Worship: Our Response to God’s Revelation
“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” (Revelation 4:11)
“You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.” (Revelation 5:9-10)
Most definitions of “worship” that I have seen could be summarized something like this: “Worship is our response to God’s revelation of who He is and what he has done.” Worship is responding to the tremendous love God has shown us by his sacrifices, especially his sacrifice of his Son to save us.
I grew up on a definition of worship that was limited to place (the church building), and form (singing, praying, Lord’s Supper, giving, and preaching during a Sunday service at the church building). However, I have discovered in my relationship with God that these items are not central to the worship God expects from me. I have discovered as Richard Foster states it, that “we have not worshiped the Lord until Spirit touches spirit.” Until God touches and frees our spirit we cannot enter the realm of worship. Singing, praying, praising all may lead to worship, but worship is more than any of these as Paul makes clear in Romans 12:1, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.”
Take some time this week to pray and meditate on these verses from 1 Peter 2:4-10. As you read and pray, ask God how he wants to touch your spirit so that you might more fully worship him with your life and respond to his deep love for you.
As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says:
“See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”
Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,
“The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone,’” and,
“A stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”
They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
––––Steve Puckett