This paper has been written by me in the course of my theological studies at European Nazarene College (www.eunc.edu). You may use this text as a part of your work provided that you give credits to its author – Petar Neychev. If you have questions – please, leave a comment or contact me through the Contact Us page.
One of the corner stones of Christianity is the personal relationship between men and God. This intimate relationship is also one of the basic needs in our life. Understanding all this, we come to the question “How do we reach and maintain it – this crucial connection with God?” The answer is: through bowing down, prostrating, serving, venerating… worshiping God (ISBE, WORSHIP). Worship, true and false – today many find it rather simple, but as we will see later, it is not. Often, it is very difficult to distinguish true from false worship, but this is not to say that it is impossible. There is enough information in the Bible, concerning the basics of true and false worship, and some of them will be presented later in this paper.
The goal of this work is to present a comparison between the false worship, which we find in the Bible, more specifically in the book of Exodus, chapter 32, and the problem of false worship in contemporary Christianity. In the process of comparison, true worship will also be discussed.
One of the major causes for the great complicity of worship is the variety of people’s inner personal experiences and external expressions. A good example of inner experience would be “an imaginative event which brings us before … God” (Webber 46). On the other hand, body language is one way of externally expressing worship – physically bowing down, or even laying down (Webber 46). Christian worship, however, does not confine simply to imagination and body language, although one of those aspects of worship is often thought to be more important than the other, but still not excluding the latter from the list, and thus shrinking the concept of worship. Christian worship is a lifestyle. Thus, the question becomes – how do we maintain a life, which is pleasing to God? read more