Why does God want worship? Doesn't that seem needy?

¹The Mighty One, God, Yahweh, speaks, and calls the earth from sunrise to sunset.

²Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines out.

³Our God comes, and does not keep silent. A fire devours before him. It is very stormy around him.

⁴He calls to the heavens above, to the earth, that he may judge his people:

⁵“Gather my saints together to me, those who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.”

⁶The heavens shall declare his righteousness, for God himself is judge. Selah.

⁷“Hear, my people, and I will speak; Israel, and I will testify against you. I am God, your God.

⁸I don’t rebuke you for your sacrifices. Your burnt offerings are continually before me.

⁹I have no need for a bull from your stall, nor male goats from your pens.

¹⁰For every animal of the forest is mine, and the livestock on a thousand hills.

¹¹I know all the birds of the mountains. The wild animals of the field are mine.

¹²If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

¹³Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?

¹⁴Offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Pay your vows to the Most High.

¹⁵Call on me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you will honor me.”

¹⁶But to the wicked God says, “What right do you have to declare my statutes, that you have taken my covenant on your lips,

¹⁷since you hate instruction, and throw my words behind you?

¹⁸When you saw a thief, you consented with him, and have participated with adulterers.

¹⁹“You give your mouth to evil. Your tongue frames deceit.

²⁰You sit and speak against your brother. You slander your own mother’s son.

²¹You have done these things, and I kept silent. You thought that I was just like you. I will rebuke you, and accuse you in front of your eyes.

²²“Now consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you into pieces, and there be no one to deliver.

²³Whoever offers the sacrifice of thanksgiving glorifies me, and prepares his way so that I will show God’s salvation to him.”

²²Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus, and said, “You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things.

²³For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I announce to you.

²⁴The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands,

²⁵neither is he served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things.

²⁶He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings,

²⁷that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

²⁸‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’

²⁹Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by art and design of man.

³⁰The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent,

³¹because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead.”