We Become Like What We Worship
So why do we bother gathering together weekly on the Lord’s Day? Why is it important to gather together regularly to worship the Lord? I want to start a short series of entries about Worship, and the value of our weekly gatherings. Today, I just wanted to start with the truth that we become like what we worship.
The first commandment is: “You shall have no other God before me.” Why? Partly because God knows that we become like what we worship. The Psalmist prays, “Not to us,O LORD, not to us, but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness. Why do the nations say, “Where is their God?” Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. But their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but they cannot smell; they have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but they cannot walk; nor can they utter a sound with their throats. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them." Again we see, we become like what we worship.
Jeremiah put it this way, “This is what the LORD says: “What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and become worthless themselves."
Paul joins both Jeremiah and the Psalmist saying that we become like what we worship, but in this case he says when we focus on the Lord and worship him, be become like Him. “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is Spirit.” When we focus on Jesus and worship him, it has a transforming effect in our lives, we become like Him.
What we worship really matters, which is why Jesus says, “A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks." This might be why some say that orthodoxia, right worship, leads to orthodoxy, right doctrine, not the other way around. Aidan Kavanagh would say, "Worship concieved broadly is what gives rise to theological reflectioin, rather than the other way around. In Prosper of Aquitaine’s phrasing, it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief – rather as a foundation establishes a house or as the virtue of justice founds the law. The axiom in all three cases is irreversible: it is not law which makes justice possible, not the house which establishes the foundation, not belief which enable worship." In the rest of his book he works out this idea. Maybe that is why the Father seeks true worshipers.
Whatever the case may be, true worship is vital to our life. When you scan the story of scripture, you see throughout the Scriptures as well as in the history of the church that both Jews and Christians have consider worship as central to their life with God. The entire book of Revelation is framed with the theme of worship. Because God understands that we become what we worship.
Aidan Kavanagh in his book On Liturgical Theology says, “Most Jews and Christians have for thousands of years expressed their religious existence not in books but by participation in assemblies which have met regularly, at least once a week, for worship of the living God. … Jews and Christians have tended to gather for, and set great store by, worship on certain regularly occurring days, usually the last or the first day of that peculiar unit of time we call the week.
Christians have from earliest times assembled for worship on the first day of the week, a day called kyriake, Lord’s Day. By reorganizing the week so as to have it culminate on the first rather than the last day, as in Judaism, early Christians not only established a day which commemorated Jesus’ historical resurrection from the dead but tapped into, not the Sabbath, but into the old Jewish eschatological symbolism of the “Eighth Day.” – the span of time following the completion of creation in redemption accomplished by the Messiah. Christians rapidly gave the Lord’s Day, Sunday, a definite structure which became more detailed and elaborate as the lives of the believers organized themselves in communal form, a structure which would become the paradigm for the other days of assembly, or feasts, falling during the week. By the fifth century, Sunday and festal worship I major church ash as those in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and the new Christian city of Constantinople had already come to be not a single service, as we are used to today, but an interlocking series of services which gave form not only to the day itself but to the entire week, the year, and time itself.” Why? Because we become what we worship. So if we want to be more like God, we will take time to worship Him.
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