The Work of the People
Summary
What if worship is less about thinking correctly about God and more about being formed by him — body, habit, and desire? Romans 12 opens with a "therefore" that hinges on everything Paul has just argued about the mercy of God, and Matt Crummy uses that hinge to explore what worship actually is. Drawing on James K.A. Smith, Augustine, and Eugene Peterson, he traces the idea that we are fundamentally creatures of desire, shaped by the liturgies we practice — whether we name them that or not. The stadium concert, the shopping trip, the weekly rhythm — all of it is forming us toward some picture of the good life. The question is which one.
Questions for reflection
Paul's argument in Romans moves from gift to obligation — the indicative before the imperative. How does it change the way you approach your faith when you start from what God has done rather than what you need to do?
Matt describes worship as something that lives more in the land of instinct and habit than in the land of ideas and beliefs. Does that match your experience? Where do you feel your loves and desires most honestly?
James K.A. Smith describes cultural liturgies as formative practices that shape our most fundamental desires over time. What are the liturgies in your own life — the regular rhythms and practices — and what vision of the good life are they forming you toward?
Simone Weil writes that humility is nothing more or less than the power of attention. Where is your attention most consistently directed right now? What is that forming in you?
Paul says to offer your bodies — not just your mind or your beliefs — as a living sacrifice. What would it look like for you to bring your whole life, not just your Sunday morning, before God?
The sermon ends with the question: what vision of the good life are the various entities and practices in your life shaping you toward — and how does it compare with the vision Jesus paints in the gospels? How would you answer that honestly?
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Before we get to that passage, I want to back up one chapter. Here's how Paul ends Romans 11:
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.
Paul has just spent eleven chapters trying to explain how Gentiles have been grafted into the covenant promises between God and Israel — that this relationship was always a gift, both to God's people and to the world. Israel was set apart to be a blessing to all nations. Called out to be a peculiar people, priests to the earth. But Paul is careful to make clear that the Gentiles have no grounds for arrogance about being welcomed in. Both Israel and the Gentiles were disobedient to God. And yet God, confounding everyone, offers mercy. Salvation. And then Paul, instead of pressing on, stops — and breaks into praise.
A doxology is a sudden burst of praise directed to God. A word of glory. And this one, I think, begins to frame everything we're going to talk about today.
Because here is the key point I want to start with: Christian worship doesn't begin with us bringing something to God — saying the right words, thinking the right thoughts, performing the right rituals. It begins with God's love, his glory, his generosity. And then we respond.
Worship is much more about our affections, our desires, our habits than it is about information or head knowledge or even theology — though those things matter, and I'm not setting them against each other. I'm just saying that worship looks maybe a little more like tears, or a lump in your throat when someone holds your hand, or a sunset over a Walmart parking lot. It's God breaking through the noise and saying, hi. And it's us responding, finally.
Paul has a little praise break in the parking lot. He interrupts his discourse on mercy to Israel and the Gentiles and the world — and it almost seems like he's wrapping up — but this is exactly when Paul leans in. He puts his cart away and turns the corner into chapter 12. And the very next word is: therefore.
Given the mercy of God — then what?
This morning we're beginning a two-week look at worship. This week: what worship is. Next week: what worship does.
[Prayer]
Cultural Liturgies
If you've ever been to a big concert, you know there's a whole culture around it. People dress for the vibe. You get your tickets scanned at the entrance. Your bag gets checked. You pass the merch tables, grab something to drink, use the bathroom, take a photo while your hair still looks good. Then you enter the stadium — which honestly feels a little like a sanctuary — maybe some haze in the air making the stage lighting look incredible. An opener or two. Someone asks the crowd three times if they're ready. And then the artist comes out dramatically, and your mind is blown for ninety minutes. A couple of encores. Lights up. You and your friends talk about it on the way to get pizza.
What I've described is actually incredibly complicated when you think about all the factors at work. Thousands of people, each with their own expectations for the night — what songs they want to hear, what they need to feel. Everything in the production is engineered to move you in some way. The live music industry knows that nothing quite compares to the experience of wonder, enchantment, the adrenaline that wells up — maybe even tears, depending on the show.
The philosopher James K.A. Smith — who goes by Jamie, and who used to edit the magazine I work for — calls these kinds of experiences cultural liturgies. He describes liturgies as formative practices that shape and constitute our identities by forming our most basic, fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world.
