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.