God is the expert in creating something so small and simple, but with tremendous and unimaginably exponential potential. 

Close your eyes right now and think of an acorn.  OK.  Most of us pictured this tiny nut with a cool hat-looking cap, right?

Within this small and fragile nut is contained everything necessary to grow an oak tree 100′ tall and 4′ wide producing 10,000 more acorns every year creating an entire forest of oak trees that keep reproducing from now until Jesus returns.

I bet that not many of us, if any, pictured a dense forest of mighty oak trees when we thought of an acorn, right?  However, given the right conditions, that’s exactly what I’m holding in the palm of my hand right now.

If I consider this nothing more than a nut with a cool hat-looking cap and leave it sitting on my table as a fall decoration, it will never become anything more.  It will never reach its full potential, but will eventually dry up and die becoming nothing more.

God’s word says about us that:

Isaiah 61:3b

3 …They will be called oaks of righteousness,

    a planting of the Lord

    for the display of his splendor.

However, if we never see ourselves as God sees us, if we never believe that we are who God says that we are, then we will die an acorn.  Not only will we never become all that we were created to be, but we will also fail to leave behind a fruitful legacy.

This morning, God is looking to stretch our minds and expand our understanding of another simple subject.  This very simple subject possesses tremendous transforming power if we would just allow ourselves to understand it for what God created it to be.  If we could just tear down the box that we’ve placed it tightly and neatly inside of, it would radically transform us and how we view everything!

Alright, so close your eyes again and clear your mind.  Now, what comes to mind when I say the simple word: worship?  OK.  Now erase from your mind that very idea of what worship is! 

That thought was a tiny, silly-hatted acorn.  God sees a dense and mighty oak forest to explore by generations behind us and one that endures for all eternity when He sees worship!  He sees a conduit wide open for His very power and Presence to be unleashed in and through our lives when He sees worship! 

It’s an open Heaven!  We have to break the barriers within our mindset of what worship is.  We have to stop boxing it into a church service or an emotional feeling or a music genre.  We need to uncage worship and see it as God sees it.

So, what is worship?  It’s so much bigger than any definition, but as a starting point, Merriam-Webster  defines it as:

Worship – extravagant respect or admiration for or devotion to an object of esteem

We were made to worship.

We were created to worship the Creator.

We can’t help but worship.

Every person is worshipping someone or something at this very moment.

Right now, worship is being expressed all across the earth.

The question is, “What or who are we worshipping?”

What or who is receiving our extravagant respect or admiration or devotion?

If we’re honest, it might be a little embarrassing; kind of like this confrontation…

* Spongebob/Patrick Goofy Goober worship *

To be honest, we worship a lot of silly things in a lot of silly ways.  However, as the elders in Heaven cry out in worship before the throne of Christ day and night:

Revelation 4:11

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,

    to receive glory and honor and power,

for you created all things,

    and by your will they were created

    and have their being.”

God is the only one worthy of our worship.  In fact, He’s worthy of so much more than any act of worship that we could ever express.  What is worship, though?

The Hebrew word that the Bible primarily uses (175 times) for our word English is the word Šāḥâ which simply means to bow down.  To worship is to bow down our lives in order to exalt something or someo