June 3rd, 2024
by Clint Bryant
by Clint Bryant
What is Worship?
Worship is a word that most churches and followers of Jesus are all too familiar with. That’s no surprise, as it’s present all throughout Christian culture. Just look at any given church and you’ll find the word “worship” somewhere. One church might call the music portion of their gathering “praise and worship.” Another might welcome people to gather in their “worship center.” Still another might simply call their whole gathering a “worship service.” Wherever you might find the word, the idea of worship seems to be important, even vital to the life of the church.
However, in using the word “worship” so freely, we seem to have lost its meaning. If you were to go into a church and ask a few random people what exactly worship is, you might get a number of different answers. Most will say it has something to do with music. Some might say that there are other forms of worship, like prayer or reading the Bible. You may have encountered a snarky person in your Sunday School class who says something like, “It’s not just music, it’s an attitude.” No shame in that, I used to be that person. While none of these answers are wrong, they still don’t tell us what worship really is. If it’s simply music, then are people who aren’t specifically gifted in music at a disadvantage when they worship? If praying is also worship, does that mean that every prayer I throw up when my check engine light comes on is an act of worship? If it’s an attitude, then what attitude is it, and can I only worship when I feel that way? I ask these questions simply to show that the common ways we try to explain worship don’t give us a clear answer about what worship is, and if we can’t answer that question, it’s hard to answer the equally important questions of how and why we worship. So in this blog post, I’m going to do my humble best to tackle the question, “What is worship?”
As I began to think through this question for myself, my first response as a good Baptist-raised boy was to see what the Bible says about worship. Then the OBU graduate in me started to wonder what worship meant in the original Hebrew and Greek, so I decided to do a couple of very brief word studies. Now I can hear the groans even as I’m typing this in my office on a quiet Monday morning, so don’t worry, I filtered out all the nerdy stuff. If anyone is interested and wants more, I got all the information below from the Bible Hub, so feel free to read more over there.
We’ll start with the most common Hebrew word translated as worship, which is the verb shachah (pronounced “shaw-khaw”). It occurs 172 times in the Old Testament and in addition to being translated as some form of “to worship,” it is also commonly translated as a form of “to bow down.” In fact, most concordances give “to bow down” as the primary definition of shachah. In quite a few cases, it’s even used alongside some other word that has to do with bowing or lowering oneself.
The most common Greek word for worship is the verb proskuneó (pronounced “pros-koo-neh-o”). It occurs sixty times in the New Testament and the technical definition is “to do reverence to,” but because that’s awkward language and phrasing in modern English, it is most often translated simply as some form of “to worship” or “to bow down.” Anything sound familiar yet? One additional detail about this word is that it derives from the two Greek words pros, meaning “toward,” and kyneo, meaning “to kiss.” Because of this, scholars have generally concluded that proskuneó is meant to invoke the image of someone bowing down before a king or ruler in order to kiss the ground in front of them. You’ve probably seen something like this in movies or on TV, so keep that in mind as we go forward.
So why are any of these details important? From these two words, we get an image throughout the Old and New Testament of worship as bowing down before God. Rather than one particular religious practice, like singing or praying, worship seems to be the way that we stand before God. In other words, worship is a posture. That gets us closer to answering our original question, but now the question is: What is a posture?
I would guess that when most people hear the word posture, they think about whether someone slouches or not, and maybe how that conveys respect or a lack thereof. I think about how I was often told before some kind of interview to sit up, maintain eye contact, and just generally communicate respect through my body language. A clearer example from our cultural context might be the military. Each branch teaches early on that when an officer of a certain rank enters an area, anyone of a lower rank is immediately required to stand at attention and salute until that officer permits them to relax. Now this is probably not quite as extreme as bowing before a king, and is certainly less striking than kissing the ground at their feet, but the message is the same: “This person has authority over me, and I must respect that authority.” Similarly, we still show respect and honor to God through our physical posture and many churches still recognize that how we physically stand before God matters. A lot of traditional churches have kneelers, which are simply cushions attached to the backs of the pews where worshipers are invited to (you guessed it) kneel at specific times throughout their services. Even here at First Baptist Tecumseh, we make a point before our musical portion to invite people to kneel as they pray to begin our corporate worship.
