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Sage — Worship

The Shore · Living Water

Everyone worships

Worship is something we do in all our experiences, not just singing at church. It is knowing God and experiencing His awesomeness.

A message from Pastor Nate Gallagher at Calvary Chapel Vero Beach, "Costly Worship," on John 12:1–8 (October 4, 2026), helped me see this more clearly. Nate said that we are "all hardwired to worship." We give our time, money, thoughts and passions to whatever we value most, and that becomes what we worship. So the question is not whether we worship, but what. And only the Creator of heaven and earth, he said, "can bear the weight of our worship."

I believe that, and I want to say why in my own terms.

What an idol is

Foremost is spiritual hunger. Our primary drive seeks spiritual fulfillment, and when it is unmet it pushes us to seek worldly substitutes. We reach for achievements that do not fulfill, and ideologies that promise belonging but deliver only more fragmentation. Nate's examples were gentle and ordinary: a favorite team, a hobby, our work, even our family. Good things, all of them, and none of them can carry that weight.

This is the nature of sin — hamartia, missing the mark. Not primarily a legal infraction, but a directional error: seeking created things to fill the place only the Creator can fill. Sin, in the same terms, is believing or acting as if we are not associated with God. That is separation, dissociation, from God. Coherence with God is association.

An idol, in the old sense, is a made thing invested with the honors that belong to what is not made. Not a rival infinite. A worldly substitute. A false worldly god is not a successful theology. It is a successful capture of attention, duty, fear, and care. Idolatry is not only false worship. It is misallocated duty.

Augustine saw that created things are signs that should lead the soul to God, but fallen humans often stop at the sign itself, worshipping or desiring the creature rather than the Creator.

This is not a diet rule and not a verdict on anyone's appetite. It names a hunger that no meal was ever meant to answer. Sin is never a name for being sick. The person who is ill is not being described by that word, and an illness is not a sign of anyone's standing with God.

One field, one God

I begin from one axiom: reality is experience itself, a single dynamic field whose dynamics are association and dissociation. We are dissociated perspectives of that field — nested windows with a boundary and a present, not second substances. Here "dissociation" means coming apart from God and from one another; it is not a psychiatric diagnosis. What we call consciousness is not a separate substance, and it is not a property added on top of physical processes. It is the graded coherence of experience, an abstraction we draw from experience itself.

There is one God — in line with Spinoza's description, but more adequate. Experience is the field. God is not a rival object inside the field, nor a second field beside it. God is the field considered under the attribute of maximal association. To know God, then, is not to reach past the world toward something parked beyond it. It is to come into deeper coherence with the life you are already part of.

That is why worship is not confined to one room or one hour. If God is the life we are already part of, then a kitchen, a workday, a hospital corridor and a quiet morning are all places to know Him.

Martha, Lazarus, and Mary

"Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, who had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. So they made him a supper there. Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table with him. Therefore Mary took a pound of ointment of pure nard, very precious, and anointed Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment."

Nate drew three kinds of worship from that one table. Martha worships with her actions: serving, and by extension folding laundry, caring for a child, or doing an ordinary job as an offering to God. Lazarus worships with his attention: simply being with Jesus, as we are with God in Scripture, in prayer, in community, and in silence. Mary worships with her affections: love poured out without holding back, which is also what our singing is for. And he warned against picking one as our type. Each of us is asked to grow in the kind that does not come naturally.

I recognize all three in the practices I keep returning to. Intuitive prayer is a natural, ongoing communion with God rather than rigid religious performance. Simply being in His presence, experiencing the peace of God, is resting in communion rather than perpetual problem-solving. The meaning of life is intuitive knowledge of God. This is communion: direct, participatory knowing that satisfies the soul at its deepest level.

Circadian health restores the natural rhythm in which the ancient practice of morning praise flows organically. The body that has slept in alignment with its Maker wakes more ready to offer itself as a living sacrifice — not as a grim duty, but as a natural expression of gratitude. A short or broken night is not a smaller faith. Shift work, illness, a newborn or grief can keep anyone from sleep, and God is no less near on those mornings.

