Right Object, Right Offering, Right Heart
Worship is life, or, at least, that’s what the Bible claims. That’s why we here at More Than Sundays wanted to take some time to dive into the topic so that we could all cherish worship like God cherishes it. We hope the articles in this series are a blessing to you in this and many other regards. Please enjoy!
We can’t easily forget a story as raw as that of Cain and Abel. You might remember how it ended, how one brother killed another, but do you remember how it started? “In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought off the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it’” (Genesis 4:3-7, ESV).
What this passage describes, at least in a general sense, is a concept we call “worship”. We humans find it easy to worship – it involves sacrifice and devotion, but we find these worthwhile prices to pay when the thing we worship has so strongly captured our affections. To worship is natural, but to worship rightly can be a challenge.
As an act of worship, Cain and Abel shared their earthly blessings with God, and yet God accepted the worship of only one of them. We can jump to conclusions rather quickly about why Cain’s worship fell flat while Abel’s worship found favor with God; however, Scripture eventually clarifies that God rejected Cain’s offering not because the size and grandeur of Abel’s offering made Cain’s pitiful by comparison nor because Cain’s offering was the rancid leftovers of his produce nor because God didn’t like vegetables. While all it says in Genesis is that “for Cain and his offering [God] had no regard”, the author of Hebrews clarifies that: “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts.” (Hebrews 11:4a, ESV).
Abel saturated his offering with faith – Cain, we can assume, did not follow suit. Are we so certain we can follow Abel’s model and avoid Cain’s error? Are we sure we even understand the nature of where Cain went wrong? If we actually desire to live a worshipful life for the glory of the one, true God, perhaps it is worth our while to investigate the matter, and there is hardly a better place to do this than to study somebody else who seemed to have it all figured out.
Encounter with God
“In the year that King Uzziah died,” recounted the prophet Isaiah, “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke” (Isaiah 6:1-4, ESV). So begins one of Isaiah’s encounters with God. If most of our experiences are any indication, such a vivid encounter is going to be a foreign one for the average Christian, but we can at least identify with the power and awe that would accompany the intervention of the living God in our lives. Isaiah proceeds to do what many of us have done when faced with such an experience: “And [Isaiah] said: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’” (Isaiah 6:5, ESV). Perhaps surprisingly, the story continues when “one of the seraphim flew to [Isaiah], having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched [Isaiah’s] mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for’” (Isaiah 6:6-7, ESV). Having been cleansed of his sin and made ready for the work set before him, Isaiah then “heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then [Isaiah] said, ‘Here I am! Send me’” (Isaiah 6:8, ESV).
Isaiah’s encounter with the Lord gives us a perfect model of worship, if we know what we’re looking for. Put succinctly, right worship involves the right object, the right offering, and the right heart.
Right Object
The object of our worship refers to the recipient of our worship. While we humans find it easy to worship (as it is effectively the thing we were created to do), we also find it easy to select any number of objects for our worship that are not the One who actually deserves it.
When Isaiah found himself in the throne room of God, he had no choice but to face the glory of God Himself. You can imagine him losing his bearings as the smoke enveloped him and as his feet gave way to the quaking ground beneath him. Disoriented and crushed by glory, he would probably agree with the author of Hebrews, that “it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31, NIV). The point of note here, though, is that Isaiah saw God, His glory, and nothing else. This is the first step of worship.
Too often, the god we worship is ourselves. We come to God with the intent to receive something from Him and “spend it on [our] passions” (James 4:3, ESV). We look at our relationship with God as a way to get a feeling or a blessing, and we are more than willing to spend time, money, or other resources on God if we get something in return. When we worship other things – say, for instance, money or fame – we tend to find ourselves running into a similar problem, sometimes without even realizing it. We’re willing to sacrifice for the sake of these idols hoping that they will fulfill us, and we come up short every time.
