What Does It Mean To Worship?

 What does it mean to worship?
In the Greek text of the New Testament, there are two words usually used, "latreuo" and "proskuneo". The first one means in ancient Greek something like "to serve as a priest in religious rites" while the second means "to prostrate oneself before someone". Think about those two pictures which these words give. The primary concept of worship in the language and culture of the New Testament is to serve and obey the object of that worship. What does "to serve" mean? It means to do whatever that person tells you to do. Again, it means to obey and attend to the object of that service in question.
        Now, in John 4, Jesus tells the woman at the well that God is Spirit, and those prostrating themselves before (worshiping) Him must do so with Spirit and with Truth. It's not optional. So, if someone is to actually "worship" God, it must be done with Spirit and with Truth. That is, that person must serve and obey Him honestly and not with the flesh, but with the Spirit. Anything else is not actually worship. And this holds up when we look at the Old Testament prophets who were very clear that God despised the "worship" of those who kept His festivals but trampled on the poor, the outcast, the widow, and the orphan. They were going through the motions, but they were neither serving nor obeying what He actually wanted which was mercy, compassion, fairness, and love.
     There are many in churches today who sing the songs, get emotional, recite the liturgies, perform the sacraments, and hit all the right performative notes, but through their words and actions outside, or often even inside, disregard, disobey, and make light of what He actually wants. They explain it away as common sense or being practical. These people are not worshiping Him at all.
     Genuine worship of the God and Father of Jesus Christ is, first and foremost to love the person next to you like yourself. It is to treat others as you want to be treated. It is to forgive, and to not pass judgment. It is to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner and to defend them. These are the acts of worship which He has repeatedly asked for. Not songs. Not liturgy. Not sacrifices. Not performative shows and theater. Love. Compassion. Mercy.
     Until you engage with these, until you do these things, you are not worshiping Him and it's best to keep your songs, liturgies, and religious rites to yourself. They disgust Him.

The Divinity of Jesus Christ

 People will argue about Jesus' divinity. Christians have been somewhat debating what it means since the first century. Jesus Himself never denied His own divinity, but in the passage where He quotes the psalm which says, "I said you are gods" and speaking to human beings, He also affirmed a divinity for other human beings as well. That it was John who recorded this is no accident.
     The key to understanding what this means is when John calls Jesus the "Logos". This was not a new concept to the first century reader. This was an old idea first really conceptualized among the Stoic philosophers. Just about everything Paul says about "the Christ" the first and second century Stoics said about the Logos. The Logos was the "firstborn of all creation" by "the God". Every human being carried a piece, shred, or part of the Logos while the "seminal Logos" was the point of origin and "head" over all. John records that the Logos existed "next to" the God, and that the Logos was Deity, that is, the Logos was of the same "substance" as the God yet distinct from the God. A Stoic would have 100% agreed with this statement. But what this also means is that every human being carries a shred or piece of the divine within themselves and are themselves a part of the greater whole of the Logos.
     The implication of John's statement that "the Logos became flesh and camped out among us" is that this is the “seminal” Logos, the Logos from which all others come, who took on flesh, as obviously a piece of the Logos takes on flesh every time a human being is born. And He took on flesh without the error which afflicts the rest of us which meant that He was in full possession or communion with the divine from His birth. The Logos was calling the God His Father, again a statement no Stoic would argue with, and Stoicism was as ubiquitous a worldview in the first century Roman empire as Christian evangelicalism is today.
     The key here is that Jesus never limited the God's fatherhood to just Himself. Even in "the Lord's Prayer" it begins with "Our Father..." not "My Father". And then there's the prayer in John 17 where Jesus prays, "that they may all be one, just as you Father are in Me, and I in them, so that they might be one in us." Interesting thing about the Greek of "one" in this passage. It's neuter. It literally means, "one thing." And of course there's Paul's description of the "Body of Christ" where Christ is the Head and the rest of us are body parts of the same body. Again, swap out the word "Christ" for "Logos" and it becomes instantly agreeable to a Stoic mind. So the thing, if anything, the Church has missed in the last 2,000 years, and not all of it, is that the divinity which Jesus owned He didn't limit to Himself. Instead, He was trying to teach His disciples how to access and live in it for themselves by connecting to and staying put within Himself, that is, the Logos.