Sunday Service - 11 Oct 1953

Worship is man’s acknowledgement of the ‘worth ship’ of God with every part of his being. But this acknowledgement should not only be in words, but in action too; otherwise it will be insincere and meaningless. “Truth” wrote a great man, “always requires subsequent action. It can never be known as a mere contemplation. It must be known interiorly so that man may do it and act true to it.”

What is it that man contemplates and acknowledges in God?

First that He is Lord, that He is all Sovereign. If in worship we acknowledge God as Lord and Sovereign, and if we are really sincere about it, we must be ready to offer the homage of obedience. In the Creed that we say at every worship there is an acknowledgement of the worth ship of God. Right at the beginning we acknowledge the Sovereignty of God: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Later on we say, “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life.” If we are sincere in what we say there must also be the desire to obey, the inner compulsion to conform to the will of God. Otherwise God’s sovereignty has no real meaning and cannot be worth anything. The acknowledgement that God’s sovereignty is a fact of supreme value must be followed by obedience in action. This obedience is a part of worship.

Secondly, God who is sovereign is also love. It is in the very nature of love that it requires loving response. Love demands love in return. To acknowledge the worth-ship of perfect love is to acknowledge the rightness of its claim to be love. A man who worships God, whom he believes to be love, cannot avoid the knowledge that he too if he is to be worth anything he must love God in return. In the modern sense the word ‘love’ primarily implies emotion or feeling. You have strong feelings of affection towards the person you love. But if we speak of love that a loving God expects of us we use the word in the New Testament sense of ‘charity’. Charity fundamentally concerns not the feelings, but the will. It is not, at any rate at first, a question of strong feelings of affection, but rather of that activity known as self-giving. By efforts of our own we cannot like a person or develop loving feelings towards him; but we can love our fellow beings in the Christian sense. In the Christian sense, love is a matter of the will.‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ is a command which it is possible to begin to obey.

Because God is love and goes out in love to his children, the worshipper knows that love expressed in self-giving must be his own lawful and inevitable response to God. To acknowledge the worth ship of divine love and to yet withhold the offering of self is to make worship unreal. Because God is worshipped man must honour his worship by the obedience of self-giving love. Thus, the sincerity of our love is tested by the extent of our obedience to God and the measure of our self-giving love. Thus we pray in the General Thanksgiving which we use in our Evening Prayer: ‘Give us that due sense of all Thy mercies, That our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we show forth Thy praise, Not only with our lips, but in our lives,

By giving up ourselves to Thy service, and walking before Thee in holiness and righteousness all our days.’