Worship God: Our Human Duty and Responsibility

Whenever spring arrives, there is beauty everywhere to behold. How wonderful is all of God's Creation and it is here for us to enjoy and to preserve.

And here we are, creatures of God; created in His Image and set apart from the rest of living things because we are created in God's Image, endowed with a soul, a conscience, a will.

With our creation came also a responsibility and a duty: to worship our Creator for He is the source of all that we are. Indeed, we were created for that purpose out of love.

While as human beings, our purpose in life is to worship God, as Christians we have been given all the tools needed to carry out that duty and responsibility.

God, through His Son, Jesus Christ, revealed Himself to us in a way that we could see Him. That way was and is through His Son.

And through that revelation, we can see God's presence more clearly in all of His Creation. Also, what we see more clearly is that we live in a sacramental world.

This clarity comes through the Sacrifice of His Son to rescue us from our rebellious nature, redeem us, and make us whole again as children of God, adopted by and joined to our Heavenly Father through infinite love.

The sacraments left to the Church are reflections, in a real sense, of all of God's Creation: the "outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace."

God used the familiar to bring to us the invisible, unfamiliar, and, in particular, His Grace through the operation of the Holy Spirit.

The familiar: just as the leaves and blooms of trees in the spring are an outward sign of the life within, so it is that the outward signs of the sacraments of the Church, as in the water of baptism, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the Laying-On of Hands of Confirmation, and so forth, signify that "inward and spiritual Grace given unto us; ordained by Jesus Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof."

Of all God's creatures, we are set apart as rational beings, capable of discerning good from evil, and capable of truly loving and caring. We are even capable of accepting or denying our own Creator.

Thus, accepting God as our Creator, we come face-to-face with our duty and responsibility to worship Him and to offer ourselves to Him in the spirit of that love by which we were created and are sustained.

In His Church, we come together in communion with all the Saints, joining together with the Angels and Archangels, and the whole company of Heaven to worship and glorify God in the form and manner given to us, wherein, we are fed and nourished with the Bread of Heaven, the Body and Blood of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

To worship God: our human duty and responsibility from which all else flows.