Worship and the Reformation Gospel
by John M. Frame
First, let me say that it is good to be with you,
and let me express my thanks to the conference organizers for inviting me. Let
me also commend them for their insight in combining a Reformation theme with a
worship theme. We often think of the Reformation as focused on the doctrine of
salvation, specifically justification by grace through faith, and rightly so.
But it was also and equally concerned with worship. The Reformers believed that
the Roman Mass had become idolatrous, with worship given to the bread and wine
of communion, rather than to the living Lord himself. Not to mention veneration
of Mary and the saints, religious relics, and so on.
Worship and salvation: these two
topics are very closely related in Scripture and in church history. In the
fourth century controversy over the deity of Christ, the main arguments from
the orthodox side were, first, that if Christ is not fully God, our worship of
him has been idolatry. And second, that if Christ is not fully God, we are yet
in our sins; for salvation is of the Lord.
The Bible also brings worship and
salvation close together. In Scripture, worship is our basic stance before God.
I define it as acknowledging the
greatness of our covenant Lord. When you stand in God’s presence, you must acknowledge his greatness. When you
meet a king, you bow, and you use language like “your majesty” that reflects
his great importance and shows your own subordination. When human beings stand
before the King of the whole universe, our self-abasement ought to be far more
profound.
So in the Bible, worship exists in
every meeting between God and his creatures. Where God stands is holy ground.
When God appears to us, we humble ourselves and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed
by who he is, by his greatness in comparison with our puny smallness. When we
meditate on how God is present everywhere, as David does in Psalm 139, we stand
in reverent awe and praise him.
So I have no doubt that Adam and
Eve worshiped God in the Garden before they fell into sin. God was there with
them, speaking to them, declaring their tasks. What response could they have
given to him, other than worship: reverent awe in his presence, supreme
readiness to hear his Word and do it?
But somehow, and I don’t
understand how this could have happened, Adam and Eve disobeyed that Word and
fell into sin. Afterward, they met God again, but it was different. They were
not only concerned with God’s greatness and authority. They were also concerned
with their own sin and God as the judge. God did come to judge Satan, curse the
ground, and bring suffering into human life. But wonderfully he also promised
redemption. We would not be destroyed, as we deserved to be, but we would live
by the sweat of our brow and bring forth children by painful labor. And in
God’s time, one of those children, the “seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15) will
crush the head of the devil-serpent.
After the Fall, human worship
could not just acknowledge God’s greatness and authority. It would also call on
him for forgiveness of sin, on the basis of his promise of a savior. And in our
worship we would praise God for that promise, and for all the fulfillments of
it through history: the Exodus, the conquest, the return from exile, and especially
the final atonement: Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.
So when Adam and Eve fell, worship
and salvation became inseparable. We would have worshiped God even if we hadn’t
fallen. But after the fall, we must always be concerned about salvation when we
meet God. So Old Testament worship focuses on sacrifice, and New Testament
worship focuses on the Resurrection of Jesus, the final sacrifice.
We should expect, then, that the
Bible’s teachings about salvation will profoundly affect our worship. In my
five messages in this conference, I will survey the doctrines emphasizes by the
Reformation, to show how they should affect our worship. The Reformation
emphasized five “alones:” salvation is by Scripture alone, by faith alone, by
Christ alone, by grace alone, bringing glory to God alone. The Latin word for
“only” is solus with, of course,
various case endings. So you often hear these principles in Latin: sola Scriptura, by Scripture alone, sola fide, by faith alone, solo Christo, by Christ alone, sola gratia, by grace alone, soli deo gloria, bringing glory to God
alone.
1.
Sola Scriptura
When we consider worship, one of
the first questions concerns authority. Are there rules governing worship? And, if so, where can we find them?
Everything else we say about worship depends on our answer to this question.
Now the rules have to come from
God. It should be obvious that in worship we are seeking to please God, not
ourselves. This is true of everything in life, and in one sense everything in
life is worship. We seek to glorify him in everything we do, even to make our
bodies living sacrifices, which Paul says is our spiritual worship. But
Scripture also calls us to meetings to worship God in a special way. And then,
when we approach God’s special presence to acknowledge his greatness, we want
above all to please him.
Now for our worship we could
invent all kinds of interesting ceremonies, speak all manner of profound
thoughts, let our artistic imaginations run wild. But which of these, if any,
actually pleases God? Can we expect God to commend our creativity, our
artistry, our ideas? Which of them does he like, dislike? Which does he like
the most, or dislike the least? If our own thoughts and imaginations are all we
have to go on, I’d have to say honestly, “your guess is as good as mine.”
We may have at hand some standards
or criteria for judging words or ceremonies or artistry: standards of truth,
depth, profundity. We think we know what makes for good preaching, good music,
a good worship experience. But why should we think that God shares those
standards? His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and his ways than our
ways.
We’re just
going to flounder around with this, unless God himself speaks, unless God
himself tells us what pleases him. I do believe that our thoughts, our
creativity play a role in worship. But first, our minds, our thoughts, our
creativity, must bow before God. First we must humble ourselves. First we must
hear his Word.
Has God spoken? The Roman Catholic
Church of Luther’s day and ours believes that God speaks equally in Scripture
and in the traditions of the church. But Luther, with fear and trembling,
rejected centuries of church tradition for the sake of Scripture. He and the
Roman Church agreed that Scripture was God’s Word. They agreed that it had authority. The difference was that
Luther also believed that Scripture was sufficient.
