The Search for Worship

Is the current call for a greater sense of worship a return to the faith of the New Testament, a faith which has been eroded by modern pluralism and materialism? Or is it a subtle, and therefore dangerous, distraction from the primary responsibilities of God’s people?

The current catch-cry.

Worship is again on the agenda. Christian bookstores are being filled with books on ‘how to give your church a burden for real worship’, while increasingly it is the subject of Christian conferences. Many are speaking of the need to improve our worship or refer to it as “the missing jewel of evangelicalism” (to use A.W. Tozer’s term). Are they right? Is it time we looked again at worship?

Are we sure what we mean?

At the most basic level, it seems, there is disagreement. Despite persistent attempts by some to change the way we use the word, almost invariably those who speak of ‘worship’ are referring to what Christians do (or ought to do) when they gather. Often they are talking about praise, adoration and thanksgiving expressed in song or, less frequently, in prayer. Even in books which define worship in terms of our “whole life response to God’s grace in Jesus” (such as John MacArthur’s The Ultimate Priority: On Worship) the issue is clouded when they devote the overwhelming bulk of their material to the weekly gathering.

I do not want to deny that what we do when we gather is ‘worship’. Our gatherings are an important part of our lives lived in response to God’s incredible kindness in Jesus. Of course they are worship, just as the rest of our lives is worship. All of life is lived in the presence of God and in relationship to him. I am never apart from him and nothing I do is unimportant to him. But the meeting has no sole or special claim to the title. Worship is not limited to a particular time, place, or activity. It is the appropriate response of a person to God, which is simply another way of talking about the life of faith.

But it seems the old notion that we go to church to worship God dies hard. Scholar and layman alike find it hard to let go of one of the most cherished misunderstandings of the Christian faith. You would think that the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman in John 4 had never been spoken. She, it appears, was concerned to tie the true worship of God to a particular location. Jesus’ reply struck at the heart of her misunderstanding: not here, nor there, but in spirit and in truth. Worship cannot be tied to a particular place when God has come in the flesh. Not one place, not one activity, can be separated from the life lived in response to God’s mercy.

The dangers of misunderstanding.

Perhaps the battle is lost. Perhaps we should just surrender the term to modern usage. But this is more than simply a quibble over words. A serious misunderstanding of how we relate to God lies beneath the surface and such a persistent misunderstanding carries with it at least three distinct dangers.

The first is a separation of the rest of life from what we do when we gather. The labeling of the meeting, or the atmosphere generated by the meeting, as ‘worship’ makes it easier to keep worship at a distance during the other 167 hours of the week. It is possible to be the most vocal in times of praise and adoration and then to return to a life of rank immorality.

Would anyone call that real worship? This is, of course, no new problem (just see the example of Saul in 1 Samuel 15, the people of Israel in Isaiah 1, or the Pharisees in the gospels), nor is it solely caused by a misunderstanding of worship. Nevertheless, by viewing the church as the corporate expression of what is going on in the rest of life, the Bible exposes such a division for what it is—dangerous hypocrisy. And on a much simpler level, isn’t this just how generations of nominal Christians have justified themselves (“I’m a Christian, I go to church!”)?

A second danger is the way in which much modem talk about worship involves a retreat into mysticism. In apparent echo of the secular world’s disillusionment with the rational, many who speak of worship emphasize the place of the emotions and the almost indefinable ‘sense of worship’. In line with this, music often assumes a higher profile, along with periods of silence ‘in order that God might tell us what he wants to do among us’. All of a sudden, we do not know what God wants us to do when we gather. All of a sudden, hearing, believing and obeying the Scriptures is not enough. The Spirit of God must be allowed to do his work (as if his work can be separated from the word which he inspired and which is his sword). No-one would want to deny that the whole person is involved in the response of faith and therefore that emotions should not be ignored. However, the fundamental response to the address of God is to hear and to obey, not to feel (see, e.g., Matt 7:21-27; Jn 14:15; 15:12-14; Rom 12:l-2).

The third danger is perhaps the most frightening of all and finds expression in the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. Who were more concerned about the proper worship of God in the Temple than they? Did they not go to great lengths to ensure that the worship of God was unsullied by the world? Why, they even made provision for the exchange of money so that the Temple would not be defiled by the Roman currency with its idolatrous images of the Emperor. But in all their concern for the proper ‘atmospherics’, their insistence that it all be just right, they neglected something much more important. They had set up their money exchange in the Court of the Gentiles and so had effectively cut off the access for outsiders to the heart of God’s temple. In short, their excessive concern for what may only loosely be termed ‘worship’ led them into conflict with the very plan of God revealed consistently since the time of Abraham. Through the Jews, God was calling the world to repentance, but for the sake of ‘the gathering’, the plan of God was ignored. Has the danger risen afresh in the renewed concern for ‘lifting our worship’? Can we afford such self-indulgence when the time is so short?

The timetable of God.

Perhaps underlying much of the modern fascination with the subject of worship is a timetable mistake. The Bible clearly presents us with a picture of the faithful gathered around the throne of God in joyful adoration. But isn’t that at the end, after the gospel has been proclaimed throughout the earth, after the return, after the triumphant Son himself has handed all things back to the Father? Then, in one sense, the work is over, the plan of God fully and finally completed. There is no need for evangelism in that heavenly gathering—the Sabbath rest has finally come. (This is, of course, not strictly true. If evangelism is properly defined by its content rather than its audience then evangelism continues to take place even in the heavenly gathering, as the wondrous mercy of God is forever proclaimed. However, in the sense of reaching out to a lost world with the hope of the gospel, evangelism is fundamentally an activity of the present age.)

However, we are not there yet. We live in that great era between the ascension of Jesus and his return—the gospel era. There is still work to be done. We have a gospel to proclaim. Now is not the time for the holy huddle, concerned with enjoying and refining ‘the worship experience’. Now is the time to bend every muscle, give every last bit of energy, to the task of proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus and calling all men and women to repentance. The time is short. The only reason the return is delayed is to give more people an opportunity to repent. It seems to me that even the gathering of Christians is in service to this great goal. There, Christians are enthused afresh with the greatness of God as he has revealed himself in Jesus. There, they are taught the implications of the gospel and equipped to share it with others. The Christian meeting is obsessed with the gospel and its advance.

The urgent task of this moment in God’s timetable is snatching people out of a dying world, “plundering the strong man’s house” as Jesus put it (Matt 12:29-30). That is at the heart of worship on this side of Jesus’ return. Can those engaged in ‘gathering with the king’ really afford the distraction of the search for experience? Is this really the time for constantly looking at ourselves or is it the time for looking at those around us, those “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12)?

True worship

I’m all for a re-examination of what we d o when we gather. In Anglican circles, it may well be that we have lost one of the concerns of our founding fathers (Cranmer et. al.): the concern that what we do when we gather be intelligible to all who come and an appropriate expression of the gospel in our culture. But let us not divorce worship and evangelism. Let us not retreat into the self-contemplation of the Pharisees and modern day mystics. Rather, let us ensure that our gathering is a proper expression of the gospel we proclaim: enthusing us afresh with what God has done in Jesus, equipping us to proclaim that message to a world that desperately needs to hear it, and encouraging us to live the truth we proclaim. That is the life of faith; that is true worship.

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