Worship is Inevitable

At the heart of the Fall is the self-love that destroys our God-centeredness. Implicitly, of course, all failure to worship God is neither more nor less than idolatry. Because we are finite, we will inevitably worship something or someone. In The Brothers Karamzaov, Dostoyevsky was not wrong to write, "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship." Yet because we are fallen, we gravitate to false gods: a god that is domesticated and manageable, perhaps a material god, perhaps an abstract god like power or pleasure, or a philosophical god like Marxism or democracy or postmodernism. But worship we will.

- D.A. Carson, Worship by the Book, p. 35