In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a parable about a raving man who storms into a shop screaming that God is dead. “We have killed him,” the man howls, “you and I. We are all his murderers.” Nietzsche was not describing a literal death. He was an atheist. What he was celebrating was the slow evaporation of God’s authority over Western culture. In his view, civilization had finally outgrown its need for a deity, and that was cause for celebration.

We live in the world Nietzsche helped build, and the results speak for themselves. A civilization that severs itself from its Creator is a civilization capable of producing the kind of darkness we encounter every day. Nietzsche called it freedom. We know better.

Here is what Nietzsche refused to believe. The second person of the Trinity, fully God and fully human, actually did die. His was not a metaphorical death or an idea losing cultural relevance. The eternal Son of God wrapped himself in human flesh, was nailed to a Roman cross, stopped breathing, and was placed in a borrowed grave. The divine person of Jesus Christ underwent real, physical, human death, and that death restructured everything about how God relates to sinners. That death is the reason for Good Friday.

Matthew 27:45–54 puts us at the foot of the cross and forces us to watch. What we see is a sequence of responses to the death of the Son of God: the natural world convulses, bystanders taunt a forsaken Savior, the religious order is dismantled, and life breaks through. Taken together, these responses reveal a single, staggering truth: when the Son of God dies, the world that refused him fractures, and those who bow before him receive life.

There is a scene in Revelation where twenty-four elders fall on their faces before the throne of God, cast their crowns at his feet, and say, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11). These heavenly beings are not performing or fulfilling an obligation. They are simply responding to what they see, and they see glory. Lots of it. They have looked at the God who sits on the throne, and the only thing their mouths can do is declare who he is.

That scene is meant to be the destination of all Christian prayer. Each time we bow our heads, we are approaching the same throne those elders are prostrate before, but we don’t always approach with the same reverence. For many of us, prayer begins and ends with what we need. We come to God with a list: fix this, heal that, provide this, remove that. While there is nothing wrong with bringing needs to God since he invites it and even commands it, if our prayers never move beyond our needs, we have missed the most important part of the conversation. The most important part of prayer is not about us at all. Prayer is about him.

Psalm 100 is one of the clearest instructives in all of Scripture to reorient our prayers around the worthiness of God. It is only five verses long, but it answers two questions that every praying person needs to consider: Why does God deserve our honor? And how do we bring it to him?