Thoughts on Worship

I spent a lot of time looking at and considering what 'worship' means and is over the summer, the forms it should take and the forms it appears in. As created beings the act of worship is normal, the first of God's commandments to Moses in Exodus is about worship - we are called not to be idolaters and worship anything other than God. Worship of God is integral, because if not worshipping God we're worshipping something else. That said, here are my initial thoughts.

In my mind the purpose of 'worship music' is or at least should be to inspire the worshiper. There can be no doubt that the creative arts are employed well in this endeavour (there is a reason my ballet shoes are put in my bag whenever I leave for church). 

Primarily worship is to glorify God, but I find the only way of truly doing this is through surrender. To fully worship God you must surrender and sacrifice everything to Him. My favourite prayer "take everything that I have, be everything that I am." If I'm in a place where I'm constantly praying that, every moment is worship without hesitation. 

An amazing form of worship is prayer, using words to open our hearts to God, and to praise Him, to bring ourselves and the world before Him. Though to me, worship is a love song, now that song doesn't need to be an actual song, but it's the easiest way of describing it. It's my heart that's singing. A year ago when I managed to have a fantastic accident at Soul Survivor Church in Watford and fractured my foot whilst dancing to the song... Undignified... with ribbons (which I will never touch again!). I was also suffering from prolonged writers block, and had a really bad chest and couldn't sing. I was suddenly in a place where everything I used physically to praise God was stripped away, within a few weeks I ended up with... nothing, and it really felt like that, I had no song, no poetry, and no dance. During that time I began to fully understand what it was to worship God, my life was falling apart and there was only one thing that could save it, to surrender my will, to surrender my control. Not an easy thing to do, and it took months before I got there, but I had relied on creativity to worship God, but that's not what He needed, or wanted. He wants each one of us, in a new way, to see and experience Him. As I said the creativity is important, but can't be seen as the only thing! I didn't realise this until my entire life was stripped down to nothing, sometimes it takes us a lot to learn these things.

Moving on, times of focused communal worship are stunning because God's people gather as a family to give Him praise and glory, now that can take many forms; written 'liturgy' (another misnomer), hymns, teaching, going out into the community together or just simply sitting down and eating a meal together. Currently the trends focus hugely on songs, surely because of the inspiration this provides, but unless everything else is seen as worship we are missing something vital. 

I want to get distracted for a moment by 'liturgy' I'm not sure why... the word itself just means worship, yet, 'the liturgy' probably more correctly, is power and amazing. I grew up in a place where this created the structure and was the entire communal worship for the week, with the exception of rare occasions. My favourite words have always been "therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name evermore praising thee and saying: holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory." To gather every week and repeat the same words may seem monotonous and boring, but it's the opposite, to fill yourselves again with those truths of God, to know Him better, the excitement in that is amazing, through it there is so much. I worry that it becomes too much of a comfortable tradition for some, but the purpose is to take out those truths and that worship into every day, and every moment and let all of it become worship because it is with you.

As I hope I've communicated, worship is vital, but we cannot rely on one simple method of worshipping God, we must consider that every day is worship, and know Him better through it. We must employ the extraordinary and the mundane. We must completely surrender ourselves to God in every breath and each moment between every breath.