Worship: To Exist or Not To Exist

A few weeks ago I was eating with some friends after church, and we enjoyed some interesting discussion about the sermon.  There was one question that my brain filed away to return to later.  This morning, I opened my brain-file and read the question again: Why does God demand our worship?  Why does He want our praise?  In our discussion, we talked about how everyone has a free choice.  God gave us that--He didn't program our will. But He did create us to worship something, and in the end, we're never really satisfied until we worship Him.  But why did He make us this way?  We're pretty sure He's not egotistical, craving praise and worship because He's insecure about Himself.

Questions are good when they make us think.  They should make us search for answers--but not just from our own wisdom or feelings or the opinions of others, but from a source that has been tested by time and many followers of God, to be found as reliable and true.  Without an ultimate standard, we can come up with a thousand different answers.  And when we bend the standard to fit our own preferences, preconceived ideas or unbelief, we can also come up with a thousand answers.  So I am learning to go straight to the source--the Bible, and try to take it as it is.  I am learning that in a world of a thousand answers, it is easy to get confused.  But in the Bible, when I ask God to help me find His answers and I let go of my biases, I find something solid and clear to rest on.

So why should we worship God?  It may not be a complete answer, but here's something I found in Acts.  When Paul was hanging out with the philosophers in Athens one time, he noticed that one of their alters had an inscription on it: "To an Unknown God."  So he decided to tell them who that Unknown God was...

"He is the God who made the world and everything in it.  Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn't live in man-made temples, and human hands can't serve his needs--for he has no needs.  He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need there is.  From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth.  He decided beforehand which should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. 

"His purpose in all this was that the nations should seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him--though he is not far from any one of us.  For in him we live and move and exist.  As one of your own poets says, 'We are his offspring."  (Acts 17:24-28, NLT)

Though Paul was specifically building up a good case for worshiping the true God instead of idolatry, it also helps me understand a little better why we should worship Him. We worship God because our existence comes from Him--and flows back to Him through our worship.  If we try to find or define our existence apart from God--worshiping anything else--we are fighting not just our reason to exist, but our very ability to exist.  Therefore, we are never truly able to completely be who we were created to be (to exist the way we were meant to exist).

So yes, we can get stuck with the question of why God designed our existence to be so involved with His existence...or we can be amazed and humbled at the mystery of being so organically connected to the Creator of the universe and everything good.  Why would the Creator of the universe want to be so organically connected to us?  That doesn't sound like an insecure God.  Especially when you consider that even though our existence is so embedded in His, He still gives us the freedom to deny that connection--to deny His existence.  So the choice we have is to deny His existence--and therefore to deny our own.  Or to choose Him--to accept His existence--and to live most fully.  To worship God is to truly exist.

"Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!"  (Deut. 30:19, NLT)