When most people hear the word liturgy, they think of a religious ceremony — something like what we're doing right now. The word in Greek simply means the work of the people. And that framing is going to be key to understanding what worship actually is. It is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is not a noble thought about God. It is not the Christian genre on Spotify.
In Acts 13:2–3 we see the church at Antioch gathering: "While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.' So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off." The word translated worshiping there is the Greek word leitourgeo — the same root as our word liturgy. Notice the relational bent: they are ministering to the Lord. It already starts to look different from what we usually mean by worship.
Smith is drawing on Augustine and Charles Taylor in pointing out that human nature is bent toward love. Our loves often become disordered — but either way, we gravitate toward action and movement, toward bodies and habits and desire and wonder and experience, toward the sensory. This is part of God's incredible design.
God is clearly not risk-averse.
What we love deeply forms us. We are changed by our loves, and they begin to remake us. We tend to move toward what we love, often without even thinking about it. Shopping, sports events, dinner with friends, a church gathering — all of these are liturgies, formative practices that shape what we love and therefore our very identities, by forming our most fundamental desires over time.
So if we want to understand what worship is, we have to talk about desire.
What do you long for?
These things — whether we name them or not — are deeply formative of our habits and priorities, often mostly without our noticing.
The Structure of Paul's Argument
Paul is writing to a church he has never actually visited, which is unusual for him. Romans is his most systematically developed letter — closer to a theological treatise than a pastoral note. The Roman church at this time was likely a network of house churches: young, fragmented, ethnically mixed, with real tensions between Jewish and Gentile believers over Torah observance, food laws, calendar keeping, and the fundamental question of who the people of God even are.
An earlier imperial decree had expelled Jews from Rome, which meant the Roman church had reorganized around Gentile leadership for years before Jewish believers were allowed to return. By the time Paul is writing — probably around AD 56 or 57 — those tensions are very much alive. And Paul has spent eleven dense chapters addressing them.
The doxology at the end of chapter 11 is almost like a break in the argument — a moment of, you know what, there's so much here I can't even fully express or understand, so let's just jam for a minute. And then the cart goes away, and the pivot happens.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.
This structure is characteristic of Paul. He never starts with commands. The gift always comes before any obligation — mimicking the way God himself deals with us, mimicking the shape of the gospel. You see the same pattern in Ephesians, in Colossians, and here across Romans 1–11 followed by 12–16.
There's a sports meme — the sportscaster Brian Windhorst holding up two fingers while making a point, and the caption: now why is that? I want that image stuck in your head as a question to carry into Scripture and into life. Paul structures his arguments this way because the shape of the argument is itself a theological statement. Ethics are a response to grace. We don't start with earning. Otherwise, it ceases to be a gift.
So here is my thesis for today:
Worship is less about thinking correctly about God and more about being formed by him and toward him — body, habit, and desire.
It lives more in the land of instinct than in the land of ideas and beliefs, at least at the surface level.
Paul knows this. It's why he spends a surprising amount of time in his letters talking about physical, embodied things — sexual ethics, food, hunger, drinking, circumcision, blood, baptism, clothing, disease, singing together. Sometimes it's even uncomfortable. But of course he does. He knows something about humanity: the areas we are most tempted toward, what he elsewhere calls the deeds of darkness, are actually wonderful clues to how we're wired. The areas of our greatest vices are helpful clues for understanding what worship is — because they show us that we're wired for something good, and that we tend to warp and twist those good things.
We are lovers. We are creatures of desire. And these desires are practiced — within the frameworks of cultural liturgies, rites of passage, weekly rhythms, favorite restaurants, road trips, holiday traditions, how you fight with your spouse, the clubs you join. These are learned things, practiced over time. We are all worshipers. We are all creatures of habit.
Offering Your Body
A lot of this is formed in our imaginations and in the social systems I've been describing. But it works a little backward from how you might expect Christian maturity to work.
Perhaps you grew up in a church or student ministry that focused all its formative energy on thinking the right things. That mode of operation tends to treat the mind as ultimate — above the body, above practice, above time, above vocation. The frame is: if you can think the right thing, you can do the right thing. But let's let Paul's language in Romans 12 push back on that.
He says: Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy — and then what? Change your mind? No. Not yet. He gets there, but first: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.
