What's in Your Well?

Worship is not optional. The only question is what we will worship. What we decide to worship shapes the entire context of our lives. Even those secular types who recoil at the very word – worship – nonetheless practice worship. Martin Luther once wrote, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is …” what you worship. God knows this better than we do and this is why He issued a very simple and straightforward commandment early on, “You shall have no other gods before Me.”  (Ex. 20:3) Obeying that one simple command would have saved us from an enormous amount of trouble. David Foster Wallace describes some of that trouble this way, “If you worship money and things … then you will never have enough … Worship your own body and beauty … and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you ... Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power to keep fear at bay. Worship your intellect … you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.” What we worship defines us and what we worship becomes the well from which we draw meaning and satisfaction and peace and anything else that constitutes a life well-lived. Problem is, what do we do when there is nothing in the well? For some, they spend their entire lives investing in something and worshipping that something believing that eventually they will draw from that well everything they ever hoped for, only to be disappointed. Don’t be that person. The reason God forbids us to worship anything but Him is because He is the only one who is a well full of living water. He is the only one who can abundantly satisfy everything we will ever hunger for. To worship God is to love God and learning to love God takes practice. Practice carries with it the expectation that there will be moments of failure and things will not always feel like we hoped. But through practice we get better at worship, at loving God. This is how we raise the bar on our discipleship.