Exploring the Worship Spectrum: A Response to Best's Traditional Hymn-Based Worship, Part 2

The more I learn and grow, the more I am convinced that nuance is incredibly difficult to grasp but incredibly important. I have said often that God created us to live in a love relationship with Him. Whether I said it in the form of, “We were created to worship,” or not, that’s what I meant. That’s what I believed. We were created to worship.

Of course, we were created to live in a love relationship with God. That’s a given (isn’t it?). But does it necessarily follow that we were created to worship? Or is worship the outward manifestation of the relationship for which we were created?

I mentioned in my last post that Harold Best delivered a blow to my thinking. Here is a quote from his chapter in Exploring the Worship Spectrum that I’ve been mulling over since I read it:

We were not created to worship—this suggests that God is a being who needs that kind of attention. Rather, we were created worshiping—already at worship, already outpouring to the eternally continuous Outpourer, God himself, who, even before he breathed his image into our dust, was eternally pouring himself out to his triune self: Father to Son to Spirit, in unending bliss and love-riddled conversation;
     who pours himself out in the endless wealth of his creatorhood;
     who poured himself out in creating a race imago Dei;
     who pours himself out in self-revelation;
     who poured himself out in the atoning and reconciling work of his Son; and
     who continues to pour himself out through the work of the Spirit and the Son in bringing the church closer to the stature and fullness of the Christ.

We fell. But we did not stop our worship and our outpouring. Rather, we exchanged gods and continued our worship.

The implications of the idea that we were not created to worship but we were created worshiping are not altogether different. In both, we will worship something. The wild card is what or who we worship. Pre-fall, our worship was directed toward God, as it should have been. Post-fall and pre-redemption, we replace God with other things and, perhaps, other people. Or ideas. Or feelings. Or . . . Post-redemption, God is we restore God to his proper place of authority and dominion and worth. Yet, the focus of our entire reason for being is dramatically altered by how one views this idea.

Is this a matter of important nuance or is this a matter of insignificant semantics?

Impacting the Kingdom through Worship,