The words “worship” and “praise” are on the lips of millions of people, surely more than ever before in history. That’s a very good thing, when it comes to biblical worship and praise of the one true God.
But I would venture to suggest that even those of us who worship and praise the Lord with all our hearts have not always taken the time to study what the Bible teaches about worship and praise. Have you ever looked up the words “worship” and “praise” in the Bible to see how they are used?
The (rather ambitious!) goal of this article is to try to summarize in ten principles what the Bible teaches about worship and praise.
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According to the Bible, to worship God is to prostrate yourself before Him.
Did you know that the word “adoration” is not found in the Bible (at least, in the Reina-Valera version of 1960)? Surprising!, right? Now, the word “worship” does appear, about 150 times.
Behind those 150 texts are six Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words. The main idea is to prostrate yourself before God. True worship consists in prostrating before God (not necessarily physically, but in the heart). And false worship consists of prostrating before any being or thing that is not God. Throughout the Bible there are many examples of both types of worship. This idea (of prostrating ourselves before God) speaks to us of his holiness and greatness, of our sinfulness and smallness and of the holy fear that we should feel before Him. That is, of his great dignity and of our great unworthiness of him.
1) According to the Bible, to worship God is to respond to all that He is with all that we are.
This is my definition of worship: responding to all that is God with all that we are, responding to all of his being with all of our being.
When we worship, we are not doing something in a vacuum; we are responding to something. To what? Well, to God, to everything that his Word teaches us about Him. And we do that with all that we are and with all that we have. That is worship.
Three biblical examples of this: (1) Abraham climbing Mount Moriah to worship the Lord, offering his son Isaac as a burnt offering (Gen. 22:5); (2) The worship of which Micah spoke: “…do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:6-8); and: (3) The worship taught by the apostle Paul: “…that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1).
Worship is so much more than just something we do at church!
2) YesAccording to the Bible, the number one goal of our worship should be to please God and give him glory.
True worship is not egocentric, but theocentric. In the center of the stage I am not; there is God The idea is not that we have a good time; the idea is to please the Lord and give him glory.
We use the words “I like” and “I don’t like” a lot. Curiously, the only place in the Bible where the words “like” are found is in Genesis 27: 4, words of Isaac to his son Esau: “Make me a stew as I like…”. And you know how that ended! But today, the words “I like” are one of the words that are heard the most; a reflection, without a doubt, of the egocentrism that so easily takes over us. And there is too much of the likes and dislikes in our worship.
True worship should not be a matter of our tastes; the only thing that really matters is that the Lord likes it, that it pleases Him and gives glory to Him.
3) According to the Bible, praising God is recognizing his virtues, being impressed by them and praising him for them.
To praise is “to praise, celebrate with words.” We praise our favorite athletes, artists and actors. We praise the people we love the most. To praise someone is to recognize their virtues, to be impressed and shocked by those virtues, and to praise them for them.
And we praise the Lord for his many and marvelous virtues, be it directly: “Lord, how great you are!”; or indirectly: “How good is the Lord!”
But is this how the word “praise” is being used when talking about “praise leaders” or “praise times”? Well, sometimes, yes, and other times, no, right?
4) According to the Bible, singing to God and praising him are two things related to each other, but different.
The words of many of the hymns and songs we sing are praise to the Lord: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord Almighty!”; “How big is the!”; “You are big!; great are your works!”; “Your fidelity is great!”; etc.
But: (1) Not all songs or hymns are of praise: “Revive us, Lord!”; “Firm and forward!”; “Great certainty!”; “Accept me as a love offering”; “As the deer searches through the waters”; “Today I surrender my being”; etc. (2) Singing to the Lord is not the only way to praise Him; we also praise him by praying, talking to each other about him, and with our lives.
If we keep using the word “praise” like we are, our grandkids won’t know what praise is! Just as the word “love” has been distorted, we are in danger of distorting the word “praise”.
5) According to the Bible, spiritual singing is used to express all kinds of emotions in all kinds of situations.
As we have already seen, there are hymns and songs of praise, but there are also songs of gratitude, trust in the Lord, consecration, petition, etc.
Now, does that have any biblical basis? Well, yes, it does: the book of Psalms! There are psalms of praise to the Lord, psalms of thanksgiving, psalms of trust in the Lord, messianic psalms, psalms asking the Lord for help, psalms that are laments, etc. One of the things we like most about the Psalms is precisely the fact that they talk about all kinds of situations, good and bad, and express all kinds of emotions, from anguish to ecstasy.
Are we not in danger of losing the rich content of the songs that the people of God sang before Christ?
6) According to the Bible, there are two things that are more important than singing: (1) the Word of God; and: (2) prayer.
I know how important the “praise times” we have in our meetings are for many people. But, although singing to the Lord is very important, even more important are the Word of God and prayer.
In the Old Testament music has an important place, but not as important as the Word of God and prayer. There are entire books that do not contain any reference to music.
In the four Gospels there are very few references to music and only one reference to the Lord himself singing, but how many references are there to the Word of God and to prayer? A lot! Right?
The book of Acts describes the first thirty years of the Church, but how many references are there to early Christian singing? Only one (explicit), and it is not a normal Christian gathering, but Paul and Silas singing in a jail! But what about the references in Acts to God’s Word and to prayer? A lot, right?
Does our reality today reflect the same emphases as the Word of God?
7) According to the Bible, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ marked a milestone in terms of worship.
Is worship in the New Testament the same as worship in the Old Testament? If not, how are they different? Did the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ change the way we worship God? What is our main model?: the worship of the people of Israel or the worship of the primitive Church? Which of the two is more like our worship?
The Lord said to the Samaritan woman: “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father… The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father also seeks such worshipers to worship him…” (Jn. 4:21-24). It seems that the Lord was aiming for a change in worship as a consequence of his coming, right? Is that change reflected in our worship?
8) According to the Bible, at the center of our worship should be the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Worship before Christ pointed to his (future) coming; and worship after Christ looks back to his incarnation, his death, and his resurrection. The person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ should take center stage in our worship.
But some believers talk about Christ, the Cross, and the gospel as if they didn’t have much to do with praise. Let’s think for a moment about the book of Revelation; much of the book describes the worship of believers and angels in heaven. And what do we find? Well, that Revelation is one of the biblical books that speak the most about Christ; that Revelation begins and ends with the Lord Jesus Christ; we find about twenty-four names or titles of the Lord Jesus Christ, of which the most used is the name of the Lamb; and that the central theme of the songs that are sung in heaven is Christ crucified.
9) According to the Bible, worship in church is worthless without the worship of our lives.
We all know how easy it is to have a good time at church and how difficult it is to live our faith on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes we seem schizophrenic: one person in church and a very different person outside of church. But if we don’t worship the Lord with our lives, what we do in church is not true worship!
The Lord had to rebuke His people Israel again and again for the inconsistency between their (supposed) worship and their lives (Is. 1:11-17; Is. 29:13a; Hos. 6:6; Mi. 6: 6-8, etc.). And the apostle Paul speaks of our “rational worship” in terms of our lives, not what we do in church (Rom. 12:1-2).
What we do in church is just the tip of the iceberg of true worship, the small part that is seen the most; but if there is nothing below that, if we are not worshipers 24/7, what we do in church is worthless!
conclusion
As the Lord Jesus Christ said to that Samaritan woman, the Father seeks true worshipers who adore him. After all, he created us, he gave us life, for that: so that we adore him; and he saved us so that we would do it “in spirit and in truth.” May the Lord find in us the worshipers he is looking for!