“Give to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering, and come before him. Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” 1 Chronicles 16:29

Worship is part of humanity, even fallen human nature. No question, we were created as beings who would worship the Lord because we love him and know that he is worthy of worship. Such worship must have been pretty easy in a pre-fall world, where humans had face to face access to God in a creation unmarred by sin, death and destruction.

Today, of course, although the innate need to worship still exists in us, it’s like everything else in this world, has been twisted and distorted by sin. Which means that among other things we can end up worshipping the wrong things or not worshipping the Lord in the way he is supposed to be worshiped.

Obviously, in the beginning we were to worship the only One worthy of worship, our Lord and creator. In ancient Egypt, some people worshiped the Pharaoh; at other times, in other lands, people worshiped statues of fish, multiple headed gods and other supposed deities.

Today, most people are too sophisticated to bow down before a statue of frog; yet they worship money, power, sex, themselves, rock stars, actors. Whatever we love the most, whatever we focus most of our attention on, whatever we live for, that is what we worship. The three Jewish boys obviously took the second commandment (Exodus 20:4-6) as seriously as God had meant it to be taken. Worship, proper worship, is so important that, it becomes central to the issues in the last days, before the second coming of Christ.

One of the most wonderful accounts in the New Testament of how Jesus ministered to broken souls is found in the story of Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4:7-26) Though she tried to change the subject by talking about worship, Jesus used her tactic to give us some profound truths about worship and what worship involves. Perhaps most important for our immediate purpose is what he said in John 4:24: God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

True worship of the Lord must be in spirit, that is, it must stem from love of God, from the experience of knowing him personally. At the same time, worship must be in truth. We must have some correct knowledge of God, of who he is and what he requires from us.