Prayer, thanksgiving, meditation, and worship are among the most effective psychological techniques for spiritual growth. These are the ways we tap into God’s spiritual currents to bring about amazing changes in our characters, our outlooks on life, and our relationships with others. But of all these techniques, nothing transforms us more than worship.
Whatever we adore, idolize, or worship is what we become. When my daughter was young, she idolized a female pop star. She dressed like her, acted like her, and even tried to sing like her. In the process, she was recreating herself; she was becoming the very thing she worshiped.
A spiritual transformation is no different in this regard. When you idolize the beauty, goodness, and truth of a divine Creator, you become beautiful, good, and true yourself. When you love, adore, and revere spiritual ideals, you eventually become those ideals. In every sense, worship is divinely creative.
Worship is the loving reverence for a divine being or a supernatural power. It is a humble act of adoration, praise, veneration, devotion, glorification, or exaltation. It is an expression of heartfelt love for the eternal and infinite First Source and all that it represents.
Over the ages, people have worshiped almost anything you can imagine—stones, mountains, trees, animals, the sun, the stars, and even other people. Nature worship is one of the earliest expressions of devotion, which is not surprising considering that early humans, immersed as they were in their natural surroundings, relied heavily on wild animals and plants. Natural events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, thunder, and lightning were inexplicable. Even in the modern era, many afflictions and natural catastrophes are still attributed to acts of God.
Worship, in its highest expression, focuses on the Source of all reality, not the manifestations of it. Therefore, we recognize that nature is not God — and natural disasters are not a form of divine retribution. All things in nature, like all things in the universe, are either products or by-products of the original acts of creation. Nevertheless, the beauty of nature can truly inspire us to worship the divine Source.
Getting to Know God
Most of us understand worship as an act of veneration, adoration, and devotion, which it is. This seems simple enough, but what is it that we venerate and adore? Clearly, The Urantia Book is not encouraging us to worship false idols. Instead, the text is attempting to direct our worship to the First Source and Center by augmenting and expanding our understanding and experience of the true nature of God (see the first five papers). The narrators of the book want us to know our heavenly Father, at least as much as we possibly can at this stage of our existence.
Ezra, the tavern-keeper in Syracuse, told Jesus he could not find God. But Jesus said to him,
To love God is to know him, and the more we come to know the true nature of this Source, the more we desire to worship our Creator — it becomes a natural and spontaneous reaction. We worship God for what we comprehend him to be, which is our highest concept of the personality and divinity of Deity. And this is one reason The Urantia Book dedicates the Foreword and the first five papers to an understanding of the nature, attributes, and relationships of God. But for us humans, one of the best ways to understand the true nature of God is to read about the life and teachings of Jesus, our Father incarnate.
Worship Links You to Spiritual Currents
In the God experience, worship is the act of linking your superconscious mind with the Spirit of God within you — your Thought Adjuster. You make a real connection with the very Source of light and life through your adoration of all that is good, true, and beautiful in God. This, in turn, works to harmonize your thoughts, feelings, and emotions with the divine nature. It is, indeed, the most powerful technique freely available for your spiritual transformation.
Prayer provides nutritional food for the soul and helps to sustain you spiritually, but worship is a divinely creative manna that literally reconstructs you. Worship is the psychological practice of uniting with God in a dynamic way and, in the process, you become more like the divinity you adore.
Prayer is spiritually sustaining, but worship is divinely creative. (143:7.5)
A worship experience is simple and effortless. It occurs any time you contemplate and venerate the attributes and nature of God or when you ponder and aspire to divine ideals and values. It is a devotional exercise enhanced by imagining yourself in the immediate presence of God and by having complete faith and trust in God’s divine wisdom and goodness. See Prayer and the Alter Ego for some practical techniques.
Sharing your inner life with God is the beginning of your intimate relationship with the divine Presence. And you cultivate this worshipful state of mind by attempting to feel the presence and love of God. In this presence, contemplate the infinity and eternity of God and stand in awe of the magnificence, brilliance, and glory of this majestic Spirit—the loving Source of all things.
Worship is often identified with monotheistic religions, but other religions carry a similar element of reverence. The Buddhist objective, for instance, is to be enlightened and become one with the universe, or one with Tao. In principle, this is similar to worship because, as many Buddhist prayers make clear, it involves an adoration of the perfect Buddha and his supreme ways.
