Worship the Son: Your View of Jesus Determines Your Worship

You bow to what you believe is worth bowing to. Nobody kneels by accident.

That is true in the little places first. A man kneels to his checking account when he lets a number decide his mood for the day. He kneels to his reputation when he edits what he says in a room full of people he wants to impress. He kneels to comfort when the alarm goes off and prayer loses to twenty more minutes of sleep. None of that looks like worship. It is worship. Worship is just wherever your attention, your affection, and your obedience go, not where you'd tell a pastor they go.

So here's the question underneath this whole series. Who is Jesus, really, in your head, on a Tuesday? Because whatever you believe about him is going to show up in what you're willing to give him.

The men in the boat

Matthew tells a story about a storm on the Sea of Galilee. The wind is against the boat, the waves are beating it, and somewhere in the dark Jesus walks out to them on the water. Peter tries it too, sinks, gets pulled up by the hand. Then Jesus climbs into the boat and the wind stops.

Here is what the men in that boat do next. "And those who were in the boat worshiped Him, saying, 'You are certainly God's Son!'" (Matthew 14:33).

Worshiped. Not admired. Not thanked, though they surely did that too. They worshiped him. These were Jewish men who knew the first commandment cold. They knew you don't bow to a man, a king, an angel, or anything with a pulse and a name. And they bowed anyway, in a wet boat, because they had just watched him do something only God does.

That is the hinge this whole post turns on. If Jesus is not fully God, that boat full of men committed idolatry and Matthew wrote it down as if it were the right response. If he is fully God, they got it exactly right, and so does every man who has ever fallen on his face before Christ since.

Jesus says the same thing plainly in John's gospel. "For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him" (John 5:22-23). Read that twice. The honor due the Father is the honor due the Son. Not a lesser honor. The same honor. You cannot claim to worship God the Father while treating Jesus like a good teacher you admire from a distance.

Paul says it a different way, in a passage that was probably a hymn the earliest Christians sang before Paul ever wrote it down. Christ Jesus, "who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant" (Philippians 2:6-7). He humbled himself all the way to a cross. And because of that, "God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow" (Philippians 2:9-10). Every knee. Not most. Not the ones who feel like it.

Then John gets a look at heaven itself, and what's happening in front of the throne is not a lecture. It's worship, aimed at a Lamb. The elders fall down. They sing that the Lamb is worthy to open the scroll, "for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood" (Revelation 5:9). Then the number grows to "myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands" (Revelation 5:11), all of them saying the Lamb is worthy to receive power and riches and wisdom and honor and glory. And then every creature everywhere joins in, giving "blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever" (Revelation 5:13) to the One on the throne and to the Lamb, together, in the same breath.

You do not sing that song to a creature. You sing it to God.

Why the fight at Nicaea was never small

This is exactly what was on the table in AD 325. A presbyter named Arius, teaching in Alexandria, was telling the church that the Son was made, not eternal. His line was "there was when he was not." Before some point, on Arius's reading, the Son did not exist. He was the first and greatest thing God made, but made all the same.

Look at what that does to the men in the boat. If Arius was right, they were bowing to a creature. The elders in Revelation are singing to a creature. Paul told the Philippians to bend the knee to a creature. Every act of Christian worship since the resurrection would be misdirected, no matter how sincere.

That is why the bishops at Nicaea did not treat this as an academic argument between theologians who liked splitting words. They confessed the Son "begotten, not made," of one substance with the Father, homoousios. Not a lesser being who resembles God. God himself, the same substance, eternally. Arianism did not die that day. It kept pulling at the church for decades, backed by emperors at times, until Constantinople reaffirmed the Nicene faith in AD 381. The fight took over fifty years to settle because the stakes were never small. Get this wrong and the whole shape of Christian worship collapses into either idolatry or a watered-down Jesus who cannot save you.

What this settles for you

If Jesus is fully God, then every place you've been giving him a smaller seat than God gets exposed. Not by a sermon. By your own week.

Think about a man who prays fine on Sunday and then spends Monday through Friday running his decisions past his bank account, his boss, and his own gut, and never once past Christ. He'd say Jesus is Lord if you asked him straight. He does not live like it. That gap between what a man confesses and what governs him is the whole battle of this Christian life, and it starts with worship because worship is where a man tells the truth about what he trusts.

Your view of Jesus is not a private theology quiz. It decides what you'll obey when it costs you something. It decides who gets your best hours. It decides whether your family sees a man who reveres Christ or a man who reveres his own comfort with Christ's name on it.

A practice this week

Pick three days this week. Give each one fifteen minutes with no phone, no radio, nobody talking to you.

Read Philippians 2:5-11 out loud. Then pray it back to God, slow, like you mean it. Then just praise Christ for a few minutes, no requests, nothing you need from him, just him. Fifteen minutes, three times, that's it. It will feel small and it will not feel like much is happening. Do it anyway. A man's affections move the same way his muscles do, by repetition, not by a single decision made once.

Sit with this question while you're at it: what competes most for your attention, your affection, and your obedience?

Don't answer too fast. The honest answer is usually not the sin you'd confess in front of other men. It's smaller than that and it's been sitting there longer than that.

A closing prayer

Lord Jesus, you are not a creature I admire from a safe distance. You are God, worthy of the worship those men gave you in the boat, worthy of the song the elders sing before your throne. Forgive me for the places I've bowed to smaller things this week without even noticing I was bowing. Take the seat you're owed in my attention, my affections, and my obedience. I don't want to admire you from the shore. I want to be in the boat, on my face, telling the truth about who you are.

For you are always with me, in Jesus name, Amen.