we are made in His image, we are not so simplistic. We are not one-trick ponies.
We are beautifully complex, worshiping and outpouring in every extent of our being, and doing it at all times.
God Wants You, Not Your Offerings
Here’s what matters: God wants us, not what we have to offer Him.
In Psalm 51, David is repenting of his adultery with Bathsheba and his responsibility for the murder of her husband. And listen to what he cries out:
You do not desire a sacrifice, or I would offer one. You do not want a burnt offering. The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit. You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God.
God wants every facet, every bit of our very existence, for Himself. And He made us worshipers, worshiping.
So: fundamentally, continuously, passionately.
And whatever is the object of our worship ultimately shapes us. With each repetition — as we return day in and day out to direct our worship toward someone or something — we are conformed to its nature, and it creates in us a habitual pull to come back for more.
Who or what you worship matters.
The Problem
This is how God created us to live. But there’s a problem.
While every atom in our bones and every cell in our bodies is fundamentally, continuously, passionately geared toward worship, we are born in sin — fallen, distant, apart from God. We are willingly sinful. And rather than living according to His design, daily transformed and renewed into the image and likeness of Christ, we lay ourselves on the altar and give ourselves up to false gods. Blind and deaf idols that will ultimately leave us disappointed and destroyed.
In Genesis 3, Eve is deceived by the serpent and Adam follows. They believed that eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make them like God — when in fact God had already made them like Him. They thought they could be their own gods. So they disobeyed, covered themselves, and hid.
Later, while Moses is up on Mount Sinai, the Israelites demand physical, hand-crafted idols to guide them instead of God.
And we do exactly the same. If we dig down deep enough, none of us can confess otherwise.
The sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin famously described the human heart as a perpetual factory of idols.
The bottom line: we either make idols of ourselves, or idols for ourselves.
Living Sacrifices
Romans 12:1–2:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.
From Romans 1:18 all the way to Romans 11:36, Paul has been building one argument: God has been so infinitely merciful toward us that we ought to give ourselves entirely back to Him because of His saving grace.
Consider what kind of mercy that is. Put whoever you consider your greatest enemy in the back of your mind — the person you think is genuinely the worst. Now put that person in your place, and step into Jesus’s sandals yourself.
I don’t think you could do it. I don’t think any of us could.
We are not owed mercy. Yet He justifies the ungodly, whose works testify against them, and by grace through faith He freely shows us mercy.
Paul takes the sacrificial language of the Old Testament and points it at the new life we have in Christ — that we have been saved and are being sanctified in mind, heart, body, and soul, and that we are to be living sacrifices.
Which is a striking phrase. Read the entire Old Testament sacrificial system and you won’t find many living sacrifices, because sacrifices die.
And that’s exactly the point. Because of what Jesus has done, we are not the ones put to death — He was. Those temple sacrifices and animal deaths foreshadowed what His sacrifice and His death would fulfill, in our place, for our sin.
Why Worship at All?
Some of you are still asking, honestly: why should I worship God, if I’m not inclined to?
I’d humbly submit two reasons. Because He is worthy and deserving of all glory. And because it belongs to Him and to Him alone.
We are all worshipers. We all glorify something, whether we know it or not.
God does not command worship because He needs it — as though He were running low on glory, His tank creeping toward empty. He commands it because it already belongs to Him.
What Is Glory?
We throw that word around without much nuance. So if we’re meant to give God glory, what exactly are we giving?
Tim Keller, who went to be with the Lord this past May, described it something like this. God’s glory is His infinite weight, His supreme importance. To glorify God is to obey Him unconditionally — because the moment you say “I’ll obey if,” you’ve given something else more importance, more glory, than God.
But, Keller says, glorifying God is never less than obedience, and it is more. God’s glory also means His inexpressible beauty and perfection. It doesn’t glorify Him if we only ever obey out of duty. We must give Him not only our will but our heart — adoring Him, enjoying Him, finding Him infinitely attractive.
