[This is an excerpt from the first in my three-week Sunday School series on the topic of worship. Taught on 12/23/07.]

As we will see over the course of this series, worship describes the entirety of the Christian’s relationship with God. Worship describes the way he views God, the way he interacts with God, the way he lives for God’s glory. Worship is the center of the Christian’s walk. So we must begin by asking the question: What is worship?

More Than Mere Respect

The dictionary does a terrible job defining worship: “to honor, revere, regard with great respect.”

But I honor my parents. I respect my pastor. Worship must mean more than just honor and respect. Let’s look at worship as defined (literally) by Scripture.

In Hebrew there are at least 7 different words for praise and at least 4 words for worship, each reflecting a different form of worship or having a different connotation. These are translated into English in many variations: to bless, to bow down, to sing praises, to shout, to kneel, to praise, to give thanks, etc.

But the word most frequently translated into worship in the English Bible is shachah. Shachah literally means “to depress,” or “to bow/prostrate oneself.” In fact, 1/3 of the time the Hebrew word is translated as bowed down and 2/3 of the time as worship. But there must be more to worship than just the literal act of bowing down and lowering oneself, right? Consider Psalm 95:6, “Come, let us worship (shachah) and bow down (karah).” Is that redundantly saying let us bow down and bow down?

So what are we missing from shachah? Connotation. Shachah, to worship, is a prostration… to render homage. And what is homage? It is to recognize or attest to something’s worth.

Worship Is About Worth

Worth! That’s the key. In fact, our word worship comes from old English weorðscipe, modernly worth-ship. As you know, the suffix -ship means something like “the condition of;” friendship is the condition of being friends, fellowship is the condition of being fellows (that is, being likeminded, as in The Fellowship of the Ring). In the same way, worthship then means “the condition of having worth (or the condition being worthy).” Therefore, to worship means to ascribe worth to something that is conditionally worthy.

Religion and God aside, this is the general definition of worship.

What Is It That You Value?

You are already a worshiper. God has wired us as humans to worship. But what we worship is the question.

Worship is about what we value, cherish, and treasure. “Worship is my response to what matters most to me.” (Rick Gamache) You see, worship happens naturally. Whatever matters to you (whether it is God, money, your job, your family, yourself, or something else), you have placed worth in that, ascribing to it worth… in worth-ship.

A revealing personal question: What brings you the most joy and pleasure? “Pleasure is the measure of our treasure.” (Jon Bloom) What gives you the most pleasure, what you strive after and seek, is what you value most, and what you consider worthy.

Rick Gamache delivered a sermon in which he challenges the listener thusly: follow the pathway of where you spend your energy, money, resources, time, and affections, to a throne. What’s the god on that throne?

We Must Worship That Which Is Truly Worthy

Now, how worthy is that god, really? You see, we can only worship something that has intrinsic worth. If we worship anything that does not have true eternal worth (animals, rocks, trees, idols, grades, jobs, money, loved ones, ourselves), then our worship is false, vain, futile. If I place value/worth in a piece of trash, that’s foolish. We must be careful to ascribe worth only to that which is worthy. On the flip side, to say a bar of gold is worth $0.02 would also be foolish. We must take care to correctly ascribe worth to and worship that which is truly worthy.

And we bring it back to God here. The only thing with true worth, the only Being intrinsically and eternally worthy, is God. God is the only appropriate object of worship because He has supreme infinite worth. In my opinion, the central, pivotal line of Tim Hughes’ contemporary worship hit, “Here I Am to Worship,” is the line “You’re altogether worthy.” Because God is worthy, because He has true worth, he deserves all worship.

Worshiping God as worthy places Him rightly on the throne He deserves. When we say that we exist to worship, we mean that we exist to ascribe worth to God’s glory. Worship is primarily and necessarily about worth. Worship is worthship.

Next: Worship Is About God’s Glorious Presence