A Life of Worship

By David Smith

In the first couple of chapters of the Bible we learn the story of Adam and Eve our common parents. There are several important things in this story; the thing in the story that is most important to understanding our life problems is the part about the fall. Typically when we discuss Adam and Eve everyone wants to know what the fruit was; was it an apple, orange, banana (my personal favorite answer because I don’t like bananas), or was the fruit just a metaphor for something else like sex. The reality is that the fruit whether it was an actual fruit or a metaphor has little to do with the larger point of the story.

When the tempter shows up he tempts them not with the fruit itself, but with the desire to “be like God” the fruit was just a means to an end. It is in the temptation in the Garden that we first discover the greatest problem of man the desire to be our own god to be able to worship ourselves and not depend on God. Worship is a central theme throughout the biblical material and for good reason. Today in most Christian circles when we discuss worship it is assumed that we are referring to music. We have worship leaders and worship teams, but we rarely seem to be concerned with becoming worshippers. However, in the biblical material music is only a small part of worship. Much more often than music we find that worship is associated with sacrifice and service. In fact the Hebrew and Greek words that we most often translate as worship actually hold one of a couple of different primary meanings they either refer to serving or bowing down before a king or dignitary and essentially showing proper respect and reverence.

Hopefully, we can begin to see that worship is not something we do on Sunday morning or Wednesday night. Worship is not an event to be attended it is a life to be lived. The reality is that we all live lives of worship; the question is not so much will we worship or will we live lives of worship? The question is whether we will direct our worship to the one true God or will we worship something else? Every person since Adam and Eve has spent much of their life worshipping themselves and their desires. In that self-worship we find little or no lasting peace or joy and at some point we come to realize the pointlessness of our self-worship; if not in this life in the next. In my estimation the Christian life comes down to one thing learning to worship truly. When replace our desires with God’s desire which is to recognize His greatness and proclaim it to the entire world.

I am the Director of Counseling for a Christ centered drug and alcohol rehab program / Christian disciplehip program. I am a also a student at Alliance Theological Seminary where I am working on my Masters of Divinity. My greatest desire in life is to learn to worship God truly. http://www.zahar.org

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