This same type of confusion happens within the Church.  Many people call themselves Christians.  They attend church, pray, read the Bible, serve in various ministries, and live morally, but when they come to worship God their attitudes and actions are meaningless, worthless, and empty.  Now, don’t begin to think this is because their heart isn’t in it, like they’re just going through the motions and so the ritual becomes meaningless.  No!  A person’s heart can be completely invested ino worship, but their worship is worthless if their concept of God is wrong – based on something other than how God has revealed himself in scripture.   J.I. Packer in his book “Knowing God” writes,

How often do we hear this sort of thing: “I like to think of God as the great Architect (or Mathematician       or Artist).” “I don’t think of God as a Judge; I like to think of him simply as a Father.”  We know from experience how often remarks of this kind serve as the prelude to a denial of something that the Bible tells us about God… At best, they can only think of God in the image of man – as an ideal man, perhaps, or as superman.  But God is not any sort of man.  We were made in his image, but we must not think of him as existing in ours.  To think of God in such terms is to be ignorant of him, not to know him. (47,48)

These words are challenging for us.  Even as I write this my gut is rebelling against me, telling me not to be such a hard-liner.  Surely God is merciful!  Surely he looks at the heart of a worshipper and judges based on intention!  My gut wants me to believe that God judges our worship based on the heart, but that is only half true.  God indeed judges the heart, but he also judges the head.  True worshippers of Christ must worship Him in spirit (heart) and truth (head) (John 4:23&24).

We can see this truth played out in the book of Exodus.  In chapter 32 the people of Israel tire of waiting for Moses to come down from meeting with God on the mountain, so they go to Aaron and say to him “Make us gods who shall go before us.”  So Aaron tells them to give him their gold and he fashions a golden calf and proclaims the next day “a feast to the LORD.”  Growing up, I heard this story and assumed that Israel consciously abandoned the LORD, Yahweh, to worship another God – the golden calf.  But that’s not what Aaron says.  He fashioned the golden calf and commanded Israel to worship the LORD, not a different god, but a horribly wrong idea of Yahweh.  “And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings… “   To Israel, they were worshipping the God that had brought them out from slavery in Egypt, their hearts lifted in worship, but God almost destroyed them in his anger at their perverted praise.  We see this happen again in the New Testament, when Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem riding on a donkey.  Crowds worshipped him that day, crying “hosanna to the Son of David!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!” (Mat. 21)  But they were not worshipping the Jesus who came to cleanse us from our sins, they were looking for a king who would deliver them from the Romans.  Luke tells us that when Jesus drew near to the city he wept over it because it did not know “the things that make fore peace” (19:42).  Days later, the crowd that had cried “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” shouted, “crucify him.”   They were worshipping God, but they were not worshipping him for who he truly was.  They worshipped their idea of the Messiah, not the Messiah.  Their worship was empty and faded quickly.  They did not see Jesus as God’s messiah who would make peace between God and man and their misconception of Jesus caused him much sorrow.

People of God, in light of these examples, we must examine ourselves!  How easily we could fall into the same trap as the Hebrews, worshipping a misconstrued idea of God instead of the Lord of scripture.  Who is God to you?  Do you think of Him as a god who would not let you suffer hardship, or trials, or hell?  Is he here just to make us feel good when times get rough?  Is he merely the reason we use to get together and experience community?  Is he just the thing we use to keep our families to behave morally?  Do we really know God?  Do we strive to worship Him for who he really is, or are we content to pacify ourselves on our incomplete or misguided conceptions of Him?  Which god do you worship?

At this point the logical question to ask is, “what now?” or perhaps more specifically, “How do we begin to truly know God?” No doubt, a long and in depth answer is needed to answer the question of how to know God, but the answer I will give here is simple:  seek Him in his word and you will find Him.  Too often we view the Bible as a history book, a self-help guide, or a manual for life, but at its core the Bible is the God of the universe revealing himself to His children.  I said the answer was simple, but I did not say it was easy.  We cannot just read the scriptures – we must study the Word and prayerfully plead with God to open our eyes to see Him more clearly.  Oh how we desperately need to know Him – to worship God in spirit and in truth, abandoning our poor ideas of Him for the fuller picture given to us in His Word!  Will you join me in striving to know our God?

Now that I have come to that understanding, there is a question that lingers in the back of my head: Why do we sing at all?  Why is music such an integral part of our gatherings?  What’s the point?  Sometimes I struggle to see why music is so important.  In a lot of ways, music opens up a big can of worms.  It is often a point of division instead of unity, It manipulates our emotions and has the potential to get us hooked on the emotional high instead of the truths of God’s word, much of the time the people I lead don’t look as if they care to sing anyways, and sometimes it is more of a distraction than anything else… Now, don’t misunderstand me here.  I love music!  I love worshipping God with music!  But sometimes, especially when I’m doubtful or frustrated, I question the importance of music in worship.  Can’t we worship God without it?

