The Heart of Worship

There’s something about worship songs that hit differently when your spirit is ready to listen. I was vibing to my usual worship playlist on Spotify when that song came on - the one we all know too well, “The Heart of Worship.” Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d heard it. But this time? Somewhere between the first verse and the chorus, I felt the atmosphere shift - the familiar became sacred and I suddenly felt the weight of conviction as I began to see myself the way Heaven saw me, and it humbled me to tears. It was a real “woe is me, I’m a person of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5) moment. Because as much as I love Jesus, as much as I serve, lead, and sing, I had to admit that somewhere along the journey of ministry, I had started confusing worship with music.

It’s frighteningly easy to do that when you serve on a worship team. You begin to prioritise what pleases people over what pleases God. You think about the mechanics of it all - the harmonies, the key changes, the cues, the aesthetic - and none of these things are necessarily bad, but when these things take precedence over the presence of God, we’ve missed the point entirely. You can rehearse a set perfectly and still forget that the One you’re singing to isn’t moved by sound but by surrender. God enjoys beauty and excellence - yes - but He is not impressed by performance. Excellence without intimacy is emptiness dressed up. Worse still, excellence becomes idolatry when we begin to perfect the sound and neglect the substance. You can have the right notes and the wrong heart, and Heaven will stay silent. Because what moves God is not the melody of your voice but the posture of your heart. God is not impressed by flawless sets; He is moved by a yielded heart. The sobering truth? Heaven has never been impressed by skill - even Lucifer had that.

The Holy Spirit reminded me of when Samuel was sent to Jesse’s house to anoint Israel’s next king. Even the prophet assumed the eldest son, Eliab, must be the one because he was tall, impressive, and strong - but God interrupted him: “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, for I have rejected him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Every other brother passed before Samuel, and God kept saying no, until the forgotten one - the shepherd boy - was brought in from the field. David was likely only fifteen or sixteen, young, inexperienced, untrained, unrefined, but Heaven had already marked him. He may not have had the right résumé, but he had the right heart. That’s the mystery of God’s selection: He doesn’t choose the most gifted; He chooses the most yielded.

That’s when I realised something about worship - it’s not just what you give; it’s what you become. Worship is not the song we sing, it’s the posture we maintain. It is the continual yielding of the heart to God’s will. It is the recognition that everything we are and everything we have belongs to Him. Worship is obedience when no one is watching, reverence when no one applauds, devotion that doesn’t need a microphone to be sincere. Romans 12:1 says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God - this is your reasonable act of worship.” In other words, worship is not a performance but a presentation. It’s the moment you climb onto the altar willingly and stay there, even when the fire gets uncomfortable. Real worship costs you something. For David it cost his dignity - he danced so wildly before the Lord that his wife despised him. For Abraham it cost his promise - he laid Isaac on the altar. For Jesus it cost His life - He became the ultimate act of worship, obedient unto death. If our worship costs us nothing, then maybe it’s not worship at all.

Back in 2019, fresh in my walk with God, I stumbled upon John 4:23 - “The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” I didn’t know it then, but that verse would mark me. I didn’t quite understand what “in spirit and in truth” really meant. So I asked the Holy Spirit, and He showed me a perpetual river flowing from the heart of a worshipper straight into the heart of Jesus - no instruments, no production, just communion. It was then I understood that worship is spirit-to-spirit connection, truth meeting Truth. You can sing all the right lyrics yet never touch that river. You can be in the room where worship happens and still not be in worship. Because true worship begins long before the first three-part-harmony and continues long after the last amen. It happens when your daily choices, your thoughts, your responses, even your silence become expressions of love toward Him. It’s possible to live in worship without ever singing a note. Every act of obedience, every moment of compassion, every private yes to God is a verse in your life’s song.

But there’s also a sobering side to this revelation. In Amos 5, God said, “I hate, I despise , and reject your [sacred] feasts… Take away from Me the noise of your songs [they are an irritation], for I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” Those words still shake me. He wasn’t rejecting music; He was rejecting their hypocrisy and misalignment. They were singing to Him with lips that didn’t match their lives. And if we’re honest, the modern church isn’t far from that sometimes. We’ve built sound systems that shake the room but hearts that rarely tremble before His holiness. We host worship nights but forget that true worship is measured not by how high we lift our hands but by how low we bow our hearts.

David understood this when he said in Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” God isn’t searching for perfection; He’s searching for brokenness that invites Him in. Worship is not us performing for God; it’s us yielding to be transformed by Him. It’s allowing His gaze to meet the parts of us we’d rather hide and saying, “Here I am anyway.” That’s why the song says, “You search much deeper within than the way things appear.” Because He does. He sees the motives behind the melodies, the pride hidden behind the professionalism, the wounds buried under the rehearsed smiles. Yet He still calls us deeper - not to shame us, but to heal us. Worship is the place where healing happens in the presence of honesty. It’s where He takes the gift we’ve polished for others and turns it into an altar that refines us.

So now, when I sing The Heart of Worship, I don’t just sing it as a song; I live it as a confession. I find myself saying, “Lord, strip away everything that sounds holy but isn’t. Take away the performance, the perfectionism, the pride. Bring me back to the place where Your presence mattered more than people’s opinions.” Because when all the lights fade, when the harmonies fade, when the crowd fades, all that will remain is whether He found truth in our hearts. The heart of worship is not returning to a melody - it’s returning to a Person - Jesus. It’s remembering that before microphones, before ministries, before platforms, there was a God who walked with humanity in the cool of the day just to be near them. That’s what He’s still after - communion. And when that becomes our focus again, everything else we do becomes holy.

That’s the only place I want to live from - not the stage, but the secret place; not applause, but intimacy; not performance, but presence. Because in the end, worship isn’t the sound we make - it’s the surrender we give. And if I ever forget that, may God swiftly bring me back to the heart of worship, where it’s all, and will always be, about Jesus.

P, xo