This is a sharper question than it sounds — and C.S. Lewis admitted he wrestled with it himself for years before the answer came.
Lewis's breakthrough
Lewis noticed something obvious about praise: "We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment." Lovers praise the beloved. Music lovers praise the symphony. Friends praise the meal. Praise is not flattery extracted from the praiser; it is the natural overflow of recognizing something genuinely worthy of love.
A genuinely egotistical god demanding praise to fill his hollow self would be unworthy of worship. The Christian God is praiseworthy precisely because he is not seeking ego-strokes. The Father, Son, and Spirit have lived in eternal mutual love before there was a single creature to worship them.
Why command worship, then?
Because we are made for it, and refusing it deforms us.
A flower turned away from the sun dies. A creature made to be filled with God who refuses God shrinks into something less than human. Worship is medicine, not flattery. The First Commandment is not God's vanity insurance — it is the foundation of human freedom.
The freedom angle
The moment you worship anything less than God — money, sex, status, country, ideology, self — you become enslaved to it. Idol worship always ends in human sacrifice, sometimes literal (Molech, Carthage) and often hidden (the lives we sacrifice for our careers, addictions, image, scrolling). Tim Keller spent a whole book (Counterfeit Gods) tracing this.
To worship God alone is the only way to be free from every other tyranny. The God who commands worship is the only Being whose worship liberates rather than enslaves.
David Foster Wallace saw this
Wallace was not a Christian, but he understood: "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."
The question is not whether you worship; it is what. And every choice except God turns the worshiper into a smaller version of the thing worshiped.
The Orthodox lens
For the Fathers, worship is humanity's true vocation — the activity for which we were made. The Divine Liturgy is not God needing us; it is God inviting us into the joy that already fills heaven. Worship is theosis in action: in worship, we become more fully what we are meant to be.
Revelation 4–5 shows the eternal worship of heaven — not a bored chorus singing forced praise, but a celebration so glorious that the crowns are flung in joy. That is what we are being invited into.
St. Augustine
"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." The restlessness of the unworshiping heart is itself evidence that we were made for this.
Tim Keller's phrase
God commands worship not because he needs it but because we need to give it. He is the only Being in the universe whose self-love is identical to love for us — because to love him truly is to receive love from him.
A pastoral word
If God's command to worship feels like a king demanding tribute, you have never met him. It is more like a father saying, "Look at me, child — look at the source of everything you love — and let yourself feel the joy of it."
That is worship. That is what you were made for. The Liturgy is the place where humanity finally stops worshiping smaller things and starts worshiping the One who can actually carry the weight of our love.