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has these questions.  Have you ever been singing with other believers and all of a sudden questioned why you were doing it?  Have you wondered why we sing every Sunday or why music seems to be so important to Christians as we worship God together?

As I’ve tried to answer my questions over the years, a worship leader named Bob Kauflin has helped me think about my questions and understand a bit more about the importance of music in worship.  He is the author of a book called “Worship Matters” which I highly recommend.  Take a few minutes to watch this video and write down a couple of the reasons Kauflin gives for why we sing. Hopefully it will help us think about this question.

Here are some questions for you to consider after watching Bob Kauflin talk about why God wants us to sing.

1. Do the reasons given in the video cause you to think differently about musical worship?
2. Evaluate the reasons you sing when gathered with others to worship the Lord.  Do your reasons fit with the reasons given in the video?
3. Apply this information to your life.  In light of these truths about why we sing, how will you think/act differently?

As I thought about how to communicate the importance of meeting together for worship, a passage from Hebrews came to mind.  While an argument for gathering together could be made from multiple passages in scripture, this particular passage seems to encompass the importance of both whole-life worship and gathered worship in a beautiful way, so this is where I’m going to spend my time for now.

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.  And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”     ~ Hebrews 10:19-25

We can divide this passage into three sections: the “therefore” section, the “since we” section, and the “let us” section.  First, we need to look at the “therefore” section.  One of the first things you find out when learning how to study the Bible is to ask the question “what is the ‘therefore’ there for?”  The word “therefore” tells us to look back and find what the author has already written as the foundation for what he’s about to say.  In the case of this passage, we find that the writer of Hebrews has spent the first nineteen verses of chapter ten writing about how Christ’s sacrifice is better than the Old Testament sacrifices of bulls and sheep.   “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified,” declares the author (v.14).  That is what the “therefore” is there for. Now we can move on to the “since we” section.

In light of Christ’s all sufficient sacrifice the author makes two statements:  “Since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus…” (v. 19) and “since we have a great priest over the house of God” (v. 21).  These two statements are declarations about worship.  The  “holy place” was a place in the Jewish temple where the glory of God dwelt; separated from Israel by a thick curtain, symbolizing that our holy God could not taint himself by mingling with sinful humanity.  We read in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that when Christ died on the cross this curtain tore in two.  Christ’s sacrificial blood covers our sin and makes us holy to the Lord.  Because of His blood we can now confidently enter into the holy place to worship God.  Furthermore, we no longer need a priest to mediate our worship for us as they did in the Old Testament.  We have Jesus, the great high priest!  He is our mediator; through him we are able to worship God the Father.  In addition to the “therefore” section, the “since we” statements help establish a foundation, a reason for the challenge that the author of Hebrews is about to give his readers in the “let us” section.

Therefore brothers and sisters, because of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice, since we can have confidence in worship through the mediation of Jesus, let us:  “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,”  “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering,” and “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together… but encouraging one another.”  In the “therefore” and “since we” portions of Hebrews 10:19-25 the writer reminds us of the reasons we have to worship.  Now in the “let us” section the writer gives us an overview of what our worship should look like – drawing near to God, standing firm in our faith, encouraging one another, and meeting together.  Here’s what is important to notice:  the author is painting us a picture of worship with a very broad brush, he does not write specifically about what these aspects of worship look like in practice.  Instead he gives us the bird’s eye view of worship, outlining broad categories that our worship should encompass.  Because of Christ’s blood, since we have confidence to approach God, and since we have a great high priest to mediate for us we are to live out our worship by drawing near to God (a personal act), standing firm in our faith (a whole-life action), encouraging one another (a communal act), and meeting together (a communal action).  In this broad picture of worship, the acts of gathering together take up half the painting!  The writer of Hebrews is reminding us of the vital importance of coming together as we worship!

