“Worship Is More Than A Church Service”
Sermon Series: “Core”
Introduction: One of our core values at True Life states, “We believe that worship is not just ritual but a real encounter with the living God is who worthy of our worship.” Worship is foundational for churches and really for everything in life. However, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about worship. In fact, Christians tend to fight over worship because we confuse the true heart of worship with styles. As Mark Driscoll says, “Don’t ascribe a moral value to a preferential style.” A lot of Christians seem to think that they are sanctified by a particular worship or ministry style. Honestly, I have had misunderstanding and shallow thinking about worship over the course of my Christian life. So, I want to share some of the key Scriptural truths about worship that the Lord has taught me in the hope that they will inform and guide us regarding what worship truly is and what it means to our lives. These truths are certainly not everything the Bible teaches us about worship, but I think they are the foundational issues that we have to grasp.
1. Everybody is a worshipper. The only question is who or what we are worshipping (Romans 1:18-25, Jeremiah 2:5-13). We either worship the Creator or created things, but we do worship. The root of sin is us putting ourselves in place of God. He created us to be dependent upon Him, but we try to live independently and be our own gods.
2. Worship is giving glory, dedication, sacrifice, and service to that which is most worthy to us (Romans 11:36-12:1). Of
course, the Bible teaches us that we are to give glory, dedication, sacrifice, and service to God the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit. God demands our worship (Matthew 4:10), desires our worship (John 4:23), and deserves our worship (Revelation 4-5). However, we are worshipping falsely when we give anything glory, dedication, sacrifice, and service instead of God. We can turn good things into gods, which makes them bad things. We are idolaters when we worship anything other than God. In reality, there is a false god behind every sin that we are treating as a “functional savior” (to quote Martin Luther).
3. True worship flows through Jesus and out of the gospel (1 Timothy 2:5, Hebrews 13:15, Luke 7:36-50, Philippians 3:3). We can only come to God through Jesus, and our ability and desire to worship the one true God comes from what Jesus has done for us (1 John 4:10). Ultimately, we can only find satisfaction through the worship of Jesus because that is what we were created for (John 4:13-14).
Conclusion: What are you truly worshipping? Are you worshipping God through Jesus Christ?
