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Last week we looked at how worship of God must be carried out; in spirit and truth. I would advise you to look in the archive to get the foundation before moving onto this week’s offering, but suffice it to say that worship of God must fully involve our spirits and can only be classed as true worship if it is as a result of God’s saving grace. However we still have not identified what worship truly is. Is there a Bible verse that says, ‘worship is…’?

Actually, there is. Paul wrote these words: ‘…from him [God] and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’ (Romans 11:36-12:1)

So, our worship should be defined by the above passage. This corresponds to Jesus’ words above quite nicely in that Paul urges us to ‘present [our] bodies’, which references Jesus’ encouragement to fully engage with our spirits, ‘by the mercies of God’, i.e. inspired by our relationship with Jesus. Other translations tell us to present our bodies ‘in view of God’s mercy’ (Romans 12:1 [NIV]).

There is more in this passage, however. Paul mentions that our bodies must be presented as ‘a living sacrifice’, which has fallen into Christian usage as a nice phrase, but it is not a nice phrase. Sacrifice is not a particularly nice concept, and I have found that use of the word in connection to my life always seems to involve me being made uncomfortable in some way. Sacrifice means giving up some significant aspect of my life; the actual word describes the death of an animal so in essence we are required to ‘put to death’ some aspect of our lives. Suddenly doing action songs with a silly grin on our faces seems to have been put into perspective.

The concept of sacrifice in worship is revisited by the author to the Hebrews. His description of a ‘sacrifice of praise’ is ‘the fruit of lips that acknowledge [Jesus’] name’ (Hebrews 13:15). So worship is certainly not merely singing, but worship is the fruit which grows from the root of acknowledging Jesus’ name, i.e. being in a relationship with Jesus (see Romans 10:9). Worship without sacrifice is not worship.

Worship always involves sacrifice.

Worship of God is the fruit of a relationship with Jesus.

An important word in this passage is ‘to’, when applied to a person, namely God. Paul writes, ‘to him be glory forever,’ and then links the ideas by saying that our sacrifice must be ‘acceptable to God’. In other words we see that the glory is directed towards God and therefore aim for the sacrifices we make to be acceptable to him. Oftentimes, however, I have found that I make sacrifices for all sorts of things, good and bad. The aim behind my sacrifices is always to please the one for whom I have made the sacrifice. My worship is not always to God!

One of the Ten Commandments is clear when it says, ‘you shall not bow down to [idols] or worship them.’ (Exodus 20:5 [NIV]) We can see that worshipping idols is a possibility, but I have not seen many in London recently chopping up a piece of wood and then bowing down in front of it!

Paul recognised the practical application of this when he wrote about idol worshippers: ‘they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things’ (Romans 1:22-23). Paul saw that making sacrifices for the glory of God does not just work itself out for God, but also for idols. We choose to give glory to creatures and objects rather than Creator God.

Worship is not always to God.

I am going to leave it at that this week – check out next week for a conclusion and a definition of what biblical worship really is!

"Refreshment in Refuge" from Gina Burgess

What's to be thankful for in this?