Glory of God, Worship

The heart of man in doing what God desires.

“I delight to do your pleasure, My God. Your law is within my heart.”

Psalm 40:8

How many ways can we disqualify ourselves from being the person we know God is calling us to be? We say things like: “I could obey God better if I just knew more about God. If I understood myself better. If I could deal with sin and get some victory. If I could get over the past. If I could be content. And a thousand other variations on that theme ….” We know that this isn’t faith. It is unbelief and excuse and defeat. These are some difficult, doomed ways of trying to live for God in our own ability. And it never works very well.

Faith is delighting in God. It is knowing God personally and intimately as a Friend. It is loving God with all our heart.

Faith shakes the believer by bringing him to see God’s grandeur and allowing him to be devastated by God’s holiness. Faith is how we become a person who connects with God. By faith we come to understand who God is. It brings us to claim a close relationship with God by which we experience all that God desires for us to know about himself.

Faith, from first to last, is knowing the unseen God. Knowing God is more than finding facts about God. It is knowing who he is, what he is like and knowing what he loves. True faith brings us to a point where we actually know what pleases him the most. This short verse in Psalm 40:8 is a picture of what faith looks like in a true believer.

Look at this language carefully:

“I delight to do your pleasure, My God.” He calls God by the one-word name, Elohâ. This is the name of God, Elohim, added to the personal pronoun “my.” It is simply, “My God.”

Many translations handle that Hebrew word, “My-God” as an oath or a prayer, a cry: “O My God.” But that is making a tender and personal name for God into something it is not.

This line of testimony is a short-course in knowing God. He says directly, personally to God, “I delight to do your pleasure, My God.” He is using the language of prayer and the language of a profound and precious friendship. This is most beautiful.

The Psalmist is telling us how in his life of faith and service he succeeds in “doing” what God delights in. He begins with the deep under-girding of the law of God that has found a home within his heart.

He doesn’t go to the law first. He begins by going to God and on what pleases and delights him. This is the grander and much more effective route to obedience: We love him and then we want to do what pleases him. The life that pleases God comes from a heart that loves God and delights in him. This is how the life of faith sets us free from the condemnation of the law.

The Psalmist tells us that God’s law is not just “written” upon the heart. It is true that that language is used elsewhere and it is a helpful picture of the way in which our lives are transformed by knowledge of the nature of God. It implies that the content on God’s law is read by us and studied seriously, and that is a good thing to do (see Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 10:16). But here what is expressed is not the process of writing the law on the heart, it is what happens after the law is written deeply within your heart. Then you know and do what pleases God.

The law is “within my heart.” Evidence that you understand God and know him, is that you love him and delight in him. “Your law is within my heart” means that you know what God is like and you are aware of what he loves and what he hates. Sin keeps God a million miles away and it makes our language about God impersonal and disconnected from our deepest loves. Saving and sanctifying faith brings us to the place where we can address God as “My God.”

Faith makes our desire and delight to do what pleases God. Faith immerses itself in the Word of God so that the very law of God is in the deepest part of our lives, “Your law is within my heart.” Not just chiseled on the surface like on stone tablets, but internalized to become part of who we are. From the heart we delight in his pleasure because our hearts are becoming a little bit like God’s very heart. “I delight to do your pleasure, My God.”

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definitions of glory

Desperate for Glory

Moses said, “Please, show me your glory.”

Exodus 33:18 

Exodus 33 is the account of God revealing himself to Moses on Mt. Horeb (Sinai). The Law has been given. Moses has seen the splendor of God, veiled, in hidden and shadow form. But after all that splendor and law-giving, now God affirmed his personal knowledge of Moses. God said to Moses, Exodus 33:17, “You have found favor in my eyes, and I know you by name.”

Then Moses replies with a plea, a desperate cry for God’s glory to be revealed to him. The Hebrew is:

“See to me [show me] I beg you [“na“] your glory.”

The word na is to beg, to plead, to crave, to entreat, to pray. Some English translations ignore this wonderful, powerful, important little word.

Moses’ desire for the glory of God is mirrored in Jesus’ High Priestly prayer in John 17:24 — 

“Father, I desire those you gave me to be with me where I am, so that they may behold my glory, that glory you gave me before the creation of the world.”

Jesus was desperate to show his glory to those he came to save. He pleaded with the Father that we might see the glory he had before the world was made.

