Is Christian worship an intelligible response or an instinctive one? Does one choose to worship, or is one graced with the ability to rightly respond to the influence of the Holy Spirit?

To be sure the worship of God is not solely a human invention, though anthropologists report worship as a practice in almost all cultures. There is something within human beings that calls for response to something outside of human beings, the other, the wholly other, the divine, the Creator of all, etc.

Scripture records that God seeks worshippers (John 4). This is a turn around from the often touted worship developments which suggest that the gathered worship of the Christian community should be seeker sensitive. The latter focuses on the human part of the worship equation. That God seeks worshippers and generously and graciously enables the free response of people in recognition of God's goodness suggests that it is God who initiates worship. Human beings enabled by God-given grace respond, and that response in positive praise of God is deemed worship. Apart from God's initiative, apart from God's grace, apart from God's wooing Holy Spirit, the can be no Christian worship. Without these that which poses as worship is empty ritual, instinctive cultic practice. Such worship does not bear the transformative qualities of Spirit-driven worship.

Human beings bear the imprint of God, being created in the image of God. Their ability to respond intelligently sets them above creaturely life which, at least for now, can respond only instinctively. (Who knows how this may change in God's eschatological future?) Though human intelligence is affected by the fall, God's on-going gracious activity calls people from self-centered, self-abegnation to loving response to the Creator and loving care for the created. God initiates what human beings can join, a shared fellowship with the One who seeks true worshippers. Thanks be to God.