What You Were Taught About Worship Is Backwards
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"If I were hungry, I would not tell you." That's God talking in the Psalms to people bringing him sacrifices. It's the sentence that ends the idea that worship was ever for his ego. He doesn't need it. He said so. And the reason you were told to do it anyway is strangers in the version most of us were handed. In my last video, I said that somewhere we got the idea that God demands praise the same way an insecure ruler demands flattery and accolades.
And if he doesn't get them, look out. That's not what worship is. And I said I'd show you from the Psalms what's actually going on when you do it. This is that video. We were taught that worship is something we give to God. Praise goes up like tribute to a king, and a God who doesn't get enough of it is unhappy and might not bless us, or worse. But the Bible describes worship as a direction, not a tribute.
It's us, the mirror, turning toward the light. And there's one verse in the Psalms that tells you exactly what happens to a person while they worship. It wasn't written about God. It was written about idols. If you've ever stood in a church service with your hands in your pockets feeling like everyone around you is getting something you weren't, this video is for you. And if you've quietly wondered why a God who has everything would need or even want to be told how great he is, you're in good company. One of the most famous Christians of the last century asked that exact question on his way into the church, and he wrote down what he found.
We'll get to him in a bit. Here's what we'll cover in this video. What God says about whether he needs anything, then the word itself, then a former atheist's objection, and finally the longest one-on-one conversation Jesus has anywhere in the Gospels. It's about worship, and it's with a woman a rabbi wasn't supposed to talk to. Let's start off with the picture I was handed about worship, because I think a lot of you got something similar to it, if not exactly the same.
I was raised in a high-control religion, commonly known as a cult, and worship there was a quantity. We measured it in hours, and literature placements, and how many people we spoke to about God. It [snorts] was how frequently we attended church, and sang songs, and reported all our activity to the leadership at the end of every month. And underneath all that was a picture of God as a sovereign whose name had been insulted, whose reputation had to be defended and vindicated in front of the universe, and we were supposed to be part of the defending. It was our job, our purpose to defend him. Praise was a kind of loyalty, a debt, even. You gave it because he was owed it, and because what happened to people who didn't was not pretty.
The church I landed in later didn't say it that way, but I still heard it. God is jealous for his glory. Worship is what we bring him. While a lot less corporate in its approach, that church still saw worship as a tribute or a debt, something God expects and that we give him. Only in this case, not out of fear, but because we love him. And then it's Sunday. The hands go up around you, the songs come back around, and somewhere in your chest it turns into a test.
God is waiting for something. Everyone else is delivering it, so you better do it, too. That's how worship becomes a performance, something that you do at God to satisfy him. And if you don't feel anything when you do it, then you're either doing it wrong or he's not happy with you. That's the same error we found in the last two videos. Prayer is a message sent to a distant God. The Bible is a textbook about a distant God.
And now worship as a tribute paid up to a distant God. But here's the problem with tribute. It only works on somebody who actually needs it. So let's ask God if he needs our tribute because he's already told us. It's in Psalm 50. God is talking and he's talking to people whose sacrifices were all in order. The offerings, the bulls, the whole nine yards.
And he says this, "I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens. For every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills." Then my favorite line from that Psalm and one of my favorites in all the Old Testament, "If I were hungry, I would not tell you. For the world is mine and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?" Read that as a sentence about ego. God is making a very clear statement there.
Whatever you think you're doing for me, I'm not the one being fed here. Paul says the same thing to a crowd of philosophers in Athens. The God who made the world is not served by human hands as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. The direction of the giving is always from God to you, never from you to God. So whatever worship is, it isn't supplying God anything he needs. There's nothing in the universe God's lacking in, so he doesn't need anything you have to offer.
The insecure king picture isn't just unkind. For God, it's impossible. Insecurity can't exist in the almighty creator of the universe.
But then why command worship? Because he does, constantly. And that's the question the rest of this video answers. And the answer starts with the word The main New Testament word is proskuneo, in Hebrew hishtachavah.
And here's what they have in common. They're both body words. The Hebrew means to bow down, to go flat on the ground. The Greek is the same, to fall on your face before somebody. In the Bible, worship isn't first a feeling and it's not first a song. It's a posture. It's what your body does when it's facing something bigger than you.
Which means the word is neutral. It doesn't tell you what you're bowing to. The same verb is used for the wise men in front of the child in Bethlehem and for Satan in the desert asking Jesus to do it for him. And in Revelation, it's the same verb for the people falling before the lamb and the people falling before the beast. Same posture, opposite direction. The word only tells you that a human being has turned to face something and goes down. It's the facing that matters.
Which brings me to the verse about idols and it's what this whole video hinges on. Psalm 115. Their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but they cannot speak. Eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear. Then verse eight.