Intimacy with God must lead us to that point, that place, the opening of a vista, to actually see his glory. We must plead, pray, be desperate in our plea,

“Please, I beg you with all my heart, show me your glory!”

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Worship

Reverence, the fear of God, is essential faith.

“Then they who feared the LORD spoke to one another and the LORD heard and listened to them. He prepared a scroll of remembrance before him of those who fear the LORD and who honor his Name.”

Malachi 3:16

We speak about God differently when we remember he “hears and listens” to us. When we worship him, we worship differently when we remember we are worshiping God as God, not merely coming to God for him to meet our needs, fix our problems, congratulate our goodness, or forgive our failures.

God “hears and listens” and we are changed by him when we worship him. He remembers us who fear him. He never forgets us who revere and glorify his name.

We love to think that God is specially in the building where we are worshiping. He is not. We love to think that our gifts and the sacrifice of time in that hour or two is all he requires of us. That is not what God requires of us. We love the security of letting others take charge of our worship, we believe they are better at it than we are. They are not better at worship; they cannot worship FOR us. We hope the religious officials are speaking for God. They may not be; what they say always needs to be tested by Scripture. 

Worship is coming with people who know and love God, giving him praise, hearing his Word, and recounting what he has done: Praising him, hearing him, remembering  him. It is not entertainment. It is not a school. It is not a religious club. 

Sin keeps the preacher proud (my greatest struggle) and the people at a distance from God. Sin makes the building the sanctuary instead of the sanctuary being wherever God is. Sin makes our moments of worship the exception to our week, not the consummate expression of what we’d been doing every minute, every hour of every day, no matter where we were or what we were doing.

God “hears and listens.” The worshiper delights in God alone. The religious fear (dread) and forget God, or they try to own him. The one who fears the LORD reveres, honors, and praises God and him alone. Nothing else is admitted to his praises. Nothing else is tolerated. It is necessary in this day to state: Only the worship of God is permitted in the worship of God.

God remembers those “who fear the LORD and who honor his name.” 

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Uncategorized

Worship styles versus worship content

The “Music Wars” are raging across the land. Those who love and insist on contemporary worship music and a more relaxed approach are pitted against those who hold with determined, unflinching devotion to the hymns, creeds, and liturgy. The fight is fierce. 

Music Wars describes how churches fight and some of them are destroyed over the battle of what kind of music and how loud is it to be played. But it is not just the style of music that is at the center of this war. Something much more important is at stake:  The Content of Worship and the Way we offer Praise to God are what matter.

Music Wars really boils down to much more than a battle over about musical taste or the casual approach to worship, with un-tucked shirts and jeans versus tradition hymns with coats and ties; dresses not shorts for the ladies, button-down shirts and not tee-shirts for the men.

The issue is not about the kind of music so much as about the content of the music and the quality of the music that is selected. It is not about the casual approach to the worship experience. It is about being focused on the Biblical content of God’s commands for his people in worship. That is where the battle lies.

God-honoring worship could contain any “style” of music, contemporary, country, bluegrass, classical, barbershop, you name it. But that music must be filled with Biblical content. That is what matters. But the music must also be melodic: it must be singable, regardless whether it was written by Chris Tomlin or J. S. Bach.

So much of contemporary music and many of the old hymns are, frankly, vapid. Their content is meaningless or silly, or in some cases, they are unbiblical in content or doctrinally imbalanced. In addition, some contemporary songs and many of the old hymns are either so simple as to be infantile or their melody or rhythm is so complex as to be utterly unsingable.  

Music for worship should meet a few tests if it is to benefit God’s people as we seek to praise and worship God together:

  • Are the words of the songs consistent with the Biblical Gospel? This would be fairly easy to test. Just line up some passages from Scripture that support the aspiration contained in the hymn.
  • Is the music beautiful? Here again the matter should be fairly easy to figure out. Is the music melodic? Does the meter and timing of the song lend itself to congregational singing?

Bad contemporary music and poor hymns fail in the content of the words they use. Or they fail by being too difficult to sing. Some of the old hymns have odd timings and very difficult melodies; contemporary worship often fails when it uses “jazz” style timing and a cadence that is really impossible for a congregation to sing. You can tell whether a song is singable simply by looking around the congregation when the music is being sung. If most of the people are not singing, the music fails the test.

