What is Worship? Thoughts on John 4.

The true worshipper worships in spirit and in truth.

I love this story. Jesus having a chat with someone he shouldn’t be talking to about having a drink and then talking about her sex-life, and then they have this amazing philosophical discourse about whether it matters where and how we worship God. So this kicks off a 4 part series on worship.

1/ what is worship

2/ the elements of worship

3/ how are we changed by worship

And then after our holiday a last one on worshipping when it’s difficult.

What is Worship?

What is worship, and why is it important? It’s not a word we use very often in everyday life, but it’s common in church. In the bit of the church that I have spent several years in it is used to refer to the music, the singing, although somehow I was never sure whether it still applied to the hymns. Maybe that’s what worship means to you. Perhaps it means something different, like when you are praying alone, or when you are receiving communion. Perhaps it just means ‘going to church’

Are worship and church services the same thing? When we gather here for our 10am service, it may be worship for some or all of us, but it could just as easily be reciting a script and singing songs or coming and meeting with friends. How do you think it was for some of the guests we had here last week? Going through a church service is only worship if something deeper is going on (which may also have happened for some of those guests). Jesus told the woman that place didn’t matter, that we don’t need to come to church to know him. We don’t need to come to church to worship him. We don’t need to come to church to seek forgiveness. We don’t need to come to church to receive God’s mercy. Our offerings to God, our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving as well as our petitions and the pleadings of our contrite hearts, are acceptable to God when they are offered in integrity, when we worship in spirit and in truth.

Let’s look at the definition of worship. The English word ‘worship’ comes from an older word ‘worthship’. If you’ve seen X-factor you’ll have seen people being asked what it would mean to them if they won. “It means the world to me” or “It means everything”. They’re saying what the prospect of winning is worth to them – that’s ‘worthship’. So when we talk about worshipping God, the heart of it is about showing what God means to us. Do we sound as sincere as those young singers? The heart of the meaning of worship is about expressing how much God matters to us, in response to the love he has shown to us in Jesus.

And church – the community of people who follow Jesus - is a worshipping community. But the music isn’t the worship. And neither is the quiet prayer time. Nor the communion. the words, the songs and all the other ingredients are there to help us to express our worship when we’re in church. Our calling is to worship, not to services. Coming to church may be helpful to us. It can help in so many ways, providing teaching and fellowship, and it may also allow us to filter out the chaos and confusion that prevents us from seeking and finding God in our daily lives. As it says in Proverbs, we ‘sharpen’ each other by coming together ‘as iron sharpens iron’. Church services help us to express what God means to us, sometimes in surprising ways.

So if worship is about the whole of life, and not just services held at a particular time, what do we mean by worship? What has the Bible got to say about it?

The first and most obvious thing to say is that worship is about God and not us.

All too often debates about worship become discussions about specific things and about our tastes. People talk about whether they like old services or new ones, organs or guitars, and why did they do that, stand there, etc. You can probably tell that I am used to doing things informally during church services. But please don’t mistake that for not desiring to express how great God is.

Because the questions we should be asking are about how our lives show what God means to us. When I come here on a Sunday morning I ask myself How do I show how much God means to me in the way that I prepare myself, the way that I strive to do my very best when serving his church? Even formality can express a lack of respect for God if it is not used to communicate how amazing he is.

Further questions: How do I show God’s worth in the way I talk to people or about them? How do I show his worth in my attitudes, my values, my relationships? Last week Graham helped us to think about how do we put God first in our giving, in our spending, in our priorities, in our ambitions? And actually, for most Christians the question isn’t ‘how’? but ‘do I’ put God first in these areas?

Putting God first means living in a way that the world at large may not expect, may find strange, may even oppose, but in a way that shows God’s heart. As James reminds us, it’s about caring for widows and orphans (James 1:27), and back in the Old Testament, the prophets said it was about justice, not religious rituals (Micah 6:6-8). That should be true for us individually and in our life together.