Those who make them will be like them and so will all who trust in them. Those who make them will be like them. Do you understand what that means there? Worship doesn't change the thing you worship. It changes you. Bow towards something deaf and blind long enough and you go deaf and blind. Jeremiah says it flat out.
They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. And if that's true of a dead idol, that it makes you like it, then think about what it means to instead turn that posture toward the living God. The law doesn't change when the direction changes. The rule is still the rule. So, no. God doesn't need your worship. You were told to worship God because of what facing him does to you.
It was never tribute. It was facing. You become what you behold. Now, real quick, if this series is helping you, hit subscribe because I'll be covering more subjects that we've often been handed backwards, even if not through anybody's bad intentions. And tell me in the comments what worship was for in the church you grew up in. Something God required? Something you had to feel?
Something you did for the people watching you? Let me know. And if you want the daily version of all this, that's in my book, The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. Chapter 24 is about worship, a hall of mirrors all turning toward the light. One reader wrote this about it. "You will see as you read what your true nature in Christ is." I love to see comments like that.
It's why I wrote the book. The link's in the pinned comment. Now, stay with me because this next man asked a question you probably asked at some point as well, which is why you're here. That same insecure king question from earlier, only he asked it on his way into the church. C. S. Lewis, the Oxford Don who wrote Narnia.
I haven't read the books, but I saw the movies. Good stuff. He was an atheist through his teens and twenties. When he finally came to Christ, he ran into this problem, and he was honest enough to write it down. Oh, what I would not give for us all to be just as honest with our questions as Lewis was with his, rather than buttoning them up out of fear, either fear of God or fear of people. God's not afraid of your questions, brothers and sisters. Only an insecure person fears questions.
Lewis wrote a little book called Reflections on the Psalms, and in it there's a chapter called A Word About Praising. And he says the thing that stuck in his throat was the way God seemed to demand praise. He read the Psalms, and it sounded to him like, and I'm quoting here, a vain woman wanting compliments.
Ouch. Now, that's some brutal honesty. It's the exact picture we're taking apart today, and Lewis started right there. But then he noticed something, and it's the same verse we just read. If I were hungry, I would not tell you. He says that line answers his whole objection. He noticed something about himself, too.
He wrote this, I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses, but completes the enjoyment. Praise completes the enjoyment. Think about the last time you saw something beautiful and just had to go tell somebody about it. Maybe a sunset. Maybe your child doing something that made you proud. You weren't performing for the sunset. The sunset didn't need your praise.
Your kid wasn't even there to hear it when you praised him to your friend. The telling was the last part of the seeing, and until you said it, the seeing wasn't finished. The feeling was locked up inside you, and you were going to just burst if you didn't go tell it to somebody. That's what praise is. It's not tributes sent up to God. It's joy coming out of you. The overflow of a person who has turned to face something so good that they just can't be quiet about it.
And commanding us to glorify him, says Lewis, God is inviting us to enjoy him. My version is that he tells us to praise him for the same reason he tells us to eat, not because he's hungry, but because we are. Now, the same word and its cousin show up nine times in five verses, all in one conversation.
In John chapter 4, Jesus is sitting at a well in Samaria at noon. He's exhausted. You can imagine how hard it must have been to do everything he did and travel as much as he did, on foot, mind you. A woman comes alone at the hottest hour of the day, when the well is usually empty, most likely on purpose to avoid the other women, though scholars debate that. A Jewish rabbi, by himself, with a Samaritan woman who had five husbands behind her. And Jesus does something scandalous. He talks to her.
It's a simple request, really. He asked her for a drink of water. Her response shows her surprise. "How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?" The author explains in a note afterwards, "For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans." What the author doesn't say is that for Jesus, a rabbi, to publicly speak to an unaccompanied woman broke several cultural and religious taboos of the day. After a discussion about life-giving water that the woman misunderstands, and Jesus revealing he's aware of her five prior husbands, and that she's currently not married, she realizes Jesus is a prophet, and she changes the subject to worship.
"Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." Which mountain? Which building? That's the tribute claim wrapped in different language. To her, worship is going to the right place to deliver something. But Jesus takes the map away completely. "A time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
Neither place is the right place, he says. And then he says this, "A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in the spirit and in truth." Jesus took worship off the mountain, out of the temple, entirely off the map, and brought it inside, in the spirit. The same spirit we found praying inside you two videos ago. The facing doesn't happen in a building anymore. It happens in the one place you can never leave.
Jesus doesn't say that God demands worship or requires worship. He says he seeks it. The Father is out looking for people who will turn and face him. That's not [snorts] what a king does with tribute. That's what a father does. He looks for the face of his child.
Then the woman says, "I know that Messiah's coming." And Jesus replies, "I, the one speaking to you, I am he." The first time in John's gospel Jesus says out loud to anybody that he's the Messiah is to a Samaritan woman at a well and a taboo conversation about worship. A woman who came expecting solitude, and Jesus gives her his face.
