Defining worship by what it is not

A couple of months ago I was doing a little study with a particular question in mind, What is worship? I found that a lot of the words that are translated into "worship" come from greek and hebrew words that often mean to bow down, which was catching my attention especially at the time because of the book "Facedown."

However, I also found that in the Torah (also called the Pentatuch, the first five books of the bible) God seems to talk a lot about how not to worship or who not to worship, in order to establish how His people should worship Him and Him alone. I encourage you to go onto biblegateway.com and type in worship for a search. You'll see what I'm talking about within the first two pages of results. There's quite a few facedown type examples as well.

These passages about idolatry bring to mind the fact that we were made to worship, so if we don't worship the One who made us, the One who saves us, then we will worship someone or something lesser. It is very easy for us humans to fall into giving our worship to something other than our true Creator, no matter what culture we're from. However, it seems a lot of American culture commits idolatry in such a way that we don't recognize it as idolatry.

I remember an American missionary to Nigeria saying how when he first got there he saw a lot of the people in the village burning fires at night up in the hills and performing ancestral worship, witchcraft, etc. during the week. Then he saw a lot of these same people coming to church on Sundays to worship God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And He thought to himself what hypocrisy, and what a mess this was and it needed to be dealt with. Then on a visit back to the U.S. he realized the same thing happens here with many Christians, but it just doesn't look as obvious as the African's idolatry, which somehow I think might make it harder to break free from. Then many of the same people that worship those lesser American idols during the rest of the week show up to church on Sunday to pay a little bit of homage to the One who says "You shall have no other gods before Me."

What idols do we bow down to, give our hearts to, our minds to, raise our hands in praise for, offer our bodies to, give our time to, depend on for our provision? What needs to happen for this to change (boy that's a loaded question, but it needs to be addressed)?