There is No Sunday "Worship Switch"

R. Kent Hughes, in Worship by the Book (p. 141):

Because worship is a way of life, you cannot worship corporately on the Lord's day if you haven't been worshiping throughout the week--apart from repentance! Christians don't have a Sunday "worship switch," despite what is sometimes portrayed on television. Neither must we be allowed to think that "worship" is only part of the service--as if singing and praise were worship in contrast to the preaching. And "worship leader"? What an odd term! Does the worship end when his or her part is done?

All of Life Worship v. Corporate Worship

In a paraphrase and direct quote of John Frame, Keller explains in Worship By the Book the difference between "all of life" worship of God, and corporate (the gathered church) worship of God (p. 205):

If you serve the king in his palace, you are doing so all of the time. Yet certainly when the king himself comes into the room where you are working and has a conversation with you, "your service takes on a different character...becomes somewhat ceremonial. You bow, and you remember as best you can the language of homage.... Something like this happens in our relationship to God. All of life is worship...but when we meet him, something special happens."

(The Frame quote was taken from Worship in Spirit and Truth, p. 33)

Worship Christ as Everything

R. Kent Hughes, in Worship by the Book, reflecting on the nature of worship and Colossians 1:15-20 (p. 153):

If you worship Christ as the Creator of everything, every cosmic speck across billions of light years of trackless space, the Creator of the texture and shapes and colors that dazzle our eyes; if you worship Christ as Sustainer of all creation, who by his word holds the atoms of your body and this universe together; if you worship him as the Goal of everything, that all creation is for him; if you further worship of Christ as the Reconciler of your soul--then you worship the God of Bible. Anything less than this is reductionist and idolatrous.

Work as Your Worship

D.A. Carson, in Worship by the Book, pp. 40-41:

In theological analysis of work, it is a commonplace to say that work is a "creation ordinance" (the terminology varies with the theological tradition). However corrosive and difficult work has become this side of the Fall (Gen 3:17-19), work itself belongs to the initial paradise (Gen 2:15), and it continues to be something we do as creatures in God's good creation. That is true, of course, but under the new covenant it is also inadequate. If everything, including our work, has been sacralized in the sense just specified, then work itself is part of our worship. Christians work not only as God's creatures in God's creation, but as redeemed men and women offering their time, their energy, their work, their whole lives, to God--loving him with heart and mind and strength, understanding that whatever we do, we are to do to the glory of God.

We Won't Be Playing Cricket

N.T. Wright, quoted in Worship by the Book, p. 57:

The great multitude in Revelation which no man can number aren't playing cricket. They aren't going shopping. They are worshipping. Sounds boring? If so, it shows how impoverished our idea of worship has become. At the centre of that worship stands a passage like Isaiah 33: your eyes will see the king in his beauty; the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our ruler, the LORD is our king; he will save us. Worship is the central characteristic of the heavenly life; and that worship is focused on the God we know in and as Jesus.

Hindrance to Excellent Corporate Worship

D.A. Carson, in Worship by the Book (p. 58):

Hindrances to excellent corporate worship are of various sorts.... [C]orporate worship may be stultified by church members who never pray at home, who come to church waiting to be entertained, who are inwardly marking a scorecard instead of participating in worship, who love mere tradition (or mere innovation!) more than truth, who are so busy that their minds are cluttered with the press of the urgent, who are nurturing secret bitterness and resentments in the dark recesses of their minds.

We Worship God Because He is Delightfully Wonderful

I am going slowly through Don Carson's essay on the definition of worship in his edited volume Worship by the Book. It is really quite something. One section, in particular, knocked the wind out of me (pp. 30-31):

What ought to make worship delightful to us is not, in the first instance, its novelty or its aesthetic beauty, but its object: God himself is delightfully wonderful, and we learn to delight in him.

In an age increasingly suspicious of (linear) thought, there is much more respect for the "feeling" of things—whether a film or a church service. It is disturbingly easy to plot surveys of people, especially young people, drifting from a church of excellent preaching and teaching to one with excellent music because, it is alleged, there is "better worship" there. But we need to think carefully about this matter. Le us restrict ourselves for the moment to corporate worship. Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it's a bit like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire themselves admiring the sunset.

This point is acknowledged in a praise chorus like "Let's forget about ourselves, and magnify the Lord, and worship him." The trouble is that after you have sung this repetitious chorus three or four times, you are no farther ahead. The way you forget about yourself is by focusing on God—not by singing about doing it, but by doing it. There are far too few choruses and services and sermons that expand our vision of God—his attributes, his works, his character, his words. Some think that corporate worship is good because it is lively where it had been dull. But it may also be shallow where it is lively, leaving people dissatisfied and restless in a few months' time. Sheep lie down when they are well fed (cf. Ps 23:2); they are more likely to be restless when they are hungry. "Feed my sheep," Jesus commanded Peter (John 21); and many sheep are unfed. If you wish to deepen the worship of the people of God, above all deepen their grasp of his ineffable majesty in his person and in all his works.

