TWENTY-THREE

March 20

Worship

“We’re here to be worshipers first and workers only second. We take a convert and immediately make a worker out of him. God never meant it to be so. God meant that a convert should learn to be a worshiper, and after that he can learn to be a worker ... The work done by a worshiper will have eternity in it.”

– A.W. Tozer –

This quotation from A.W. Tozer gives us much to ponder. The heart of our ministry as a church and as individuals is worship. Worship is the fuel that sustains us and draws us closer to Jesus. Worship reframes how we think … and how we live.

At its most basic level, the Church is a gathering of believers to worship God. When we read the Book of Revelation, when we get that sublime glimpse of heaven, we see that there is going to be continual praise and worship around the throne of God.

And yet, how often do we miss the point by defining worship in too small of ways. We think of it in terms of times or venues or musical styles. We use words like contemporary or traditional or blended. These are the tools that lead us to worship; but at its heart, worship means reverence. It means to be overcome by awe and gratitude at the invitation of the Creator to know Him. It means to adore Him, to venerate Him, to perform acts of homage to God. Worship, in fact, shares the root word of worthy. Literally, it’s a gathering of believers who adore God because He is worthy. Here is the great danger for us, though. Over time, we get caught up in our acts, traditions, and rituals. We go through the motions … but we don’t adore. We forget that Jesus sustains us through our praise. He encounters us and calls us to come and follow.

We are sustained by worship. But our worship is not confined to a sanctuary, chapel or worship space. It must overflow into all of life.

A great example of this was St. Francis of Assisi, who lived some eight hundred years ago. In Francis’ call from God, he heard a distinct summons to put his worship and adoration of Jesus into practice. Francis wrote: “As for me, I desire this privilege from the Lord, that never may I have any privilege from man, except to do reverence to all, and to convert the world by obedience to the Holy Rule rather by example than by word.” Francis had a deep commitment to both the proclamation and embodiment of the Gospel.

He lived with the tension of the way we worship and the way that we live out that worship. He walked away from family wealth to take a vow of poverty. It is said that he would go to extravagant parties of the wealthy and preach the Gospel. When walking the streets of Assisi, he would preach to those he met. He was even said to preach the Good News to birds!

The challenge of Lent is to learn from St. Francis. We should not lock our worship up inside a building. Instead, we should bring our adoration and praise into all the world. A.W. Tozer was right: “The work done by a worshiper will have eternity in it.”