Since man was created for God, his primary and most fundamental duty is to acknowledge God as his Creator and the Source of his very being. We do this through the virtue known as religion. Religion is a subset of the virtue of justice. Justice means giving to someone what that person rightly merits or deserves. When that person is God, religion is that branch of justice that involves giving to God what He rightly deserves. And what does God deserve from us, His creatures? Everything!
Everything good that we have comes from God. God is the source of every good thought, word, and deed. Everything that is holy, noble, and true has God as its origin. In the Sacred Scriptures, this truth is revealed by Our Lord Himself when He says to His disciples, "Without Me, you can do nothing" (Jn 15:5). Truly, we can do nothing good without God.
Even our very own existence and being depend on Him in the most radical way. If He were not to hold us up in existence at this very moment, then we would immediately cease to exist and would return to the nothingness from which we came. God is pure Being, and we are not. We only have being (existence) because God, in His goodness, has graciously bestowed it upon us.
God created man out of nothing (or, to be more precise, as the Book of Genesis recounts, God formed man "from the slime of the earth" (Gen. 2:7). Yet, in creating us, He gave us value and worth and dignity. Our dignity as human beings comes from the fact that we were created in the image and likeness of God. And the fundamental way in which we acknowledge this truth is through our acts of worship. The worship of God is therefore a necessity of the virtue of religion (justice that is due to God).
To worship or adore God belongs to all creatures endowed with an intellect and free will. Plants, animals, and other created beings (whether animate or inanimate) cannot worship God, because they do not have an intellect and will. Only beings that are spiritual can freely engage in an act of divine worship of the Creator. Thus, of all created reality, only the angels and men are capable of rendering to God true worship or adoration.
To worship God is the highest thing that man can do in this life, for our worship is an acknowledgement of our complete and total dependence on God. Wanting to be independent from God, wanting to be "free" of God, is a diabolical temptation. It is based on a false concept of freedom and liberty. The great paradox that our Catholic Faith teaches us is this: the more completely we surrender to God and depend on Him, and the more completely we conform ourselves to His Holy Will, the freer we become. And the contrary is also true: the more we seek to become "free of God" and independent of Him, the less free we become.
Satan was the first creature who rebelled against God and sought independence from Him; and yet Satan is the least free of all God's creatures, precisely because he has chosen to reject the Source of all true freedom. Satan is a prisoner of his own rejection of God. Those who embrace atheism and false religions have the same fate as that of Satan -- and this is why they will never be truly happy.
On the other hand, who was the freest of all creatures? It was the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Our Saviour and Lord. Our Lady shows us that to serve God is to be truly free. And the first and most fundamental way of serving Him is through divine worship. This is why the Catholic Church has the Sunday obligation, by which all the faithful are obliged to attend Holy Mass on Sundays. In doing so, they are fulfilling their duty before God of rendering to Him true worship and adoration.
To say that man was created for the worship of God means essentially that we were created for the Holy Eucharist; we were created for the Blessed Sacrament!
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