The three gifts - Page 3

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So too with our response to Our Blessed Lord as God made Man.  “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God…” (Matthew 4:10) and worship is adoration, the total adoring response of human beings to the One Eternal God as he has revealed himself.

Worship is not a matter of our feelings or emotions, rather, it is essentially a conscious action of the will, whereby in adoring love we deliberately offer to God our whole selves, all that we are and all that we do, for him to possess and to use as his very own.  Thus true worship issues in true obedience.  As Archbishop William Temple said, it is not so much that worship helps conduct, as that conduct tests worship. (1)

But love for Our Blessed Lord cannot fail to be accompanied by penitence for our rebelliousness and our acts of rebellion against him, and for our many failures to respond by our loving obedience to him who loved us and gave himself for us.  And so, as the myrrh reminds us of the crucifixion and death of Christ – the price that he paid for coming to save us from the power of sin in ourselves – it symbolises also our penitence for our own particular sins which he came to save us from.

True penitence for our disobedience to our King and our God, followed by a determined and practical effort to amend, must always be an essential proof of our love.  To adopt the attitude, consciously or unconsciously, of “I couldn’t care less about my sins” when confronted with the crucifixion, is to reject Our Saviour himself.  Indeed without both penitence and obedience, worship is not worship at all.  It is simply an empty formal act unconnected either with the kind of person one is or with the kind of life one leads – it is something loveless and therefore valueless.