There’s something universally human about our response to babies. We coo. We smile. Something warm spreads through us—peaceful, happy, content. That reaction is God-given, part of how we’re wired to love, protect, and nurture.
But when you read the biblical story of Christ’s birth, that’s not quite how the people around the infant Jesus respond. The angels don’t show up saying, “Isn’t He adorable?” They worship: “Glory to God in the highest!” The shepherds don’t just come to ooh and ahh over a newborn. They come to worship. The wise men travel hundreds of miles, and when they finally arrive, they don’t take pictures. They fall down and worship.
They’re not marveling at a baby’s cuteness—though I’m sure He was beautiful. They’re marveling that God Himself came in the form of a baby. They’re worshiping the King.
Feelings and Foundation
We often come to worship hoping to feel something—warmth, peace, joy, inspiration. These feelings are good gifts from God. But those emotions aren’t the foundation of worship; they’re the fruit of it.
The worship of Christmas isn’t because of how a baby makes us feel. The worship of Christmas is because of this baby who is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. When we see Him rightly—when we encounter the King—that’s when the true joy comes. And maybe conviction. Maybe wonder. Maybe surrender. But it all flows from seeing who He is.
Advent is a time to consider what it means to truly worship. What makes worship more than coming together to sing songs, enjoy music, and hopefully hear a good sermon? Here’s a definition to anchor us:
Worship is the declaration of God’s holiness and glory and our surrender before Him.
That’s the theology of worship —not techniques or styles, but the foundational truth about what worship actually is and how we can participate in it more fully.
Heaven’s Pattern: The Throne Room
To understand worship, we need to see where it’s happening perfectly—right this very second. In Revelation 4, the apostle John, exiled on the island of Patmos, sees a door standing open in heaven. A loud voice calls to him, “Come up here.” Immediately, John is caught up in the Spirit.
He sees a splendid throne with someone sitting on it. That throne is the center of everything. Everything in creation revolves around it. Surrounding the throne are strange, winged creatures and twenty-four elders clothed in white, wearing golden crowns. And day and night—never stopping—they declare:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
Three times. That’s the superlative in Hebrew—the holiest of all! God’s holiness is the supreme reality of the universe. He is worthy of constant, never-ending worship.
Notice that no one worships alone. The creatures declare, the elders respond. Call and response. Worship is communal by design. Heaven is a gathered assembly declaring God’s glory together—not isolated individuals having private spiritual moments.
Church, our worship happens in its most complete form only when we do it together. The proclamation of God’s glory, his holiness, and Lordship is the primary vocation or work of the church! This is why we are here.
This scene around the throne tells us that worship isn’t something we initiate—it’s something we join. It’s been happening since before the foundation of the world. Day and night, never stopping—creatures and elders declaring “Holy, holy, holy.” Angels bowing before the throne. All the saints who’ve gone before us singing God’s praise. When we gather on Sunday morning, we’re not initiating worship. We’re joining the song that’s already being sung. We’re adding our voices to the chorus of heaven.
Crowns being cast down. Hands lifted in praise. Voices declaring His holiness. Hearts surrendered in joy. They’re filled with delight, giving thanks. This is pure, unbroken worship.
Why?
“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” (Revelation 4:11)
You are worthy. Not opinion. Objective reality. We are the creatures. He is the Creator and King. The presence and glory of the King has their complete attention.
What holds our attention? If aliens landed and studied us based on what captures our focus, they’d think our gods are smartphones and Netflix. “These humans bow their heads for hours in sacred silence and reverence to a large glowing rectangle.” We laugh. But what captures our attention tells us something about what we worship.
What strikes me about this vision is that there’s nothing competing for their attention. No notifications. No distractions. No lesser things. Just the throne. Just the King. Just the overwhelming reality of His holiness. Worship is the never-ending business of heaven. What would happen in our church if we began to see God this way together, even just a fraction?
But the truth is we don’t live there yet. This is the vision of heaven, not our present reality. Our worship is messy and sometimes misdirected. We’re easily distracted and divided. We’re still learning to see God rightly, to surrender fully.
Advent reminds us: we’re waiting for the King to restore what’s broken. Heaven sets the pattern: worship is about God’s holiness, not our feelings. Our response is surrender, not self-seeking. To understand why we must rediscover this posture, we need to go back to the moment when worship first went wrong.
When Worship Went Wrong
Just like us, the first humans faced a choice: trust and worship God or follow their own desires. The first sin was fundamentally a failure to worship.
Adam and Eve lived in paradise, in perfect fellowship with God. One command bounded their freedom: “You may eat from any tree, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That boundary wasn’t arbitrary. It was God saying: “I am God. You are not. I am King. Trust Me.”
Then the serpent shows up with a simple question: “Did God really say…?” The real temptation was to doubt—to question whether God’s word was true, whether His way was really good. The promise—”You will be like God”—is absurd when you think about it. Imagine your dog deciding he’s the master of the house: “I’ll feed myself. I’ll decide what’s right.” Yet we do exactly that. We look at God and say, “I’ve got this. I can handle life on my own.”
That’s a worship failure. Worship is declaring God’s glory and surrendering to Him: “You are King. I am not. I trust You.” But Adam and Eve stopped declaring His glory. They chose autonomy. They chose their desire over His decree. They chose to worship themselves rather than surrender.
We were made to worship something. But Genesis 3 shows us what happens when we worship the wrong thing: wrong worship wrecks the world. When we worship feelings, we become self-absorbed and emotionally unstable. When we worship convenience, we bail when things get difficult. When we worship control, we manipulate those around us. The result is always the same: shame, fear, hiding, blame, conflict, division.
