Designed for Worship

I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about cooking. It was baking that first hooked me when I was a kid – the endless, delicious things that could be created by the simple act of creaming butter and folding flour. It was like magic. At first it was the sweet stuff, but as I grew into an adult the necessity of putting meals on the table introduced me to the wonders of savoury cooking. Now I can’t help but daydream and plan and sometimes even obsess over the new and interesting creations I can spin with a pan and a spatula. (Unfortunately the effort is all but lost on my happy-with-cheese-on-toast husband and only-eats-white-food three year old – I hold out hope for the baby.)

What is it that you dream about when your mind wanders? If it’s not cooking, is it Netflix? Books? Travel? Gaming? Maybe you’re more of the career-minded type, planning on climbing the corporate ladder. Or maybe you’re just one post away from making it as an influencer on the ‘gram (or Tik-Tok if you’re younger than me).

All of us spend a lot of energy serving and slaving over the things that have captured our attention, the things that have won our hearts – and these are often the things that we worship. Sometimes we worship them openly and publicly, but often they’re things that we don’t admit to others – or even acknowledge to ourselves. They sit in the deepest corners of our hearts, shaping who we really are and what we really stand for. We humans are very good at worshipping. We were designed for worship.

Only we weren’t designed to worship the things God created, however good (or delicious) they may be. We were designed to worship the creator.

The sustainer of the universe and the saviour of our souls is the one who should rightfully captivate our attention and take the highest place in our hearts. Worshipping God is what we were made for and should be the primary purpose of our lives. So what does such worship look like?

What is worship?

We’ll start with this simple definition: worship is the attitude of the heart which honours God above all else. The Bible talks about this worship in two primary ways: worship that is done for us, and worship done by us. How does this work? Firstly, worship is something done by Jesus, on our behalf. The problem created by our sin is that we readily and easily exchange the truth about God for a lie. We worship created things rather than the creator (Rom 1:25) – a problem we can’t fix ourselves. It’s only through the perfect worship of Jesus on our behalf that we can turn and serve the creator. Jesus intercedes for us, making us acceptable to a holy God (Heb 9:24-25). This is the worship Jesus does for us.

At the same time, we have a responsibility to offer worship to our great God. The Bible shows us that in response to the true worship of Jesus, we are to offer up our lives and lips in service of him. In Romans 12:1 we are called to “present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service”.

By God’s grace we are saved through faith. And just as Israel offered its ritual sacrifices under God’s grace, so now we should offer our own bodies as living sacrifices. This is the right response to being saved. Equally, we are called to offer the fruit of our lips. Hebrews 13:15 commands that “through him [Christ] then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.” The words that we say ought to bring him glory and praise.

But we don’t just have to speak these words – we can sing them!