Worship Is Self-Less but Beneficial
In Zen meditation, practitioners not only admire the qualities of Buddhahood, but they also attempt to forget themselves in order to merge with universe consciousness or the wisdom of Tao. This is a meaningful objective similar to that of worship, which requires forgetting ourselves in order to become unified with the First Source.
Indeed, genuine worship is completely selfless. Unlike prayer, it asks for nothing and expects nothing in return. You put yourself completely out of the way. It is an act of selfless adoration, an attitude of mind in which you look up to and revere the perfection of God in all ways and all things.
Our attitude of worship needs to be selfless; nonetheless, it has many personal rewards. Apart from transforming our spiritual natures, it is a source of relaxation, dissolves anxiety, eliminates mental conflict, enhances our powers of reflection, and enables us to perceive ever-deepening meanings and values. It also fosters wisdom and courage, augments spiritual insight, and inspires the soul.
(For more in-depth discussion, see True Worship and Teachings About Prayer and Worship.)
Through worship, we approach divine realities and begin to see things from a spiritual and cosmic perspective. This, in turn, lends a hand to greater wisdom, increasing self-realization, cosmic consciousness, and God consciousness. We also find ourselves drawn to helping others. These are acts of a spirit-born soul wholeheartedly dedicated to the love of God.
Worship is an Attitude of Mind
Worship begins as a mental exercise — it is the conscious act of recognizing the truth and fact that we really do have a loving and personal relationship with our heavenly Father, a living spirit. Worship comes to us easily when we accept the reality of our humble relationship with God.
The core of Jesus’ message is that God is our spiritual Father and, consequently, we are his spiritual sons and daughters. But Jesus was also clear that the full reality and nature of God is so much greater than we could ever imagine at this time. This is why, to climb the ladder of spiritual progress, we need to put things in perspective by adopting a sincere, humble, and trusting mental attitude.
Our minds can’t connect with God if, in our ignorance and arrogance, we think that God is our equal or, worse yet, our servant. Any true connection with the spiritual currents of the universe is best realized by acquiring the spiritual attitude of a sincere child. In other words, we acquire, through faith, a state of mind that is not only humble in the presence of an eternal Creator, but also one that trusts completely in the goodness of God and his divine plan for us.
Gratitude
Gratitude is another state of mind that encourages worship. Jesus urged us “to employ prayer as a means of leading up through thanksgiving to true worship” (146:2.15). We ascend to true worship by being sincerely thankful. If you are unsure about what to be thankful for, ponder the seemingly magical presence of the Father’s Spirit within you, the Spirit of Truth beside you, and the Holy Spirit around you. All of these alluring spiritual forces work day and night to re-create you as an eternal spirit being.
The Benefits of Worship
Ideally, worship is a state of self-forgetfulness in which we are not motivated by anything we derive from it. But this is a bit of a paradox because, while worship supposedly asks for nothing in return, it actually delivers much. Worship re-creates us in many positive ways. And there are other benefits.
Worship relaxes us. It helps us to overcome feelings of anxiety or stress, and it helps to remove mental conflicts that can cause depression or confusion.
Worship sharpens the power of our minds and reveals destinies. As such, we are better able to evaluate our thoughts and behaviors with a balanced and progressive spiritual approach. We also get a glimpse of our future life in the spirit.
Let God Help You
All communion with God eventually results in the very real experience of feeling the divine presence of the Spirit Within. But put unrealistic expectations aside — it is unlikely the angels of heaven will appear to you in a glorious epiphany.
We are continually reminded, in the very least, to attempt to commune with God. But if you are having difficulty engaging in worship, an effective way to overcome this is to develop an unwavering faith and absolute trust in the work of the Father’s Spirit. Whenever you feel challenged by your limitations, always declare:
Even if I cannot do this, there lives in me one who can and will do it… (4:4.9)
This is a compelling statement. It brings to mind that you can’t do it by yourself — that you must first give yourself and your problems over to a higher power. This is the secret of self-mastery. Trusting in the power and love of God to transform us is a rejuvenating experience because it allows God to transform us.