I was recently sick as a dog. I ran a 102-degree-or-higher fever for a week. My throat broke out in cankersores. It wasn't a fun time. But it wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying to fight this illness; I was going to the doctor, taking medication, drinking tons of water, but nothing seemed to help.

It turns out that what was originally thought to be a bacterial infection was a viral infection. Thus, the prescribed solution to the illness wasn’t working and would never have worked because the disease had been misidentified.

I feel like my sickness can offer us insight into the problems that seem to plague worship within the church. One person says our worship is dead because our music is dead; we need new, fresh songs to bring people into worship. Another person sees the issue as a need for fervent emotion in our singing; we need to really feel what we are singing and then we would really begin to worship.

In the midst of all this discussion, I wonder if we don’t have a wrong diagnosis and are therefore being prescribed wrong solutions. In order to offer a true diagnosis, we need to establish some basic facts.

First, you are a worshipper. That statement is true of any person anywhere who is reading this article. I don’t need to know if you go to church or what church you attend if you do go. You are a person whose heart is directed and moved and motivated by something, and that thing—whether it is a job or a person or a pleasure—is what you worship. The Bible’s primary question isn’t if you will worship, but what you will worship. You are a worshipper.

Second, not only are you a worshipper, you are either a true worshipper or a false worshipper. In the place of worship that should be reserved for God alone, there exists a tendency in our hearts to worship the creation rather than the Creator. Rather then loving God as the Giver of all good gifts, we tend to love the gifts more than the Giver. We are constantly loving wrong things or even loving right things wrongly. To paraphrase John Calvin, our heart is an idol factory.

Idol worship seems to be a foreign concept to most modern Americans. We don’t tend to have a large household idol in our backyard or a shrine in the living room. We don’t head to a pagan worship temple or sacrifice our children to false gods. So we don’t have traditional pagan idols, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t living in a culture full of idols.

What are some typical modern idols? How many people do you know who are killing themselves to keep up with the Jones family next door? How deeply have we mortgaged our life in worship of status? How much of our disposable income is being dumped into the purchase of more and more stuff? How many people have recently used the conversion to high-definition broadcasting as justification to buy a gigantic advertisement machine we call a flat-screen TV?

How many dads head home from a hard day at the office so they can forsake their real life family to worship the idol of entertainment? And don’t try and tell me that we don’t know about child sacrifice—there are day-cares in the Des Moines area packed with kids who are being sacrificed as their parents pursue the almighty idol of career success.

As we can see, we do have a worship problem, but it is a problem that extends far deeper than issues surrounding musical style or emotion in worship. The disease goes far deeper; our worship problem is a problem at the deepest levels of our heart. In order to be freed to truly worship God, we don’t fundamentally need better music or even a deeper emotional experience.We need to be set free from slavery to idols. We need a Savior.

The good news of the death of Jesus Christ for sinners is the true prescription for our most basic worship problem. Only Jesus can bridge the gap between God and man by satisfying the demands of God’s justice. Only Jesus has the power to set us free from our false gods by giving us a new heart and putting his Spirit within us. Only Jesus can now be the mediator, the connector, between God and man.

In our contemporary worship discussions, we can easily fall prey to misdiagnosis and, therefore, bad solutions. Music alone can never usher us into the presence of God; Jesus is the one mediator between God and man. Certainly our emotions should be stirred as we contemplate the death of Christ for us, but it is his Passion, not our passion, that has brought us near to God. The true solution to true worship is found only in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Mark Vance is the Music & Ministries Pastor at Saylorville Baptist Church in Des Moines, Iowa.