However, we recognize that a certain physical posture is not itself enough for proper worship. When we think about worshiping through music, there are many postures we find acceptable for expressing worship and acknowledge that that may look different for any given person. Jesus himself addresses a similar issue in John 4 when he speaks to the Samaritan woman drawing water from a well. For some reason which isn’t immediately clear, the woman expresses confusion over the proper place to worship, and in part of his response Jesus gives us the well-known line in verse 24, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:24 ESV, emphasis mine) So though our physical posture, location, etc. are important things to consider, they are not God’s primary focus in our worship of Him. Instead, if I can offer my own interpretation of verse 24, God is concerned with the posture of our hearts (spirit) and minds (truth). With that, finally, we can figure out what the correct heart posture looks like. To do that, let’s apply what we learned earlier from those Greek and Hebrew words, starting with the mind, building up to the heart, and finally arriving at a holistic view of worship which encompasses our whole state of being.
What does it mean to have the right posture with respect to our minds? I think a helpful illustration of this should look like is found in Genesis 2. In this story, God gives humanity dominion over the rest of creation, with the following rule: “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17 NET) As we know, they fail to obey this charge and as a result they lose the privileges of living in the garden and ruling the earth. But in this original choice that on the surface is just about eating fruit, there is another, underlying choice. The choice is this: humans must choose whether to trust God’s wisdom and receive the knowledge and wisdom from Him, or to take knowledge and wisdom for ourselves and define them according to our own standards. To put it in more relevant terms, we have the choice to bow down with our minds and submit to truth as God defines it, or simply to not. Worship of our mind, then, is choosing to trust God’s revelation of Himself, morality, and truth, which is found first in God’s Word and then by the use of our minds in submission to the basic truths God gives us. Solomon, the author of Proverbs, captures this in one of his more popular sayings. “The beginning of wisdom is to fear the Lord, and acknowledging the Holy One is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10 NET)
Now, as we bow down to God with our minds by trusting Him for our understanding of the rest of Creation, we can also bow down in our hearts by trusting Him with our very selves. Worship of the heart is this: giving my entire identity over to God in an ultimate act of trust and submission, recognizing that His will for my life is better than anything I could come up with according to my own desires. At face value, this sounds relatively simple. At its core, this is the basic message of the Gospel that many of us have heard for most of our lives. But as those same of us can attest, it’s not simple and it’s definitely not easy. The Old Testament character Job is a testament to this truth. By anyone’s standard, Job was a righteous man that even God does not seem to find fault in. He trusted God in every way that we have already talked about, yet he ended up losing nearly everything anyway. On top of that, he never gets an answer as to why any of this happened. After many pleas to God and a lot of arguing with some less than stellar friends, God gives him something of an answer, which really ends up being more of a non-answer. God shows Job just how great His Creation is. He shows Job great beasts that he couldn’t have imagined, then reveals tiny details about the world that Job would have spent his whole life overlooking. Yet God is constantly mindful of them all and daily provides for all these countless creatures. His response to Job throughout this revelation is the repeated question, “Where were you?” I recount this story to bring us to Job’s final response, which I believe is a brutally honest picture that captures what this heart posture we’ve been getting at is. Job finally says to God,
“I know that you can do anything,
and no one can stop you.
You asked, ‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?’
It is I—and I was talking about things I knew nothing about,
things far too wonderful for me.
You said, ‘Listen and I will speak!
I have some questions for you,
and you must answer them.’
I had only heard about you before,
but now I have seen you with my own eyes.
I take back everything I said,
and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” (Job 42:2-6 NLT)
In the end, Job didn’t understand. God didn’t provide a systematic answer as to why Job lost his family and his wealth. He didn’t give Job a convoluted line of reasoning that showed how He was going to use this experience to “strengthen Job’s testimony.” All Job gets is the reality that God is wise and, as wise and righteous as Job is, he is not as wise or as righteous as God. So he worships. He doesn’t sing a song that ignores the reality of his situation. He doesn’t expect God to repay him for passing the test. Job simply recognizes that his life does not ultimately belong to him. His wealth, even his family, are not his. All that he has, all that he is, belongs to God, and whether or not he understands it - whether or not he even likes it in that moment – God deserves his trust.
I know that when I began this conversation, it sounded like I was going to arrive at a more systematic, practical answer for what worship is. But as I reflect on Job, I’m reminded that worship is not that simple. It’s not a mystical function where you put in X-attitude and it produces Y-response. Worship is submitting to God. In that sense, it’s simple. But the reality is that every person must trust God for themselves, and that obedience will lead different people to different extremes. Many have already been called, and many more will be called, to lay down their lives as a result of trusting God. That is their “true and proper worship,” as Paul puts it in Romans 12. For others, submitting their lives to God will lead them through a relatively peaceful life serving their communities in the local church, and that is just as much true and proper worship as the opposite extreme. I can’t give a clear, prescribed method for worshiping God in your daily life that can apply to every person. Instead, let Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane serve as an example of submission, trust, and worship. “Not my will, but yours be done.”
