Do you know why you are upon the earth? Do you know that for which you are uniquely designed? The answer is the worship of God. A dear saint from generations ago known as Brother Lawrence was on his deathbed and as his life ebbed away he related to those around him, “I am not dying. I am just doing what I have been doing for the past forty years, and doing what I expect to be doing for all eternity”. When asked what that was he replied “I am worshipping the God I love”. Worshipping God is man’s reason for existence. 

“The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Rev. 4:10-11). You were created to worship; you were recreated (born again) to be able to worship. It is said that John Wesley as he was dying was trying to sing the phrase, “I will praise my Maker while I’ve breath, And when my soul is lost in death, Praise shall employ my nobler powers”. Note the words of the hymn writer Robert Grant (1779-1838): 

O worship the King, all glor’ous above, O gratefully sing, His pow’r and His love; Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of days, Pavillioned in splendor and girded with praise. 

O tell of His might, O sing of His grace, Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space! His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, And dark is His path on the wings of the storm. 

Thy bountiful care, what tongue can recite? It breathes in the air, it shines in the light; It streams from the hills, it descends to the plain, And sweetly distils in the dew and the rain. 

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail; Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end! Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer and Friend. 

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) penned of man’s chief employment also: 

Bless, O my soul, the living God; Call home thy tho’ts that rove abroad; Let all the pow’rs within me join In praise and worship so divine. 

Bless, O my soul, the God of grace; His favors claim the highest praise; Let not the wonders He hath wrought Be lost in silence and forgot. 

Tis He, my soul, that sent His Son To die for crimes which thou hast done; He owns the ransom and forgives The hourly follies of our lives. 

Let every land His pow’r confess; Let all the saints adore His grace; My heart and tongue with rapture join In praise and worship so divine.

A child of God, who is engaged in a desperate search to find meaning 

and fulfillment to life, who does not involve himself in the praise of God will be confused about their life and at best only eek out a lack luster of an existence. Are responsibilities, past times, or pursuits choking out the worship of God? My dear Christian friend within you is the Spirit of the living God; your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:1-3). 

Please understand that God is not to be worshipped simply because we get something out of it. If we worship only as a means of being blessed, we see God as a ‘fix’ rather than as the Lord, and He becomes a cheap formula for selfish gratification. Worshipping God with a selfish motive can be as empty as not worshipping at all, both are wrong. God must be worshipped because He is transcendent, because He is gloriously exceeding the excellence of all. 

Having said this, we must still note that genuine worship is not wearisome. If worship services are drudgery to you, you have not actually been worshiping. You may have ‘gone to church’ but you have not worshipped. “For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand . . .” (Ps 84:10). Worship is delight in the presence of utter Infinite Excellence. Worship is entranced spiritual fascination and astonishment at the inconceivable elevation and magnitude of His splendor. Worshippers are mesmerized by the majesty, by the glory of God (Ps 147-148, Eph 1:3-6, 3:21). 

A child of God who forsakes worship cannot but by comparison be involved in morbid and mundane pursuits. William Temple writes, “Both for perplexity and for dulled conscience the remedy is the same; sincere and spiritual worship. For worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose—and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centerdness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin. Yes—worship in spirit and truth is the way to the solution of perplexity and to the liberation from sin”. 

We worship God because of His ‘worth ship’ of reverence and awe, because He has commanded us to worship Him, and because He has created us to worship Him. However, this is not to say that there are no blessings from worshiping God, rather, the heavenly Father designed that everything worthwhile and meaningful will spring up into the souls of His children who worship Him in Spirit and in truth. True spiritual worship in its transforming experience will convey Christ likeness to our personalities, relationships, and endeavors. “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:17-18). 

What is that which makes heaven, heaven? “And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever” (Rev. 5:13-14). Heaven is worship. So, what do you suppose it would be that would make earth the most like heaven, that which would make your life the most like you were in heaven? My friend it is worship, Worship, WORSHIP, W O R S H I P ! ! ! What are you doing this Sunday?