(4) The Question of Worship

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendour of his holiness.

                       (Ps.29:2)

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.  Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God.  It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

(Ps.100:1-3)

Who will not fear you, Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.

(Rev.15:4)

We thought briefly in a previous study about the distinctions between worship and evangelism.  In one sense those aren't hard and fast distinctions – worship is intrinsically missional, and evangelism is a form of worship.  But in terms of centre of gravity, it has some traction.  Once evangelism becomes something that we do intentionally and deliberately elsewhere in the life of the Church, we liberate our Services of Divine Worship to be what they are supposed to be. 

Someone once said: there are no right answers to the wrong question.  ‘How do we make our services accessible to people who aren’t Christians?’ is the wrong question.  It can’t be done and shouldn’t be tried, and if you succeeded, it would no longer be Christian worship.  We might feel I Cor.14:24-25 challenges this.  But this passage says precisely nothing about the ‘accessibility’ or otherwise of the service to the unbeliever.  It speaks of the presence of God at work in the context of worship to convict an ‘unbeliever’ or ‘enquirer’ of their sin - perhaps the least culturally relevant thing we could ask for.

We’re not advocating, of course, deliberate irrelevance, or even cultivated non-relevance, as if idiosyncrasy is a virtue we should pursue.  Neither is it a mandate for traditionalism.  But it is to suggest that while a service of Divine Worship should be genuinely incarnational and therefore culturally authentic, its purpose, expression and (most importantly) content is not primarily shaped by that culture.  We don’t come to worship with a blank sheet of paper, free to design something that ‘fits’ us.  Worship should redeem and shape our culture, not be captivated and shaped by it.   There is ancient wisdom in thousands of years of Christian worship (seen in the Scriptures and since) that it is utter folly to disregard, and even more so in the name of anything as superficial, transitory and unstable as accessibility to our contemporary (unbelieving) culture.

Here is a series of propositions that seem radical to the point of incredulity; but which for centuries were the working assumption of every Church in the world.

• The LORD’s day should be set aside (as far as possible given that many Christians over the generations have been slaves) for worship, prayer, fellowship, teaching and study of Scriptures and Christian service.  If there was no other time when the saints could gather, they would do so before sunrise and the beginning of the working day.  This gathering was preceded by prayer, teaching and worship on the Saturday evening (even today in the Russian Orthodox Church, if you do not attend Vespers on Saturday evening, you will not be given Communion on Sunday).

• Liturgy is a powerful restorative and formational tool in our worship, not an inevitable mark of inauthenticity.  It can draw us into a deeper experience of worship than we would fashion left to our own devices. It’s worth bearing in mind that every revival in the history of the British Church took place in the context of liturgical worship - many in fact in Churches who knew only the BCP!!

• God has revealed what is acceptable worship, and we aren’t free to re-design a worship service according to personal preference.  There are non-negotiable components, and worship is less authentically Christian if they are absent. 

• The integrity of a worship service isn’t primarily dependent on my ‘really meaning it’, or giving voice to what is in ‘my’ heart (!).  Worship isn’t about me and my story, it is about God and His story.

• The purpose of a service is not limited to my declaring the glory of God.  It also includes – amongst other dynamics - the Spirit’s work of breaking the power of sin and re-forming me; the renewal of covenant; my hearing and responding to God in word and sacrament; envisioning, training and investing me with the spiritual resources for life and mission as a disciple of Jesus; public confession; establishing Godly ritual as a foundation for personal holiness and devotion…

That all this and more is at stake should make us very careful about disregarding the wisdom of our spiritual forbears, still less, the Scriptures themselves.

Questions:

What would be the impact on the ministry and mission of MIE if we re-captured the Sabbath nature of the LORD’s Day?  Do you think the main act of a Church’s worship can be moved from Sunday?  Why / why not?

What makes an act of worship authentically ‘Christian’? 

What sort of things might mean that a worship service actually does more harm than good (the phrase is taken from I Cor.11:17, but can other things make a worship service damaging apart from what Paul is specifically addressing at Corinth)?  Do you think worship services at MIE do more harm or more good?  Why?

Read Heb.12:18-29

Do you think we should be more or less awe-struck in coming to Mount Zion rather than Mount Sinai?  How would that affect us as we come to an act of corporate worship?  How can we cultivate that?  What difference does it make that we join with the Church triumphant in worship (v.23)?

What does it mean to ‘refuse Him who speaks’ (v.25)?  What does this teach us about God?  What did it look like at Sinai?  What might it look like in our own experience?  Why is it such a serious danger?

What is the shaking spoken of in vv.26-27?  What is the connection between this, and God’s speaking? …and our worship?

What does it mean to ‘worship God acceptably with reverence and awe’ (v.28)?  How could we cultivate these characteristics in our own approach to worship?  What would it mean if they were absent from a service?  How could we tell?

How does the way God is described in this passage shape how we approach Him in worship (the Living God, Judge of all, Him who speaks, a consuming fire)?  Why is the role of Jesus as Mediator so important (v.24)?

Memory Passage:

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”  The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”  Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

John 4:23-26

For further reflection:

In our cultural context we tend to privatise and individualise the very concept of worship.  We think that the important part of our spiritual life is our ‘personal’ relationship with Jesus. We then struggle at times to know where the corporate worship of the Church fits in, if it does at all.  And even when we are at Church we can easily think of the fact that others are there as simply an accident of geography.  We don’t think of what God is doing in ‘us’; but still in terms of what God is doing in ‘me’ in this room in which there happens to be other people. 

It’s hard to convey how out of step this is with historic Christian thinking, which saw the public and corporate worship of the Church as the fountain head out of which all personal devotion and discipleship flows.  Perhaps the tension can be best exposed by considering a sermon preached by Rev. David Clarkson, a minister in London in 1680s.  One week he took as his text Ps. 87:2, The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the other dwellings of Jacob – and he entitled the sermon: ‘Public worship to be preferred before private’.

He argued that public worship is more central to the heart of God – and to our own  spirituality - than private, personal devotions.  It sounds strange, perhaps even incomprehensible to us.  But Clarkson develops 12 arguments from the Scriptures why he thinks this is the case,  including the idea that the LORD is more glorified in public worship than private; that there is more spiritual advantage in the use of public worship; that the Lord works his greatest works in public worship; that public worship is nearest resemblance to the worship of heaven…  After all, you don’t read of people in heaven heading off for their personal devotions!