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What is a Disciple of Jesus? – Part V – Worshiping Jesus

Jesus continuously worshiped God the Father.  Depending on your background, the word worship could have a lot of baggage with it.  Some view worship as a meeting time once a week.  Some view worship as a music genre.  Some view worship as doing a set of prayers/chants/mantras.  Some view worship as singing some songs.

While all of these are forms of worship, they all fall short of a full understanding of what worship is.  Worship at its core is giving value to something or someone.  In his book Unceasing Worship, Harold M. Best defines worship better by saying that, “worship is the continuous outpouring of all that I am, all that I do and all that I can ever become in light of a chosen or choosing god.”[i]

Human beings are worshipers.  Everything we do, says, think, or feel is an act of worship.  At the heart of everything we do is giving value to someone or something. We are born worshiping and we never stop. The only thing that changes is what we worship.  God is the only one worthy of worship.  God’s original design was for us to continuously worship Him, but sin entered the world and we started worshiping lesser things.  We started to worship created things (ourselves generally being at the top of the list).  We started to worship idols.[ii]

The reality is that at the heart of all sin is an issue with worship.  Romans 1:24-25 puts it this way, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”[iii] Because of sin, instead of continuously worshiping God, we continuously worship created things.  Because of sin, we have had no desire to ever give glory to God.

Now that we are being made into the image of Christ, we are able to glorify God with our lives once again.  Jesus used everything in his life to worship God.  He is the only person to perfectly worship God, and through the power of the Holy Spirit we can do the same. Instead of worshiping money, we can use money to worship God.  Instead of worshiping our jobs, we can use our jobs to worship God. Instead worshiping our families, we can use our families to worship God.  Instead of worshiping all of our stuff, we can use our stuff to worship God.  In Jesus, we have been freed to worship God.  Spend this week focusing on how you are called to worship God with all your life.

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[i] Harold M. Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (InterVarsity Press, 2003), 18.

[ii] An idol is anything that we worship that isn’t God.

[iii] (ESV)