Maybe you’re like me and it’s easy for you to become frustrated with church – the ritual, the politics, the people…  the list could go on. I have a critical eye and often its easy for me to dwell on the things I think need to be fixed rather than glory in what God has done and is doing in the church.  For people like me who can get easily weary with gathering together, it is important for us to remember this passage in Hebrews and how the author reminds us that because of Christ’s blood, since we can draw near to God, and since we have a great high priest to mediate our worship for us we are not to neglect meeting together to worship.  Do you see the significance of the “therefore” and “since we” sections?  Together they explain to us the gospel – Jesus coming, dying, rising, and opening a way for us to worship the Father.  This is the foundation, the reason, and the motivation the author gives before challenging us to worship as individuals and as a community by meeting together.  The gospel is good news that is to be celebrated and gloried in!  When your favorite team wins the championship would you rather jump around alone in your living room or celebrate the victory with other fans that have the same excitement?  Furthermore, does the team receive more glory when you shout their praises to the T.V. and couch cushions or when you are in the stadium joining in the roar of the cheering crowd?  Clearly the team is celebrated and gloried in more fully when people come together to do it.  This is more deeply true in our worship of God.  As we celebrate Christ’s victory for us, we should long to gather together with others who also know His sweet triumph. In this way we glorify him more intensely.  This does not diminish the importance of individual, whole-life worship, for if we spent our individual lives not celebrating and glorying in the gospel, we would have no reason to worship when we gather.  Our gathered worship would be inauthentic, conjured, and forced without our individual, whole-life worship.  Our lives of worship make our gathered worship complete and, in turn, our gathered worship spurs on our lived-out worship.   One is not fully realized without the other.

I began this blog committed to taking a break from writing about worship in all of life, but it seems its significance for the Christian life cannot be avoided.  We cannot neglect meeting together; we cannot afford to forget its enormous importance for us as we seek to worship on a daily basis.  As we remember our “therefore’s” and “since we’s”- our foundation: the gospel – let us draw near to the Father, standing firm in our faith, spurring one another on, never neglecting to meet together.

These are some things I know about worship: (1) I am always a worshipper of something, no matter what – it is something intrinsically part of me. (2) Christian worship is a response to what God has done for us in the redemptive work of Jesus. (3) Since I am a constant worshipper and I now worship Christ because of what he has done in me, it follows that worshipping God encompasses the whole of Christian life. To be a disciple of Christ means to be a life-worshipper of Christ. So, in light of that truth, lets take a look at the token “missions verse.”

“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go        therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’” ~ Matthew 28:18-20

In this passage Christ comes to the eleven disciples having won the victory through his death, burial, and resurrection and gives them their marching orders: “Go therefore and make disciples.” What I want us to see is that if we think about what we know about worship as a response to the gospel, we have to see that mission must be a natural extension of worship. A personal response to the gospel of Jesus without a personal proclamation of that gospel to the world is no response at all. Furthermore, if worship encompasses the whole of Christian living and to make disciples is the mission of the Christian life, then mission can be seen purely as a part of worship.

As a result if, we approach missions without thinking about it as a worshipful response to the gospel of Jesus we will come at it in an incomplete manner. I think, however, that it is easier for us to look at missions as an extension of worship than it is for us to view worship as incomplete without mission. This is mostly because we tend to box worship into a service, building, style of music, etc. Whole-life worship makes this sort of thinking impossible – we must see worship as deficient if it lacks a call to go make disciples. Our response to what God has done in our individual lives as well as in our corporate gatherings must include the spreading of the gospel. The gospel that stirred in us worship of God must be taken to the rest of the world.  We must do this both individually and corporately.

So, to sum it up: missions are a natural extension of worship because worship encompasses the whole of the Christian life. They are not separate disciplines that can be compartmentalized; they have an intrinsic relationship. Worship is mission. Mission is worship. One without the other makes them incomplete. Case made.

When I was in college I took a sociology class, and learned about a sociological principle called the “self-fulfilling prophecy.”  We were learning about how the success of children in academics, relationships, and life in general is dependent upon how people label the children when they are young.  A child is less likely to be successful in life if people don’t expect him to be successful when he is young.  In contrast, children are more likely to lead successful lives when the people surrounding them simply expect them to be successful.  Here is a more academic definition:[1]“The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’.”  This principle illustrates the power of the way we think and speak.  Our thoughts and our words now have the ability to influence the way things happen in the future.

So lets remember this: a self-fulfilling prophecy begins with a false definition.

Why have I taken the time to explain this sociological principle?  Because I think we can take this concept that is usually applied to sociological structures and use it to better define a flaw within the common structure of Christianity.  Within the Christian sub-culture we are consistently making use of a false definition of worship that induces a way of thinking and acting which makes the false conception become “true.”

Let me explain what I mean by a false definition of worship.  I am employed at a church as the “Director of Worship,” there are other people that I work with called “worship leaders,” in church services the music is often referred to as “worship” which is separate from the message, which is separate from the offering, etc., there is a thriving genre of Christian music called “worship music,” people who shut their eyes and lift their hands while they sing are seen as very “worshipful,” and a service that leaves us in tears or gives us chills is described as “great worship.”  These are common ways in which we in the Church uses the word “worship” and each example ties the concept of worship to a piece of music or a church gathering.  Whether we realize it or not Christians are re-classifying the word “worship” to be a synonym for some sort of musical, emotional, experiential event.

