Worship Defined

Worship Defined

Mark 7: 6, 7

6. He answered and said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, 

as it is written:

‘This people honors Me with their lips,

But their heart is far from Me. 

7. And in vain they worship Me, Teaching 

as doctrines the commandments of men.

Worship is not a matter of Sunday, nor is confined to a building. If we understand the meaning of worship, our life will be different. The worship involves two things, drawing near to God and honoring Him. When we worship God we need to draw near to God, and we need to honor Him. 

We would like to call drawing near to God as fellowship and honoring God as service.

Fellowship and service are the two important aspects of our worship of God.   We need to listen to God, and we need to talk to Him.  This is a fellowship

we have with God. If you want to listen to Him, you need to come to His Word. So, every day, we need to come to the New Testament to read it,  

study it, think about it, meditate on it, and pray to the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus will enlighten us to speak to our hearts and lead us into the truth. Then we shall know the truth, and the truth will set us free from all the sinful negative things in our lives. So that is how we can have fellowship with Christ. Then, with the word we received, with the enlightenment received,  we should talk to Him. We should praise and thank Him. We should pray to Him. 

Then, after having fellowship, we also need to honor Him. In honoring 

Him,  we should go beyond singing songs, we should honor Him with the righteous deeds/life. That righteous life will be produced by having fellowship with Him. It is a spontaneous thing. When we have fellowship with 

Christ, automatically, our life will be changed. We have been saved to worship. And we worship to be saved. 

Hebrew 7:25

"Therefore, He is also able to save to the uttermost, those 

who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make 

intercession for them." 

The Lord Jesus saves those who come to God through Him. We are being sanctified, so the sanctification, the transformation, the renewal is a lifelong process. So for that, we need to come to God every day. That is the meaning of the complete Salvation. God wants to save us to the uttermost.  He doesn't want to give a partial Salvation. He wants to give us the complete Salvation. For our Salvation to be completed,  we need to come to God every day, Only by coming to the Word of Christ, our minds can be renewed. Our thinking, our desires, can be renewed.  We can think the way God wants us to think, we can desire what God wants us to desire, we need to fellowship with Him. We need to come to his Word every day. 

Hebrews 10: 22

"22. let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having 

our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with 

pure water." 

So the way to fellowship with God is through the experience of the powerful death of our Lord Jesus Christ. That means to have fellowship with God...to have fellowship with Christ we need to lose a little bit of our earthly comfort and our time. When we do that, we can enjoy the heavenly blessings, the spiritual blessings, which the world can never give.  The spiritual blessings, the heavenly blessings are so precious. When we do that, we can draw closer to God. 

So the worship means drawing near to God and honoring God. We can honor God only by drawing near to Him. Unless we fellowship with Him, unless we draw closer to Him, we will never be able to honor Him as He wants.  God is asking us to fellowship with Jesus Christ by coming to the New Testament every day to receive the speaking of the Lord. And then with that speaking, we should every day, praise Him, thank Him and pray to Him. And then we should confess His name to others. We should share the joy we received from Him with others. So that way we can honor Him in our daily lives. 

May the Lord Jesus Christ strengthen each one of us to do that. Amen.