He believed that our decisions should be based on Scripture alone, so that if there is a conflict
between Scripture and tradition we must always resolve that conflict in favor
of Scripture. Scripture not only has authority, but its authority is unique,
over against all other sources of authority. It is the judge of all human
thoughts, of all human life, of all human worship, and of all church tradition.
It was this insight that got the
Reformation going. If Scripture is sufficient,
then we are free to sweep aside centuries of traditions, human customs,
ceremonies, theological ideas, liturgies.
Now we need to ask, was Luther
right? Was he right to base everything on Scripture, to be as negative as he
was toward the traditions of the church? Was he right about sola Scriptura, the sufficiency of Scripture? From time to time over the centuries and
in our own day, some Protestants have left their churches to go back to the
Roman church, or to Eastern Orthodoxy. They do this for many reasons. Some want
to go back to smells and bells, as they say; they want a worship that’s more
aesthetically pleasing. But a more fundamental reason is that many of them have
come to doubt sola Scriptura. That’s
the issue that comes up again and again when you talk to former Protestants who
have gone into the Roman church. Is sola
Scriptura true? Or, to put the point most sharply: is sola Scriptura scriptural?
The Roman Catholics
have always said no, Scripture is not sufficient. They employ mainly two
arguments. (1) The church, they say, is older than the Bible, and it was the
church that gave the Bible its authority. So the authority of the church is
greater than the authority of the Bible. (2) They say that an authoritative
Bible is of no use without an authoritative interpretation, and that
interpretation comes through the church.
This is an
important question, and I don’t want to leave you tonight without an answer to
it. For an answer, let us go back to the beginning of God’s relationship to
Would you enjoy that, having the
Lord speak to you directly some Sunday morning instead of your pastor? A lot of
people today say that they’d like to have God talk to them directly, rather
than through the Bible. But
So Moses went up to talk to God.
And when he came down the mountain, just like Charleton Heston in the movie, he
brought with him two tables of stone, which Ex. 31:18 describes as “the tablets
of stone inscribed by the finger of God.” These were God’s words, and God’s writing. Listen to God speak: I am the
Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage; you shall have no other gods before me.” The Ten Commandments, with the other documents that make up
the Bible, were to be the fundamental written constitution of God’s people,
written by the finger of God, or, as Paul later puts it, spoken by the breath
of God, God-breathed. These were the words of that fearsome God.
Now let’s imagine somebody in
And twice in Deuteronomy, the Lord
warns
Can the church imagine, then, that
they give authority to Scripture? Certainly not. God gave Scripture to the
church, and he told us “get under it.”
And anybody who loves God will get under
his Word. In the Isaiah passage, living by human rules is a heart problem. If
your heart is with God, your greatest
passion will be to live by his Word. And you won’t make silly arguments about
how your authority is greater than his.
What about the argument that an
infallible book needs an infallible interpreter? No. The chief rule of
interpretation is that the interpreter is subject to the text. The text tells
the interpreter what to say, not the other way around. And if an infallible
text needs an infallible interpreter, then that interpreter needs an infallible
interpreter, and that interpreter needs an infallible interpreter, ad
infinitum. No. Interpretation has a beginning and an ending. It begins with the
text, and it ends by stating the meaning of the text. And that’s all there is to
it.
So there we have it. God has
chosen to rule his church, not by the living voice of a long tradition of human
teachers, but by his sufficient written Word. Luther was right to stand on that
Word. Sola Scriptura is scriptural.
It was on that Word, sola Scriptura,
that Luther based the other great Reformation solas: solo Christo: salvation
only through the righteousness of Christ, applied to us. Sola gratia: salvation
through Christ is a free gift of God; not by our works, lest anyone should
boast. Sola fide: we receive that grace through faith, simply receiving God’s
gift, not trying to give him anything in return. And soli deo gloria: since salvation is entirely by
Christ, through grace, by faith, the glory goes to God alone.
Without sola Scriptura, we don’t have the others. Obviously Scripture is
the place where we learn about these other doctrines. And somewhat less
obviously, written revelation is the only place where we could find out
something like this. If salvation is entirely gracious, entirely a gift of God,
how could we know it, unless God told us? Only God can tell us when he intends
to give a gift. And we can be certain about that gift only if the message is
certain. And we can have no certainty if the message contains the Word of God
and the ideas of men all mixed up together. That’s one reason Roman Catholics
don’t have much assurance of salvation. They rely on a big thing called
tradition, which includes both Scripture and human theology down through the
years. In Roman Catholicism, there is no sure and certain word of promise.
When we apply the sola Scriptura principle to worship, we sometimes call it the “regulative principle.” The regulative principle can be found in the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the phrase “regulative principle” probably comes from the nineteenth. The Westminster Confession of Faith says,
But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imagination and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture. (21.1; cf. 1.6, 20.2)
So what the
regulative principle says is that everything we do in worship must be biblical.
It must be “prescribed,” warranted, required by Scripture. Now the writers of
the Confession understood that in order to do everything Scripture prescribes,
we must do some other things that Scripture does not prescribe. For instance,
Scripture commands us to meet together for worship; but it does not prescribe
the time or place, what clothes we should wear, how many hymns we should sing,
or even what precise words we should use in song or sermon or prayer. So earlier
in the Confession it says,
There are
some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church,
common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of
nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word,
which are always to be observed. (1.6)
In other
words, when Scripture tells us to do something, but doesn’t tell us exactly how
to do it, and when, and where, we use our God-given human reason within the
general boundaries of the Word. So there has arisen a distinction between the elements of worship, the things
Scripture prescribes, and the circumstances
of worship, the things we must work out for ourselves in carrying out the
elements.