  • Does the music inform, or teach the content and impact of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Those who have sung the old hymns know that some of those songs are just “bad poetry sung to worse music” (something like a comment that C.S. Lewis quipped after a particularly distressing worship experience in the Church of England). 

A song that is selected must pass the test that it is melodic. A key to this is the ease with which the congregation can learn the song, and the ability that people have to find harmonies within the melody. This test of harmonies is a good one. If the congregation has trouble simply singing the melody and cannot rise to harmonies, there is something missing. 

Worship should be the center of our Christian lives. It should be filled with gloriously beautiful music and these songs should be sung by an engaged and focused congregation that loves the songs and benefits from them. Other parts of the traditional worship experience have been ejected as being irrelevant or arcane to the modern worshiper. But confession of sins, assurance of pardon, even reciting a creed, can all be done with freshness and they can result in the encouragement of the worshipers. Even in a strenuously contemporary service, things can get stale if they are done the same way over and over again. 

Worship is for God, not us. But when God is glorified we are transformed by his presence and by the glory of his Person, his Word, and his Redemption. 

There really is not a “Music War.” There is a content and purpose war that those who love the Word of God and who have been changed by the Gospel desire to win for the Glory of God when his people gather to worship.

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Glory of God, Jesus Christ makes God's glory known

Glory of God — the great work of the Son of God

Some have seen that holiness is “a coordinating relationship between other qualities” within the divine person. In Dutch this is Verhältnissbegriff, the coordination of the divine attributes within the divine person, working together for a common purpose: The glory of God.

Each of the attributes of God coordinates with one another, never competing, limiting, or hindering the ultimate outcome of each individual attribute, but each attribute of God propounding and protecting aspects of the divine person relevant to each, accomplishing together and ultimately all that is within the divine will. Holiness is the means by which this coordination of every divine attribute within the attributes of the divine person is established and expressed.

Wrath and love might be first thought to be competing qualities seeking different ends, just as grace might be viewed as waging war against justice. These qualities are coordinated by means of God’s overarching, holy intention to work all things together for his own glory in everything he does and says (cf. Romans 8:28, “we know that God causes everything to work together for the good …” NLT), satisfying the demands that every quality within the divine person be glorified because they are God’s.

This coordination and purposefulness within the divine person, especially seen in his holiness and glory, is most definitively displayed in the Cross of Christ. No quality within the Godhead is usurped. No aspect of God’s nature is diminished. God is wrathful toward sin and yet he loves his elect people. Certainly the most glorious aspect of the Cross is that every attribute of God is displayed without confusion, competition, or diminution; all are displayed gloriously, yet the redemption of Christ fulfilled God’s intention to save the sinful and to punish sin, thus God honored his own nature as the Holy God while magnificently displaying his love and electing grace. God acted as One to redeem (Deuteronomy 6:4; Mark 12:29).

There is a wondrous singularity in the purpose of God to save. This especially is the display of his holiness. Holiness may be studied as a particular attribute of God, along with God’s other attributes, e.g. wisdom, eternity, goodness, patience, and the like. Holiness also may be studied as a Verhältnissbegriff, by which God coordinates all his qualities and attributes in the accomplishment of his holy will. But it must be said that there is much about these matters that begin to touch the inner economy of the divine person that is necessarily, rightly, protectively, graciously, and forever hidden from our view. Some things within the divine person are unknown to us, not only because God so values our humility as creatures, but much more because he so greatly prizes within himself the glory of his divinity. He has determined that much of this divine economy has been shielded from our knowledge simply because he is God. We should study what we can and love what God has revealed, but the end of this inquiry of the economy within the divine person must be worship, not philosophy.

From More Glory by W. Thomas Warren (2013).

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Uncategorized

The requirement and impossibility of holiness in man, worshiping God.

Man, bereft of his holiness, is also bereft of beauty and excellency. Beauty and excellence are essential qualities of the glory of God. Holiness, therefore, is required of those who rightly give God glory. So if man is to glorify God, his holiness must first be restored. Holiness and glory are causally related to one another: holiness is the interaction, the interplay, the self-consistent expression of those elements of the divine character, balancing and supporting each one (love and justice, mercy and wrath, e.g.); glory is the demonstration of God’s holy character.

