Don’t Waste Your Worship – Part 1

By Greg Sanders 

Everybody worships something. God deserves to be worshiped above all.

God is greater than everything. Since He is greater than everything, let us treat Him that way with our worship. Don’t waste your worship on things that are not lasting.

Mark 7:5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?” 6 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 7 They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ 8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”

Everybody worships something or somebody. You were created to reflect the image of God. You were created to be in relationship with Him and to worship Him. You were created for His pleasure and the greatest pleasure in life is to know that you have connected with Him and He with you.

In the absence of that experience, in the absence of truly worshipping the father, you will worship something else. One of the BIG 10 Commandments of God is to “have no other God’s before me.” You were created to worship Him.

Worship is the sum of our whole existence bringing glory to God. Worship is not traditional or contemporary. It’s not from 10:30-12:00 on Sunday morning. It’s not a service we enter into or even an activity we practice from time to time. Our whole life is an act of worship. Your life is worshipping something. You’re magnifying something or someone. Anything that we value more than our worship of God is called an idol.

As a kid in Sunday school, I used to hear my teacher say, “You should have no idols.” I thought this is an easy one. There is no way I would ever carve a piece of stone or wood and then worship it. My teacher would read Exodus 20:4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” As she read the scripture, in my mind I was thinking, “I have got this.” However, I have to admit I have had to deal with my share of idols. You can turn success into an idol. Ministry can be an idol. A hobby can be made an idol. Anything I worship more than God is an idol. The Pharisees made an idol out of tradition.

Tradition is not bad…you just can’t worship it. You can’t value anything more than you value God moving in your present. These guys missed who Jesus was and what He wanted to do in their lives because they were too consumed in their worship of tradition to notice the gift that was in front of them. I look at this account in the Bible and I just want to scream at them through the pages “Hey! Wake up! Jesus is right there and you are missing the greatest appointment of your life because you are worried about whether someone’s hands have been washed. You are wasting your worship on tradition when you could be worshipping Him.” I think, “What a waste.”

Really anything we worship other than Jesus is a waste.

I can say that because He is the only thing that lasts. Everything else you worship is going to burn up, die or, rot. Don’t waste your life worshipping things that don’t matter and things that won’t last. Over the next few days, I want to give you a few ways to make sure you don’t waste your worship.

Today’s Challenge: Ask the Lord to reveal to you any areas of your life where you are wasting your worship on other things instead of placing it on the person it belongs to…Jesus.

Blessings,

Greg