“I was made for this!”, I said, sighing with a deep sense of pleasure as if I ate a bunch of fresh strawberries on a hot summer day. 

For me as a teenager this was not an abnormal experience. I ran into the extraordinary value of singing the Bible when I was around thirteen years old. Almost every night I would bust out my guitar and sing a certain portion of scripture that I was studying at that time. From these encounters with Jesus, I discovered three things about myself when I worshiped Him.

1.) I loved knowing that the Lord was proud of me. Occasionally when I would sing the Bible in my room my dad would slip in without me noticing and lay down in the presence of God until I was finished. To this day, even when I worship by myself, I feel like someone is in the room and He is immensely proud of me. Like a father who watches his son play baseball or his baby who takes their first steps, God just couldn’t get His eyes off of me.  It made me sing from a different perspective because I knew I belonged to someone. This made my heart full of joy even when I felt nothing from Him. 

2.) I loved when my heart was filled with revelation. The sons of Korah described this very well when they sang, “My heart is overflowing with a good theme; I recite my composition concerning the King; My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.” (Ps. 45:1). When my heart was overflowing with fresh revelation, the English vocabulary fell short to describe what was transpiring in my heart. It felt like taking a drug, but instead of deadening the senses, it resurrected them to a whole new dimension. 

3.) I loved it when people encountered God in the room. Obviously, this specifically happened during times of corporate worship. I remember one time when I led worship and a man was weeping under the presence of the Lord for thirty minutes. In these moments I realized that God put this calling inside me not just for myself, but for the entire body of Christ. 

In these moments, I realized that God made me to worship. God did not primarily create me to do something for Him. He created me so that my entire life would be to love and delight in Him.