Worship part 1: Worship defined.

And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my lord unto his servant? And the captain of the LORD'S host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.
Joshua 5:14-15

Worship is defined as “1: to adore; to pay divine honours to; to reverence with supreme respect and veneration. 2: to respect; to honour; to treat with civil reverence. 3: to honour with extravagant love and extreme submission; as a lover.
Now that we have talked about our position before the LORD I would like to look at what it means to us as His servants in the area of worship. To do this I would like to use the definition as an outline using each definition as a point.
Worship firstly is “to adore; to pay divine honours to; to reverence with supreme respect and veneration.” I believe that we have, over the past one hundred and fifty years, swung to far over the side of the pendulum that says GOD is our friend. At times we act as if GOD is our equal, as if He was our pal and our buddy and as if he just “loves everybody”. I believe that this thought has brought us to the point to we think that we can accept Him or reject Him at our choosing and that we may adore him as we see fit or in the manner that makes us more comfortable. However, the Word of GOD does clearly state that the LORD is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother and that GOD is love and so I do not want to swing to the other side of the pendulum and say that GOD is this heartless Being that does not listen to us and that only desires our destruction. He is not like as unto us, He is different and therefore deserves a different approach in our worship. We see in the verses above that Joshua fell to his face when he found out it was the LORD that stood in front of him. He was also told to remove his shoe from his foot leaving one of the most valuable parts of his body exposed to harm. My friend the LORD moves not into our comfort zone so that we might adore Him, but it should be us that move into His zone of holiness. He needs not to move at all, but His greatness demands that we move to Him.
The second definition is “to respect; to honour; to treat with civil reverence.” I believe that one question that we ought to ask ourselves when we seek to worship the LORD is, are we worshipping with civil reverence. In our society we are taught to “come as you are,” you can be casual, you can worship however you feel is right for you. We have come to a point where we can dance in our services, we can where what we want and it does not matter. There have been people (myself included) who have walked out of a service and have said that the service resembled more like a circus or night club than worship. Why is this so? We would not let our wives dress or act inappropriately if we were to eat with the president of the United States of America, but if she dresses like a whore and dances in the presence of GOD Almighty, then we do not feel like it is that important. Why? Is not our GOD greater in every way more than the president? Where has the civility of our adoration gone? We are called to be different than the world. When we worship the LORD on High people ought to know that we are doing just that and not as if we were going to a circus, rock concert, or night club.
The last part of the definition says that worship is “to honour with extravagant love and extreme submission; as a lover.” With our lenient mindset where is the love of GOD that should be there? The majority of us that name the name of Christ go to church because it is the right thing to do, or because there are programs for my children, or because the preacher and the church makes us feel good. Because of these self-centered reasons we miss out on the true reason that should make us go to church: to glorify the name of our LORD Jesus Christ and love him as He has loved us. Now this is not a mushy, gushy, type of love, but a type of love as a woman might have for a man that rescued her from the deepest and worst manure pit and purchased her from the worst torture and slavery and then above all else he told her that he would marry her. We can image the gratitude and the love and the desire that this woman would have to try and repay the debt she owed to this man. This is how it is for us, however our debt is greater and so should our desire to love the LORD and worship Him in Spirit and Truth and in great submission to his wills and desires.