One Sunday night when our church was new and very small, I preached one of those messages that was everything I wanted a message to be. And yet I was frustrated. We had seventeen people in a room that seated 250. The room was so big that it felt more like three. I remember driving home that night frustrated that we had brought this amazing message and worship to the table and only seventeen people experienced it.

As I was driving home, I remember saying, “Look God, I get that numbers don’t matter, but really, seventeen?” I didn’t expect anything. I was just venting a bit. But God almost tangibly said, “Pull over. We need to talk.”

I physically pulled over on the side of the road to wrestle with God on this thought. God was saying to me, “Who are you really doing this for?” Well, that’s obvious. I’m doing this for you, Lord. But I realized God was challenging me. If I’m really doing this for God, then what difference does it make if there are seventeen, seven hundred, or seven thousand people present? I realized then that though I claimed to do these things for God, that wasn’t completely true. The breadth of my preaching influence mattered greatly to me, and I measured whether my effort was worth it or not based on how many people showed up. I sat there on the side of that road and asked God to help me move my focus and the motive for my efforts; I promised God and myself that whether there were two people or one hundred thousand, I would get up and preach with the same vigor and passion, because it would be for Him and Him alone. I did not realize it then, but my understanding of worship, deep, Christ-centered worship, was beginning to form.

That experience has shaped tremendously how I minister. More importantly, it has shaped how I live. It triggered a journey of exploring what it meant to live all of life as worship. I realized that I had separated my life into categories of activity. Some of my life was active work for God, some active worship of God, some common and neutral, and some a struggle. Worship (praying, singing, meditating) was just one category, lumped in with eliminating the worship of other things. In fact, my life paralleled how many churches talk about the worship service. We divide our gatherings into parts: the welcome, the worship, the teaching, the announcements, the closing. Worship is just one component. All of this misses the deep and wonderful reality of what Christ-centered worship really is, individually and corporately. The truth is, every moment is worship.

God’s vision for true worship has been revealed all along in Scripture. In the Old Testament, there is a beautiful word that captures this idea of life being worship so eloquently: avodah. Avodah is a Hebrew word that means “work,” “service,” and “worship.” In Exodus 34:21, Moses is renewing the covenant when God says, “Six days you shall work [avodah].” In Psalm 104:23, we read, “Then man goes out to his work [avodah], and to his labor until evening.” In the Scriptures, avodah describes the backbreaking work of making bricks in Egypt and the craftsmanship of the artists building the Tabernacle.

In other passages, the emphasis is on worship. Joshua 24:15 says, “But as for me and my house, we will serve [avodah] the LORD.” Exodus 8:1 carries the sense of worship: “This is what the LORD says: Let my people go, so that they may worship [avodah] me” (NIV). Avodah describes the work of the Levites and priests leading the people in worship.

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