According to the Westminster Confession of faith, the “Chief end of man is to know God and enjoy him forever.” What lead the writers of the confession to instruct us about our priority of worship? It has been said that all of humanity will worship something. We were created for worship. Prior to creation, God had a host of Angels who served him, but He wanted more than servants. So, God created mankind in his image. His desire was for us to be able to enjoy the beauty of His creation and walk with Him in the cool of the day. One of my college classmates loved to say that God created us to be naked gardeners. God wanted his human creations to choose Him. Adam and Eve enjoyed that relationship for a season, and then broke that relationship.
A.W. Tozer wrote: The purpose of God in sending His Son…was that He might restore to us, the missing jewel, the jewel of worship; that we might come back and learn to do again that which we were created to do in the first place – worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, to spend our time in awesome wonder and adoration of God, feeling and expressing it. We’re here to be worshipers first, and workers only second.
Our first priority should be worship. Of all the commandments, Jesus said, The most important one is this…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 12:29-30 There are a number of Biblical stories to remind us of this. Remember when Martha was frustrated because Mary chose to sit at the feet of Jesus? Jesus said she has chosen the better things. Remember when Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” He asked him three times. The love for Jesus had to come before the work of feeding the sheep. It seems like many churches want to move immediately from a person’s decision to follow Jesus into a creating a worker for Jesus. How can a person effectively work for someone who is unknown?
I love the way Don McMinn wrote this: “The first priority of the church must be…God.” He continues, “Our programs, designed to promote the kingdom, must not take precedence over the King. And the King’s friends and enemies must not receive more attention than the King Himself.…And we must not devote ourselves more to those He came to save than we do to the Savior Himself.”
Our practice of worship on earth, in part, prepares us for heaven. None of the other functions of the church will continue in eternity. There will be no need for evangelism. We won’t need to feed the hungry. The theological event that is expository preaching will have served its purpose. These tasks are important only for a season.
W Nicholls, in his book Jacob’s Ladder: The Meaning of Worship, said it this way:
Worship is the supreme and only indispensable activity of the Christian Church. It alone will endure, like the love for God which it expresses, into heaven, when all other activities of the Church will have passed away. It must therefore, even more strictly than any of the less essential doings of the Church, come under the criticism and control of the revelation on which the Church is founded.
