Bottom-Up Worshiper
by John Fischer

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God… He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together. (Colossians 1:15 & 17)

Last week we noted the faith of Templeton Prize winner, Charles Townes. I’ve run into an additional source of praise and worship from yet another renowned physicist who believes in God. His name is Sir John Polkinghorne, and he has been honored for his remarkable achievements in mathematical physics by being appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in England. He was part of the team that discovered the quark (the most fundamental particle of matter yet discovered). He has since left his post at Cambridge to study theology and serve as an Anglican priest. The title of one of his lectures is “The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker.”

I love that title. It makes me think about a different angle on worship. Often when we think about worship, we think about something lofty. We think of God in the heavens, and how He reaches down to us here below. It’s definitely top-down worship. We look up to see Him; we lift our hands, trying to meet Him reaching down to us. We start with God and we remember how He has worked throughout history, and how He has invaded our lives with His love. That’s top-down worship. It starts with God and seeks how a belief in Him colors the decisions and details of our lives. This is definitely one aspect of worship but not the only one.

Worship is also bottom-up. We can start by observing our world, our lives, and our history and begin to find God’s hand in all this. This is what you would expect from a scientist. Scientists begin with observation at the most basic level. They start with particulars and try and build conclusions or theories based on those particulars. For a scientist to believe in God (especially one who helped discover the universe’s most fundamental elements) means he started by observing the universe from the ground up, and based on all the particulars he gathered, God become his final conclusion. There was no other way for him to correlate all the facts that have been gathered by all the scientists over all time.

I would like to encourage you to be bottom-up worshiper. Such a person would be finding God everywhere, not just waiting for church or the worship music to start. God makes sense of our everyday lives. Everything from ground up holds something about God and something that can point us to Him. It’s a matter of opening our eyes and realizing that when it comes to worship, class is always in session.


John Fischer is the Senior Writer for Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotionals. He resides in Southern California with his wife, Marti and son, Chandler. They also have two adult children, Christopher and Anne. John is a published author and popular speaker.