But is this the definition of worship that the Bible gives us?

Absolutely not!

From Genesis to Revelation worship is never compartmentalized – it is a thread that runs through all of life.  To be sure, there are places in the Old Testament where specific attention is given to worshipping God in a corporate setting, but even then those instances are meant to flow out of and into a life of worship.  To outline the Bible’s whole counsel on worship would take too much time and too many words, but here are a couple instances that come to mind.

Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” Humanity was made in the image of God.  As Christians we understand God to be triune, three in one, a worshipping community in and of Himself.  He is eternally pouring ceaseless conversation and immeasurable love into himself.  So for us to be created in the image of this self-glorifying God means that we are created worshipping.  Just like a baby is born crying, we came out worshipping.  We cannot help it; it’s a central part of our nature.  The coming of sin into humanity in Genesis chapter three doesn’t stop us from worshipping, it just perverts our worship from God to something else.

Deuteronomy 6:5-9, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.  And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way; and when you lie down, and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”   Here God outlines a way of life for Israel; a lifestyle lived in full view of God’s law.  In the Old Testament the law was more than a set of rules.  To the Jews, following the law was a response to what God had done for the nation of Israel – it was an act of worship and it applied to their whole lives.

Romans 12:1, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”  Paul is appealing to us in this passage to offer ourselves as living sacrifices in view of God’s mercies.  Because of the gospel we are to give our whole selves – this is our spiritual worship.

These passages each weigh in on the topic of worship from slightly different angles, but in each case we see that the Biblical definition of worship is a based in whole-life action.  According to the Bible, worship is much more than a musical, emotional, experiential event.

Now, back to the self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we can agree that (1) the word “worship” is often used by Christians to describe a musical, emotional, experiential event and (2) that the Biblical definition of worship leads us to a whole-life understanding of worship, then we can say that when many Christians think of worship, they are beginning with a false definition.  And, according to the self-fulfilling prophecy principal, a false definition will evoke new behavior (or new thinking) that will make us perceive the false definition as “true.”  In plain English what I’m saying is that falsely defining worship as a musical, emotional, experiential event is causing us to behave towards worship wrongly.  It makes us put the musical, emotional experiential events on too high of a pedestal.  Eventually it leads to worshiping our idea of worship instead of worshipping God because the false definition places much emphasis on feelings and experiences and little emphasis on the God that is to be glorified no matter what the circumstance.  This is a serious flaw.

Happily, in my view, the solution to this flaw is very straightforward.  We simply need to stop feeding our false definition of worship by changing our vocabulary.  A “Director of Worship” could instead be called “Director of Services,”  “Director of Congregational Worship,” or “Director of Music.”  A “worship leader” might be called a “song leader,”  “lead worshipper,” or “the music guy.”  We could do away with “worship music” and simply call it “Christian Music” or just plain “music.”  People more articulate and creative than I am could come up with new ways to identify the things we put the “worship” label on.  Furthermore, when we speak of worship we can do our best to speak of its significance in all of life and emphasize that our Christian events are simply gatherings meant to reflect the lives of worship that we lead.  In changing our vocabulary, we will starve out the Church’s false definition of worship and introduce a more biblical view of it.  The way we talk about worship has deep significance.  We have the power in our words to introduce connotations that can lead to false definitions that will become a reality unless checked.  Brothers and sisters, Let us embrace that power to bring a right understanding of worship back to the Church.

This agitation is hereditary.  It is passed down from generation to generation and can be traced back to our first parents: Adam and Eve.  They alone of all humanity have experienced truly peaceful existence.  They communed with God in the garden and their relationship to all things was perfect because their relationship to their Creator was perfect.  But then they believed a lie.  They believed that God was limiting their potential because he was keeping them from being like Him, so they took and ate.  And in that moment the creature showed the Creator, “I don’t trust you, I don’t need you, you are not my king, I will cast off your yoke and bear my own because I know better than you what is best for me.”  They declared rebellion against the kingdom of God and their peace with God was shattered.  Their treason put a divide of hostility between God and man.  Their relationship with all things was marred because their relationship with God was broken.  And so, because of the sin we have inherited from our first parents, we live at odds with God and creation.

The blind cannot lead the blind.  The dead do not raise themselves.  The traitor cannot declare himself innocent.  We would be perpetually condemned in our treason were it not for the mercy of the Father – the only one with true vision, the only real source of life, the only righteous judge.

“Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.  And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.  For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Ephesians 2:13-18)

Before the time of Christ, the prophets foretold that the Messiah would be called the “prince of peace.”  In making Himself the perfect atonement for our sin He fully embodies that name.  He is our champion of peace!

So if we are reconciled to the Father through the work of the Son, we are new creations!  The old is replaced by the new.  Since we have received this reconciliation from Christ we have become partners with him.  We have been entrusted as bearers of this message of peace because we ourselves have seen it to be true.  So, in a sense we are ambassadors for Christ, tools for him to use to make his message of peace known.  Through Christ we are reconciled and we are agents of reconciliation to the world (2 Corinthians 5:17-21).

And as we are used as God’s tools, this is the seed of peace that we must sow: that for our sake the sinless Son, Jesus, humbled Himself and bore our sin so that we might be clothed in His righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21, Philippians 2:5-8).  Fighting hunger, working to end poverty, helping orphans, and all other manners of social justice are eternally unjust if the good news of Christ is forgotten.  We may do more than Mother Teresa to help the poor in the name of bringing redemption, but we will never foster true peace in this world without the gospel of Jesus Christ.

God calls to us through Christ.  We are made alive and creature is reconciled to Creator.  We respond to God’s call by partnering with him as agents of God’s peace, taking the gospel to the world.  God calls.  We respond.  This, my friends, is the essence of worship.

The first question of the Westminster shorter catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?”  The catechism’s answer is simple, but profound: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”  To me, part of this answer is expected.  Of course the purpose of humanity is to bring glory to God!  The second half of the catechism’s answer, however, is surprising and powerful.  “To glorify God and enjoy him forever”?  Enjoying God is part of our “chief end”?  Somehow enjoying God doesn’t seem like it should be as important as glorifying God, but lets think about it a minute.  If I am telling someone about how wonderful my wife is with a flat tone, empty eyes, and a yawn no one is going to believe me.  Even if everything I said about her was 100% true, I wouldn’t be pointing back to her as something worthy of recognition; rather I would be communicating that what I was sharing wasn’t important in the long run.  If I do not enjoy the amazing things about my wife, no one watching me will recognize that she is amazing.  The same goes for our God.  If we do not truly enjoy God we will not be fulfilling our purpose of glorifying him.  So, our chief end is to enjoy God in order to bring glory to Him.

Notice the word contained in “enjoy”?  Joy.  Webster defines “joy” as a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.  When we enjoy something, we are experiencing great pleasure and happiness within ourselves.  We are in-joying.  So the Shorter Catechism is telling us that our highest purpose is to bring glory to God by finding joy in Him forever.  Sounds like a great purpose, but there’s a bit of a hiccup here.  We can’t glorify God or find joy in Him.

You see, humanity fell.  It rebelled against God and was cast away from communion with Him as a consequence of its treason.  What was once a perfect union was broken by humanity’s disobedience.  The eyes that once could recognize the hand of the Creator working in all things are now blind.  The heart that once loved the Father purely and innocently is now corrupted by sin – turned to stone.  The being once fully alive in the presence of God is now dead in its trespasses.  In our sin we are dead to God, completely unable to acknowledge Him for who He is, helpless to worship him.  In our fallen state we could never glorify God, let alone find joy in Him.  But the story does not end there.  God, in His love for us, has made a way for the blinded eyes to see, the stone hearts to beat, and the dead to rise full of life.  Through the atoning work of Christ we are given the ability to see God and respond to Him.

In light of this truth, it follows that joy is an intrinsic part of our salvation.  Joy and salvation cannot be separated.  We have true joy because we have salvation through Christ!  I have written before that our worship must be a response to our salvation and since joy is an essential element of salvation I could rewrite that statement to say our worship must be an overflow of the joy of our salvation.   Our worship should be filled with joy.  This means that our daily life should be infused with joy as well as our worship services.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  How can our daily life-worship be filled with joy?  The world is broken; life is full of hardships, grief, pain, and sorrow.  It would be impossible to be joyful every day in the mist of the world’s suffering.  But I would encourage you to expand your understanding of what joy is for Christians.  The dictionary says joy is a feeling of great joy and happiness, and Jesus takes that definition and attaches it to one truth that will transcend every circumstance – we have our joy because we have our salvation and our salvation will never leave us though all else may fail.  Our joy is the hope that we have.  Our joy is Jesus.