However, in using the word “worship” so freely, we seem to have lost its meaning. If you were to go into a church and ask a few random people what exactly worship is, you might get a number of different answers. Most will say it has something to do with music. Some might say that there are other forms of worship, like prayer or reading the Bible. You may have encountered a snarky person in your Sunday School class who says something like, “It’s not just music, it’s an attitude.” No shame in that, I used to be that person. While none of these answers are wrong, they still don’t tell us what worship really is. If it’s simply music, then are people who aren’t specifically gifted in music at a disadvantage when they worship? If praying is also worship, does that mean that every prayer I throw up when my check engine light comes on is an act of worship? If it’s an attitude, then what attitude is it, and can I only worship when I feel that way? I ask these questions simply to show that the common ways we try to explain worship don’t give us a clear answer about what worship is, and if we can’t answer that question, it’s hard to answer the equally important questions of how and why we worship. So in this blog post, I’m going to do my humble best to tackle the question, “What is worship?”
As I began to think through this question for myself, my first response as a good Baptist-raised boy was to see what the Bible says about worship. Then the OBU graduate in me started to wonder what worship meant in the original Hebrew and Greek, so I decided to do a couple of very brief word studies. Now I can hear the groans even as I’m typing this in my office on a quiet Monday morning, so don’t worry, I filtered out all the nerdy stuff. If anyone is interested and wants more, I got all the information below from the Bible Hub, so feel free to read more over there.
We’ll start with the most common Hebrew word translated as worship, which is the verb shachah (pronounced “shaw-khaw”). It occurs 172 times in the Old Testament and in addition to being translated as some form of “to worship,” it is also commonly translated as a form of “to bow down.” In fact, most concordances give “to bow down” as the primary definition of shachah. In quite a few cases, it’s even used alongside some other word that has to do with bowing or lowering oneself.
The most common Greek word for worship is the verb proskuneó (pronounced “pros-koo-neh-o”). It occurs sixty times in the New Testament and the technical definition is “to do reverence to,” but because that’s awkward language and phrasing in modern English, it is most often translated simply as some form of “to worship” or “to bow down.” Anything sound familiar yet? One additional detail about this word is that it derives from the two Greek words pros, meaning “toward,” and kyneo, meaning “to kiss.” Because of this, scholars have generally concluded that proskuneó is meant to invoke the image of someone bowing down before a king or ruler in order to kiss the ground in front of them. You’ve probably seen something like this in movies or on TV, so keep that in mind as we go forward.
So why are any of these details important? From these two words, we get an image throughout the Old and New Testament of worship as bowing down before God. Rather than one particular religious practice, like singing or praying, worship seems to be the way that we stand before God. In other words, worship is a posture. That gets us closer to answering our original question, but now the question is: What is a posture?
I would guess that when most people hear the word posture, they think about whether someone slouches or not, and maybe how that conveys respect or a lack thereof. I think about how I was often told before some kind of interview to sit up, maintain eye contact, and just generally communicate respect through my body language. A clearer example from our cultural context might be the military. Each branch teaches early on that when an officer of a certain rank enters an area, anyone of a lower rank is immediately required to stand at attention and salute until that officer permits them to relax. Now this is probably not quite as extreme as bowing before a king, and is certainly less striking than kissing the ground at their feet, but the message is the same: “This person has authority over me, and I must respect that authority.” Similarly, we still show respect and honor to God through our physical posture and many churches still recognize that how we physically stand before God matters. A lot of traditional churches have kneelers, which are simply cushions attached to the backs of the pews where worshipers are invited to (you guessed it) kneel at specific times throughout their services. Even here at First Baptist Tecumseh, we make a point before our musical portion to invite people to kneel as they pray to begin our corporate worship.
However, we recognize that a certain physical posture is not itself enough for proper worship. When we think about worshiping through music, there are many postures we find acceptable for expressing worship and acknowledge that that may look different for any given person. Jesus himself addresses a similar issue in John 4 when he speaks to the Samaritan woman drawing water from a well. For some reason which isn’t immediately clear, the woman expresses confusion over the proper place to worship, and in part of his response Jesus gives us the well-known line in verse 24, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:24 ESV, emphasis mine) So though our physical posture, location, etc. are important things to consider, they are not God’s primary focus in our worship of Him. Instead, if I can offer my own interpretation of verse 24, God is concerned with the posture of our hearts (spirit) and minds (truth). With that, finally, we can figure out what the correct heart posture looks like. To do that, let’s apply what we learned earlier from those Greek and Hebrew words, starting with the mind, building up to the heart, and finally arriving at a holistic view of worship which encompasses our whole state of being.
