Worshippers by Design

You and I are built to worship. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the very structure of our soul. We were made to worship something, and we just can’t resist doing so. Of course, we were rightly made to worship God. He is worthy of our worship.

Our bent toward worship was built into us by the very hand of God when He made us in His image, according to His likeness (Gen. 1:26-27). We were created to have a relationship with God in which we rightly recognize His majesty and enjoy His goodness forever. We were created and designed to worship God and bear His glory to all creation (Gen. 1:28).

As the Shorter Catechism famously puts it:

Worship Gone Wrong

Of course, the problem is that we messed it all up. Our fall into sin creates a disconnect between our created purpose and our everyday practice. In our fallenness, our proclivity toward worship is subverted and skewed. Our hearts turn away from God to idols. As my friend Marshall Campbell used to say, we engage in “real worship…wrong object.”

Because we are built to worship but are also fallen, our hearts become a factory for idols. This is the language of Calvin. He says,

Sometimes our idols are evidently wicked. We worship things that are clearly immoral and contrary to God and His commands. We want the pleasure of sex without the covenant of marriage. We are greedy for money and possessions. We want power and control over others.

Other times we worship the gifts instead of the Giver. We orient our lives more around our job, our family, our hobbies, or our happiness in such a way that God gets pushed to the periphery. But in these moments, we need to recognize that good gifts make poor gods.

Whether our idols are the evident kind or the acceptable kind, we need to hear Paul’s indictment in Romans 1 so that we can see what is at stake in our everyday worship.

Worship and Redemption

Being built for worship but worshipping wrongly brings us to our need for redemption. We must accept the condemnation of the gospel wherein we are justly under God’s wrath for failing to worship Him (both in confession and conduct). We “fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). The just penalty for this wrong worship is death (Rom. 6:23a). But God in His mercy and love has made a way through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to redeem and repurpose our lives back toward Himself in worship (Eph. 2:4-10). For indeed, the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus where we might glorify Him and enjoy Him forever (Rom. 6:23b). All that is required is that we call upon the name of the Lord in faith. So that, “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).

Once we are rescued and redeemed from sin and death, we can now offer ourselves and all that we have as worship (Rom. 12:1-2). In this way, we learn to live worshipfully towards God rather than bend our hearts and hands towards lesser things.

Worship and Mission

Being built to worship also has implications for mission and discipleship. John Piper has accurately stated that “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” To this I would add: Discipleship exists because worship doesn’t. Missions and discipleship are two sides of the same Commission (making disciples and teaching them in Matt. 28:18-20). If we are built to worship but we aren’t worshipping rightly, then the mission and message of the church is grounded upon reorienting people through redemption and renewal back toward a proper worship of God alone. In other words, the Great Commission is our marching orders to Glorify God and Make His Name Known. That is the vision of Lakewood, and that is what we will be about. We must glorify God and make His name known. In order to do that we must both make and mature disciples who glorify God in all things. We do this through gospel witness and gospel living. We multiply the gospel so that people might hear the good news and be saved. And we live the gospel in such a way that God is glorified in all that we do in Lynchburg and beyond. The community of believers at Lakewood must be a people who are so invested in Glorifying God and Making His Name Known that we will not relent in our pursuit of it. We will not back down or cave in. We will not lose heart or lack focus. We will be God’s people living out God’s vision for His glory and a world in need of His goodness. May God grant grace that it might be so!