For those who grew up singing Hillsong and Tomlin, we can be often reminded that worship is not about us. For example, in his song, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” Paul Oakley writes that “all this [worship] is for you, for your glory and your name. It’s not about me.” Similarly Tomlin writes “It’s not for us, it’s all for you.” These songs grasp the real truth that worship is about giving worth to God, and not to ourselves. However, worship—the songs we sing, the services we go to—must also be for us and thus it is in some sense, about us, and when we forget this we miss a large part of what it means to come together each Sunday as a Christian community to bring worth to God. Indeed, when we forget that worship is for us, as I’ll more fully explore in the next post, we lose the ability to fully worship God with our whole hearts, minds and strengths.

Worship is the act of giving worth, and specifically, it is an act that emerges as a response to God’s self-revelation in scripture, in preaching, and directly in our lives. In the very first instance of the word “worship” in scripture, we find that Abraham gives worth to God by elevating him above the most dear thing in the world to himself, his son. And in Exodus 34, we see that after one of God’s greatest self-revelations, a revelation of God’s glory (the manifestation of his character), Moses’s response is worship. So rightfully, we sing that worship is all about God. However, the bible also clear that our act of worship that God commands is also for us.

Both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, worship is commanded of us. In the Old Testament we see this clearly in the proclamation of the Sabbath as the day of rest and worship of God:

But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God […] so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. (Deuteronomy 5:12-16 (NRSV))

In this passage, while God demands that Israel praise God in remembrance for his gracious salvation from slavery, the same way we are to praise God for our current deliverance from the dominion of sin, we are also told that it was set aside so that we may rest. In the New Testament we see this double purpose of worship even more clearly in Paul’s letter to the Colossians where he says to “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” Here in this passage commonly used to instruct us to lift up our hearts in praise as a call to worship, we find again the twofold purpose of worship: (1) It is for God and towards God and (2) it is for us because by singing those psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, we teach and admonish one another so that we may all lift up our hearts higher together. Rest and community, these two things are why worship is for us and not just for God.

When we forget that worship is for us, we forget why we are called to be in community and we forget why it is impossible to be a true christian worshipping by yourself. Every time we worship we more deeply engrain in ourselves the truths of the gospel by hearing with our ears and speaking with our lips. So as we gather together every week as the elect, scattered exiles and we are reminded that we don’t walk this walk of faith by ourselves but find strength in the community and family of faith. Worship might not be for our self-esteem, but it most certainly is for the development of our renewed selves, and in developing ourselves together, with the help of the Spirit we can better turn back our praise to God, glorifying his name in our lives and in our words.