One of the problems that has kept surfacing as I have been thinking about worship over the past little while is our selfishness. When we look at the music of worship as a stimulant, as Stapert suggested we often do, we are looking for something that will make us feel good. When we make the music the primary aspect of our worship, we are acting on the premise that what we say is more important than what God says to us. And, of course, there are many other ways that we make worship a thoroughly self-centred act.

The thing is – and we know this to be true despite our actions often being to the contrary – worship is not about us at all. The image of worship we get from Revelation 4 and 5, for example, makes perfectly clear that the focus of worship is the Lord. All that his creatures do in the picture John paints for us in those chapters is to praise God, ceaselessly. They have seen the glory of the Lord, and they fully understand the purpose of worship.

William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his book, Readings in St. John's Gospel, had this to say about worship:

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose – and all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin (68).

Temple understands the purpose of worship. Deep down, I think we all do too. But there are countless idols competing for our worship and adoration (some of which may even be disguised as true worship) and our sinful nature is all too eager to serve those idols. Indeed, the god we seek to worship most often is ourselves. I believe it was Luther who said that pride is the first sin, and the root of all other sins.

It would be easy to say in response that changing this is just a matter of setting our hearts on God. True as this is, it is much easier said than done. It requires the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, who empties us of ourselves and fills us with himself. For this reason we must constantly implore the Spirit to be present in our worship, because unless he is among us, there can be no true worship.