Tag Archives: worship

Philosophy of ministry.

Redeeming worship

Worship is connected to the glory of God. If worship is aimed at another goal or target than the glory of God, it has fallen into a form of idolatry. Worship is not to entertain or delight an audience. It should be the expressions of praise and adoration, love and submission to God who alone is worthy of worship, from his children. Worship is not measured by what we gain from the experience, but by the content of our praises, the fullness of our focus upon God and on God alone, by our self-emptying in his presence, and above all, by the degree or measure by which we are motivated by the grace of God to enter into such a wonderful exercise. Worship is a sublime privilege.

Worship is shaped by our view of God. What we think of God; what we know about God; what we stake our lives on about God — and worship is an application of all these operations, focusing them into the experience of worship.

Much worship in the modern church fails because there are no qualifications for those who are invited to worship God. Seekers are asked to join in worship. Those who do not know God are invited along with every Christian to come into his presence with praise, to worship and bow down before the LORD our Maker. But such worship is, by definition, diluted (perhaps even deluded).

When a true worshiper comes to offer praises to God, and that Christian comes into the place where worship is offered with others who have no faith, no interest, there is no commonality, no agreement, no understand of the grand design and purpose of worship. There are a 1,000 different reasons for people to be in the room, and most which have little to do with ascribing praise to the Glorious God and our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Such diluted purpose is confusing to the unbeliever and it is a harm to the true Christian.

Worship is for Christians only. Others may be invited to come and see, but they cannot, by the definition of worship, offer their praise and thanks for the grace of God, for the work of Christ, or for the many promises of the Bible to those who believe. Such confusion about those who qualify for worship is killing worship. Christians must redeem worship as the prerogative of believers alone.

We fall and we fail at worship.

The worship of God is a high and pristine aspiration. It is, in this life, something that we do incompletely, with mixed motives, we enter into it imprecisely and with inadequate understandings. We bring our preconceived notions, our previous experience with “worship” (as in “Worship is at 11 am Sunday Morning,” or “be a part the worship team” ), and therefore everyone has prejudices, longings, expectations, and ideals in mind when we think about worship or take steps to engage in it.

Worship is to be directed toward God because it longs to be worthy of him. But no matter how much we try, no how much we plan the experiences of worship or have numberous teams working and developing worship themes and goals, our worship in this life will always fail. We will fail in the sense that our words are not adequate, our love for God is not sufficient, our lives lived do not echo his majesty, our faith is not full, and our holiness is not like God’s.

So, with these constraints, our worship while we are still living on Earth will never meet the goal of the glory of God. It cannot be adequate, for we are humans offering praise to God. It cannot be worthy of the God who created the Universe, who redeemed us by Jesus Christ, or who gives us new life and hope by faith in him. We are just people. He is God.

Of course, worship, like everything in the Christian life, must be conducted by the grace of God and by faith in him. No worship will be perfect, but it should be God-focused. It must be a celebration of his grace toward us who believe. Worship, though we “lisp and stammer” in our offerings of praise (we don’t say what we should, and what we do say is insufficient and flawed), by Jesus Christ is acceptable to God.

Worship is not a place for invention. Worship is not an event where people come up with whatever they desire to give to God, just because they want to. Worship is essentially and always guided, constrained, and filled with content from the Word of God.

The Critical Question.

The most important question by which a worship service is measured is: What role and importance does God have in the service of worship? Is God absolutely central in all that is done? Are the songs offered to God? Are the prayers offered to God, and are they filled with praise and adoration, thanks and honor to God for what he has done? Can people hear from God in the worship service? How is the Word of God read and explained to God’s people? Is worship, from beginning to end, about God?

Unbelievers will tire quickly of “only talking about God all the time in worship.” Christians will love to talk with God, hear from God, offer God praise, and sing to God offering honor and glory to him. Unbelievers what to see what God will do for them. Christians want to understand more about who God is and they desire to know more and more of his will for their lives.

Worship for an unbeliever is a very different experience than the worship that a Christian offers to God. One is centered on God, the other is centered on themselves. One wants to know God, the other wants to know what God will do for them. One is learning how to live for God supremely and in all choices, the other is negotiating with God to do the least possible so they get the greatest return from God. The Christian comes to be in the presence of God. The unbeliever comes so God can be in their presence. Where is God in the worship service?

Worship is for God, but it benefits us who worship.

Christians are blessed by God when we worship him. He is pleased with us, he delights in our praises, and he accepts our offerings of praise and thanks when they are given by grace through faith.

Ephesians 1:3, God blesses us “in Christ with every spiritual blessing.” This is the resource from which worship wells up from within us. We have these resources of spiritual blessings, the truth about God, the revelation of Jesus Christ, the fulness of the Holy Spirit. We have the promises of God, the record of the miracles of God. We have the accounts of how God has revealed himself in history to real people, here on the Earth, and we know that the principles that Scripture teaches are true because God has affirmed the power, the truth, the accuracy, and the transforming potential of the Word of God. We are blessed with every spiritual blessing. All that God wants to give us, we have!

Ephesians 1:4, “He chose us … that we should be holy and blameless before him.” To be before God is to be in the position of worship and praise. It is to be in a relationship of close proximity to God.

Ephesians 1:6, Grace is introduced as “his glorious grace” by which he has blessed us in the Beloved (that is, in Jesus Christ). Grace is central to all access to God. When we are talking about salvation, it is through grace. When it is walking with God (as in Galatians) it is by grace. When we are talking about ascribing to God all glory, it is by grace that we do this.

