The Essence of Worship

Faith -- The Essence of Worship

Essence: 1. Identifying nature: the quality or nature of something that identifies it or makes it what it is. Basic feature: the most basic element or feature of something

I first became involved in leading what we would call contemporary or modern worship in 1976, yes I know, ‘long ago in a galaxy far, far away’. It was a time when churches were just beginning to use ‘worship teams’ or ‘praise bands’ and the catalogue of music was somewhat sparse and was made up mostly of choruses that came from the Jesus Movement. In terms of resources like instructional materials, seminars, books and such, they just didn’t exist.

Fast forward to 2007 a time in which we have more resources than we could possibly digest in our lifetime. I recently signed up for a membership with CCLI (Christian Copyright Clearance International) that gives me access to 9,000 songs! Needless to say there is a lot of stuff out there, much of it really good and really helpful. I can assure you as well that there is a mountain of teaching regarding every aspect of worship and of course the church being the church lots of debate about virtually every aspect of worship ministry.

I want to focus worship and its essence, or ‘its most basic’ elements. I believe there are three ingredients that are necessary for worship to take place and for it to honor God and affect us. One is faith or what I will call expectancy, two would be honesty or truth and three would be intimacy. For this post, let’s focus on the ingredient of faith.

The scripture tells us in Hebrews that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’. Therefore I would argue that without faith it is impossible to worship. The Bible doesn’t quantify the amount of faith we need, but we need some level of faith when we approach God, ‘he who believes in God, must believe that He is and He is a rewards those who seek Him.’ If we are approaching God, it must mean that we at some level believe in Him.

“God loves me, He wants me to come to Him” -- this is the attitude we need to approach God. He has good plans for us. Again as the writer of Hebrews tells us we are to ‘enter boldly into the throne room of grace through the blood of Jesus.” Or confidence is not in ourselves, it is in God, it is in the fact that we are at peace with Him because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who has provided full access to God the Father for us.

So when we worship in faith, our expectations are that God has good intentions towards us and that not only will we honor Him when we draw near through worship, we will be refreshed and blessed as well. Without the ingredient of faith there is no worship.

I would encourage you to think before you worship. Prepare your heart by considering who He is, what He has done and what He wants to do in your life. Then approach with expectancy. I believe He will reward your faith in Him.