Articles

First, we see that the word comes from “worth-ship”, indicating that you find something worthy. But, worthy of what?

Then, we see that the Old Testament, starting with Abel, and continuing through Noah, worshipped God by offering him animals, such as lambs.

This is continued by mandate in the Old Covenant which continually offered up gifts of sacrifice in the Temple as a form of worship.

And finally, Jesus is the True Lamb of God, and his great act of worship was to offer himself to His Father. The Church continues to present this one true sacrifice to God the Father every day during Mass.

So we see that offering something to God is the Biblical definition of worship. But it goes further:

In Hebrews 10, we see that when Jesus came into the world, he offered God, not animals and burnt offerings and other sacrifices, but his own will.

So doing God’s will is the greatest sacrifice of all. And we know it is painful to do God’s will when we are so opposed to it in our character. Thus it can rightly be called a sacrifice.

On our own, we can’t fulfill this sacrifice, but we only do our own will. But because Jesus died on the cross, he purchased for us the grace to do God’s will. So without the sacrifice of Jesus, we could make no sacrifices. But his death on the cross infuses our souls with enough grace to make these sacrifices.

This is why, at Mass, we are a universal priesthood. Not that we are priests in the same way as the actual priesthood, who presents to the Father again the sacrifice of Jesus. But that we bring all our sacrifices since the last Mass we attended to the Mass we are going to, and these sacrifices had their source and origin in Jesus, and now they are reunited with him in Holy Communion, being offered back up to God.

In other words, we are truly offering up a sacrifice to God in a real way, when we trust that Jesus died to purchase grace for us to do the right thing, out of his love for us, and we actually do the right thing, and then go to Mass, and receive Holy Communion.

Now obviously doing God’s will refers to moral actions and ommissions, and no other kind. Therefore, true worship of God has to do with morals.

And the inverse of this is a law we can infer and verify from all life experience: the god you worship is indicated by the morals you live by.

Of course, there are no other gods, there is only one God. But by saying we worship a god, it really means we consider the morals and principles of that god worthy of following, obeying, and imitating.

Ancient pagan civilizations often fell into abominations like child sacrifice. The modern secular world does the same thing, indicating that it worships a particularly evil god, even though they pride themselves in not believing in any gods or the supernatural. It’s a strange thing to pride yourself proportionately to your blindness to truth.

So true worship is really following God’s morals, the highest, truest morals.

This is also why it’s fair to say that different Christian denominations do not worship the same God, proportionately to how different their morals are.

And even within Catholicism, sects like the SSPX, who hate obedience and submission, worship a different god than the Saints, who submitted to lawful authority, secular or religious, even unto death, like St. Thomas More, St. Joan of Arc, etc.

Protestants have a hard time admitting that prayer is not worship, because they have neither the worship of the Eucharist, nor the worship of doing God’s objective morals, as is evident by their usually choosing a denomination according to their own preference for morals.

One time I was talking with a lady about religion, and when I said I had become Catholic, she said incredulously, “really? out of all denominations, why did you choose the strictest one?” As if we get to create morals in our own image and likeness!

True worship is intricately tied to morals. And your morals indicate which god you believe in.