In his excellent book on worship called Rhythms of Grace, author and worship pastor Mike Cosper discusses the innate and incurable insistence to worship that all human beings possess. In the garden of Eden, the continual and natural inclination to worship seems obvious. However, when sin enters the picture the predisposition to worship does not depart from mankind.
People are still made to bear God's image, still made to give and receive in the exchange of blessing and outpouring from God to creation and back again. As Harold Best describes it, we're continuously outpouring, perpetually worshiping something: "At this very moment, and for as long as this world endures, everybody inhabiting it is bowing down and serving something or someone-an artifact, a person, an institution, an idea, a spirit, or God through Christ."
It is part of our hardwired, image-bearing heritage...
Just as Adam ceaselessly worshiped God in Eden, in the wild his worship continues unabated, but disconnected from the God who made him. Praise still pours forth, though missing its proper home. (35-6, emphasis mine)The issue isn't that we need to worship more. We are always worshiping. Worship is our default position and there is no way to switch it off. The real issue is the object of our worship. Is our worshiping, our relishing, our affections, our admiration directed towards the one and only rightful object, God, or is it indiscriminately poured out on a myriad of lesser gods? Or worse still, do we intentionally displace the God of the universe with a god of our choosing?
I don't need to worship more. I need to worship God more.