This is the world that cries out for Advent. Humanity exiled, creation coming apart. God’s people waiting: “How long, O Lord?”
Then, in Bethlehem, the answer came—not with armies, but with a baby’s cry. The King arrived to heal what Genesis 3 fractured. Advent reminds us that God steps into our brokenness, offering a way back to right worship.
How We Come Back
In Isaiah 6, the prophet has a vision that mirrors what John would see centuries later. Isaiah finds himself in the throne room of heaven. He sees the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne. The train of His robe fills the temple. Seraphim surround Him, calling out:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.”
The same song. The same eternal declaration.
And Isaiah’s immediate response?
“Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
Seeing God rightly makes us see ourselves rightly. Isaiah is undone, recognizing his own unworthiness and crying out in confession.
When was the last time our worship undid us like that? When we saw God so clearly that we couldn’t help but see ourselves—and fell to our knees?
But God doesn’t leave Isaiah in the “Woe is me” stage. One of the flaming seraphs takes a coal from the altar—the place of God’s atoning sacrifice—and touches Isaiah’s lips: “Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
We cannot worship fully until we’ve been touched by the fire. Our lips are unclean because our hearts proclaim ourselves as king. God provides what Isaiah cannot provide for himself: cleansing, atonement, the ability to stand in His presence and truly worship. Only then—after recognition, repentance, and cleansing—does Isaiah respond eagerly with a new, purified heart: “Here am I. Send me!”
This is the theology of worship in three movements: seeing God for who He truly is, confessing we are not Him, and surrendering our desires to Him. What Isaiah experienced in vision, we experience in Christ. God has drawn near. He’s provided cleansing—not with a coal from the altar, but with His own body on the cross. And now He invites us to the same response: “Here am I. Send me.” True worship begins with seeing God rightly and ends in willing surrender because of who He is.
What This Means for Us
We’ve all been trained by our culture to approach everything like consumers. When we went to a pizza buffet recently, it wasn’t great—dirty tables, loud music, sticky floors, nearly empty buffet line, thin salad bar. We probably won’t go back. That’s fine for restaurants where we’ve paid for an experience. We can be a consumer.
But worship is not a buffet line. Worship is a throne room. And we don’t come to pick and choose. We come to bow down.
Come as a worshiper, not a consumer. When you walk through those doors, come with your heart already saying: “God, I’m here to declare Your glory. Whatever You want to do in me today—shape me. Send me. I’m Yours.” That’s the posture of the elders in Revelation 4—crowns in hand, ready to lay them down. That’s the posture of Isaiah after the coal touched his lips—”Here am I. Send me!”
And here’s what’s beautiful about surrender: it’s not loss. It’s homecoming. When we surrender to God, we don’t become less—we become fully human, flourishing as God designed us. We discover the joy the elders experience when they cast their crowns. We discover the mission Isaiah found when he said, “Send me!” Surrender to the King is the path to the life you’ve been longing for.
Prepare your heart. Advent isn’t passive waiting. It’s active preparation—getting ready to worship the King who has come and who is coming again. Take five minutes before you arrive at church. Declare God’s holiness. Surrender your agenda: “God, I’m not coming to evaluate. I’m coming to worship You.” Let your heart get ready to encounter the King. When you prepare like this, you’ll come as a worshiper. You’re not waiting for worship to happen to you. You’re ready to participate with each other.
Worship together. That word—”each other”—is critical. A foundational truth from Scripture is that we’re meant to worship together. Worship is a corporate act by design. This isn’t something we do in isolation. D.A. Carson says, “The gathered assembly is itself a proclamation to the watching world: this is our King.”
Worship isn’t a solo performance. It’s not me and God in a private moment while 200 other people happen to be in the room. Revelation 4 shows us creatures, elders, angels—all creation declaring God’s glory as one. One voice. One song. One surrender.
When that 80-year-old saint who’s walked with God for decades stands next to that 20-year-old who just met Jesus last month, and they both sing “Holy, holy, holy”—that’s the body of Christ declaring truth together. When the person who loves the old hymns stands next to the person who comes alive through contemporary worship, and they both surrender their crowns—that’s unity that proclaims God’s glory.
When we stop asking “What do I get out of this?” and start asking “Who is God, and how can we declare His glory together?”—that question doesn’t divide us. It unites us. Because the answer is the same for every person: He deserves everything.
The Advent Tension
This is why these three practices matter so much during Advent. Because Advent reminds us that we live in the tension between two comings:
The King has come—born in Bethlehem, healing what Genesis 3 fractured, making a way for us to worship rightly.
And the King is coming again—to fully restore what’s broken, to bring heaven to earth, to unite all creation in the song of Revelation 4.
So every Sunday when we gather to worship—when we come surrendered, when we come prepared, when we worship together—we’re doing something profound:
We’re proclaiming that the King has come. That Jesus is Lord. That the way is open.
We’re practicing for the day when worship will be perfect, when every knee will bow and every tongue confess.
We’re preparing ourselves for His return—training our hearts to recognize the King, learning the song of heaven, becoming the people we were created to be.
When we worship like this, the world takes notice. Not because we’re trying to put on a show. But because there’s something about a people so captured by God’s holiness that they’re willing to lay down their preferences, their comfort, their demands—and declare His glory together.
That’s when the watching world stops and asks, “What do they have that we don’t?”
That’s when our worship becomes proclamation—not because we planned it, but because that’s what happens when the church worships the King rightly.
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