God desires to be merciful and redemptive. He is also just and rejecting of every human virtue. Every characteristic of God is bound by his nature to act, with all the power of divinity, in defense of his glory. As we long for the beauty and excellencies of the nature of God—as we desire to abandon our ambitions and hopes so that we may be consumed, lost in those qualities for which we so deeply yearn, from the best parts of our redeemed human souls—we begin to know God.

Our desire as restored man is not merely to observe God’s beauty and wonders; it is to be identified with those excellencies, to know them in a way that knowing is not sufficient to describe. We need more and better words, songs, paintings, deeper friendships, more courageous experiences, higher, grander, clearer insights, if we are to know and love God as we ought. Our tools of speech and human language, our arts and sciences, do not give us the sufficient vocabulary to express what we know of God. The longing we have in our souls about God cannot be contained. Neither does our world seem very substantive to us in comparison to the solidity, the eternity, the profundity of God. Something more real has come to us and now is in us.

So worship is to participate in the holy; it is to know God’s glory face to face; and it is to find our longings and aspirations fulfilled in his presence. Lewis wrote lyrically about this longing, not only to understand but to be joined with God’s glory:

“Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 12–13).

By engaging in a direct quest to know and to extol the virtues and actions of God, we find true and abundant life and a glimpse of the life that is ahead. Then we will see clearly and can say exactly what we mean and we begin to praise God without omission, delusion, or distraction. We are stirred by his gracious invitation to examine his glory without shadow or cloud. All of these realities flow from his loving heart and result in our greatest good forever.

Excerpted from More Glory, W. Thomas Warren (2013).

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Philosophy of ministry.

Thinking about God’s glory.

The word that is used for glory in the New Testament is doxa. It comes into English in doxology, a word of glory, or a word of praise. Doxa comes from the verb meaning “to think.”

A person may be good, even noble, but if you don’t learn about that person, and think about their choices, their moral character, and their impact on people, that wonderful person may never have made any impression on you. Unless you learned about them and thought about their actions, their character, and words, they would have no impact on you whatsoever.

It’d be like you’d never heard of Mother Theresa. Her service to the poor and her wise and courageous words to the most powerful people in the world (regarding the evil of abortion), were astounding. The impact of her life on thousands of poor lepers and indigent poor in Calcutta is so filled with love and compassion that it shook the world. But if you’d never heard of her life and never contemplated the impact of her life she’d have no impact on you. It would be as if she didn’t even live, as far as you are concerned.

God isn’t glorious just when you think about him. He is glorious if you’d never been born. But it is through thinking about God, and this thinking is necessary and it is important, that the glory of God has its impact in your life and on you as a person.

When you hear about the love of God, you must take some time to think about the importance of that aspect of God and how it should impact and direct your life. If you learn about the mercy of God — how he forgives sinners and loves people in spite of what they’ve done — it would be crucial for you, in the light of this information about mercy, to take the fact of your sin and to align that fact against the incredible promises regarding the mercy of God toward sinners. At that point, the mercy of God becomes more than an interesting fact, it becomes a principle within your heart, your mind, and it impacts the way you live. But it becomes important, a point of glory in your life, when you think about it.

Glory comes as we “contemplate” God. God’s Person and his moral perfections and actions all occurred apart from our physical observation (in 99.999% of the cases), yet all of them can change our lives, inform our worship, and inspire our greater holiness when we think on them and understand who God is and what he has said and done. We need to study God.

Our culture labors to keep people from thinking about God. The culture wants us to be entertained, distracted, or exhausted by recreation or labor, every moment we are awake. If we are distracted, entertained, or exhausted, there is no room in our lives to think. Godly people of old would take time to contemplate, to think, on God. They would see thinking about God as one of their most important spiritual exercises. Today, we listen to everyone else but to God.

For a little exercise: Read Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (ESV).

Taking time to think on these virtues that are derived from God, will have a powerful impact on our lives, “and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:9).

Taking time to think about God.

Think about God. Think about what God has done. Think about what God has said. Think about who God is in his moral nature and by his holy virtues.

This is how we see God as glorious. Apart from thinking, God is still absolutely glorious, but we miss his glory completely and we are spiritually impoverish.

Our thinking must not be unfettered and ill-focused. It is through the Word of God that our thoughts are directed to what can be known about God. Studying, reading, and contemplating the Word of God is the beginning, the middle, and the end of our learning about God in this life.

Think on these things.

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Bible Study

Translation study on 1 John 5:18

Today I was translating 1 John 5:18 and looking at some of the English translations to try and make sense of it. The English translations just didn’t make sense when I was reading them.