Because God is good and merciful and has proved it, we can trust him — which means we can trust him with our desires. That is the risk of falling in love. There's vulnerability. You're offering yourself to another. The invitation of Jesus to the disciples wasn't believe this or else. It was come, follow me. That is how they were transformed. That is how their beliefs changed, interestingly. That is how they matured.
Paul in Romans is saying we respond to God's initiating act of love with love. We bring our hopes and dreams and deepest longings to God and follow him and let ourselves grow over time.
The flow from verse 1 to verse 2 is instructive. Paul leads with the offering of ourselves as true and proper worship, and then moves to the famous instruction: do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
The phrase true and proper worship doesn't mean worship with good table manners. It carries the sense of something consistent with reality itself — the ordering of life. Given everything Paul has argued in chapters 1 through 11, offering yourself to God is the only coherent response. It's not an extra act of piety on top of Christianity. It is Christianity. It's reasonable, fitting, and logical — if you understand who Jesus is and what he has done.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world is the idea of resisting being pressed into the mold of the present age. I don't think I need to argue for how relevant that feels right now. The sense of being pressed into various molds — of what to think, how to feel, where to stand — is intense at the moment.
The call to be transformed — the Greek is metamorphoo, the same root as metamorphosis — is a transformation from the inside out. The renewing of the mind Paul describes is not a one-time event but an ongoing reorientation to Jesus. A habituated way of seeing and desiring that emerges from worship practiced over time.
Here's how Eugene Peterson restates Romans 12:1–2 in The Message:
"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life — your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life — and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."
And the French philosopher Simone Weil, in an essay published after her death, puts it in one sentence:
"In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention."
The virtue of humility is the power of attention.
This might help explain why so much of the conflict and turmoil we see in the world feels so existential — so deeply personal, down to the core of what it means to be human. You may have heard the term the attention economy. Companies and political parties know that our habits and attention shape our behavior and slowly begin to transform how we think and what we believe.
It's worth pausing to reflect: where do you give your attention? Not just to phones and Netflix — I'm thinking more of where you find your heart tugged, where your desires are pulled, where your fears lie, where your longings are most honestly on display. What is of ultimate concern to you?
Worship, then, is an act of humility — the directing and redirecting of our time, attention, affections, and habits toward God. All in response to his mercy and generosity.
Worship is your whole life, oriented toward God.
Telos
That's directional language, so let's sit with it for a moment.
In theology — and in philosophy more broadly — we use the Greek word telos, meaning end, goal, or purpose. Not the ending of something, but its destination, its reason for being. The telos of the Artemis space missions isn't actually the moon — it's deeper exploration, Mars and beyond. The moon is a waypoint in a bigger vision.
Jamie Smith says the problem isn't just that competing cultural liturgies form us. It's that every liturgy carries an implicit vision of the good life — a picture of what human flourishing is, of what you and I are ultimately for. Amazon and Costco don't just form our shopping habits. They tell us a story about what the good life is: acquisition, comfort, status, choice, remarkably cheap hot dogs. The concert at the stadium has its own narrative. So does NASA. Smith calls this the telos embedded in every formative practice.
So the question isn't only: what is forming you? It's: what picture of the good life are you being formed toward?
Most Christian formation strategies operate on the assumption that if you get the beliefs right, the rest will follow. But the honest reality — as a human being, as a parent, as a colleague — is that habits and virtues tend to eat your worldview for breakfast. We'll explore that more next week when we talk about counter-formation. But the point is that liturgies usually win, because they match how we're actually wired.
Closing
What vision of your life do other entities and people have for you? And how does it compare to the vision Jesus paints in the gospels — with both his words and his actions?
Worship is your whole life, oriented toward God. And as Christians, we do have a new telos in Christ.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is — his good, pleasing, and perfect will.
Bring your whole life to God. Take on new kingdom habits as you aim toward Christ, and allow this new way of being human to develop your desires and reshape your loves. In that, you find that this new pattern of living begins to change how you see reality — so much so that you become able to discern what God's desires are, because you know him. Because you love him and are moved by him.
When your imagination is captured by the beauty and mercy of God — when that is where you long and where you are moved — you begin to see the world differently. Perhaps yourself differently.
The goal of Christian worship is people who are alive to God, whose loves are rightly ordered, and who can look at tomorrow and know that God will meet them there.
That's where we're going next week.