Now let's back up 1,000 years because the Bible already showed us what facing God does. Moses comes down the mountain after talking with God, face to face as Exodus puts it, and it says he was not aware that his face was radiant. He came back shining and he didn't even know it. The people most certainly did notice though. Paul picks that story up and turns it on us. We all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory. We read that verse in the last video, too.
And now you know what it's for. Psalm 34 says it in one line, "Those who look to him are radiant." Idols make you like them, deaf, mute, and worthless. Moses' faith shows us what happens when that same law gets applied, but toward God. You become what you behold. And Jesus says it happens inside you. All right, now for the objections to this.
There's two of them, and there's also one that's not an argument at all. Objection one. So, worship isn't about God at all? Sounds like you just made it about me. Absolutely not. It's entirely about him. That's the whole point.
You don't get radiant by looking at yourself. You get radiant by looking at him. What I'm taking away isn't God at the center of your worship. It's the idea that he's at the center needing something from you. It's the opposite. He's at the center giving something to you. Later in that same Psalm, God says, "Don't feed me.
Call on me, and I'll deliver you." The glory is his. The face it lands on is yours. This was never a competition.
Objection two. Okay, then what does the Bible say he's jealous for his glory? Because the two are the same thing. His glory is what lands on your face. When he guards his glory, he's guarding the only light that can make you shine. And the tragedy he's jealous about is the one in the idol verse. People he made to shine turning their faces toward things that would make them blind.
A father isn't jealous for his reputation when his kid runs into traffic. He's jealous for the kids' safety, for their protection. And finally, the wound, not an objection at all. This all sounds beautiful, John, but when I stand there in church, I don't feel anything. Everyone around me is glowing, and I'm just counting the minutes till the final prayer is over. I said at the beginning that this video was for you, and I meant it. Moses couldn't see it, either.
The most famous face in the Old Testament, and the man it happened to had no idea. The shine was on the outside for the people who saw him. Moses got the better part. He got to look, and that's you. You don't have to grade whether it's working. You're not even standing where you could see it. You just turn and face him.
What happens to your face is his business, and it's usually visible to everyone but you. As the saying goes, we are our own worst critic. And your hands can stay in your pockets if you prefer. There's nothing wrong with that. The word for worship means to bow. It has never once meant to look like the person standing next to you. And if your hands go up, that's still the same word.
That's still worship. Bowing has a lot of shapes. Some of the truest worship in that room is happening in the person who's too tired to lift anything at all, but they turn to face him anyway.
So, here's this week's practice. I call it face him. Before you sing a word, whether that's in church, in the car, at the sink, before the first note, say this out loud or to yourself. I've got nothing you need. I'm just here to look at you. Then sing, or don't. Either way, just stay facing him for a minute.
You're a mirror turning toward the light, and you're refusing to grade the reflection, cuz that's not your job. And if you feel nothing, you didn't do anything wrong. Do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next. Your face is not your department. God will make it shine. Remember the line, I've got nothing you need. I'm just here to look at you.
Now turn to the very last page of the Bible, Revelation 22, the new city. And it says of God's servants, they will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads. His face first and then his name is written on them. It doesn't describe a throne room full of people paying tribute to God. It describes a room full of people who looked at him so long that like Moses, they carry him on their faces. They became what they beheld and so will you. Now, here's where we're going next because worship isn't the last thing we were handed backwards.
In the next video, we'll tackle why communion isn't a memorial snack. You were taught that the bread and the cup are a remembrance, a moment of silence, a small piece of bread and then it's over. And the word Paul chose for it is the same root Peter uses for sharing in God's own nature. What's actually happening at that table is much, much bigger than remembering. And if this one helped you, if you're the one with your hands in your pockets, watch it again before Sunday and try the sentence, I've got nothing you need. I'm just here to look at you. And if that person isn't you, but somebody you love, send this to them.
The one who stopped going because they felt like a fraud in the sanctuary. Not as a nudge to try and get them to feel bad so they come back. Just to tell them there was never a performance they had to act out or get right. It was always a face and he was always seeking theirs. Like a father who smiles at the child who turns to look at him. Then meet me at the table in the next video. But first, let this be our prayer.
Abba Father, we know now that you were never hungry. You told us in your word you didn't need anything we've ever brought you and you told us so, but we didn't believe you. Forgive us for the years we brought you tribute like a nervous subject instead of looking to your face as our loving father. Thank you for seeking us even when we misunderstood. Please turn our faces to you and take away every veil we've hung between our face and your glory. We didn't know. We put them on out of fear and shame when what you wanted for us was glory and a sharing in the divine nature as vessels of the Holy Spirit.
Let us look at you so long that we glow in ways we may never see, but everyone around us will. We have nothing that you need. We're just here to look at you. We love you. We reflect you. We are yours in Jesus' name. Amen.
