Worship is…. a complex thing. I wanted to start this devotional with something quick, witty, and memorable about worship. But I couldn’t. Not because I can’t boil down worship into a simple truth, but because the first time we see worship in the Scriptures is in the middle of a story, a difficult, radical, but hopeful story. What I love about stories is that they can teach us truth in ways that we’re more likely to remember, ways that dig down deep into our souls and confront us with more than just a simple statement or a compact truth. What we find is something complex but not complicated, a lot of interconnected parts that in the end point to something central, something we can walk away with. In the stories of the Bible, we come face to face with a God who asks much of us but who also gives much to us. Let’s dive in. Read Gen. 22:1-14. Our friend Abraham is being put in an impossible situation. As readers, we can see immediately that God is testing him, but let’s put ourselves in Abraham’s shoes for a moment. Imagine what he must have been feeling: the gut-wrenching fear and anxiety, the stomach-dropping heart-shattering wave of emotions accompanied by this task, the silent debates he must have been having within himself. This test was truly make or break for him, in more ways than one. Quick background, Abraham’s son Isaac is the son that God promised him, the son that he waited 25 years for, the son who he had at the ripe old age of 100. Every promise that God gave to Abraham would be passed down to Isaac—that’s how important he is! Coming back to the story, it looks like all of this is now in jeopardy. Everything that Abraham had been promised, everything that he had waited for, was now on the line, and he would have to be the one to make the sacrifice, to take the knife and kill his own son. Woof. In the midst of what we can only imagine is the most harrowing, difficult moment of his life, Abraham recognizes this act of obedience as worship to God. He takes his servants, takes his son, and sets out where God had asked him to go, all without hesitation, all without a plan B. From this, we can build out a sense of how Abraham understood worship. Abraham worshiped God through immediate obedience. Abraham worshiped God by not withholding what was most precious to him. Abraham worshiped God by completely relying on Him for the outcome. All of Abraham’s hopes, all the promises God had made him, were wrapped up in the life of this young boy, the son of promise. But he (Abraham) had a history with God; time and time again God had come through, even when Abraham would go out on his own and make a mess of things. Now, at this critical moment, Abraham finally got it. He was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised,” even if it meant he had take the knife to his boy (Romans 4:21). He wouldn’t waver. He couldn’t; everything that he had came from God, and he knew God would provide, even if he didn’t know how. We know how this story ends. God ultimately provides a substitute, a ram for sacrifice in place of Isaac. But what was God testing in Abraham? It’s revealed in the angel’s instructions in Genesis 22:12—“Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” Abraham worshiped God in this way because he feared Him. He wasn’t afraid of Him, per se, but he recognized God’s rightful authority over his life. This is why we worship God too. We worship Him when we acknowledge He is the rightful King over our lives....