That distinction is legitimate up to
a point. In the Puritan theology, however, that distinction has given rise to a
very complicated theory in which there must be a scripturally prescribed list
of elements for every distinct form of worship (tabernacle, temple, synagogue,
family worship, private worship, civic worship, NT church worship, etc.), and
three different kinds of circumstances, only some of which are within the
discretion of the church. This large theory, in my judgment, is not found in
the Confession, though it is found in other writings of the Confession’s
authors. I don’t think this larger theory is biblical, and I don’t think it
carries any authority in Presbyterian churches, though it has played a major
role in the history of Presbyterian worship. If you’re interested in that
issue, I have a paper on the subject I can e-mail to you, but I don’t think we
need to deal with it any further here.
But the Confession is certainly
right in emphasizing sola Scriptura as our principle of worship, as in all of life. In worship, as everywhere else
(because all of life if worship in one sense; all of life is giving our bodies
as living sacrifices, which is our spiritual worship, Rom. 12:1-2), we seek to
do God'’ will, not our own, and we find his will in his Word. Yes, we need to
use our minds in addressing matters where Scripture is silent: when and where
to worship, for how long, with what themes, etc. But even in planning those
matters, we’ve got to have the Bible in mind. For instance, the Bible says
worship is to be edifying. So we’d better not schedule our services at four in
the morning. The great passion of our worship planning should be, is what we’re
doing biblical? Does it please God?
What will sola Scriptura worship look like in our time? Some would argue that
such worship would look very old fashioned. Some say that if we want to govern
worship entirely by Scripture, we will have to turn back the clock and worship
as our Puritan forefathers did: singing only Psalm arrangements, without
accompaniment, in an utterly plain worship area. This argument is built on the
complicated theory of elements and circumstances I rejected earlier.
Others argue that we should worship as Calvin did,
following a certain liturgical order every week with elaborate scripted prayers
and congregational responses. In my judgment, there is much to be said for that
style of worship, and we can learn from it; but certainly Scripture doesn’t
prescribe it. The most we can say is that it represents a wise ordering of
circumstances for one period of history. It might be the best choice for some
congregations in our own day. But Scripture does not require us to worship
according to that pattern.
The fact is that we need to rethink
worship in every generation. What Calvin and the Puritans did for their time,
we must do for ours. Let me make this point emphatically: Sola Scriptura does not mean traditionalism. It doesn’t mean adhering blindly to the models of the
past. In fact, it is just the opposite. As with Luther, Sola Scriptura tells us to criticize tradition. It is that new
broom that Luther and the other Reformers used to sweep the church clean.
Darryl Hart, one writer with whom
I’ve locked horns on several occasions complains that modern evangelicals are
of two minds. They are very conservative on matters like abortion, but they are
very liberal on matters of worship, seeking innovation, contemporary music,
etc. He urges them to be more consistently conservative: if they are
conservative about abortion, he thinks, they ought to be conservative about
worship as well. Here Prof. Hart misses something very central, very basic,
very important: the rule for Christians is neither conservativism nor
liberalism. The rule is Scripture. Our passion as Christians should not be to
be as conservative as possible, or as liberal and up-do-date as possible, but
to be as biblical as possible. Sola Scriptura! Sometimes that may mean looking
old-fashioned to the world. Sometimes it may mean pursuing the latest means of
communication. We must be willing to be inconsistent, in terms of the world’s
categories, to be consistent in terms of Scripture. Unfortunately, Hart and
similar critics adopt the world’s categories here. And despite their desire to
be conservative, they fail to honor the fundamental principle of Reformed
worship, sola Scriptura.
Others use a somewhat different
argument, trying to convince us to worship in an old fashioned way. Writers
like Ken Myers, David Wells, Michael Horton, and others argue that modern
culture is so depraved, so terrible, that we should avoid using any elements of
it in our worship. Therefore we should worship in a way that will appear to be
old fashioned to our culture, if only to bear witness against that culture.
Certainly I agree that much in our culture is wretched and worthless—“idols for
destruction” to cite Herbert Schlossberg. But it is no worse, I think, than
first-century Judaism or the
The problem for us, brothers and
sisters, is that nearly five hundred years after Luther’s great insight, we now
have five hundred years of Protestant tradition. We have had our own scholars,
doctors, councils and confessions. No popes, thank goodness, but are there
perhaps some thinkers in our past history that we regard almost as highly,
perhaps more highly, than medieval Christians regarded the popes? And then
there’s the tradition of our local churches—the way things have always been
done. And there are the traditions of our own individual lives, what we often
call our “comfort zone.”
What shall we do with all this
tradition? Respect it, first of all. Be thankful for it. Be confident that it
is nowhere near as messed up as the traditions Luther wrestled with. I confess
to you that I need to become more of a heritage person; I need to learn from
this tradition, to grow through its riches. But I hope I’ll never get to the
point where I stop measuring tradition by this book, the Bible. Tradition is
wonderful, but this is the Word of God. Tradition has much to teach us, but
this is God talking. God gave us this book; we didn’t give it to ourselves. And
God says to us, as he said to
Everything in worship must be
biblical. Where Scripture is silent, we should use whatever means are available
in our time and place to pursue biblical values in worship. Should we use a
sound system where people have a hard time hearing? Of course. Scripture
doesn’t mention sound systems, but Scripture certainly wants us to hear God’s Word. Should we use
contemporary music? Scripture doesn’t say yes or no to that specific question.