Ephesians 1:7, We have “redemption” “in him” “the forgiveness of sins.” Worship must include what God has done for us. It must describe the forgiveness of sins. All access to God must deal with human sin. He is sinless, we are sinful. How can sinful people come into the presence of a Holy God? Answer. By Jesus Christ and his grace and redemption by which we can come. Worship is one way that we come into the presence of God.

Worship essentials.

Worshipers must be faithful people. Ephesians 1:1, “faithful in Christ Jesus” is the description of the Christians Paul was addressing. Our faithfulness today is just as central and important as in that day.

Are we: Believing, trusting, living in Christ Jesus, forgiven and forgiving, filled with grace and living by faith, and does the Spirit of God dwell within us?

Is worship grace-centered in all that is done in the name of “worship.’

Is worship God-centered from beginning to end?

Is the content and subject matter of worship found in the Word of God? Do we use the language, the words of Scripture in our worship services, or are we only hearing from man in the name of worship?

Summary.

Worship is about the glory of God, “to the praise of his glory” Ephesians 1:13. Worship says the words that bring glory to God. We teach people about the glory of our God. We believe that God is glorious. We labor diligently and at cost of our lives and time, for the glory of God.

Worship is adoration, it is an act of love to God. We worship God supremely because he loved us and invited us to love him. Worship is about love.

Worship is giving God his worth. In one sense we always come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). But worship calls us to something higher than we can reach, something greater that we can do, and to use words that we cannot express, yet. It is the aspiration within us that we might worship God by grace through faith, that we attempt it. Our insufficiencies in worship are more than compensated for by the greatness of his grace toward us who believe.

Worship is about God. It is designed for God. It is to bring us close to God. And in that closeness, we are overwhelmed and deeply and profoundly blessed by God. His delight in us, his love for us, in worship is turned to praise from us to him.

God is the only reason for worship.

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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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The Hebrew of Psalm 65:2 reads, “To you silence is praise, O God.”

Every form of worship needs time, room for contemplation. We need time to think. When there is too much talking, too much music, and too many distraction, we can’t focus on God effectively and we cannot worship as we should.

When worship is true and life-changing, it will lead up to the point when speaking is insufficient for the Subject of God and even really good music becomes unnecessarily intrusive. For us to think about God we need periods of silence.

Teaching and proclaiming the Word of God are essential to Biblical Worship. But silence is needed, too. Silence is a recognition of God’s presence and it is a specific time set apart to think of him without distraction. But with no silence in the service, the teaching doesn’t have a chance to be received into the mind or the heart. Thousands of words in a sermon demand time to take in — to process. We need silence to sort through all those words. Quiet Please.

Silence is missing in most contemporary worship services today. Worship has become performance. The service can resemble a rave or a rock concert, filling every second of the event with words and sound from beginning to end. Screaming guitars give you no chance to contemplate. They drown out thoughts. The service is designed only so you will feel something. But silence is needed if you are to think.

Silence gives the words we have heard in proclamation “room” to inform and challenge the heart, and to be embraced by our will. This takes some time. If there is no gap, no break, no opportunity to collect ourselves in worship, we miss most of what could have been revolutionary and life-changing in our approach to God. Silence gives space for the contemplation of God and it can prepare us to hear his holy Word.

The Psalmist felt that silence was an offering of praise to God. Praising God with our silence may be the key to acknowledging God and entering into his powerful presence. Without silence, we may be entertained by what we hear, but we need the space that silence creates, to be alone together with God.

Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.”

Silence may be our best reply to God when our sins are exposed by faithful teaching. It may be the only thing that we ought to do when our sins are laid bare. We make no defense, offer up no excuses, we know that there is no adequate justification for our sin. We just stand silent before God in a knowing quietness. We know who God is and we know who we are and what we have done. Then we choose at that moment to be silent — utterly quiet because any word or song would be an intrusion upon God’s presence in that moment of pure and glorious worship. We have nothing left to say. Silence is all the praise that remains. This is extreme worship.

Praise can be silent. But it’s so hard for us to be quiet! We demand a word, “Somebody say Something!” Our sins SHOULD stop our mouths from speaking, or singing. As we are confronted with sin, God moves us toward silence in confession, and he teaches us and comforts us when we are silent and broken.

Sadly, it is sin that wants to break the silence. If even a little gap in the barrage of noise and words is given to us in a worship service, we quickly get uncomfortable. We get fidgety. We get distracted and find anything else to focus on (cell phone, the people whispering next to us, the crying baby, or the soft and distracting music that is being played over the prayer or the preaching). We aren’t use to silence.

But we get precious little of it today. Silence is almost completely absent in young churches. Silence is almost never experienced by young worshippers. Respect for God’s holiness demands silence from us. Sin wants us distracted, unfocused, or in an emotional riff.

Silence allows us room to think of God, and to contemplate him. It gives us time to capture what God has said. It allows confession to move to the heart so it becomes far more than simply repeating religious words. It takes descriptions of God so we can reckon with who God is. Confession — deep, and real — comes most beautifully when we are silent.

There is a need to recover silence in worship. Those who plan and lead worship should include times to be still within the service. We need fewer words and less distraction. So we can turn our silence into praise.

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Philosophy of ministry.

Silence is praise.

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First worship.
Simple structure so our needs and preconceptions don’t get in the way of giving praise and glory to God.
Focusing on the language of praise in Scripture.
Having time to pray. To reflect on the Gospel. To express love and praise to God.
Not driven by expectations of worship from the culture.
Driven by grace and the Holy Spirit with us who brings us the inheritance of grace.
Experiencing the sufficiency of the spiritual blessings we have in Christ, as all we will ever need.

Getting Started begins by considering what the glory of God demands of his people.

Philosophy of ministry.

Getting Started begins by considering what the glory of God demands of his people.

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