What's with God and worship?!

I got the following dialogue about worship from my Stanford campus pastor, Glen Davis. As usual, Glen invents an incredibly witty and funny way of explaining difficult concepts. He is one guy I really respect for being truly intellectually honest about faith! Hope you enjoy the following as much as I did!

Q: Does God need us?
A: No. God did not create us because he was lonely or lacking in anything. He had perfect community within the trinity before creating anything.

Q: I thought maybe he fed on our worship or something.
A: No. You've been playing too much Dungeons & Dragons.

Q: Then why did God create?
A: For the same reason that an artist paints or a singer sings. For the joy of it.

Q: So why should God care whether we worship him or not?
A: Because God is love.

Q: You didn't answer my question. What does that have to do with worship?
A: Yes I did, I just didn't unpack it. Here's how it goes: love is to desire good for someone else. God is the ultimate good and so he desires Himself for us.

Q: That sounds fishy. How is worshiping God good for us?
A: Let's hit it from a different angle - God's highest value is God. That's not arrogance--that's a simple realization of truth. God understands that He is greater than any thing in the universe (or indeed the whole universe put together), both from a standpoint of raw power and from a standpoint of moral perfection. If God were not intelligent enough to understand his own greatness and not truth-loving enough to admit it he would be a very poor God indeed. In fact, to not recognize his own perfection would be evidence of horrendous imperfection.

This is where we come in. When we don't acknowledge God's greatness and give due honor to his perfection (which is another way of describing worship), we reveal our horrendous imperfection. Moreover, we begin to build our lives on false assumptions--assumptions that are dangerous. We begin to ignore the existence of a real and binding moral code external to ourselves, and so we take immoral actions and reap painful consequences. Ultimately, we reap the final consequence and are consigned to eternity apart from God (a fate more horrendous that we can conceive of, for we are not truly separated from him now).

Because God loves us, He doesn't want that fate for us.

Q: Saying how not worshiping is bad is not the same thing as saying how worshiping is good.
A: True enough. The flip side of the coin is that God wants to help us overcome our horrendous imperfection. He wants us to become morally admirable, even as he is. We have to at least admire moral perfection to make any progress towards it. There are other ingredients, but not admiring or desiring moral perfection will certainly stymie progress.

To admire it is to admire God, which returns us to the idea of worship.

Q: Perhaps. What does that have to do with evangelism?
A: Everything--we aspire to moral perfection (or at least sustained moral improvement) and so we desire to become more like God. God wants people to worship him and so we desire the same thing for much the same reasons.

Q: Much the same reasons? What reasons are different for us?
A: An additional motive for us is the desire to bring God pleasure.

Q: Not only do I have to worship him but I have to make him happy as well? How neurotic is this guy?
A: You miss the point. First, we don't have to worship him. We have a choice, and the choice (like all choices) has consequences. We either understand the nature of reality accurately or we do not. Upon understanding it, we either act congruently or we do not.

Second, we don't have to make him happy. But what else can you get for the guy who has everything? Bringing him pleasure is about all that we can offer.

Q: Why should I care whether or not I offer him anything?
A: Let's see--gratitude for being created, gratitude for being forgiven, gratitude for giving us help in our journey towards being like him, and that whole love thing.

Q: That whole love thing?
A: Yeah. We ought to love him because love is moral. Loving him means we want what's best for him. Bringing him pleasure is undeniably better than bringing him pain.

Q: But why doesn't that motivate me?
A: That brings us back to the whole horrendous imperfection thing...