He goes on to say that finding God most delightful is quite practical insofar as it determines who we are:

This is not an abstruse theological point divorced from our conduct and ethics. Nor is it an independent point, as if there were two independent mandates: first of all, worship God (because he deserves it), and then live rightly (because he says so). For worship, properly understood, shapes who we are. We become like whatever is our God.

Is God Your Mate or Your GOD?

Matt Osgood writes well on how we can make our corporate worship interactions more about us than God. The last one is the most intriguing:

What do the lyrics say about God? Do they present him as he is - the God who is beyond our imagining - or do they bring him down to our size? Do our words help us realise God's awesome grandeur, or do they present him simply as a mate who helps us through life's troubles and finds us parking spaces when we need them? Yes, our God is intimate as well as infinite, yes he knows the number of hairs on our heads - but if we have the idea of God as fundamentally like us but a bit bigger, we have missed the point. God is entirely Other. We are bound by time and space, he is not. The greatest wisdom of humanity falls infinitely short of God's thoughts. Our power is pitifully limited, whereas God never fails to achieve anything he chooses to do.

Matt understands that, in much of our corporate worship, God is considered friend much more than he is considered God. The pendulum is swung left (or to the right?). But I do think that one must understand God not just as the transcendent, mighty and auspiciously holy Lord. One must also consider the biblical teaching that God is indeed immanent too. And his immanence is known mostly in the person and work of Christ.

One of my favorite portions of scripture is in Mark when Jesus raises the little girl from the dead. When he goes into the house, he does not push everyone out of the way, raise his hands into the air and proclaim loudly that she rise from the dead. Rather, he goes, sits by her side and, probably in a whisper, says Talitha cumi, which was the original Aramaic. It's most basic meaning, as R.T. France says, is 'Lamb.' Jesus, in truth, was saying to her 'Rise, little kid.'

Yes, proclaim the greatness of God. But also that he has come to us in the person of Jesus Christ. It is no easy task, but it is a tension we must hold if we are to paint an accurate picture of God.

Even Calvin Worshiped Like a Pentecostal

Calvin, in commentary on Acts 20:36:

The inward attitude certainly holds first place in prayer, but outward signs, kneeling, uncovering the head, lifting up the hands, have a twofold use. The first is that we may employ all our members for the glory and worship of God; secondly, that we are, so to speak, jolted out of our laziness by this help.

HT: BB

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Turn Down Your Worship

So says John Stackhouse. He lists several reasons why worship music at churches is too loud. It's an interesting perspective. I am a worship leader and usually don't play well with people who tell me to turn it down. But one thing he said was particularly convicting:

The Protestant Reformation yanked musical worship away from the professionals and put it back in the pews. Luther composed hymns based on popular melodies, including drinking songs. Calvin insisted on taking lyrics from the Psalms. This was music in which almost anyone could participate. The problem today, to be sure, is rarely elaborate music. We could use a little more artistry, in fact, than we usually get with the simplistic and repetitive musical figures of many contemporary worship songs.

No, the contrast with the Reformation is the modern-day insistence that a few people at the front be the center of attention. We do it by making six band members louder than a room full of people. But a church service isn't a concert at which an audience sings along with the real performers. Musicians—every one of them, including the singers—are accompanists to the congregation's praise. They should be mixed loudly enough only to do their job of leading and supporting the congregation.

Whole thing.

On How to Glorify a Mountain Spring

From John Piper's The Pleasures of God:

God has no needs that I could ever be required to satisfy. God has no deficiencies that I might be required to supply. He is complete in himself. He is overflowing with happiness in the fellowship of the Trinity. The upshot of this is that God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or a bucket brigade. So if you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough you work hard to keep it full and useful. If you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart's satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you've found.

Luther on Music

Bob Kauflin, quoting Martin Luther:

When man's natural musical ability is whetted and polished to the extent that it becomes an art, then do we note with great surprise the great and perfect wisdom of God in music, which is, after all, His product and His gift; we marvel when we hear music in which one voice sings a simple melody, while three, four, or five other voices play and trip lustily around the voice that sings its simple melody and adorn this simple melody wonderfully with artistic musical effects, thus reminding us of a heavenly dance, where all meet in a spirit of friendliness, caress and embrace. A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.

(1538, in his foreword to a collection of chorale motets)

HT: JT