I’m going to give you a definition of the word worship as I shall use it. You’ll not find this definition anywhere because I made it myself. After Webster’s done the best he can for you, then a good thinker ought to make his own definition. If you don’t define, you won’t be understood; if you define too much you won’t be listened to, because there isn’t anything so boring as a preacher who gets up and gives you a lecture on Webster; but if you don’t define enough people won’t know what you mean. You’ll be talking about one thing and your audience will be hearing something else, and you may not mean the same thing at all.
I want to define worship, and here is where I want to be dogmatic. Worship means “to feel in the heart”; that’s first—feel it in the heart. Now I happen to belong to that segment of the Church of Christ on earth that is not afraid of the word “feeling.” We went through a long deep-freeze period at the turn of the century, when people talked about “naked faith.” They wanted to hang us out there like a coonskin drying on the door. And so they said, “Now, don’t believe in feeling, brother; we don’t believe in feeling. The only man who went by feeling was led astray; that was Isaac when he felt Jacob’s arms and thought it was Esau.” But they forgot the woman who felt in her body that she was healed! Remember that? A person that merely goes through the form and doesn’t feel anything is not worshiping.
Worship also means to “express in some appropriate manner” what you feel. Now, expressing in some appropriate manner doesn’t mean that we always all express it in the same way all the time. And it doesn’t mean that you will always express your worship in the same manner. But it does mean that it will be expressed in some manner.
And what will be expressed? “A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder.” It is delightful to worship God, but it is also a humbling thing; and the man who has not been humbled in the presence of God will never be a worshiper of God at all. He may be a church member who keeps the rules and obeys the discipline, and who tithes and goes to conference, but he’ll never be a worshiper unless he is deeply humbled. “A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe.” There’s an awesomeness about God which is missing in our day altogether; there’s little sense of admiring awe in the Church of Christ these days.
—A. W. Tozer, Worship: The Missing Jewel in the Evangelical Church
