This summer at Christ Church we’re spending Sunday mornings highlighting what we believe as a church and why it matters. We’re looking at our doctrine and theology in areas like salvation, evangelism, relationships, the Holy Spirit, sacraments, and others. One that we considered but just ran out of weeks was worship. What do we believe about worship and why it matters for Christians to take worship seriously? Since we won’t be spending an entire morning on it, I thought I’d offer a brief word here.

A key Biblical passage for me related to worship is Psalm 95:

“Come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come to him with thanksgiving. Let us sing psalms of praise to him. For the Lord is a great God, a great King above all gods. He holds in his hands the depths of the earth and the mightiest mountains. The sea belongs to him, for he made it. His hands formed the dry land, too. Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God. We are the people he watches over, the flock under his care.”

“If only you would listen to his voice today! The Lord says, ‘Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did at Meribah, as they did at Massah in the wilderness. For there your ancestors tested and tried my patience, even though they saw everything I did. For forty years I was angry with them, and I said, they are a people whose hearts turn away from me. They refuse to do what I tell them. So in my anger I took an oath: They will never enter my place of rest.’”

The reason I love this Psalm is that it reveals to us why worship matters. Worship offers us a way to respond and give thanks to God for His great love for us and His great care for our lives. It’s through worship that we find peace and rest in the midst of all that the world is throwing at us, knowing that God is in control and walks with us through it all.

But this Psalm also reminds us that worship involves not just praise but obedience as well. David is calling us to make sure we are listening for God’s voice in worship and being obedient to that voice, not hardening our hearts to it as the Israelites did in the wilderness. True worship has a heart that is receptive and open and faithful, yielding to God’s will. As David cries out in v. 7, “If only you would listen to his voice today!”

So, worship is thanking God for who He is and all He has done, but it’s also responding to God, yielding our will to His voice in worship, however He chooses to speak to us – through song, prayer, the Word, or even silence. We should come to worship every week with open ears and a soft heart, ready to give God our praise and our full attention; and we should leave worship every week full of joy and gratitude for the great love of God, and full of desire to live out God’s call upon our lives as we have received it. May this adapted prayer from Paul to the Ephesians (1:17-20) be our prayer every Sunday as we come to church:

“Dear God, this morning give me spiritual wisdom and insight so that I might grow in my knowledge of you. May my heart be flooded with light  - open the eyes of my heart, Lord – so that I can understand the confident hope he has given to me. Help me understand the incredible greatness of your power, the same power that raised Christ from the dead. We are your body, made full and complete by Christ, so may I worship you in the confidence of that promise. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”