In our culture we actually don’t have a worship problem, we have a focus problem.  Worshipping is easy.  Figuring out what to worship is the hard part.

Let’s read a story from the Bible where Paul, one of the New Testament leaders, talks to a culture that is not actually that different from our own.

Here is a paraphrase of Acts 17:16-33:

Paul is talking with people in Athens and they are confused because they believe in MANY gods and he is trying to tell them about the ONE God – Jesus. Then he walks around this hill with different idols for different gods and he finds this one and realizes, this is it!

Here’s verse 22:

 ²² Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³ For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.

So he takes their own idol and realizes that they are so ‘religious’ that they want to cover all the bases, even if they don’t know what they are covering.  So they make this idol to the ‘unknown’ god.

Paul names this god for them.  He tells them that this God is Jesus.

Then he tells them about their worship problem.

They worship EVERYTHING but they miss the ONE thing they should be worshipping.

Verse 23 cont: ‘…so you are ignorant of the very thing you worship.’

The Athenians have many similarities to us.

They did not have a ‘worship’ problem.  They worshipped EVERYTHING, but they didn’t worship the RIGHT thing.

Just like the Athenians, we don’t have a worship problem, we have a focus problem. We worship all kinds of things, bands, cars, jobs, kids… But Paul reminds us that we are called to worship the living God.  The one true God.

God wants to have your worship.  He wants a relationship with you.

Part of being a follower of Jesus is our focus on him.  The Bible calls us to direct our attention towards God.  The Bible tells us to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thess 5:17) but this concept may be easier to understand if we think about worshipping without ceasing.

Once we know WHAT to worship (Jesus) we can learn HOW to worship -> without ceasing.

We must learn to worship through ALL we do.

We must learn to praise in ALL we do.

We must ask God to transform us from who we have been into who we are created to be.

We are created in the image of His Son, Jesus.

Transform us from the inside out we pray…