But it is mightily concerned with encouraging heartfelt praise from God’s
people, with multiplying musical instruments in God’s praise (Psm. 150), with shouting God’s praise. In many
situations today, those values will motivate us to use some contemporary music.
We want to choose music that doesn’t detract from the reverence and awe we owe
to God, that communicates the gospel clearly, that challenges and builds up
God’s people. But much contemporary music, in my judgment, expresses those
values.
That’s what worship planning meetings should be like: everybody measuring everything by biblical standards. That’s the way to worship in Spirit and Truth. That’s the way to really please God as we worship Him.
2.
Sola Fide
In the last lecture, I focused on
God’s Word in Scripture as the rule of our worship. In worship, God meets with
human beings, and they acknowledge him as their covenant Lord. So what he says
to us must govern our worship. We want to please him, not ourselves; so the
principle of our worship is sola
Scriptura, “by Scripture alone.” In this message, I will move on to the
second of the five solas, sola fide, “by faith alone.”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism
defines "faith in Jesus Christ" as "a saving grace, whereby we
receive and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the
gospel" (Q&A 86). For the Reformers, as for Paul, faith is always
opposed to works and law (Rom. 3:21-5:11). We are not saved
by keeping the law or by doing good works, but only by receiving God's free
gift of salvation in Jesus, that is, by faith.
It's tempting, I know, to think of
faith as just another kind of good work, as if it were the one thing we can do
to earn God's favor. But that's not the Bible's teaching. In itself, our faith,
like the rest of our works, is contaminated by sin. It wavers, it cries out, as
the troubled father cried out to Jesus in Mark 9:24, “I do believe; help me
overcome my unbelief.” Our faith is mixed with sin and deserves no favor from
God. We can't earn our way into heaven by faith, any more than we can earn it
by giving to the poor, writing good books, or eating a Kosher diet. Why, then,
is faith so important? Because faith connects us with Jesus. It is receiving
and resting on Christ. Our faith doesn't merit salvation, but Jesus does.
So when we have faith, when we
believe in Christ, we are saying that we have no hope in ourselves, no hope
even in our faith, only in Jesus. We are justified by faith, as Paul says, "apart from observing the law" (Rom. 3:28). So our salvation is only by faith, sola fide.
I mentioned in the first message
the close relationship between worship and salvation. When we come to worship,
that's what we should be telling God: I have no hope in myself, only in Jesus.
I trust in his complete sacrifice on the cross for me. Worship should give us
frequent opportunity to say that to God, and it should be saturated with the
sense that without Jesus we are nothing.
Here we must make a distinction
which is somewhat fine, but also very important. Worship should glorify God,
but it does not save us. I repeat: Worship is something we do to glorify God,
but not something we do to gain salvation.
What efforts Satan puts in to
fuzzy up that distinction, to confuse it. We bring our gifts for the offering
plate, we offer our voices in praise, we listen hard to the Word of God, we meditate
on the sacraments, and somewhere, in the back of our minds, Satan interjects
the idea that all of this helps at least to insure our place in heaven.
What we need to remember is that
worship is not the way of salvation, it is thanksgiving, eucharist:
thanksgiving for salvation already given. The early Christians met to celebrate
the Resurrection of Christ, his final victory over sin and death. They
worshiped, not to turn God’s wrath into favor, but to thank him for placing
their sins on Jesus. That is worship in faith, sola fide.
Let’s look at Scripture for a
while to try to understand better how worship is thanksgiving, and therefore
worship in faith.
We tend to think of worship and
praise as favors we do for God, gifts that we bring to him, to make him happy.
In a way, that’s true. In all of life we should bring glory to God. It’s right
to think of worship as God-centered, as bringing him glory, as pleasing
him.
But there is a problem here. Van
Til called it the “full-bucket difficulty.” If God is all-glorious, how can we
bring him more glory than he has already? If God owns everything, how can we do
him any favors? If God enjoys perfect bliss, how can we make him happier than
he is? What do our songs, offerings, and prayers really do for him?
So
Scripture sometimes challenges our naïve view of worship. God comes to us and
says, “I really don’t need it.”
So
theologians speak of the aseity of
God. That means that God is self-contained, self-existent, self-sufficient. Aseity simply means that God doesn’t
need anything at all. He doesn’t need our praise or our worship. He is majestic
and holy, the creator of all things, the Lord of all creation. He made us and
made everything around us. Everything we possess, he possesses first. He is the
landlord, and we are the tenants, the stewards. Anything he wants from us, he
can take; because everything he wants from us, he has already. “The earth is
the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it,” (Psm.
24:1). He owns everything because he made everything; he is the creator of all
things in heaven, on earth, and in the sea.
Now God is
unselfish, and he has given many things to us, so that in a real sense, we own
them; they are our possessions. But when God gives us something, he doesn’t
stop owning it. He is the ultimate owner; we are proximate owners. He is the
sovereign Lord; we are the vassal kings, the stewards of God’s world.
So now we
come to worship, and we bring gifts for God: sacrifices in the Old Testament,
now what the New Testament calls sacrifices of praise, collections for the work
of the church, and so on. But when we give to God, we give him only what he has
first given us. And so when we give to God, he is not under obligation to pay
us back. He says to Job, “Who has a claim against me that I must pay” (41:11)?
Paul alludes to Job when he says “Who has ever given to God, that God should
repay him?”
So God is
the first giver. We often talk about
him as the first cause, and he is. And because he is the first cause, he is the
first giver. We are second givers; he’s the first, always the first.
