Worship Is NOT About You

Today’s post was born out of a social media post I made a couple of weeks ago. I made the following comment:

If the purpose of your worship service is anything other than a gathering of the body of believers to glorify their King, then you’re doing it wrong. It’s not about lights, smoke, or squealing guitar riffs.

Acceptable Worship Facebook Link

I further added, “If you cannot ‘worship’ without a particular style, then you have created an idol out of that form.” I understand that those can be some tough words to hear, so I want to take the time to explain those comments a little bit further. Understanding the “who” of worship is vital to every corporate gathering, so let me provide a few points to help keep us focused in worship.

NOTE: Jonathan Cruse writes, “How a particular congregation approaches the worship service as a corporate entity is not all that matters – how I myself as a Christian individual and son and servant of God approach worship is of crucial significance.”1 This post is not just for those who lead worship, but for ALL Christians! So please keep reading!

Who initiates worship?

Have you ever stopped to think who initiates our worship? Is it God? And if it is God, how does he initiate worship? Or do we initiate worship? And if we do, why would that be acceptable to God? I hope you take some time to ponder these questions as I work through them in this post. So the question is…who initiates our worship? Revelation 4 gives us a glimpse of worship around God’s throne, so we know that it is continuously occurring. Thus, when we gather to worship, it is only by God’s initiation that we respond to him. WE do not create the response. This is an important distinction that can get lost in many services today. God does not show up at 9:00am on Sunday morning because that’s when we meet to worship. Worship is continually occurring around God’s throne, so when we meet as a body of believers, we are responding to God’s invitation to worship him. He initiates, we respond.

How do we respond to this initiation?

To get right to the point, we ONLY respond to God’s initiation through Christ’s sacrifice, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let me break that down a bit. If we, in our fallen sin nature, tried to approach God by our own merits, we would fall woefully short. There is nothing we can do to earn favor with God. We need a mediator who can provide intercession for us to worship. Jesus is our mediator. His atoning sacrifice on the cross provides the ability for all who believe to worship God acceptably. That’s it. There is no other way that we can worship God according to the standards that He alone has set forth.

James B. Torrance states, “The church which takes her eyes off Jesus Christ, the only mediator of our worship, is on the road to becoming apostate. There is no more urgent need in our churches today than to recover the trinitarian nature of grace – that it is by grace alone, through the gift of Jesus Christ in the Spirit that we can enter into and live a life of communion with God the Father.”2 The other component of our worship is that we only worship in the power of the Holy Spirit. Through the power of the Spirit, we are brought into communion with God the Father and his Son, Jesus. That is a mind-blowing thought! Michael Reeves notes, “if the Spirit were not God, he could not do that.”3

Understanding that our worship is ONLY about worshiping our triune God removes the narcissistic tendency in our culture today to make everything about us. By placing our eyes rightfully on the One who initiates our worship, and then understanding how we worship through Christ’s sacrifice in the power of the Holy Spirit, we learn how to worship rightly.

Like my quote said, worship is not about smoke, lights, and squealing guitar riffs. It is about worshiping our holy, worthy, triune God. I encourage you to, first read Scripture, then read some of the resources I have used to write this post. Understanding more deeply how we approach God in worship transforms what happens when we gather. The question changes from “Did you like worship today?” to “Was our worship pleasing to God today?”

1. Jonathan Landry Cruse, What Happens When We Worship (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2020), 8.
2. James B. Torrance, Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic), 59.
3. Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL” InterVarsity Press), 90.