By saying that, I don’t mean to minimize our hardships, grief, and pain.  Those things are stinging realities that we will not escape in this world.  Our hearts will ache, our souls will be heavy, we will know our brokenness afresh, and in those moments the joy of our salvation will seem like a memory.  But we have been given this hope: though we are faithless, God is faithful.  If we are His, He will not abandon us to our brokenness, he will uphold us with a willing spirit, he will restore the joy of our salvation.  Take heart.  Let us worship with joy!

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever [truly] loves has been born of God and knows God.  Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son in the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

“By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us his Spirit.  And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.  Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God.  So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.  God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.  By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.  There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.  For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.  We love because he first loved us.”

~ 1 John 4:7-19

“We love because he first loved us.”  Worshipping God is more than a dry obligation.  Through the work of Christ, the Holy Spirit reveals to us the overwhelming worthiness of God, and we worship in response to that.  But worship is more than a forced reaction.  God is love, the cross is saturated with love, and our personal awakening is an act of the Spirit’s loving kindness.  When we truly see such love given to us, we cannot but love in return.

I have written before that the root of our problem with sin is a worship problem.  Sin perverts our worship instinct so that we turn away from God to worship the created rather than the Creator.  In the same vein of thought, we need to understand that we worship what we love, so if we love something more than we love God it will become the object of our worship and if we truly love God more than anything our love for everything else will flow from our love for God.  Worship and love are not concepts that can be separated.

Having just been married, one thing that sticks in my memory from premarital counseling is that love is more than a feeling.  At its core, love is a commitment to endure through any circumstance.  As we examine ourselves, looking for the spiritual fruit of love in our worship we must not dismay if the feeling is not there all the time.  Instead of looking for the feeling of love, we should search for signs of genuine love-based commitment.  1 Corinthians 13 gives us a great definition of love that can help us as we examine our worship practices: ‘Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”

All that being said, if we claim Christ as our savior, yet do not ever feel loving towards God as we worship Him, we need to do some serious heart-checking.  If your affections are not ever stirred towards the One who brought you from death to life, you cannot simply make the excuse that love is more than a feeling.  Its true – love is more than a feeling, but it is a feeling.  Never once having your emotions kindled for Christ may mean you don’t truly know him.  If this absence of affection describes your relationship with God please run to Him in prayer.  Beg God to stir your affections for Him, to truly open your eyes to His love so that you can respond with a heart full of affection for Him.

As we come to the end of this discussion, one thing about worship and love remains to be said.  The scripture from 1 John sited above contains the famous phrase “God is love.”  Our culture has made much of this phrase, but for followers of Christ we must remember that the verse says “God is love,” but it does not say that God is our idea of love.  Our concepts of love must not dictate our idea of who God is.  God is love.  God is also just, holy, righteous, etc… love is not God’s principle attribute.  It is not the only attribute that factors into His relationship with humanity.  As we approach God in worship we must be careful not to put God in a box by assigning our human concepts of love to a God that transcends human understanding.  We love Him because he first loved us and that love is a love so deep that it transcends our limited experience.  Let us respond to that love with worshipful, love-filled hearts and lives.

~Galatians 5:16-26

I am a worship leader.  That’s my job.  Every week I plan the flow of the next Sunday’s worship service, meet with the pastor, gather music, coordinate volunteers, lead practices, make media presentations, get to church early on Sunday mornings, welcome the congregation, lead them in song, lead them in prayer, and share my heart for the gospel with them.  I am pretty heavily invested in the gathered worship at my church…  But when Sunday morning comes I am not the worship leader.  Neither my job title, nor all my preparation and time invested into the different service elements qualify me to really be the worship leader.  You see, even as we come together to worship God, He Himself is the true leader in worship.

In the book of Ephesians we read, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:1-2 &4-5).  In case you didn’t pick this up, the word “dead” in this passage means dead, not alive, unable to respond to any stimulation, not functioning at all.  Before we knew Christ we were spiritually dead in our sin.  Nothing we could have done could make us undead – dead people don’t raise themselves.  “But God” in his mercy “made us alive.”  God is the outside power that calls us from death to life in Him.  Through the Son’s work on the cross our debt is paid and we are able to see God for who He is and respond in worship.  Moreover, the Holy Spirit comes into us and empowers us to worship because we are weak and frail – unable to worship in our own strength.  So, we worship God the Father, through the atoning work of God the Son, by the power of God the Holy Spirit.   God is the initiator of our worship because He is the one who initiates our salvation.  We can only worship Him when He leads us into worship.

This truth is a daily reality for followers of Christ because of what we know about worship:  it is so much more than a service or a song – it is a way of life.  Romans 12:1 urges us, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”  Our lives are to be continual offerings of worship in response to the mercy of God towards us.