So in the
most fundamental sense, he owes us nothing. Of course we must say more than
that. Sometimes by his grace, God makes promises to us, and thereby obligates
himself. He brings himself under obligation to us. Quite an amazing thing! But
he doesn’t have to do that. He’s not obligated to become obligated. He is still
the first giver, the one who doesn’t have
to give us anything.
One of the
problems in pagan worship, and, unfortunately, in the Roman Catholic worship of
Luther’s day, is that they forget about God’s aseity: they ignore—or suppress—this truth about God. When Paul
visited pagan
Earlier in
Scripture, Isaiah ridicules pagan worship. The sad thing is that this pagan
worship took place in
As for an idol, a craftsman casts it,
And a goldsmith overlays it with gold
And fashions silver chains for it.
A man too poor to present such an offering
Selects wood that will not rot.
He looks for a skilled craftsman
To set up an idol that will not topple. (40:19-20).
See, if you worship idols, you have to take care of them.
You want it to look nice; an ugly god isn’t worth worshipping, so you take care
to get the nicest decorations. And you have to use the best materials and the
best craftsmanship. You don’t want your god to rot, and you don’t want your god
to topple over. Think what a terrible embarrassment that would be. There you
are, bowing down, and the thing comes crashing down and breaks in pieces.
Theologically, I hope you’ve drawn the conclusion that these idols do not have
the attribute of aseity. They have needs, big time needs. They are not the
first givers; rather, they owe their very existence to the idol makers. So that
it is ridiculous (God, through Isaiah, wants us to laugh here), ridiculous to
compare these things to the true God.
Another of
God’s jokes, his ridicule, comes a few chapters later (44:12-20). We read there
of a carpenter who cuts down some wood:
It is man’s fuel for burning:
Some of it he takes and warms himself,
He kindles a fire and bakes bread.
But he also fashions a god and worships it;
He makes an idol and bows down to it.
Half of the wood he burns in the fire;
Over it he prepares his meal,
He roasts his meat and eats his fill.
He also warms himself and says,
“Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”
From the rest he makes a god, his idol;
He bows down to it and worships.
He prays to it and says,
“Save me; you are my God.”
One stick of wood gets burned; the other stick of wood gets
worshiped. What’s the difference between the two sticks of wood? Nothing; that’s
the point. The idol owes its existence to a man, so it’s ridiculous that a man
should worship it. Not only does idolatry remove worship from the true God, but
it also dishonors God’s image in man. For ironically, the carpenter himself is
a better image of God than the idol he has made. What an indignity for God’s image to bow before the image of
something else!
But to get
back to our theme of Thanksgiving, I want to go back to Psalm 50. For it is in
Psalm 50 that we see the connection between God’s aseity and our thanksgiving, between God as the first giver and our
response as thanksgivers.
The
Mighty One, God, the LORD,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to the place where it
sets.
From
God shines forth.
Our
God comes and will not be silent;
a fire devours before him,
and around him a tempest rages.
He
summons the heavens above,
and the earth, that he may judge his people:
"Gather
to me my consecrated ones,
who made a covenant with me by sacrifice."
And
the heavens proclaim his righteousness,
for God himself is judge.
"Hear,
O my people, and I will speak,
O Israel, and I will testify against you:
I am God, your God.
I
do not rebuke you for your sacrifices
or your burnt offerings, which are ever before
me.
I
have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens,
for
every animal of the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.
I
know every bird in the mountains,
and the creatures of the field are mine.
If
I were hungry I would not tell you,
for the world is mine, and all that is in it.
Do
I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?
Sacrifice
thank offerings to God,
fulfill your vows to the Most High,
and
call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you will honor me."
But
to the wicked, God says:
"What
right have you to recite my laws
or take my covenant on your lips?
You
hate my instruction
and cast my words behind you.
When
you see a thief, you join with him;
you throw in your lot with adulterers.
You
use your mouth for evil
and harness your tongue to deceit.
You
speak continually against your brother
and slander your own mother's son.
These
things you have done and I kept silent;
you thought I was altogether like you.
But
I will rebuke you
and accuse you to your face.
"Consider
this, you who forget God,
or I will tear you to pieces, with none to
rescue:
He
who sacrifices thank offerings honors me,
and he prepares the way
so that I may show him the salvation of God."
The Psalm
begins with an image of divine judgment. When the Lord comes to judge his
people, he looks fearsome, as he did on
He is judging them for their
hypocritical, formal worship.
In the middle of the Psalm, God
proclaims his aseity: He doesn’t need a bull from their stall, or goats from
their pens. He owns every animal of the forest, the cattle on a thousand hills,
all the birds, all the creatures of the field. Go to the stall to find a bull
for sacrifice. God says, that’s mine already. And you say, “Oh, I’m sorry,
Lord. I’ll try another one.” “That’s mine, too.” “Well, a goat then.” “That’s
mine, too.” “Well, what about an ibex, or an alpaca, or an okapi [giraffe
family; committee project], or a wallaby.” “That’s mine, too.” Oh.
And what do you think God wants to
do with these animals? You think he eats them? Is he hungering for a Whopper?
Of course not. And if he was, he wouldn’t ask you to get him one; he’d just
reach down himself. Pagans sometimes think that the gods eat the sacrifices and
nourish themselves. Sometimes that involves a bit of chicanery: the priest eats
it and says that the god ate it. But our God doesn’t eat meat and drink blood.
He doesn’t eat anything. He is a se.
He doesn’t need it.
Then what is the point of worship,
anyway? It’s not enriching God, and it’s not nourishing him. So what is it? In
verses 14-15, the Psalmist tells us:
Sacrifice thank offerings to God,
Fulfill your vows to the Most High,
And call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you will glorify me.
