Worship is the action of the spirit. It springs up from our depths, as love does. It is a form of love, and just as desirable, and just as necessary to human life at its fullest and highest. To worship is an innate need of man. It is not imposed upon us from the outside, though the way we sometimes go about it may make it seem an imposition.

Suppose you are hungry. No one has to tell you to eat. No one has to force you to take food. Suppose you are in love. Must you be told to think of the person you are in love with? Must you be forced to yearn for the loved one?

Worship is a hunger of the human soul for God. When it really occurs, it is as compelling as the hunger for food. It is as spontaneous as the love of boy for girl. If we feel it, no one needs tell us we should worship. No one has to try to make us do it. If we do not feel it, or have no desire to feel it, no amount of urging or forcing will do any good. We simply cannot be forced, from the outside, to worship. Only the power within us, the life within, can move us to it.

But others can guide our preliminary efforts. They can help us to prepare to worship. Such preparation, as Rufus Jones has said, is the most important business in the world. Others can provide conditions, such as the Friends meeting for worship, thanks to which the desire to worship may spring up and grow. The meeting for worship came into existence because the early Friends were powerfully moved to worship together and meet the spiritual needs of one another. I use the word needs. Their spiritual needs were more dynamic than ours or theirs for food and shelter. Neither threats of violence nor active persecution could keep them away from their meetings.

Why is it that some of us would rather go to a movie, or listen to the radio, or see a ball game, or read an exciting book? One reason, it must be acknowledged, is because our meetings today are sometimes dull and unliving. We assemble in our meeting houses, but nothing happens. A related reason is that many of us have not yet awakened spiritually. Our bodies are active. Our minds are alert. But not our spirits. Such awakening, however, will come in due time, if we encourage it, if we do our part to prepare for it, if we live honestly and are true to ourselves, face life with clear eyes, and continue growing.

The main reason why we do not worship, or do not want to, is that God is not yet sufficiently real to us. He is not as real to us as our human father. His power is not as real to us as the power of man’s brain and muscles, as steam power, as electricity. Worship expresses man’s relationship to God. How then can we worship if we are not aware of this relationship, if the main party to it is unreal to us?

Some people speak of worshiping things that are not of God. God being unreal to them, their relation to Him being unrecognized, they turn to what is real to them, and engage in various so-called worships: money-worship, hero-worship, ancestor-worship, the worship of material power and machines, the worship of political States and their rulers. These are false worships. God is the sole object of genuine worship God and His power which He manifests to us as love, light, and wisdom.

All forms of true worship arise from an experience of the fact of God, from the realization that God is. Men such as George Fox and John Woolman had their first experiences of God early in life. Most of us come to the experience gradually and later on, if at all. What are we to do meanwhile? Most religions offer formal official statements of what they believe God to be. They say what God’s nature is, and set forth His attributes. Friends make no such pronouncement; and I, for one, am glad there is none. Man’s words about God cannot substitute for a first-hand experience of the living reality. Friends are directed to seek for the reality within themselves. Meanwhile, we are called upon to have faith that God exists and that it is possible for us to meet with Him. We are called upon to prepare ourselves for this supreme experience. We are urged to try to sense God’s presence, daily to practice His presence. By such practice, if we persevere, we shall surely come to have a convincing experience.

Worship is our response to God’s reality, a reality which is, to be sure, within men, but which also is the radiant foundation of the entire universe. In trying to worship, we turn ourselves Godwards. We yearn for Him and endeavor to know His will. Our lives are pointed toward Him. If, and as we succeed, we make contact with God, and by this contact He is made real to us. When He becomes real to us we spontaneously love Him.

Can we see a sunset without responding to its beauty? Can we witness those we love, in their goodness to us, without being touched and moved? Can we hear the voice of our best friend on the phone without eagerly listening and eagerly replying? Be sure, then, that when we come into God’s presence we will be touched and moved beyond our greatest expectation.

Nothing so deters us from wanting to worship as the notion that worship is unliving. If it is unliving it is not worship. If it seems dull, tedious or difficult, it is because we are not truly worshiping. We are, perhaps, preparing ourselves to worship. There are difficulties to be overcome in the preparatory stages. Or, we are but assuming the appearance of worship, there being no life, no yearning within, we being more dead than alive inside. Indeed it is dull and tedious to hold the posture, if it is not backed up by a quickening life of the spirit.

True worship is a living experience. By and through it we enter into a life so vital, so vivid, so large and glorious that, by comparison, our life of ordinary activities seems narrow, dull, dead. By bodily action the body comes alive. By mental action the mind comes alive. So by spiritual action the spirit comes alive. Worship is spiritual action. By means of it our spirits awake, mature, and grow up to God.

All human beings, except those who have been badly damaged by man’s inhumanity to man, are moved to love. Some love animals, some flowers. Others love the sea or farm lands or mountains. Some love truth, some love beauty. All of us want and need to love and to be loved by our families and friends, and we would be happy were we able to love all people everywhere. To love and be loved is a universal human urge. Is it any wonder, then, that we are moved to seek God’s love? It is inevitable that we should desire this supreme form of love. The First Commandment expresses our innermost desire as well as God’s will.

There is nothing incredible about our wanting to love and to be loved by God. The incredible fact is that it can actually happen, does happen. Some day we will experience it. Then our doubts will end. Then we will worship God through love of Him.

Here is what two religious men of advanced spiritual development had to say of their experiences. George Fox wrote, “The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘My love was always to thee, and thou art in my love.’ And I was ravished with the sense of the love of God.” Brother Lawrence wrote, “You must know that the benevolent and caressing light of God’s countenance kindles insensibly within the soul, which ardently embraces it, a divine and consuming flame of love, so rapturous that one puts curbs upon the outward expression of it.”

It is to this divine love that we are called. This is the high promise of man’s life. We are called away from indifference, from meanness, malice, prejudice and hate. We are called above the earthly loves that come and go, and are unsure. We are called into the deep enduring love of God and man and all creation. Worship is a door into that love. Once we have entered it, our every act is a prayer, our whole life a continuous worship.