WORSHIP: Why Should You Worship God?

In the next six blogs I want to catch up on the theme I’ve been preaching on these days: Doing Church on Purpose. Much has been written about the Purpose Driven Church or about the broader idea that a church must have a clear sense of mission in order to thrive as a congregation. So, let’s think about the first primary purpose of the church: Worship.

Why should you come to worship on any given Sunday? There are so many other things you can do with your time, aren’t there? There are family outings, needed rest time, children’s sports, or many other leisurely activities that can demand our time. Why worship? Does God need our worship or do we? Have you ever considered what can go wrong in your life when you cease to be faithful in worship?

Consider this. Too much news coverage has been given to the recent death of pop star Michael Jackson. I’m really not that interested in him as a music icon, as much as I’m interested in him as a human being. One bit of news surfacing recently was about the Jackson family being Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW). Since Michael’s death, his children have been taken regularly to participate in worship at a JW Kingdom Hall. Though I have reservations about specific teachings of JW’s, what moved me was the report that Michael Jackson once commented how ‘real’ and ‘at peace’ he felt when he recently visited his faith community again.

Here is a very important reason human beings need to worship. You can even see it in the tragic, premature death of Michael Jackson: There is a ground of reality that we all need to build our life upon or we can become lost. We can become lost, even in our own skin. Who hasn’t observed a person who loses their sense of community and connectedness? Who hasn’t watched as a married couple become embroiled in expressing hate for each other rather than love? And who hasn’t watch as a family is broken apart over a will or a church loses its sense of fellowship over some lesser issue? We all have a need to find and keep the right focus or life can very quickly get out of sorts.

In our Baptist congregations we have made much of the concept of how lost people need Jesus as their personal savior. This teaching is based upon a beautiful biblical image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd and Jesus’ own parable about the Shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to go after the one lost sheep. I hope we never lose this beautiful image of what it means to be lost in the world or what it means to be found by a loving, seeking, caring Shepherd. But what we haven’t spoken enough about is how lost any of us can become when we fail to keep ourselves grounded and focused in God.

Even in our own skin and even in our own beliefs, we can lose our way if we lose the vision of the God who is our source, our compass and our ultimate destiny. He is not only the redeeming God who has saved us from our sins in the past, but he also has the power to help spare us from the sins of the future; from ourselves, and from all the darkness, the destitution and the self-destruction that can come to life without a focused sense of reality and stability. As Isaiah 26:3 promises about God: "You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You." Keeping our mind and our focus on him, and not in only in ourselves, nor any kind of lesser distraction which may become destructive; this is why we must worship.