He mentions four elements of worship: thanksgiving,
obedience, prayer, and then thanksgiving again. The first thanksgiving refers
to the thank offering. The thank offering, a form of peace offering, was a
sacrifice that was partly burned to the Lord, partly eaten by the priests and
the worshiper. It was, like our Lord’s Supper, a dinner with God. (The Lord’s Supper, too, is a kind of
thaksgiving, a eucharist. Paul speaks
of the “cup of thanksgiving” in 1 Cor. 10:16.) An Israelite would bring a thank
offering when he wanted to thank God for some special blessing in his life. And
God was willing to accept that offering, not because he needed it, but because
he deserved it. This offering was an appropriate response to God’s mercy. And
we should be alert too, to opportunities we have to bring offerings before the
Lord as expressions of thanks. What has God done for you this year? You can’t
ever repay him, but maybe you can put a little extra in the collection plate.
We worship God to express our thanks.
Secondly, the Psalmist speaks of
obedience, keeping vows. A vow is a promise we make to God. Often a worshiper
would bring a votive offering, a vow offering, to seal a promise that he made
before God. Have you made God any promises lately? Well, if you’re a believer
you have certainly promised to serve Jesus as your Lord and trust him as your
savior. If you’re a church member, you’ve promised to be faithful to your
church. If you’re married, you’ve promised God to love, honor, and maybe obey
someone till death. If you’ve baptized a child, you’ve promised to raise him or
her in the knowledge of Christ. But we live in a time when for most people vows
mean nothing. Consider the rate of divorce. I recall back in the 1980s when the
air controllers went on strike after promising not to. President Reagan fired
them all! Most commentators said that the President should never have taken
those vows so seriously. Unlike those commentators, however, God takes vows
very seriously. Perhaps we should remind ourselves of how seriously we take our
vows, by making a small sacrifice from time to time, a votive offering. Bring
something extra to God to show him you mean business.
As with the other elements, a vow
is not a favor we do for God. It’s an obligation we take on ourselves. God
doesn’t need our vows. He can accomplish his purposes without them. Our vows
arise out of thanksgiving. When we see how much God has done for us, we respond
by promising to do something for him, out of gratefulness. But the vow is not
the way of salvation; it is thanksgiving for salvation. It is faith.
The third element is prayer: call
on me in the day of trouble. We don’t do this often enough either, for
ourselves or for others. You know what Jesus is doing today? Many things. But
what Scripture tells us is that he’s praying, interceding for his people. Do
you believe that God delivers his people from trouble in answer to prayer? He
does.
God doesn’t need our prayers, any
more than he needs our vows. But he graciously promises to answer our prayers.
Prayer is not a way for us to save ourselves. From God’s side it is one of the
blessings of salvation. From our side, it is part of our thankful response to
salvation. It is prayer in faith.
And then, after he delivers us from
trouble, we worship again to glorify him, thank him, for his deliverance. So
the pattern: thanksgiving, vows, prayer, thanksgiving. Worship is surrounded by
thanksgiving. This is worship that recognizes God’s aseity. It doesn’t try to
meet God’s needs. It recognizes instead that we have needs that only God can
meet. In elements two and three, we bring our lives before the Lord, in
promises and prayer. In elements one and four, we offer thanks.
This
worship is theocentric, vertical, but to a surprising degree it is also
anthropocentric, horizontal. It is to God that we sacrifice our offerings, to
him that we call in trouble, and him that we glorify for deliverance. On the
other hand, this worship speaks over and over of blessings for the worshiper,
for us. We thank him for blessing us. We
keep our promises before him. We call
for help and receive it.
It is God’s aseity that undergirds both
dimensions of worship. Obviously it supports the vertical dimension. A God who
is a se, self-contained, is truly majestic, exalted. He is worthy of worship,
and he is the only God worthy of worship. But God’s aseity also undergirds the horizontal dimension. To put the point
briefly: he doesn’t need worship, but we do. Worship ministers to our needs,
not to needs of God. To say that is not to disparage the vertical dimension. To
two dimensions reinforce one another. Worship best glorifies God when it
ministers to people; and we minister to people best when we teach them to look
to God for blessing, rather than themselves.
Biblical
worship, then, as distinguished from pagan worship, is full of thanksgiving.
When you are thankful, you come before God and say, “I know I can give you
nothing you don’t have already. I know that you’ve given me all that I have,
and I glorify you in thanks.” The thankful worshiper says, “I know I should
obey you, because this is your world. I should keep my promises. I shouldn’t be
joining in with theives, adulterers, blasphemers and deceivers. You have been
so very kind to me; I must behave as you wish.” And he adds, “I continue to
need you every day. Please deliver me from trouble, for I have no other hope.
If you, the owner of all things, aren’t with me, no one will be; and if you are
for me, nobody can be against me.”
Another way
of making the same point is this: Worship of an a se God is worship that recognizes grace. The worshiper stands in
amazement, saying “God didn’t need to bless me, but he did. Thank you, Lord.”
That’s the gospel, isn’t it? God didn’t have to bless me, didn’t need to, but
he did. He sent his own Son to die for me, when I was dead in sin. God did that
simply because he loved me. He didn’t
compromise his majesty by saving me; rather, he showed how great he really was.
Because he is a se, he can be
gracious. Because he is a se, he can
be kind when he doesn’t need to be, merciful to creatures who cannot return the
favor.
Grace and
thankfulness go together. Because grace gives us everything, all the rest of
life is thanksgiving.