With all of that in mind, I find myself consistently asking, “How do you life-worship?”  I mean, corporate worship is easy – it has definable guidelines and a predictable flow.  It’s much easier for me to measure weather or not I truly worshipped in a corporate gathering than it is for me to evaluate how I am doing at offering my life as worship and submitting to the worship leader of my life.

Obviously life-worship has less to do with singing and more to do with submitting our life to Christ.  Right away, that compels me think that life-worship means putting sin to death in my life.  Conquering sin and temptation is a vital discipline in the Christian life, but scripture has lead me to believe that if we only focus on the sin in our lives we will not be following our worship leader very well.  In Galatians 5, Paul writes to the Christians in Galatia instructing them to walk by the power of the Spirit and not gratify the desires of the flesh.  He goes on to outline some of the evil desires of our flesh, but he doesn’t stay there very long.  Instead he moves ahead to talk about what it looks like to walk by the Spirit – writing out the fruit of the Spirit.  This seems to complete the picture for me – focusing not only on our sin, but what we should replace our sin with.  So often Bible studies and prayer groups turn into dramatic sin-confessing sessions in which we ask to be free from sin, but spend little time encouraging each other to strive to be loving, joyful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, or self-controlled.  These are the tools of measurement that God has given us.  “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit” (Luke 6:43).

In my life, this means examining myself to see which fruit I am lacking and spending a lot of time in prayer, asking for God to prune me so that I may produce better fruit.  Often this sin that we struggle with does correlate with the fruit that we lack, but focusing on the fruit allows us to look past merely wallowing in our faults and failures.

So, in order to be better worshippers in all of life, we must follow the leading of the Spirit in our lives and strive for the fruit of that labor.  This thought has made me want to examine each of the fruit of the Spirit more closely to see how each one can be identified and utilized in worship.  Look for more thoughts on the fruit of the Spirit in future blogs!

Sin had left a crimson stain

He washed me white as snow”

“And now, let the weak say I am strong

Let the poor say I am rich

Because of what the Lord has done for us”

“He loves us, oh how he loves us, oh how he loves…”

“Oh happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away”

Do you notice a pattern in these lyrics?  They aren’t exceedingly similar songs, but they all exemplify one mode in which we worship God – a plane that we worship Him on.  You see, God is the only one worthy to be worshiped on two main levels: because of who He is and because of what He has done.  We can worship God vertically by praising Him for who He is and we can worship him horizontally by praising Him for what He has done for us.  The lyrics above are all examples of us worshipping God horizontally.  Both planes of worship are legitimate and necessary, but if we focus too much on one plane our understanding of worship will be damaged.

From the beginning God has taken the action.  He creates.  He judges.  He redeems.  He protects.  He delivers.  He disciplines.  We have always been weak and he has always been strong.  He is the eternal giver and we are ever the receivers.  Ultimately, God took the paramount action by sending His son to dwell among us as a human, to live a completely sinless life, to be the atoning sacrifice for our sin, and to rise from the dead and ascend to heaven where he sits at the right hand of God the Father.  This is what God has done.  These actions are spectacular, they are captivating, and they draw us in.  In light of these actions it makes perfect sense for us to worship Him.  It is only by God doing a work in us that our eyes can be opened to offer our lives to Him.  In view of His mercies, we would be wretched fools not to worship him.

But…

Think about this.  When you watch a musician perform a mesmerizing piece of music or witness an athlete pull off a stunning feat you can be in awe of what they have done, but do you know who they are?  Do you know how they got to that point?  Do you know what their character is like?  The answer is no.  In the same way we can be completely thankful for what God has done for us, but we should not stop there on that horizontal plane. Instead, we need to continue down that track to worship God purely for being God.  We must know His character and worship Him in light of it.

Scripture reveals to us many names for God.  Some of these names are:  El Shaddia – “God Almighty,” El Elyon – “The Most High God,” El Olam – “The Everlasting God,” Yahweh Jireh – “The God who provides,” Yahweh Nissi – “the Lord is my banner,” Yahweh Shalom – “The Lord is peace,” El Roi – “The God who sees me,” or Adonai – “the Lord, master.”  Scripture also attaches different attributes to God; it shows us that God is loving, just, faithful, merciful, mighty, etc.   With each name or attribute we are able to see a small part of who God is.

These names for God teach us something about Him, but on an individual level they fail to teach us everything about Him.  A person who only praised God for his love would not be able to comprehend a God whose justice calls for punishment of sin.  Likewise, someone who only worshipped God for his might could have a hard time praising Him as the God of peace.  Our names for God are helpful, but we must be careful not to emphasize one characteristic of God over the others.  Holding up one attribute of God as more important than His other attributes will result in a very poor understanding of who God is.  And a poor understanding of God leads to worshipping him in an unacceptable manner.