What I read in the Greek text didn’t come out in the English translations I was checking. Here is what I was struggling with.

Here is the ESV:
1 John 5:18 “We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God [here is the difficult two word phrase] protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.”

The problem is who is “protecting whom”? He who was born of God is protecting “him.” Who is in mind? Who is protecting the Christian? It is unclear. Read the verse out loud and you will hear how unclear it is.

It is much simpler to get at the meaning, it seems, just by following the Greek text.

Here is my translation:

“The one who is born from God keeps (or perhaps, “protects”) himself.”

The word in Greek is “auton” the personal pronoun, “him.” Here used in a reflexive sense, “himself.”

From the same paragraph we know that a Christian doesn’t continue to sin (the verb “sin” there is 3rd person, present, indicative, active). Here the verb “to keep” is also 3rd person, present, indicative, active. The verbs are lining up in tense and voice.

It would appear that the paragraph is referring to the Christian who doesn’t keep sinning, and who keeps on protecting himself from evil.

The paragraph ends with the restriction upon the Evil One (Satan) who, we learn, cannot touch the one whom God has made alive.

The paragraph ends:

“and the Evil One cannot touch him.”

The lesson for us is that God brings us new life (we are “born of God”) and then we are responsible to “keep ourselves” (in God’s love, and away from sin).

God makes us alive and then we keep ourselves (safe) by the power of God. It is a wonderful verse that has been lost in translation.

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Glory of God, Jesus Christ makes God's glory known

The love of God and glory.

The grandeur of God’s glory and of its incredible, powerful, impact on those who are redeemed. Glory works in us by the love of God for us.

We first see how glorious God is in his power and creation.

Psalm 89:
Vs. 5 “Let the heaven praise your wonders…”
Vs. 8 “Who is mighty as you are?”
Vs. 9 “You rule the raging of the sea …”

We see how amazing God is in his nature and wonders.

Exodus 8
Vs. 10 “There is no one like the LORD …” (see 9:14 for parallel)
Vs. 22 “That you may know the I AM the LORD in the midst of the earth…”

Exodus 10
Vs. 2 “That you may know what I have done … that you may know that I AM the LORD.”

From these few verses (and there are dozens more in the Old Testament) we see that God desires people to see him, to know his excellencies, and to experience who God is by what he has done. When we see what God has done, we know there is no one like Him.

But how does God’s glory translate into the lives of people? Into the lives of God’s people?

God’s glory is “vastly distinguished” as being utterly different from anything in humans. He is categorically different from his creation. He is far more wonderful! But he wants people to know how immeasurably rich is his glory, and how unsearchable he is as God.

Glory is not just touting God’s greatness. Glory becomes a personal interaction between God and his people. God wants them to know the glorious God, and to know that glory as worthy of every praise by those who worship him.

How does glory turn into worship?

It happens only through the working of the love of God. Love makes the glory of God known in people. The glory of God for the believer is supremely seen and experienced in the love of God for sinners. What a surprise this is! Glory leads us to his love — his eternal, saving love for his people is where glory is made perfect!

When Jonathan Edwards (one of the greatest minds every to write on theology and the nature of God) sought to describe how the Holy God could come into a relationship with sinful people, he found that language failed him. He could not express what he was experiencing as a Christian adequately, even in the loftiest language. His great gifts, his mighty intellect, could not describe the glory of God well-enough. But love could.

Edwards used the language of love to describe God’s glory! He could only turn to the language of love to describe how the Glorious God had come into his life. We see that the love of God is tied to the glory of God.

We will unpack some of the archaic phrases Edwards uses, but look for the language of love:

Edwards wrote this way, “Tis the soul’s relish of the supreme excellency of the Divine nature, inclining the heart to God as the chief good” (Edwards, Treatise on Grace, 48).

He speaks of relish (delight of the soul), of inclining the heart, and of God as the “chief good.” Edwards didn’t leap into complex language about the attributes of God or even the stilted language of redemption (reconciliation, substitution, salvation, propitiation, and the rest) to describe God’s glory. He spoke of God as the greatest good.

God is the most wonderful Person in his life, “inclining the heart to God as the chief good.” We might say that we are “declaring our love for God as our most precious and enduring Treasure. He is more to us than anything or any one.” The language of love becomes the way we offer praise and glory to God.

