March 2026
‘You shall worship the Lord your God' Matthew 4.10 (RSV)
Jesus quotes the Jewish scriptures when tempted by Satan in the wilderness. He appeals to the authority of scripture as He does so in what is a real test of His identity as the Son of God. The devil, ‘the father of lies’ (John 8.44) and falsehood tries to turn and undermine this with three temptations, prefixed with the words ‘if you are the son of God’. These three temptations go to the core of human frailty and of our failure to distinguish good from evil. They take us back to Eden and the lies about ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (Genesis 2.17). The third temptation that Jesus faces is the ultimate test about being given all the kingdoms of the world, if He will bow down and worship the devil. Jesus immediately tells the devil to ‘begone’ (‘get lost’ might be a modern way of putting it!) and then quotes the book of Deuteronomy: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve’ (6.13).
The late William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, defines worship as ‘the submission of all our nature to God: the quickening of conscience by his holiness, the nourishment of mind with his truth, the purifying of imagination by his beauty, the opening of the heart to his love and the surrender of the will to his purposes’. Temple further suggests that worship is gathered in adoration, a selfless emotion that counteracts the self-centeredness of sin.
As a definition it is hard to better these words. They can help us discern and differentiate where we are not showing God our true worship, impacted by the falsities that beset us, masquerading as the truth; a prevalent problem of our times.
It is perhaps impossible to offer God our true worship all the time. This is one of the reasons that we can enter the divine worship of our churches on Sundays and at other times. The Fellowship method of contemplative prayer also offers us opportunities to enter the worship of God in silence as we listen to His Word. Thereby we can offer God our minds, hearts and wills, and intercede for all the people and places of our world, finding therein true worship of the Lord our God: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God’.