What Is Worship?

Worship is a Verb

Romans 12:1

February 12, 2017

When I was in school, my favorite class was math. I loved math and wanted to major in math when I went to college. My most dreaded class was English. I couldn’t write well and I didn’t understand grammar. When Joshua and Zachary needed help in math, I was the chosen one to help them. Give me science, history, Spanish or math . . . but don’t give me English. That was totally turned over to Debbie who can recite every preposition there is. She would explain grammar to the boys, I would look at her and shake my head. She would try to explain it to me, and I would just tell her to stop. I didn’t understand grammar 40 years ago, and I’m not going to start today!

Well, we have a grammar problem in the church. It’s true for so many of us. We get a lot confused on this one.

Here’s a quick grammer lesson ~

Nouns are a part of speech that denotes a person, animal, place, thing, or idea.

Verbs are words that show an action, occurrence, or state of being.

So, what does this all have to do with us? Great question!! I believe when it comes to worship, most of us look at worship as a noun. It’s a thing, it’s a place, it’s maybe even an idea.

And for many of us, it’s definitely not a verb. It’s not an action oriented event. That may sound harsh, but I believe that is pretty true for the universal church. Starting last week, we were moving from talking about community and moving into talks about worship.

Worship has been a hot topic in the church for the past 20-30 years. It used to be every church had a hymnal, sang out of that looking down at the hymnal. My first church was progressive, we had an overhead projector and a screen on the stage. Those were fun logistics to deal with, especially when the transperancy slid off the screen and you couldn’t get the screen down quickly.

Now, most churches have multi-media, we have screens and no hymnals and EVERYONE has their thoughts about worship . . . what it is and what it is not. This series is not about starting a worship war, it’s actually to get us more on the same page, because worshiping God is the greatest thing we do.

God’s call to us is to worship Him in spirit and in truth. That’s what Jesus said in John 4:23.

My hope as we move through this series is that we will be able to come to a better agreement about what worship is and is not; different styles and ways to worship, and possibly to stretch each one of us a bit so we can expand the way we worship. I’m not advocating for us to become pentecostal in our worship or do to cartwheels and flips down the aisle. Worship should never be divisive. If it is, then satan is winning the war. Worship should always be unifying, because the focus is not you and me, it’s the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Worship has to fit who you uniquely are according to God’s creation. We all have some pretty strong feelings about what the right and proper way is to worship, and most likely, none of them are wrong, which makes this even more difficult. Yet, we’re going to look at different aspects of worship during this series. Even to the point of dissecting our worship and ways we can be more effective at worship.

Ultimately the question is this - - - Am I worshiping God with all that I have in response to all that He is?

Last week we were looking at Romans 12:1-8, today, we’re only going to look at Romans 12:1, because I believe there is a great deal of richness in what Paul is asking us to do ~

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. – Romans 12:1

I’m going to break down this passage. It starts out with one of my favorite words . . . therefore. Whenever you see that word, you need to ask this question - - “what’s it there for?”

Romans is the most theological book of the New Testament and for the last 5 chapters of this book, Paul goes from theological to practical. Paul is now wanting the people to put into practice the theological tenets he’s been talking about. Believe it or not, theology can be fun, but theology alone only gets you so far, it’s not meant to be cold and lifeless, it’s meant to be dynamic and applicable to life.