Love, valuing, appreciating vs Submission

[Thumpalumpacus]

Sorry all I could think of when I read the Title was BDSM.

Seriously, I think worship implies a kind of submission. That god asks for worship rather tha love, suggests something about the people imaging god.

Worship is high adoration. It's the highest classification of adoration and honoring. That means it's love. If people worship God and act of adoration to him, that's an act of love.

Submission implies they do it out of a sense of duty.

Although we should love God, we shouldn't love God because we should love him, we should love him out of love for who he is and it shouldn't be out of a sense of duty.

Worship of God should be in the spirit of love.

The corollary to that is that if your god loves us, he wouldn't demand our abasement.

I love my son. I don't demand he worship me, I don't demand that he structure his life around my rules. On the contrary, I revel in his growth into a young man with his own mind; I joy in his successes, and I commiserate in his failures, and I try to help him draw the appropriate lessons from both success and failure. I don't stop loving him because he gets angry at me, I don't stop loving him because he breaks my rules, and I certainly don't think of torture and torment as appropriate punishments.

That is my understanding of paternal love. I don't want him to worship me.