That’s what
it means to worship in faith, to worship sola
fide. In faith, all our worship is thanksgiving to God, for the infinite
blessings he has freely given us in Christ.
Is that the
way it is with you? There are those moments when we become aware of how unthankful
we are. Usually we don’t find that out for ourselves; somebody else has to tell
us. Next time you are embarrassed by your lack of thankfulness to God, think
about who he is. He is the one who owns everything, who needs nothing, and who
has given you everything you have, and who, even though he didn’t have to, has
taken you from the hopelessness of spiritual death to the ecstatic joy of
eternal life with him. We cannot pay him back. The only thing, the only thing
left for us, is thanksgiving.
3.
Solo Christo
We saw in my last message that biblical worship is
Gospel-centered: it’s not the way we earn salvation; it is thanksgiving for the
salvation God has given us. And so worship is by faith. In worship, our faith
receives what God gives. In worship, we tell God over and over again, “I have
nothing you need, but you have everything I need. And you have richly supplied
all my needs in Christ.”
The Gospel, of course, is the good news of Christ, and so we must move quickly to the third of the Reformation solas, solo Christo, by Christ alone. All who profess Christianity, of course, confess Christ as Lord and Savior. But the Reformers believed that the Roman Church of their day detracted from Christ as the only source of salvation.
The
question the Reformers raised is, on what basis does God declare us to be
righteous? They recognized that no unrighteous, no wicked person can enter
Heaven. God is perfectly just. He does not reward the wicked or curse the
righteous. He saves only the righteous.
But the problem is that we are not
righteous. The apostle Paul says, “for all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” After he surveyed the moral
state of the Jews and Gentiles, he said,
There
is no one righteous, not even one;
there
is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
All
have turned away, they have together become worthless;
there
is no one who does good, not even one." (Rom. 3:10-12)
All our righteous deeds
are like filthy rags, says Isaiah (64:6). We are no better than mankind before
the flood, of whom God says, “every inclination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil all the time” (Gen. 6:5).
So our sin has left us utterly hopeless before God. We
can’t claim anything from him. We don’t deserve even the slightest amount of
favor from him. On the basis of what we are, we can expect only eternal
punishment, for having offended a God of infinite dignity, justice, and love.
So Scripture utterly humbles us, it takes away all our pride. This teaching is
terribly offensive to non-Christians, but it is absolutely biblical and
therefore absolutely true. And we all know that it’s true when we look honestly
into our hearts.
Is there any hope at all? Certainly not in ourselves.
There is nothing we can do. But God’s own love has found a way.
You remember that in Genesis 2, God told Adam not to eat
a certain fruit, saying “when you eat of it you will surely die” (2:17). Adam
and Eve did eat, as we know. If we didn’t know the story, we would have
expected them to die right then and there. But amazingly they didn’t. Indeed,
God came and promised them continuing life. He pronounced a curse on the
ground, that it would produce thorns and thistles. But nevertheless, Adam would
grow food, keeping people alive. To Eve, God decreed pain in childbearing. But
the wonderful thing is that there would be children. No immediate death, but
life; not only life, but new lives, children. And not only that, but one child,
one “seed of the woman,” would destroy the serpent, the devil. That seed would
be the savior, the redeemer.
Adam believed that promise. He named his wife Eve, the
mother of all living. He believed that she would bear children, just as God has
said. And when Cain was born, Eve also spoke in faith, “With the help of the
Lord I have brought forth a man” (4:1). In the birth of that baby, she saw that
God was keeping his promise.
This is the wonderful, extravagant hope that God gave to
us: that even though every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts is only
evil all the time, God will still show us mercy through that baby. This is the
central theme of all Scripture. The Old Testament looks forward to this
wonderful child, and the New Testament says he has come! God shows his mercy in
that he gives his only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins.
That’s the answer to Luther’s
question. How can God receive sinners into heaven? On what basis does he
declare us fit to enter his presence, when we know that in our flesh dwells no
good thing? The answer is Jesus Christ. You know the “diagnostic question” used
by Evangelism Explosion: if God asks “why should I let you into Heaven?” the
only answer is Jesus. Not our works, but Jesus. Not our works plus Jesus, but
Jesus. Not even the works that God enables us to do through his Spirit—for even
they fall far short of his standards—but Jesus.
Now the promise of a Redeemer was central to the worship
of God from the very earliest times. When men “began to call on the name of the
Lord” (4:26) in the time of Seth, certainly they remembered that promise, looking
ahead to the Redeemer. Even earlier, from the time of Cain and Abel, people
worshiped God by bringing animal sacrifices, and this became the central part
of the worship of the tabernacle and temple in Israel. Certainly they knew that
no animal could be the Redeemer. The Redeemer must be human, a seed of woman.
But God told them that without shedding of blood there could be no forgiveness,
and he ordained the deaths of animals to prepare the people for the death of
his Son, the only death that could atone for sin.
But in the New Testament
we learn that the Redeemer has come. So the most significant fact about worship
in the New Testament is that its focus is on Jesus. Jesus comes as the
Lord of the covenant. He is Yahweh, Jehovah, come in the flesh. He brings to
his people a deliverance greater than the Old Testament deliverance from
Egyptian slavery; Jesus delivers his people from sin. He makes them into a new
people of God (see 1 Pet. 2:9) encompassing Jew and Gentile in one body to give
him worship.
From
a New Testament perspective, we can see all the various elements of Old
Testament worship pointing to Jesus. In Jesus, we meet with God, John 1:14, as
the Jews met with God at the tabernacle. Jesus is also the ultimate sacrifice
for sin and therefore brings an end to the temple offerings of bulls and goats,
Heb. 10:1-18, Eph. 5:2, Mark 10:45. The Old Testament sacrifices had to be made
every day, over and over again, showing their insufficiency to take away sin.
