Essentials Of Worship Series

I wish there were some Scripture that would just spell out what I have to have in order to worship God. Wait, there is at least one! Jesus said,

John 4:23-24

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

There’s one essential we can hang our hats on. Jesus said that worship of God must be this way. So, all along the next 4 weeks, we’ll be working to identify what it means to worship in spirit and in truth. We have to. It’s an essential. That Scripture, along with several others we’re going to look at this morning, help us to see some of the must-have’s of worshiping God. This is kind of a “Worship 101” course this morning. But, once again, we’re trying to get back to some basics this morning because we need to do that once in a while.

Here are some worship essentials:

I. An Object of Worship

Worship always has an object. That is, there’s always someone or something to which worship is directed. It may be God, it may be an idol, or it may be something else, but be assured, if there’s worship, there’s an object of that worship.

When you go back through the OT and look for what it has to say, it’s interesting how much of it is talking about the object of worship. Usually, God is warning Israel or rebuking Israel about worshiping false gods. The very first of the 10 Commandments was about this:

Exodus 20:3-5

"You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,

The nations Israel would be overthrowing as they entered the land of Canaan were all worshiping false gods. Israel was in a dangerous situation. They weren’t supposed to mess around with those gods. They weren’t even to allow the people to remain. It was too dangerous. Sure enough, look at all the times Israel either made golden calves or sold out to worship of Baal or Chemosh or other phony gods.

There was an instance where God gave help to Israel and they forgot the point of it. He used Gideon and 300 men to overthrow thousands of Midianites. And Gideon took gold earrings from the spoils of that victory and made an ephod – a breastplate like a priest wore – and it became an object of worship.

Judges 8:27

Gideon made the gold into an ephod, which he placed in Ophrah, his town. All Israel prostituted themselves by worshiping it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and his family.

There was a time in their history when God sent snakes among the camp of Israel to punish them. Lots of the people were bitten, and many died. So, they cried to God for help, and He had Moses make a snake of bronze and put it up on a pole in the middle of the camp. If someone was bitten, all that person had to do was look at the bronze snake, and they’d be healed. Neat solution – look and live. Jesus even compared this to the way that He would be lifted up on the cross. Interesting parallel – look and live. But later, good king Hezekiah had to get rid of the snake, because people had made it into an object of worship.