What does it mean to have the right posture with respect to our minds? I think a helpful illustration of this should look like is found in Genesis 2. In this story, God gives humanity dominion over the rest of creation, with the following rule: “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17 NET) As we know, they fail to obey this charge and as a result they lose the privileges of living in the garden and ruling the earth. But in this original choice that on the surface is just about eating fruit, there is another, underlying choice. The choice is this: humans must choose whether to trust God’s wisdom and receive the knowledge and wisdom from Him, or to take knowledge and wisdom for ourselves and define them according to our own standards. To put it in more relevant terms, we have the choice to bow down with our minds and submit to truth as God defines it, or simply to not. Worship of our mind, then, is choosing to trust God’s revelation of Himself, morality, and truth, which is found first in God’s Word and then by the use of our minds in submission to the basic truths God gives us. Solomon, the author of Proverbs, captures this in one of his more popular sayings. “The beginning of wisdom is to fear the Lord, and acknowledging the Holy One is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10 NET)
Now, as we bow down to God with our minds by trusting Him for our understanding of the rest of Creation, we can also bow down in our hearts by trusting Him with our very selves. Worship of the heart is this: giving my entire identity over to God in an ultimate act of trust and submission, recognizing that His will for my life is better than anything I could come up with according to my own desires. At face value, this sounds relatively simple. At its core, this is the basic message of the Gospel that many of us have heard for most of our lives. But as those same of us can attest, it’s not simple and it’s definitely not easy. The Old Testament character Job is a testament to this truth. By anyone’s standard, Job was a righteous man that even God does not seem to find fault in. He trusted God in every way that we have already talked about, yet he ended up losing nearly everything anyway. On top of that, he never gets an answer as to why any of this happened. After many pleas to God and a lot of arguing with some less than stellar friends, God gives him something of an answer, which really ends up being more of a non-answer. God shows Job just how great His Creation is. He shows Job great beasts that he couldn’t have imagined, then reveals tiny details about the world that Job would have spent his whole life overlooking. Yet God is constantly mindful of them all and daily provides for all these countless creatures. His response to Job throughout this revelation is the repeated question, “Where were you?” I recount this story to bring us to Job’s final response, which I believe is a brutally honest picture that captures what this heart posture we’ve been getting at is. Job finally says to God,
“I know that you can do anything,
and no one can stop you.
You asked, ‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?’
It is I—and I was talking about things I knew nothing about,
things far too wonderful for me.
You said, ‘Listen and I will speak!
I have some questions for you,
and you must answer them.’
I had only heard about you before,
but now I have seen you with my own eyes.
I take back everything I said,
and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” (Job 42:2-6 NLT)
In the end, Job didn’t understand. God didn’t provide a systematic answer as to why Job lost his family and his wealth. He didn’t give Job a convoluted line of reasoning that showed how He was going to use this experience to “strengthen Job’s testimony.” All Job gets is the reality that God is wise and, as wise and righteous as Job is, he is not as wise or as righteous as God. So he worships. He doesn’t sing a song that ignores the reality of his situation. He doesn’t expect God to repay him for passing the test. Job simply recognizes that his life does not ultimately belong to him. His wealth, even his family, are not his. All that he has, all that he is, belongs to God, and whether or not he understands it - whether or not he even likes it in that moment – God deserves his trust.
I know that when I began this conversation, it sounded like I was going to arrive at a more systematic, practical answer for what worship is. But as I reflect on Job, I’m reminded that worship is not that simple. It’s not a mystical function where you put in X-attitude and it produces Y-response. Worship is submitting to God. In that sense, it’s simple. But the reality is that every person must trust God for themselves, and that obedience will lead different people to different extremes. Many have already been called, and many more will be called, to lay down their lives as a result of trusting God. That is their “true and proper worship,” as Paul puts it in Romans 12. For others, submitting their lives to God will lead them through a relatively peaceful life serving their communities in the local church, and that is just as much true and proper worship as the opposite extreme. I can’t give a clear, prescribed method for worshiping God in your daily life that can apply to every person. Instead, let Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane serve as an example of submission, trust, and worship. “Not my will, but yours be done.”
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