Why Do We Worship?

Objectives:

• Demonstrate the need and necessity of private and congregational worship.
• Examine Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman.
• Explain that God made us to worship, and gives us the means to worship him in spirit and in truth.

I. The focus of worship is on God himself

1. If you have any other goal in worship less than engaging with God, you probably don’t understand what worship is yet.
2. The focus is on God himself and the acknowledgment of his inherent and unique worship
3. You go to bless God and you come back with a blessing.
   1. Numbers 6.

II. God is inherently worthy of worship

1. There is no higher answer than this: the glory of God is more important than anything else in this world
2. If the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, then the chief end of the church is to glorify God and enjoy him together forever.

III. God made us for worship

1. When Moses asks Pharaoh if the Israelites can go out and worship, it wasn’t a trick; God really was saving the Israelites for worship.
2. We were redeemed to worship
3. It is our duty as creatures and our joyful duty as Christians to worship

IV. God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing

1. Ephesians 1
2. Hughes Old section
3. He chose us before the foundation of the world
   1. That we would be like him
   2. That we would worship him

V. Our aim is to glorify God and enjoy him in accordance with the Scriptures

1. We have to worship in the way that God has commanded us to worship
   1. The very purpose of assembling together as the people of God in congregational worship is to give to the Lord the glory due to his name and enjoy the blessing of his promised special presence with his own people.
2. Jesus tells the woman at the well about worship in John 4
3. Just as he did in the Old Covenant, God tells us how we ought to worship him in the New Covenant
   1. The great distinctive of our whole approach to public worship i that we aim for the form and the substance of our corporate worship to be guided by and suffused with Scripture.”
   2. Read the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible

“We worship God because God created us to worship him. Worship is at the center of our existence  — at the heart of our reason for being. God created us to be his image — an image that would reflect his glory. In fact, the whole of creation was brought into existence to reflect the divine glory.”  — Hughes Old