The Ten Commandments do not command us to worship God, yet Jesus said in John 4:23, “…true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.” 

So, it’s not a command yet God is seeking those who will worship him in spirit and in truth.

How do we make sense of that? 

We often attend church services where there is praise and worship. Praise is easy to understand as expressing gratitude to God for who he is, what he has done, his creation, his provision, and all the good things in life that come from him. 

But worship is another level that goes beyond praise.

Sometimes in a wedding ceremony we say, ‘With my body, I thee worship’. It carries with it the thought of becoming one flesh. A joining together of two into one, a submission of ourselves to the other. You cannot command that; it has to be given as a voluntary surrender of ourselves.

Worship, similarly, is many things – adoration, submission, surrender, and the giving of ourselves back to the almighty, our creator. Worship takes us from being self-centred to being God centred.

The fact is that God is seeking those with whom he can have this level of intimacy. If God is seeking, then my prayer is, “Lord let me be found.”