Stop what you’re doing and worship!
June 30, 2009
Here’s the situation: It’s Wednesday evening. You and your family have finished dinner, and the children scatter (after, of course, dutifully clearing the table and doing the dishes) to their four corners of the house to return to whatever playthings had captivated their attention before dinner. You also take up your normal after-dinner routine, checking your email, reading the news, making sure the weather will hold for your cookout this weekend. Then you look at the time and it’s 6:45, which means one thing: “Kids, stop what you’re doing and let’s go to worship!”
Of course, right? It’s time to go to worship. You have to stop everything else so you can go to the place where you worship. So you can do the things you do when you worship. Take a pause from life and worship. And then an hour and a half later, after worship is done, you can resume life as usual.
Is this what our gatherings are for? To take a pause from life, to stop whatever else we’re doing, and worship? And then afterward, carry on with life—perhaps with a better perspective, a stronger resolve, clearer spiritual sight, or maybe even having seen God in His word and in Christ, and having repented of sin. But nevertheless, afterward, you resume something you had temporarily stopped in order to worship.
Here’s the problem: You never stop worshiping. Whatever you or your children were doing before you came to the church building, you were worshiping. And whatever you go back to doing when you leave, you are worshiping. Everything you do is worship.
You don’t get to turn worship on, then turn it off. You don’t get to turn life off in order to worship. Life is worship. Worship is life. How so?
Everything you do is service to someone or something, indicating the worth of that person or thing in your life. Which is exactly what worship is: Worship is service of some kind offered to someone or something, indicating the worth of that person or thing. And therefore everything you do is worship. It may not always be readily obvious what or whom you are worshiping; but you are always worshiping.
Worship is woven into our very make-up as God’s creatures. He created us to serve Him and to bear His image. We therefore cannot be anything other than servants and image-bearers. Which means we therefore cannot be anything other than worshipers. Which means we cannot do anything other than worship.
This is a foundational truth that we must grasp if we are to order our lives—and the church—rightly. Worship is not an event; it is not a compartment of life; it is not music, or prayer, or preaching, or the ordinances; worship is life.
Coming up next: The real worship war