Everyone is a worshipper

You might not think worship is something you've ever taken part in [HTML_REMOVED] but it is.

Christians tend to use a broad definition of worship.

It means giving of ourselves to someone or something.

It means sacrificing our time, money, energy and emotion to something. What we worship drives our ambition. Whatever makes you get up in the morning, that's what you worship.

To Christians, it means we give our first and best to God. He's given us everything we have anyway, so we show our love for him by recognizing it and giving some back.

The most precious thing we can give back to God is our time.

A typical way is spending time with God is prayer and reading scripture. He also speaks to us through it.

We also worship God by giving to others. We both financially support and serve in the church we are part of, and we also feel it's our responsibility to provide for the needy, in both physical needs and spiritual ones. This gives glory to God and pleases him.

In Psalms, we are told to make a "joyful noise" unto God. So when we go to church on Sunday we sing to God and thank him for how wonderful and loving he is. At some churches it can get pretty crazy and sometimes it's like a rock concert, while at others it's pretty clear that it doesn't matter how good of a singing voice a person has.

But when it comes down to it, to a Christian, we should strive to worship God in everything we do. The Apostle Paul tells us that we should do everything to the glory of God.

In other words, each task, no matter how mundane or seemingly unimportant, like washing the dishes for instance, is a chance to please God by doing it with a willing attitude.

We want to worship God because he deserves it and it's a way to show our love, because he did a sweet thing dying on the cross to pay for our imperfection, not to mention he loved for us before we wanted anything to do with him.

Jesus gave up his own life so that we could have a loving relationship with him. He knew that since we were fallen, we wouldn't naturally worship anyone but ourselves.

Not to mention, God didn't have to create us, but he chose to bless us with existence so that we could experience his love and his amazing creation. Despite all the crap that the world manages to do, God is still love.

Paul tells us that God works everything out for the good of those who love him. We mess things up because we think we know better than God, who is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful). However, he'll still use the bad things we do and work it out for good.

God made man, not the other way around, so it makes sense that we can't understand him in the same way we understand people or animals. It would be like a paper doll cut out trying to comprehend the humanity of the little girl that cut it out. The fact that philosophers and theologians can't always make sense of God isn't proof that he doesn't exist, but that he's too big for our minds to wrap around. Combine that with our understanding that he's good, and that's a God who deserves our praise.

In most ancient cultures, the community and everyday life revolved around the temple and worship, as with some cultures today. This is because God made us to be worshippers to enjoy him.

But then we started worshipping worthless and empty things. If we're not worshipping God, we're worshipping someone or something else, whether that be the future, work, sex, money, other people, food, video games or whatever.

Worship also has this neat ability to satisfy. It makes sense, since God made us to worship Him, and it's not scary, because He's perfectly good. When we turn from worshipping empty things and start to worship Jesus, we are doing what we were designed to do, and find completion.

Worship is interesting not because people are willing to do it, but because a god so deserving of worship is also actively responding and blessing men, as lowly as we are. "What is man, that you think so highly of him and pay so much attention to him?" (Job 7:17).

[Reach columnist Jenn Jaeger at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]