Did Jesus Worship?

Have you ever been thinking about a topic or subject, but it was so deep, you couldn’t wrap your mind around it?  And the more you tried, the worse it got, until it started to make your head hurt?  That happened to me recently.  I was reading a book about worship and it asked the question, “How did Jesus worship?”  OK, that doesn’t seem too difficult.  Jesus was raised in a Jewish home.  I’m sure that He was taught to worship the Lord like all good Jewish boys and girls were.  But the more I thought about it, another question popped into my head: 

Did Jesus even need to worship?

Hear me out.  If Jesus and God are one (John 10:30), then wouldn’t worshiping God be considered worshiping Himself.  That seems rather self-centered, but at the same point in time, if ever someone had a reason to be self-centered, it was Jesus.  But, Jesus wasn’t all about Himself.  He was about exalting His Father, and so I believe He worshiped God.  But by worshiping God, He was still sort of worshiping Himself.  It’s kind of a big circle.  See why this gave me a headache?

But, after reading/studying/thinking some more, here is what I finally settled on:

1. Jesus did worship.  In his encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4, Jesus said “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.”  Did you catch that?  He said “we worship”.  He was a part of the “we”.  He participated in the worship of God.  That’s pretty cool!

2. While Jesus had every right to exalt Himself, He did the very opposite.  Philippians 2:5-8 says “Christ Jesus:  Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death-even death on a cross!”  Jesus was totally and completely about doing His Father’s will.  His humility and submission to His Father knew no bounds!  And because of this, I believe that worshiping God was easy for Jesus, with no self-centered exalting involved.

So, those are my deep thoughts for this week.

Worship Big!

Brad