Made to Worship

You and I were made to worship
You and I are called to love
You and I are forgiven and free
-Chris Tomlin

We were made to worship (Isaiah 43:7; Romans 1). We are worshipers. It's what lies at our core. If my memory serves me well, I don't see God (either through the prophets or through Jesus) asking his people to worship, but instead to turn their worship towards him. All of Hosea is about a woman running after other lovers, I think of Isaiah and Zechariah and Jeremiah (I may be getting names wrong) pleading with Israel to return; Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 about true worshipers. It's not that we don't know how to worship, and God is trying to teach us how to worship. It's that we give worship to other things.

But what is worship? I'm not sure it's something you can define. I remember discussing this very thing in a track for worship leaders at an IV conference a few years ago. Most of us would agree that worship is not just church music. Worship includes prayer, it includes obedience. They way I answered (which apparently earned me the temporary nickname of "Jenga") was that it was a posture. Worship is a posture (certainly on an internal level, possibly also in a physical manner) in which you pour out to God and you allow God to pour into you.

So then if we were created to worship, we will, by nature, place ourselves in positions to expend energy towards something, as well as positions in which we are poured into. We are guilty of idolatry when we place ourselves in positions where we are offering and surrendering to that which is not God. It's hard to think of our idols because we think of idols like little cows made out of gold or something. But really the sin wasn't that the Israelites made a little figurine. The sin was that they trusted that little figurine for what it could never offer: hope, security. Our idols are what we rely on to give us hope and security. Performance. Wealth. Ourselves. Other people. These things are not bad things. But they can become idols.

We were made to worship. We are going to worship something. The question is where is our worship focused?

Lord, forgive us for the times when we have surrendered our worship to idols, things that are not you, that could never be you, but we insist on placing our trust in them all the same. Free us from the bondages, God. Free us from the bondages that come from serving foreign gods that never promise our safety, that never promise us love, but merely cheap thrills to lure us deeper into darkness and slavery. Lord! We cry out for release of those chains and bondages!! We cry out for the release of these shackles of shame and guilt and darkness. Invade our hearts, shine brightly into our darkness, lead us out of our self-made prisons, and heal the wounds our chains have left and our captors have dealt us. Walk us into your light, Father. We give you highest praise; may it be from the deep places of our hearts.