Worship in the glorious church will bring people into the presence of God. It will not bring God into the presence of people. Worship is adoration and honor. It is hearing the commands of Christ and falling on our faces in obedience to them. It is yielding ourselves to the will of God, as Christ did, and seeking support and help from our brothers and sisters to walk in it.

Worship hears from God. This would mean that worship is filled with God’s Word. We read and hear God’s Word and we receive it. But more than that. We obey the commands of God that we have heard, especially regarding what worship is and what it demands of us.

My mentor, Harold O.J. Brown (Protest of a Troubled Protestant), wrote about worship connecting the people of God with the meaning of what God has commanded us to do in the worship experience. He was puzzled that “religious language” carries so little weight in peoples’ actions in worship or in their lives more broadly. For example, when you hear in church, “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker” (Psalm 95:6), one who was unfamiliar with the Christian faith might think that this phrase would effect an action on the part of God’s people. But after that Psalm is read, no one, not one person in the room, kneels. No one moves or does anything at all in response to that specific command. They do not understand nor do they perceive those words to be a command at all. They do not see that God’s people should  actually do something with their bodies and with their knees. That admonition in the Psalm is perceived by the dull-listening worshipers simply as religious talk and we all have learned that no one does what the preacher says. The words do not carry any import into the lives of the worshipers. They have missed the meaning of the text altogether. There is no expectation that the Word of God would be translated into the obedience of those who worship God and that it would have the power to drive a person to their knees.

How different, if at the reading of Psalm 95, and when verse 6 was read, that there would spread over the entire congregation the creaking and shuffling noise of people taking their knees,without instruction, without being prompted to do it. They did so because the Psalm called the worshipers to do it. The most appropriate, the right and proper thing, would be to drop to our knees. That is what the glorious church would look like.