Worship 101

"Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father." (John 4:20-21)

I notice something interesting in the emphasis in these two statements. The woman's statement about worship focuses on the proper place to worship. This is so reflective of almost all religions, a focus on the externals or on formulas or ceremonies etc. Religion for all too many people is not much more than a prescription to follow or a list of rules or even something along the line of incantations to invoke some sort of supernatural benefits. Pagans explored these kinds of things at great length and Christianity brought much of that kind of reasoning and thinking into the culture of the church not too many years after Jesus lived on earth.

But Jesus here puts the focus back on the only real issue in true worship. And if we learn what true worship actually is then we will begin to experience the effects of real worship far more effectively in our lives. For true worship cannot be separated from an encounter with the living, loving God of the universe. Anything short of this is a counterfeit of worship which abounds everywhere, even in the name of the worship of God.

I attended an all-day seminar a number of years ago on the topic of worship. I was offered the chance to attend only the night before and felt an overwhelming desire to go, for my heart was just beginning to learn the real truth about worship and I longed to know much more. The details for me to be able to go were so dramatically and miraculously worked out almost immediately that I sensed that this was very much a God thing for my life. I arrived early in the morning at the seminar filled with anticipation of what God was going to reveal to me that day about worship that I had never seen before.

And did it ever happen! That day marked one of the most dramatic enlightenment points of my whole life. The things I heard that whole day were thrilling, enticing and deeply informative but at the same time saddening, for I realized how far most of us have strayed from experiencing true worship of God. The seminar presenters were not focusing on denominational ideas or even worship styles which I greatly appreciated. In fact, the attendees came from many different denominational backgrounds but all of them seemed to deeply appreciate the narrow focus of the presenters on what it really means to worship God even in very different styles or contexts.

I just now went back to glance at my notes from that seminar and felt my heart warming immediately once again. The main definition of worship that they shared with us and that I realized was so true was that authentic worship is simply the response of a heart when it encounters the true presence of the God of heaven. The closer we come into His presence the more our heart is going to worship spontaneously if we allow it to.

I, like most people, have grown up in a culture where the word worship was simply the term used to describe what happened at church each week, particularly during the “divine worship hour”. I have found it so true for many religious words that our assumed definitions of them come more from the meanings we have assigned to them by default rather than from careful searching in the Bible to see what God intended for them to mean. As a result we have cultivated religions of various colors and flavors all based on our own private dictionaries so to speak of what the religious terms mean for us and our particular group. They may all be the same words and verses quoted from the same Bible but they mean something different depending on which denomination or subculture you belong to.

But there really is a master document that can be used to reliably discover the true meanings of the religious terms we use so loosely. But only those who are willing to first doubt their own assumptions and take the time to open their minds to seek deeper truth will be able to discern the far more incredible realm of true spirituality and experience the amazing encounters with our Creator that true religion must involve. And real worship lies at the very heart of all of this activity. If we do not pay attention to learning how to truly worship God in the way He has revealed in His Word, then we will be content to remain in self-deception insisting that our form of worship is what God intended for us.

I am interested in tracing again the progression in this story that led to the most profound revelations about real worship that Jesus shared with this woman. My mind is always seeking to understand where I came from and how I got here partly in order to be able to ingrain that sequence of logic into my own psyche to help correct my own faulty assumptions assimilated elsewhere.

Jesus initiated a relationship with this woman by asking her for a kindness in spite of the fact that all social norms pressured both of them to remain distant and disconnected from each other. When responding to her amazement at His lack of prejudice, He moves the conversation quickly into the much deeper waters of her relationship to God and His attitude of kindness towards her. Jesus offers to share with her a wonderful gift called living water if she is willing to ask for it.

She then brings up the issue of identity and value for both of them. Jesus completely skirts the issues that divide them or that would produce emotions of prejudice and instead expands on His offer to her by describing this new kind of water more enticingly. She accepts the bait and asks for it but with still a focus on the externals.

Jesus' first response to her brought up the subject of God and the gift He wanted to give her. The woman's response to that was to point to their common ancestor that had been part of the lineage chosen by God to represent His character to the world. So the issue of worship was already starting to emerge, especially since unbeknown to her she was already talking to God directly face to face herself. Jesus was actually drawing her into worship as they spoke together without her even knowing what was going on.

Since worship is a response of the heart to an encounter with the real truth about God in His presence, then this woman was a prime candidate for experiencing authentic worship right then and there. She was observing how God treated the marginalized without any prejudice but with deep compassion and care for their heart. As she continued to experience and respond to this encounter with the One who was the only true representation of the Father, her own heart was quickly waking up and coming to life and stirring with emotion to connect more deeply with this most unusual love. Her heart was already entering into true worship even before she consciously realized what was happening.

When Jesus asked her to go get her husband and come back to receive His living water, I don't believe He was only saying that to set her up in a sting operation to expose her. And while He did use that to bring to her attention the most painful and vulnerable parts of her life, He was not doing it to shame or hurt her deeper but was doing it to help her and all of us realize that worship will always involve opening up areas of the heart that we are trying to hide from others. Genuine worship will always involve facing the inner pain, the shame, the fears and all the other things deep inside that skew our picture of God and hide His face from us. When we encounter the true God that has been largely obscured by religion and our own fears of Him for most of our life, we will come to realize that He is eager to bring healing and wholeness to the most painful, messed up areas deep within us and fill us with overwhelming love, hope and joy.

Instead of responding immediately to Jesus' offer to talk about her painful past, she instead moved over to talking about worship not realizing that the issue of her painful relationships with men was actually her opportunity to interact with God in the healing experience of worship. Like so many of us today, she believed that worship was just something you did when you went to a religiously designated place and performed certain routines that others have defined as being religiously required. But worship goes far deeper and is far broader than simply performing religious incantations or singing some songs, praying and listening to a sermon.

All of these things can be performed endlessly and yet true worship of the Father may never actually take place. What I have observed over the years is that very often we indeed do worship in church but far too much of the time we are actually worshiping our own routines and traditions, or even our emotions, our music and our sermons but without ever actually experiencing true worship of the Father. This trap is so subtle that it is very difficult to unmask in religion, but it is very pervasive and is something that all of us must face if we really desire to encounter the transforming kind of worship that this woman experienced.

She was used to thinking of worship as a place just like we do most of the time. Jesus viewed worship in a radically different way, for in His life worship was all about a loving heavenly Father that Jesus spent much time communicating with on a daily basis. In fact, the secret of Jesus' perfect life on earth did not come from the fact that He was inherently divine, giving Him an advantage over all the rest of us. He had completely laid that aside and steadfastly resisted ever using His own power for Himself while living here as a human. He came to demonstrate that any human being could live in such close connection with God experiencing authentic, life-giving worship that they could come to perfectly reflect the character of God in the life just as Jesus did simply by focusing on the heart of the Father. That is the essence of real worship.