Worship That Pleases God Love the Lord your God with all your heart

and with all your soul and with all

your mind and with all your strength

God wants all of you.

God doesn’t want a part of your life. He asks for all your heart,

all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. God is not

interested in halfhearted commitment, partial obedience, and the

leftovers of your time and money. He desires your full devotion,

not little bits of your life.

A Samaritan woman once tried to debate Jesus on the best

time, place, and style for worship. Jesus replied that these external

issues are irrelevant. Where you worship is not as important as

why you worship and how much of yourself you offer to God when

you worship. There is a right and wrong way to worship. The

Bible says, “Let us be grateful and worship God in a way that will

please him.”

The kind of worship that pleases God has four

characteristics: God is pleased when our worship is accurate. People often

say, “I like to think of God as . . . ,” and then they share their idea

of the kind of God they would like to worship. But we cannot just

create our own comfortable or politically correct image of God

and worship it. That is idolatry.

Worship must be based on the truth of Scripture, not our

opinions about God. Jesus told the Samaritan woman, “True

worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are
the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” 2

To “worship in truth” means to worship God as he is truly

revealed in the Bible.