What Is Worship?

I. Meeting someone who is famous or semi-famous – thoughts and feeling

a. Story about Kansas

II. All People Worship

a. All people worship. Atheist, pagan, faithful, or undecided, all human beings have the need deep within them to worship – or “serve” as Brother Bob put it. This need to worship is essential in how we develop as human beings.

III. What we worship matters

a. Bill Johnson – “What we fear is what we trust. What we trust is what we worship.”

b. Example of money

c. Example of anger

d. Talking about Gentiles – Jews come later - "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen." Romans 1:21-25 (NIV)

i. God revealed himself to all mankind

ii. Many rejected the truth

iii. Rejecting the truth lead to foolish thinking

iv. Foolish thinking lead to worshiping other things

v. Sin produced by wrong worship

e. Ask for thoughts

IV. Worship, at its heart is about Relationship

a. Martin Buber’s Dialogical personhood

i. I It relationships – one way, impersonal, exhaustive (e.g. my computer)

ii. I You relationships mutual, reciprocal, symmetrical, and inconsolable e.g. Karry

b. Idolatry is an I It relationship – Islam, Hinduism, idolatry

c. Sometimes we treat God as an I It relationship

V. Why do all people worship?

a. We are made in the image of God

i. God was in perfect communal Love before creation

ii. God desired – did not need but wanted to share His perfect love

iii. Out of Nothing God created everything and declared it good

iv. God created humanity out of nothing (the dust and the material that formed the first man was made form nothing), and declared it very good

v. "Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So, God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God, he created them;

male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning —the sixth day." (Genesis 1:26-31 NIV)

1. Out of nothing He created humanity and stamped His image upon them so that they could be in loving community together

2. He gave humanity free will to choose to love Him back, but humanity choose to rebel

3. The image of God was damaged by sin

4. That damaged image causes us to worship other things instead of God

vi. The problem is: God Saves. Man suffers. Use e.g. of personal relationship

vii. The problem resolved: Jesus suffered. Jesus saves.

viii. Through the death, burial, resurrection, ascension of Jesus, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, we can have the image of God.

VI. ALL OF LIFE IS WORSHIP!!

a. Our indwelling deepest purpose is to have relationship with God. He created us out of nothing for the sole purpose of loving us. Through Jesus we are redeemed form our sin, restored in relationship with God, and transformed into the people God has created us to be.

b. Worship is the unending fellowship and relationship with God – every aspect of our lives is an act of worship.

VII. Worship is a spiritual weapon

In this part I am going to look at the wicked weapon of despair, and how God has given us a powerful weapon to defeat that weapon in worship.