There is only one attribute of God that we can hold above all the rest – His holiness.

“Holy.”  This is one of the central words in the language of our faith.  We find it throughout the Bible from beginning to end.  This word is not foreign to most people.  Even un-churched people use it.  Often it is used as a synonym for “pure” or “religious,” but when we ascribe holiness to God it means something entirely different.  The chief interpretation of “holy” is separate.  R.C. Sproul writes, “It comes from an ancient word that means ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’  To translate this basic meaning into contemporary language would be to use the phrase ‘a cut apart.’  Perhaps even more accurate would be the phrase ‘A cut above something’” (46).  So, when we say God is holy, we are actually saying He is separate, He’s “a cut above the rest.”  But it’s more than that.  In addition to separateness, calling God holy has an implication of transcendence.  God utterly exceeds our limits.  He is above and beyond what we could ever conceive of.  He is completely other than us.  He is more than “a cut above the rest” – He is an infinite cut above everything else in existence.

This is the beauty of calling God “holy” – it calls attention to all of who God is.   Since we understand “holy” to denote the transcendence of God, it follows that naming him as holy calls attention to the attributes that make Him an infinite cut above the rest.  “His love is holy love, His justice is holy justice, His mercy is holy mercy, his knowledge is holy knowledge, His spirit is holy spirit” (Sproul, 48).

One of my favorite passages in scripture is Isaiah 6.  In it the prophet Isaiah is given a vision of the throne room of heaven.  He writes:

Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with                               two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;the whole earth is full of his glory!”

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house                                was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me!For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean                                         lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King,                                     the LORD of hosts!”

I appreciate this passage for many reasons, but the thing that teaches me most is Isaiah’s reaction to seeing God.  He encountered God’s holiness and in the presence of His holiness he saw who he truly was – a sinner.  Isaiah was a prophet, a righteous man in the eyes of Israel, but in the presence of God’s holiness he was wretched and filthy.  You see, encountering the holiness of God is not a warm and fuzzy experience.  God’s holiness made Isaiah uncomfortable and afraid.  You know the feeling that comes when you think too hard about something you can’t really understand?  Your mind starts to spin in circles, you begin to feel panicky, and you are unexplainably afraid; you want to escape the thought but you are strangely captivated by it.  I bet that is what Isaiah felt – times infinity.  In the light of God’s glory he saw his own darkness and knew he did not belong.  The beautiful part of this passage of scripture is that after Isaiah despairs in his unworthiness God cleanses him and makes him worthy of being in His presence.

This is what connects the two planes.  Knowledge of God’s holiness (who God is) causes us to see our deep need for cleansing and gives us a profound appreciation for our salvation (what God has done).  This is why we must always be careful to not deemphasize who God is in worship in favor of emphasizing what he has done; because knowing who God is gives us the truest understanding of what God has done.  God’s holiness is the filter by which we see and understand the rest of the gospel!

An example of this is the Lord’s Prayer.  This is the model that Jesus gave for us to approach God in prayer.  It begins with “Our Father who are in heaven, hallowed by thy name.”  “Hallow” is a verb that means, “to honor as holy.”  So Jesus is teaching us in this prayer to honor God as holy.  Then Jesus goes on to teach us to ask for His kingdom come, for His will be done, for Him to provide for our daily need, for Him to forgive us our sins, For him to protect us from temptation and deliver us.  All of these requests come after the prayer establishes God as holy.

Lets think about this.  If we honor God as truly holy it follows that we will see our desperate need for a Savior.  If our eyes are opened to our need for salvation, then we will respond to our redemption with lives of worship.  If we offer our lives as a sacrifice of worship the rest of the prayer will flow from it.  God’s kingdom will come through our worshipful acts of evangelism and justice, His desires will be accomplished in us because worshipping Him will mold our hearts, we will have faith in Him to provide for us, we will have confidence to confess our sins, and we will have a reason to resist temptation.  All of this flows from us first qualifying God as holy in the beginning of the prayer.

If we step back and take a broader look at all of this information, the application becomes obvious.  In order for us to worship God rightly, we must know him rightly.  To worship Him solely for what he has done in our lives is to worship him incompletely.  To worship Him incompletely give us room to worship him wrongly.  To worship him wrongly is dangerous at best and idolatrous at worst.  We must know the character of God.  We must sit in the incomprehensible expanse of who He is.  We must acknowledge God’s holiness and seek Him in the midst of it.  Only when we know who God is will we truly be able to worship him for what he has done.