What True Worship Actually Is — Tozer’s Lost Definition

⏱ 13 min read

You stood in the row on Sunday. The band was good. The lights were warm. You sang the words because you knew the words, and because the woman beside you was singing, and because the worship leader had asked the room to come in. Somewhere around the second chorus you noticed you were going through the motions. You had been going through the motions for several Sundays in a row. You had assumed something was wrong with you — that your faith had gone shallow, that your heart had hardened, that the spirit had withdrawn for reasons of your own making.

This is the quiet ache of a Christian woman who has been in church for years and is slowly realising that what is happening in the room on Sunday morning may not be what scripture means by worship. You have not become unspiritual. You have been told worship meant one thing — the music portion of a service — and the thing you are doing during it does not feel like what the saints of the older centuries seemed to mean by the word. You suspect there is a definition you have not been given.

This article is the slow recovery of that lost definition. A. W. Tozer — the twentieth-century pastor and contemplative who titled his last book Whatever Happened to Worship because he believed the church of his own day had already lost the thing — spent a lifetime trying to teach Christians the word again. We will walk it with him. The destination is not a different Sunday morning. The destination is the worship Tozer believed every soul was made for, which the Sunday morning can hold but is not equal to, and which begins not in the band but in what he called the burning heart. (If you would like a quiet companion alongside this article — somewhere to actually let the practice settle into the week — the Bible Study Workbook for Women is the matching home for the slow scripture reading worship grows out of.)

What true worship is not

Begin with the negation. Worship is not the music portion of a service. Worship is not what you do during the four songs before the sermon. Worship is not the act of singing words about God in a building. The music can carry worship. The music can also fail to carry it. The two things are not the same.

This is the distinction Tozer spent his career making. He noticed, by the 1950s, that the English word worship was already being shrunk in American Christian usage — that it had come to mean the songs rather than the orientation of the soul before God. The songs are an expression worship can take. They are not the substance of it. A soul can be in deep worship sitting silently in a chair by the window on a Tuesday afternoon. A soul can be entirely outside of worship while singing the third chorus on a Sunday. The music is not the test.

What is the test? Tozer’s answer, drawn from a lifetime of reading the older mystics and the Puritans together, was this: worship is the response of the soul to God when the soul has seen God for who He is. It is the bowing — sometimes vocal, often silent, occasionally in tears, occasionally in song — that happens inside a soul that has caught a glimpse of the actual majesty of the actual God. Without the seeing, the bowing is performance. With the seeing, the bowing is the only thing the soul can do.

This is why the Sunday morning has felt thin to you for several weeks. Not because the service has changed. Because the seeing has not been happening — and worship, on Tozer’s definition, cannot happen without the seeing. You can stand and sing for as long as the band can play, and if the soul has not seen God that morning, the singing will not be worship. The bowing will be acted. The soul knows.

The first quote — what true worship looks like inside the soul

Tozer’s most-cited passage, drawn from The Pursuit of God, names what is going on in the soul of a worshipping woman. Read it slowly. The same speed you would read a verse you were planning to spend an hour with.

“Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshipping soul: We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, and long to feast upon Thee still; We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead, and thirst our souls from Thee to fill. Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Stay with the line to have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love. That is the definition. True worship is the still-pursuing of a God already found. The woman who has been a Christian for thirty years and who, on a Tuesday morning at the kitchen table, is still reaching for more of God — that woman is in worship. The woman who has stood in the row for thirty Sundays and assumed the standing was the worship — that woman may not be, depending on whether the seeing has been happening.

Tozer calls the still-pursuing the soul’s paradox. It is paradoxical because, ordinarily, finding ends seeking. You find your keys; you stop looking. With God, the finding opens the seeking. You taste Him; you grow more thirsty. You drink of Him; you long to drink more. This is not the failure of the drinking. This is what drinking of the living God always does to a soul. The soul that has been deeply with God is the soul that wants more of God, not less. We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, and long to feast upon Thee still.

The line that follows is the diagnosis. Scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. Tozer is naming two kinds of Christian. The too-easily-satisfied religionist — the one who has settled for the Sunday morning, the songs, the printed prayers, the surface — does not believe the still-pursuing is necessary. She has the badge. She thinks the badge is the destination. She scorns the description of a Christianity that keeps reaching after the finding, because it sounds like dissatisfaction, and her religion has trained her that dissatisfaction is a faith failure.

The children of the burning heart know better. They have justified the paradox by happy experience. They have walked with God for years, and the walking has not satisfied the wanting; it has deepened it. They are the saints of the older centuries Tozer points us toward — come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. The heat is the test. The Sunday morning that does not produce the heat is not, by Tozer’s definition, worship. The Tuesday morning that does produce it, even in silence, is.

The second quote — what the worshipping soul actually prays

Tozer’s prayer at the end of the same chapter is the line that names what the soul is asking for when worship has gone right.

“O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee. I long to be filled with longing. I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Read it twice. The first time, the eye is doing the work. The second time, listen for the verbs. I want to want Thee. I long to be filled with longing. I thirst to be made more thirsty still. The worshipping soul is not praying for satisfaction. The worshipping soul is praying for the appetite itself. She knows that an appetite for God is more precious than any temporary filling of it, because the appetite is the engine of worship and the temporary filling is only one of its fruits.

I want to want Thee. That is the line you may not have prayed before. It names the actual condition of the woman whose Sundays have felt thin. The thinness is not, primarily, that you stopped loving God. The thinness is that the wanting of God itself has cooled. You have been singing about God without wanting Him in the deep way the saints meant by wanting. Tozer’s prayer is the recovery of the wanting itself. He prays not fill me but make me thirstier. The woman who learns to pray I want to want Thee — slowly, in the chair, before any Sunday service — has begun, on Tozer’s definition, to worship again.

The reason this matters for the Sunday morning is that worship cannot be turned on by the band. Worship has to be brought into the room by the worshipping soul. The band can carry it once it is there. The band cannot start it from nothing. The woman who arrives Sunday morning having spent six weekday mornings in fifteen minutes of I want to want Thee will arrive at the row already worshipping. The songs will carry what she has already brought. The woman who arrives Sunday with no weekday wanting will stand in the row and find the wanting will not start, because the wanting was supposed to have been kindled by Tuesday’s chair, not by Sunday’s band.

This is the diagnosis under the thinness. The wanting has cooled. The chair has been empty. The Sunday cannot start what the chair was supposed to have kindled. (The slow scripture-reading practice that re-kindles the wanting — one verse held for thirty quiet minutes — is walked in how to meditate on scripture, and the older monastic version in what is lectio divina. The wider rest under both practices is walked in the sibling piece on Hebrews 4 and the rest Sabbath really was.)

The 140-day form of this — fifteen minutes of slow scripture, with the chair and the verse and the silent wanting — is the Bible Study Workbook for Women. It is the practical home for the weekday kindling that makes the Sunday singing into worship. Not a substitute for the Sunday morning. The fuel the Sunday morning is meant to draw on.