Worship: The True Nature of Ourselves, Our Problems, and Our Solution

Often times, we underestimate the depth of our problems and see only the tip of the iceberg. Some bad behaviors we cannot stop, some fears we are unable to overcome, and frequently, we are blinded to weightier matters beneath the surface. Yet what we do see above the surface is usually enough to motivate our search for help. The world offers many sophisticated theories for understanding the depths of the human problem. Psychological explanations promise to dispel the mystery and equip us with greater self-understanding, but how do we know when we’ve rightly understood the real issues at hand? Recovery programs abound, offering clearly laid steps to aid our walk away from something bad to something better. But who defines what is bad and what is better? Any approach to solve a problem requires a basic understanding of how things work in the first place, and what they should look like when they’re fixed. Every approach to solving human problems is built upon an understanding of how to be human. Yet most approaches to solving human problems have little or nothing to say about God. Those that do often relegate him to a supporting role in the human drama of recovery. Often God merely plays the part of the powerful being who helps us move from something bad to something better, as we define it. How can we ever hope to find the meaning, purpose, and freedom for which we are intended if we do not know the design of the One who intended it? God created mankind in His image to reflect His glory by showing us that He is the ultimate object of our desire and worthy of our imitation (Genesis 1:27-28). This is what it means to worship: to make something ultimate in our desires. God designed us to make Him ultimate, and in so doing, to find our greatest satisfaction, joy, and freedom. Worship is not just church activity on Sunday. It is what drives your core. It is who you are. Tragically, since Adam and Eve in the garden, we have used the very capabilities that He gave us for worship and turned them towards the worship of anything and everything other than God himself. We tend to take something He created—a substance, experience, or person—and make it ultimate. That ‘thing’ becomes more important to us than God Himself. We exchange the true worship of God for the false worship of the gods of our own making (Romans 1:25). In essence, we take on a false identity. This may happen either because we construct a false identity to live out of, or because we believe the Enemy’s lies about who we are. The false identities we construct seem to work initially, but eventually backfire. We put them on in an attempt to make our lives work, but in the end, they claim our lives. Take the Nice Guy, for example. He puts on this false identity when he realizes that, by being exceedingly nice, he gets to fit in and make friends by avoiding conflict. These benefits may come at the cost of forfeiting his opinion, going along with peer pressures, and choosing his favorites by emulating others. The payoff: everyone likes him. He has made an otherwise natural desire to be liked and accepted by others into a life-shaping ultimate desire. He worships the approval of others. Later in life, he may find himself in the crucible of marriage, where he is surprised to learn that trying to be the "nice one" in the relationship does not turn down the heat. In fact, it only pushes his wife’s buttons. She swings from controlling him to get her own way one day, to detesting him the next for being spineless. But he is The Nice Guy—or so he thinks—and this is what Nice Guys do, right? "Can’t she understand that? This is just who I am. What does she expect? What’s her problem? She’s the one who’s uptight. This isn’t my fault." The Enemy always seeks to destroy the image of God in man, so it is no surprise that abuse and addiction are strategic battlegrounds in which he assaults us with lies about our identities. If he can get you to believe you have some other identity than that of God’s image bearer created for worship, he can make you an accomplice in his work against you. If you take on the identity of Victim, then you will feel most natural when you are paranoid and mistrusting of others’ motives. What will your suspicion cost you? It will most likely rob you of the healthy relationships that the Enemy knows would be vital to your healing. If he can get you to take on the identity of Addict—"once an addict, always an addict"—as if you are always one step away from succumbing again, then you have basically volunteered for a life sentence in a self-imposed prison. Addictions aren’t just drug, alcohol, or pornography problems. They are worship disorders. They develop out of hearts bent on worshiping created things rather than the Creator, and the root cause a distorted identity. The victim of abuse is not merely a passive responder with no choice but to live in mistrust, fear, anger, and shame. That victim stands on a battleground in a war of worship where his heart fights to find rescue, refuge, comfort, and sense of identity. But will that heart pursue God for these, or will it seek them in created things—in other relationships or addictions? Our problems are always deeper than bad behavior or our wounds. It is an identity crisis, a war of worship.