We are drawn to love the glory of God by the love of God. We worship God most gloriously when we know his love and receive his redemption most personally.

Then God become our “chief good.” He is our greatest love. God is known in us, by his love for us, as most glorious.

From More Glory, W. Thomas Warren.

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Glory of God, Understanding Christ at the focus of God's glory.

Making distinctions regarding the local church.

What does the local church look like and what does it do? Churches function according to their central core beliefs. They always do what they accept to be their mission and purpose. A church may have been founded to be a center for worship for local Christians, but over time it chose to become a center of recreation, a school, and a place to serve the needs of the poor. And the founding principles were lost.

The YMCA is the often-used example of an organization that was founded to “make disciples of young men” and it became a gym. Most fraternities were founded to be “little churches” on the campuses of colleges, where men learned to live the Christian faith, where prayer and study of God’s Word were essential to the fraternity’s values, and where Jesus Christ was exalted in their pledges and covenants. Today, of course, they are social clubs that have nothing to do with the Gospel of Christ at all.

Here are some distinctions between the Biblical Local Church and what we see almost universally in the local churches of our day. No church is perfect. But today, so many churches have become something different, something essentially alien to the Biblical model, that we hope to recover the Glorious Local Church, for the salvation of men and women, and supremely for the glory of God. Here are some distinctions. This is short-hand, and much more could be said about each of these. These are intended to spur your own thinking and reflection.

Churches don’t provide services for people. We serve God.
Churches are not commanded to have programs. We worship God.
Churches in Scripture did not advertise or sell services. The Glorious Local Church is captured by the Christian Gospel and we give all to advance the spread of Christianity in every way we can, even at the price of our fortunes and our lives.
Churches don’t convince or convert anyone. God redeems. God gives faith. God makes dead men and women alive. God gives grace. Jesus said, “I have come to seek and to save those who are lost” Luke 19:10.
Churches don’t seek members to join them. We gather those who are saved for instruction, for worship, and for ministry and mission.
Membership is not about the local church. Membership in the Church of Jesus Christ is governed by God. Men have nothing to do with it, other than to test the faith of those claiming to believe, so that the local church is kept as pure as possible.
The church is for believers not for those in need, not for the lost, not for those needing a class or an intervention.
The church may minister to those in need as God commands, but “confessing the good confession” 1 Timothy 6:12, is the standard for entry into the local church.
We must not confuse the local church with the Church of Jesus Christ. One is a human, broken, failing institution. But it is to come as close as possible to the Glorious Body of Christ as we can. We are the eternal Bride of Christ, the assembly of the victorious, the fellowship of the redeemed.
Churches do not entertain or provide performances in the name of worship. We are Christians that, as a gathering of the redeemed, worship God. We do not relegate worship to a few people standing up front.
Worship is the passion of our lives, the undergirding strength for facing every trial, our great joy, and our astonishing privilege. We will not delegate it to others, even if they sing better than we.

The Biblical Local Church grows not by programs or by structures. It doesn’t expand through marketing campaigns and targeting segments of the population. We grow by the faith and beauty of the lives of those who make up the worshiping assembly. People are changed by true worship. Our lives are enriched by coming together and all of us worshiping God together. Our minds are instructed. We learn about God. We hear his Word. We love one another as God loves us.

Churches can’t repair peoples’ lives. God alone can. We must decide what is first (the Worship of God) and what else should be done in obedience to God’s commands and instructions in his Word. We must never lose sight of our first duty to God: To worship and praise — to Give Glory to God in worship, in our lives, in prayer, in obedience, in service, in sacrifice, and in holiness.

True worship is the wonderful gathering of Christians, in which all believers stand before God personally praising, saying the content of our faith, listening to the Word of God, singing praise to our Redeemer, joining our song and confessions with others who love God and who have been transformed by his amazing grace, too. Worship involves everyone in the room. Christians must worship God alone. But we worship him together.

The essential point is this:

Churches are for believers. What we do in worship may be shared with friends and family who visit, but everything we do is focused on the Church coming before our Loving Redeemer God in worship, growing unto maturity so we can serve him, and living lives that bring honor to God and praise to Jesus Christ.

The highest and most glorious commitment of the Local Church must be the glory of God. When that is in focus, everything else becomes clear as to what we are to do, and how we are to do it. God is to be glorious among his people.

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