Answer: That is a great question, because it gets to the heart of what it means to be a Christian. Many people around the world honor Jesus as a great teacher (and He was!) or as a prophet (He was that too!), but to be a Christian is to go a step further. We say that Jesus is God Incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. And that means we worship Him.
For Biblical evidence of Jesus’s divine status, we need look no further than the prologue to the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.” (John 1:1-3 ESV) Here we see that Jesus participated in the very creation of the world, and creation is an act reserved to God alone.
Some people have said that Jesus Himself never claimed to be God. But when we read the Gospels, we discover that Jesus angered the religious leaders of His day precisely because they recognized that by His words and actions, He behaved as though He possessed divine authority. For example, in the second chapter of Mark, Jesus heals a paralytic and forgives his sins. Some of the scribes who witnessed this accused Jesus of blasphemy, because “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7) This is just one of many instances in the New Testament where Jesus says or does something that demonstrates that He understood Himself as divine and as One with the Father.
The Christian church has taken the question of Jesus’s divinity and His humanity and the relationship between them very seriously. Two of the great ecumenical creeds of the church, the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D. and the Chalcedonian Creed of 451 A.D. are products of earnest wrestling with the writings of Scripture (Old and New Testament) and the worship and prayer practices of the first followers of Jesus. These creeds and other doctrinal teachings guide the church and are essential to helping us interpret the Bible and shaping our own worship and lives of discipleship. But they are also evidence of how central that very question, “Do you worship Jesus?” was to the identity of early Christians, and it remains so to this day.
That is why this is such a great question! To ask if we ought to worship Jesus is not just as abstract question about His divinity. It is to ask if He is Lord, and if the answer is yes, that means we ought not just to worship Him but to love Him, serve Him, and follow Him with all our hearts.