Worship and First Love

If asked to define myself, it would be hard to come up with a few succinct words to explain who I am. I’m a wife, a mother, a friend, a statistician, a teacher, a manager – and the list could go on and on. While each of the many aspects of my life are important, there are usually one or two that take top billing at any particular point in time. But, one of the constants in my life has been music. I started playing the piano when I was 8 years old, and I started playing for church when I was 12. Somehow, the congregation in that little country church suffered through my halting renditions of “Love Lifted Me” and “Just as I Am” and gave me the opportunity to get my feet wet as a lead worshipper of sorts. And thankfully, through the years, my skill has grown and my understanding of what it means to worship God through music has grown as well.

So, the past few months have been interesting as I’ve stepped back a bit from the musical aspects of leading worship in my church and focused more on writing. But, it has also given me the opportunity to reflect more broadly on worship and the role it should play in our church and in our lives.

One of the questions I always ask when digging into a topic is “What?” In this case, “What is worship?” The word has been used in a lot of different ways and for a lot of different purposes, so much so, that if you asked 5 different people to define the word, you would probably get 5 different answers. It is used to refer to what happens inside a church building on Sunday morning – “Did you go to worship service today?” It can be used to describe a genre of music. It has been used to distinguish between the more upbeat songs that we sing in church (praise) and the slower, more intimate songs that we sing (worship). And, I could go on and on.

So, I decided to do what every good researcher does these days and did a quick google search for the definition of worship to see what I could turn up. I found lots of good (and not so good) definitions, but the one that really spoke to me is the following, written in the late 1800’s:

“Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His Beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose – and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.” –from William Temple’s Readings in St John’s Gospel.

I like this definition because it emphasizes the fact that worship should involve every aspect of our being, and it should result in an intense adoration of our God that is reflected in everything we do. It’s not something that should be reserved for Sunday morning, and it doesn’t have to involve music – although music is a great way to express our adoration to our God.

If you’re married, think about the way you felt when you first fell in love with your spouse. You were likely consumed by that love (I know that I was!), and you were intensely focused on getting to know that person, on finding ways to spend time with them, and on showing them how much you cared. And, it was obvious to anyone who was watching that you adored the person you were with.

That kind of passion – that first love, if you will – should be evident in our worship of our God. And, it should show on our faces and in our lives. Think of Moses when he came down from the mountain after receiving the Ten Commandments. It says in Exodus 34:29, “…his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.” All of the people were able to see that he was changed because he had spent time in the presence of God. The same should be true of us.

Are we living a lifestyle of worship? Are we pursuing God the way we would pursue our first love? Are we changed in a way that says to everyone around us that we have spent time in the presence of the Lord today? Those are tough questions, but they’re the ones that I’ve been asking myself recently.