What does Christian worship truly look like? That is a question I hadn’t taken the time to dwell on until I recently read and analyzed “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit”, written by James K.A. Smith. This Book teaches us about the power of Christ’s love versus the rival liturgies in the world. In chapter 3 of the book, the focus is on how God’s spirit meets us and how the historic nature of worship should impact us in the present. This addresses the primary topic in this post, our misconceptions about what Christian worship truly looks like.

 The chapter points out that the first thing that comes to mind when we think of worship is the part at the start of Church where we sing songs of praise.  The issue with this line of thinking is that we tend to only think of worship as something we perform, rather than something that is happening to us. By thinking about worship this way, we have taken God out as the primary character of worship and replaced Him with ourselves. When we worship God, the praise is not simply an expression of our will to Him, but rather how his will affects us. This, unfortunately, can be misinterpreted as such based on certain lyrics in contemporary Christian music. The example the book uses, and one that I am familiar having sung it many times at my first church, is “Here I Am to Worship” by Hillsong Worship (a rather blunt example given the name and band of the song). While I mean no offense to the song, a lot of the lyrics put most of the emphasis on human effort in worship, with examples including: “here I am to worship, here I am to bow down”. This puts too much focus on the worship being something that we do rather than an action that happens to us because of God. If we focus on the act of us worshipping rather than the One, we our supposed to worship; we are no longer making the act about God. The book tells us that praise by us is the response we give to God’s glory and grace to thank him for what he has done for us. If we boil down praise of God to mere human effort, we are taking the supernatural presence of God’s spirit that allows us to respond this way. True Christian worship focuses on how God’s workings in us have changed us rather than how our effort to proclaim God glorifies him. That does not mean our actions and feelings have no place in worship, but the focus should be on how it comes from God above all of us, as he is the primary character of worship.

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