What are we doing when we gather for worship on Sunday? The hymns, the readings, prayers, sermon, and Eucharist. What do they amount to? The simple answer is this: to give glory to God. We meet to worship God, to give thanks, and to express our love and our devotion to the one who loved us first and to a degree beyond our wildest imagining. Indeed the origin of the word worship means worthy of honour.
Sometimes, however, we inadvertently make worship about ourselves. We start focussing on how much our likes and desires are being satisfied. We choose a church that worships in a particular way because we prefer that. We want to sing our favourite hymns. We don’t want liturgy to deviate from a familiar and comforting formula. We need to sit in our favourite pew. We enjoy being noticed when we contribute from the front. Soon worship becomes less about honouring God and more about self-satisfaction.
Worship isn’t simply a matter of what takes place on a Sunday morning. For Christians it is a way of life. All that we do should honour God: the way we lead our lives, conduct ourselves at work, home and in the community — and not least how we sustain prayerful union with God through our daily prayer and devotional life. As we become more adept at this, and our personal prayer life becomes richer, we begin to discover that Sunday worship is less about pleasing us and instead is the culmination and fulfilment of our weekday worship, in which we join with others to collectively glorify God. This week, why not take time to prayerfully reflect on who is being honoured by your worship. And if you’d like some resources to help with your prayer life at home, a good place to start is here.