The cost, and the objection

"Then Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, one of his disciples, who would betray him, said, 'Why wasn't this ointment sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?' Now he said this, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and having the money box, used to steal what was put into it. But Jesus said, 'Leave her alone. She has kept this for the day of my burial. For you always have the poor with you, but you don't always have me.'"

Nate pointed out that three hundred denarii was close to a year's wages for a laborer, and that the perfume may have been the family's safety net. As he put it, "Mary sees Jesus as worthy of extravagance. Judas evaluates worship according to usefulness." Jesus was not setting worship against the poor: "It isn't care for the poor or worship to Jesus. God cares about both." Our trouble, Nate said, is that "we're good with stewardship. We struggle with sacrifice."

Nate also noticed what the high priest, Caiaphas, had said one chapter earlier.

"… it is advantageous for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish."

That is the crowd's kind of sacrifice: someone else's life, spent to keep the peace. The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate exposure of the mechanism. An innocent victim is killed by a mimetic mob under the cover of religious and political legitimacy. Yet the resurrection and the proclamation that followed declare the victim righteous and the violence unjust. Mary's gift is the opposite: something of her own, poured out in love, and no one pushed out. God's agape is pure association: the non-rivalrous, non-sacrificial joining of the field that does not consume the other in order to remain itself.

Nate saw one more thing. John's Gospel puts Mary at Jesus' feet, and in the next chapter Jesus himself kneels and washes his disciples' feet. The cost of worship is a gift, never a victim.

"A value problem"

Some of us, Nate admitted, do not think of ourselves as worshippers. His answer was blunt: "you might not have a worship problem. You might have a value problem." When we see the worth of Jesus, worship becomes our response.

"Worthy are you, our Lord and God, the Holy One, to receive the glory, the honor, and the power, for you created all things, and because of your desire they existed and were created!"

I find all of this most coherent in Christ. Christ's revelation is the field revealing itself from within, outside of time. It came to Abraham and to others, most deeply in the Passion, and it continues through the Holy Spirit as intuitive knowledge of God. This fits Girard's early non-sacrificial reading. The Passion is more than payment for sin: it reveals the pathway to relationship, to coherence, with God, which is why the resurrection was needed.

So seeing His worth is not winning an argument. It is God made known from within, and the awe that follows.

Awe is intuitive knowledge of God. It is enhanced and informed by perception and by reason, but the awe itself is what Spinoza called intuitive knowledge: the highest moral good.

Like incense

"Let my prayer be set before you like incense; the lifting up of my hands like the evening sacrifice."

Nate noted that David prayed this far from the tabernacle, and that in Revelation the prayers of the saints rise like incense before the throne:

"The smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, went up before God out of the angel's hand."

Worship, he said, takes part in something bigger than what is happening in the room.

In my terms, prayer is not a message sent across a distance. It is turning toward an association that never ended on God's side. That is how a song, a hard day's work, or a silent hour can all rise like incense.

Back to the water

Orientation towards God's agape toward Him and others means shifting focus from self to His love and the love of others. The highest commandment is to love God with all the heart and soul and mind, and the neighbor as oneself. Reserve worship for the Word that became flesh. Reserve duty for the neighbor who can suffer.

A reading can be faithful to a text without claiming to exhaust it. If a verse means more than this map can hold, the verse keeps the surplus. The philosophy is allowed to be smaller than the Gospel.

Worship, then, is not one hour of the week. It is a whole life that knows God, and keeps being amazed by Him.

Nothing on the Shore is medical advice, and questions about your own health belong with your own physician.

Working hypothesis and reflection. Not medical advice.

Related: Sabbath and Rest · Agape · Strength as Service · The Miracles Are Spiritual · Death and Heaven.