Woship, part 1

This is another one of my Sunday school topics. Again, these are just my notes, so they're very rough. A more refined version will hopefully come out this summer.

From the beginning of the Bible, man has tried to decide how he would worship God.
- Illustrated by Cain and his offering. We don’t know how God had communicated it to them, but even by that time, they knew what God desired.
- The importance of the study of worship then comes from the fact that we want to make sure that our concept of worship matches with what God has said in His Word.

Look at the meanings of the words used for worship, worshipper, etc. (taken from Strong’s [KJV]).
- proskuneo: most common word translated as "worship"; used 60 times in the NT; used when someone comes to ask something of Christ (“fell down and worshipped Him”); used of worship in Heaven

Look at the OT: the worship of God has always been that of the heart (Mic. 6:8) but the Israelites still had to give the offerings because they were commanded by God.

The main problem with worship in the church today is that we have divorced what is done at church from what is done the rest of the week.
- This doesn’t mean that we act the same way during a sermon as during a football game, or that we are always supposed to say “Amen” when we agree with something someone says; some discretion is in order. But we have our “service for God time” and our “worship time” and see the rest of it as being our own.

Worship is not a time where we give something to God in hopes of getting something in return. The very concept of worship is that of giving someone glory for who they are, totally devoid of what you want.
- If we allow an “I’ll serve God, so He’ll answer my prayers” attitude to come up, we have, in reality, ceased to worship God and have begun to attempt to put Him in some sort of position where we can demand from Him what we want.
- How many times have we heard some type of story about this: something good like “I gave $100 and the next day someone gave me $120!” or something bad like “I felt God prompting me to give $100, but I didn’t, and then the next day, I had an accident and had to pay $200. If only I had given the $100 to God I probably wouldn’t have had the accident.”?
- There are rewards in the Bible, but remember, those rewards are in Heaven, where titles and amount of crowns won’t matter for prestige or anything else. More crowns just means more that we will have to cast at Christ’s feet.
- Our worship for God is because He is worthy of that worship, not because we want something. This is not a restaurant we come to, giving one thing and expecting another in return.

In the NT, it’s kind of interesting that no order of service or even comprehensive list of what is to take place at public worship is even mentioned. We have the qualifications for speaking in tongues and prophesying found in I Cor., and we have the passages on the Lord’s Supper, etc. But we really have no idea what constituted a regular church service in the early church.
- But even with the little bit that we do have, the emphasis was on the edifying of the believers and the testimony of the gospel, more than the actual practice itself.
- I Cor. 13, set right in the middle of exercising spiritual gifts, shows what the true worship is supposed to be.
- Christ said that those who worship God are supposed to worship Him “in Spirit and in truth.”
- Christ said, “if you love me, keep my commandments” which are “love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, and might” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” That is true worship. These are the goals; the very description of how we are to love God should show that it encompasses every aspect of life.
- In every aspect of life, we can worship God, in the sense that we have laid out here.
- Examples: football, writing an English paper
- In no way does this minimize the importance of assembling as a local body of believers. We come together in order to be edified and encouraged (I Cor. 14:12, 26; Rom. 14:17-15:13).

Edited: As I looked at the paper on worship, I realized that I can't really post it here because of the footnotes and format of the paper. If for some reason you might want it -- except to turn in for a class, of course :-) -- e-mail me.