And there is no greater beauty than to see the Son of God laying aside His glory and dying for us.
Idols Can’t Bear the Weight
Whatever we worship and glorify, we also plant our identity in.
And if we put our identity in anything other than God — if we substitute any created thing for the One who alone is worthy — it will not be able to bear the weight. It might appear to hold for a second or two. Then it will be crushed, and you will be thoroughly broken. Because you put your identity in a flawed savior. A savior who can’t even save himself.
Spouses: odds are that at some point you placed a very high, idealistic, possibly unrealistic expectation on your spouse. Now, there are grounds for expectations — you should have them. But when they failed to meet the ideal, the idol you had made of them in your heart caved in. And you went spiraling: did I marry the wrong person? Or did I push them into failing?
Parents: we fall into this trap too, making idols of our children, bowing to them. And when they miss the mark — especially if they’re your perceived second chance at the success you never had — their failure doesn’t only crush them. It crushes the other idol, the one where you’re the perfect parent. So you pace the floor asking what you did wrong, because your identity was in your parenting.
And the same goes for kids idolizing parents. Which is why, parents, when we make mistakes, our kids need to see the real us — so that in our brokenness and weakness we can relate to one another as people made in the image of God.
When we idolize others, we place an unbearable weight on them, expecting perfection according to our own standards — a weight they cannot carry and were never meant to carry.
Only one human being ever lived perfectly according to God’s standard. His name is Jesus, and He made a way for the forgiveness of sins for sinners like us.
Three Ways Worship Works in Us
It helps us respond to who God is and what He has done.
In Galatians, as Paul argues that Gentile believers are grafted into the same promise of salvation as Jewish believers, he says God sends the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6).
So when you are drawn by God’s loving-kindness to repentance — a full one-eighty change of mind — and you come to faith in Him through Jesus Christ, His saving work causes you to respond. When that switch flips, when He takes your hardened heart of stone and gives you a heart of flesh for His Holy Spirit to take up residence in, you cannot help but welcome Him with joy and thanksgiving. All because of who He is and what He’s done.
It reminds us of Christ’s redemption.
There are moments when we flash back to who we were before Christ — and moments now, when we stumble and fall back into the ditch of sin, where we forget who we have become in Him.
When we fix our eyes on Jesus — whom the writer of Hebrews calls the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2) — we’re reminded not only that God was faithful to rescue us at a certain point way back when, but that He is still right beside you now.
It reforms every nook and cranny of our lives.
Not only do we respond to what He’s done, and not only are we reminded that we’re still His children whom He will never abandon — by His grace He is actively working in us. As Paul says in Philippians 1:6, God will finish what He started, bringing you to completion when you meet Him face to face.
When our entire lives point back to Him, revolve around His word, and are centered on His work, we are being recalibrated, reoriented, transformed, and renewed by Him — to look, live, and love like Him.
Coming to the Table
So as we worship God corporately, we respond to what He’s done through communion, prayer, reflection, and singing.
We remember that Jesus lived the perfect, sinless life we should have lived, and died the death we should have died — because the wages of our sin was death. His broken body, in the bread. His shed blood, in the cup. Given up to reconcile us to relationship with our heavenly Father. His worst moments redeemed us for an eternity with Him.
And we are being reformed as we go to God in prayer, confessing our sins, singing His praises, giving Him glory through everything we do.
If you’re not a Christian — we want to welcome you. We planted this church for you, and we’d love to invite you to find and follow Jesus with us. I’d simply ask that you abstain from the elements, because we take them as Christians who believe that through what Jesus did on the cross our sins have been forgiven, and that He exchanged our sin and unrighteousness for His grace and His righteousness.
But please still come forward for prayer. Because as Christians we recognize that all of us are people in need of prayer — all of us in need of a Father in heaven who loves us and sent His Son to save us, so that the Holy Spirit might dwell in us.
You are a worshiper. The only question is who receives it.