Second worship is about what we put into it, not what we get out of it

I have a confession. One of my pet hates in church services relates to music. When I was younger I listened to lots of very diverse music and I have very broad and eclectic tastes. This week I have been listening to Beyonce, Ed Shearan, Chase and Status, and Miles Davis. I like all sorts. But one thing I don’t like is those choruses written with a sort of Hebrew style that get faster and faster. You know the ones, and you may well not share my view. I don’t know why, but they sort of bug me. Which I’m sure is why God put it on the hearts of the children when they chose the songs for the service after the sleepover to sing not one but two of them when I was on guitar duty and was unfamiliar with playing them. So what did I do? Now I’m not telling you this to make me look all holy but just because its what happened: I spent hours on the Saturday playing them over and over to ensure that I could make the necessary chord changes as the songs got faster. Hours practising my least favourite type of song ever, till I couldn’t get them out of my head. But I did it out of love for God and for the children. And I enjoyed it. JFK said “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. In all our thinking about worship, perhaps we need to hold on to something similar. I see that this has been paraphrased on the leaflets here asking about people’s gifts, and look at the fruit-different people, different voices, different faces, amazing growth and life in the Sunday Club. And I’m sure that there are other gifts lying waiting to be discovered but which some of you will be reluctant to offer up, perhaps due to lack of confidence or because you haven’t been encouraged. Worship isn’t done for us, it’s from inside us to glorify God, to encourage one another and to share with others. Everything we do should build up others when we meet. So when we experience something in a service that we may not particularly like or is unfamiliar, like a new song or a different prayer, or if we are asked to do something outside our comfort zone like read or preach or sing up front we need to consider how it might encourage others and strengthen them.

Third, worship is about who we are, and not about performing certain rituals.

The most used word in the Bible for Christian worship has quite a funny meaning. In the original language, it’s proskuneo and it’s usually translated as worship or sometimes pay homage.

Some commentators claim that it means to approach like a dog (pros = towards, kuon = dog) – a domesticated dog.

Story of Cerberus. Surprise that he did this as never had done EVER!

Here are a few examples of the word being used:

·        When the wise men fall to their knees and pay homage to the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:11)

·        When a leper approaches Jesus and bows to him (Matthew 8:2)

·        When a man with an unclean spirit falls at Jesus’ feet. (Mark 5:6)

·        It’s also the word used throughout the passage we heard today when they discuss worshipping in the Temple compared to worshipping on a mountain, and then Jesus says the kind of worshipper the Father wants is one who will worship in Spirit and in truth. (John 4)

·        It’s also the normal word for worship in heaven in the book of Revelation.

But notice, nearly all uses of this word concern worship outside religious buildings. When Jesus went to synagogues and the Temple it usually didn’t go well. He got a death threat after preaching on Isaiah in Luke 4, outrage that he healed someone on the Sabbath in a synagogue in Luke 13, and plots to kill him when he gets to the Temple during the days before his crucifixion.

Worship is actually about the big picture, about what we do for the other 166 hours of the week when we aren’t here. Do we live lives, in some sense, in acknowledgement that Jesus is sovereign in our lives, in every part of them?

So it’s vital to understand that worship isn’t confined to church:

A church service is when we come together to share in worship with others, to learn about the God we worship, and encourage each another. It is a vital and important resource, which is why worshippers will give carefully and prayerfully to support the life of the church. (look at first reading) It’s why Graham came to speak to us, to remind us that bringing in the kingdom of God starts with our own hearts and whether we prioritise the life and work of Christ’s church.

So as we've looked at what is worship, we’ve learned that it is about God, not us, that it’s about what we put in and not what we get out, and it is about who we are, not what we do in church.

Worship is expressing what God means to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not for 1 ½ hours one day a week. It’s about the way we live our lives, the choices we make, the words we use, the money we spend, the time we give. In other words it’s about who we are and the priorities we have. And worship is an amazing privilege, to be able to come into the presence of the living God and express how awesome he is. If for some reason we could no longer meet here on a Sunday we would still know God. We would still be called worship him. We would still need to seek forgiveness. We would still freely receive his mercy. And it is in knowing this, that worship is something we do all the time, everywhere, that we truly find God, like the woman here recognising Jesus as Messiah. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

So as we go through this series, my prayer is that God will enable both us and others worship God in Spirit and in truth. Amen.