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Worship with a Holy Expectancy
By Criss Bertling

William Temple said:
“To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God,
To feed the mind with the truth of God,
To purge the imagination by the beauty of God,
To open the heart to the love of God,
To devote the will to the purpose of God.”

Think about that for a moment: quicken the conscience, feed the mind, purge the imagination, open the heart, devote the will. Worship is an experience in adoration and love. It is our human response to a gracious and loving God. It is extravagant reverence.

Jesus’s very first commandment was, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30). We worship because we love Him and want to honor to Him.

We bring our bodies, minds and spirits to God to give him glory. This is worship. We offer Him the sacrifice of our mouths through singing, praising, preaching, and confessing. We worship him by offering a listening heart. We meditate on His Word to learn truth, and listen for His voice to speak to our hearts with words of love, wisdom, guidance, discipline, and encouragement. We worship him by celebrating who He is, what He has done, and what He will do. We offer our obedience as a sacrifice of our will so that He can mold us and use us and bless us.

Yet there are no step-by-step rules and regulations about how worship is to be accomplished or where it is to be carried out. Our worship is our ongoing adoration, our efforts to praise him, our desire to please him, and our need to confess and be made whole again.

Jesus declared in John 4:23, “The true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him.” God is alive and present with us and He is actively seeking worshipers! Richard Foster says, “Worship is our human response to the divine initiative. It is our response to God’s overtures of love.” It is that moment when the Holy Spirit touches our spirit that true worship happens.

Paul says in Romans 12:1 that the only reasonable response to God’s goodness, faithfulness, justice and mercy is for us to worship him. In order to experience worship, we must see who God is. That means we need to read His Word to understand his character. He must meditate on His attributes to understand His greatness. And we must find joy in His son Jesus Christ.

Paul says we are to pray with the spirit and pray with the mind, sing with the spirit and sing with the mind (1 Corinthians 14:15). We are to worship even when we don’t “feel like it.” So go to God praying, with a holy expectation that He will meet you when worship Him. True worship begins with a holy expectancy and ends in holy obedience to the only One who is worthy of our worship.