While Isaiah’s documented experience is a little different than the average Christian’s, the principles of it still hold. If we intend to worship, our first step should be putting God in the middle of our view and everything else outside of our view. It is quite easy to think that the feeling our worship gives us is an indicator of how good it is – rather, a better metric might be how much more clearly we see God when we worship. This can be a challenge since we can’t dial God on Facetime anytime we need a reminder of who He is or what He is about. We can, however, consult His Word, engage in prayer, and engage with others who belong to Him. To know and acknowledge His character, His qualities, and His identity as God is what we should aim for first.
Right Offering
It’s been said before that when we see God clearly, we will find it easy to see everything else clearly as well. After Isaiah had seen the Lord, he began to lament his personal state by saying “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” We might find this an odd thing to say; surely after seeing the thrice-holy God of the universe, he can come up with something better than, “What a terrible man I am, for I use foul language, as do so many around me!” In truth, though, that’s not really what he was trying to say.
The Pharisees once quizzed Jesus about why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating. The ensuing debate progressed to the point where Jesus mentioned this truth: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person…. Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person” (Matthew 15:11, 17-18, ESV). Isaiah’s admission that his lips were unclean served the purpose of acknowledging that his sin – in other words, how he had fallen short of the glory he had just witnessed (Romans 3:23) – was a great and dire problem. Far from just his mouth, his heart had been far from God.
God seems to be interested in the heart above all things. In a way, Jesus summarized this concept in His Sermon on the Mount: “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24, ESV). We might remember that God owns everything in the world in the first place; the possessions we have are gifts He has given us (James 1:17), and the fruit of the earth is something He makes grow (Acts 17:28). To give Him something He already owns rationally has little value. Something that’s been separated from Him, however, is another matter entirely. Our sinful hearts separate us far from God, and one of the primary reasons that sin runs to the core of our being is that we have made ourselves out to be gods in our own right. It’s an interesting point to be made that Isaiah doesn’t seem to interact with Jesus in this story, yet he still finds forgiveness in the faith of his confession toward the Lord. The essence of the Gospel is to make that original sin right again, to acknowledge that the Lord is God and that we are not. Jesus was able to live a sinless life and pay for our sins because He was God, even though also fully man. As part of our worship, our second step after setting our sights on God should be to acknowledge that He has done what we could not and then to receive the forgiveness He promises in that confession (1 John 1:9).
Right Heart
A heart that’s been offered to God becomes a heart that is willing to follow God wherever He leads. It might make us uncomfortable to notice that, when God asks for a servant to do His will in Isaiah’s story, Isaiah volunteers without hearing the assignment first (Isaiah 6:8). To merely say “yes” to something without thinking about it tends to be lunacy – Isaiah understood, though, that there was no task given by God that would not be worth it to complete.
There comes a point in every Christian’s life where we find ourselves faced with uncomfortable and seemingly unreasonable requests from God. The tone deaf are asked to sing. The poor are asked to give. The awkward are asked to speak. In Isaiah’s case, God asked him to preach to a people who, “keep on hearing, but do not understand” and who “keep on seeing, but do not perceive” (Isaiah 6:9, ESV). When we do things in worship, though, we must recognize that worship is not about the outcome and that it is not judged by worldly standards or wisdom. Acknowledging God as the object of our worship and offering Him our hearts as our main sacrifice means that we should care about what God thinks and wants more than anything else. He will give us the graces to do the things He asks us to do (Ephesians 2:10), and we should never expect to lose anything more valuable than what God has already secured for us in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:8).
A Fragrant Offering
“And through [Abel’s] faith,” the writer of Hebrews reminds us, “though he died, he still speaks” (Hebrews 11:4b, ESV). What Abel still says to us is that there is a kind of worship God will accept. We choose to believe that there is a God even when He is hard to see, we put our trust in Him that His promises for forgiveness and life are true if we just give Him our hearts, and we take steps of faith by our actions because of our ever-growing desire to please Him. These sorts of things are the essence of faith, are they not? Worship therefore is not only a process of showing our affection towards God but also a gracious process of correcting our affections toward Him. With that in mind, may we engage in that process day in and day out, becoming imitators of God as well as fragrant offerings unto Him (Ephesians 5:1-2).