But Jesus's sacrifice of himself on the cross dealt with sin "once for
all." His sacrifice suffices to make his people holy, Heb. 10:10.
Jesus
is also the one who brings the
ultimate sacrifice; that is to say, he is the ultimate priest. Being both God
and man, he is the ultimate mediator, the only such mediator, between God and
man, 1 Tim. 2:5. The Book of Hebrews (6:13-8:13) calls Jesus a priest, not
after the order of Aaron, but after the order of Melchizedek, the mysterious
priest who "brought out bread and wine" to Abraham in Gen. 14:18-20,
and to whom Abraham presented tithes. In the Genesis narrative, Melchizedek
appears out of nowhere: no genealogy, nothing said of his life before or after
his meeting with Abraham. Similarly, says the writer to the Hebrews, Jesus is
not connected with the tribe of Levi or the sons of Aaron. He begins a whole
new priesthood, "not on the basis of regulation as to his ancestry but on
the basis of the power of an indestructible life," 7:16. And his
priesthood is permanent, because he "lives forever," 7:24. Unlike the
Aaronic priests, he does not lose his office because of death.Therefore he is
able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always
lives to intercede for them. (verse 25)
Hebrews
also tells us that Jesus, as the ultimate high priest, ministers at a
tabernacle which is far greater than the tabernacle or temple of the Old
Testament. The heavenly tabernacle, the pattern of the earthly tabernacle, is
the ultimate dwelling of God's presence. For us to enjoy eternal fellowship
with God, our sins must be dealt with in that eternal tabernacle. Jesus as the
ultimate high priest brings his own blood to the heavenly tabernacle as the one
perfect and permanent sacrifice for sin; see 9:11-28.
In
a somewhat different use of the symbols, Jesus is God's tabernacle and temple. He is the one in whom God
tabernacled with his people, John 1:14. After casting out the salesmen from the
temple at Jerusalem, the Jews asked him for a miraculous sign of his authority.
Jesus
answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three
days." The Jews replied, "it has taken forty-six years to build this
temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" But the temple he
had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples
recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that
Jesus had spoken. (John 2:19-22)
Jesus is God's
dwelling among men. The purpose of the temple was to point forward to him. In
the final consummation of history, the "New Jerusalem," there will be
no temple, for "the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple," Rev. 21:22.
Therefore all the tabernacle and
temple furniture speak of Christ (9:1-5). The altar of burnt offering speaks of
his sacrifice of himself. The laver, like the sacrament of baptism, speaks of
Christ as the priest who is perfectly clean, free from any defilement, and who
cleanses his people. The lampstand represents Christ as the light of the world.
The showbread and the manna, like the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, presents
Christ as the one who feeds his people. The incense altar and Aaron's rod
represent Christ as the priest whose prayers for his people always ascend to
the Father's throne. The holiest place was opened to us at the death of Christ,
when the veil of the temple was torn in two. Through Christ, we enter boldly,
Heb. 10:19-25. The ark, God's throne in Israel, represents Jesus as "God
with us," Immanuel. The tablets of the law speak of Christ as God's
eternal word.
Jesus is also "Lord of the
Sabbath," Matt. 12:8, and the focal point of the annual feasts. He is the
Passover lamb, John 1:29, 1 Cor. 5:7. He is the one who sends his Spirit on
Pentecost to empower the church. He fulfills the Day of Atonement by bringing
the ultimate blood-sacrifice to God in the holiest place. He embodies the Feast
of Tabernacles, as he dwells forever with his people in human flesh.
Jesus is also the true Israel, the
faithful remnant of God's people. Those in him are the new Israel, the
"Israel of God," Gal. 6:16, the heirs of God's promises to Abraham.
Christians, therefore, worship God in the consciousness that they are God's
elect, God's people, chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, Eph.
1:4. Like Israel at Mount Sinai, we have assembled in God's presence. But just
as the earthly tabernacle was an image of a far greater tabernacle in heaven,
so the assembly at Sinai was an image of a far greater assembly in heaven. We
are part of that greater assembly:
But
you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living
God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to
the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come
to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to
Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a
better word than the blood of Abel, Heb. 12:22-24.
We also have a greater circumcision,
separating us from all the nations of the earth as God's holy people. Against
those who insisted that Christians must be circumcised, Paul replies,
For it is
we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in
Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh, Phil. 3:3.
In Christ we are not only the true
Israel; we are priests. As he is the ultimate high priest, we are all called to
be his priestly people, 1 Pet. 2:5, 9, Rev. 1:6, 5:10, 20:6. In the New
Testament church, there is no special group of priests as in Old Testament
Israel. Rather, we all bring to God "spiritual sacrifices" of praise,
prayer, godly behavior, and of our whole existence, Rom. 12:1, Phil. 2:17,
4:18, Heb. 13:15-16.
Not only are we priests, but we are
also temples. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, 1 Cor. 6:19. For this
reason, Paul teaches, they should not be defiled by sexual sin. Or, to put it
somewhat differently, the church as a whole is God's temple, not to be defiled
by division or pride, 1 Cor. 3:16-17, 2 Cor. 6:19, Eph. 2:21. But it is only
"in him" (Christ) that we are joined to one another as a holy temple.
We are a temple only insofar as we are the body of Christ.
Clearly, then, Christian worship
should be full of Christ. We come to the Father only by him, John 14:6. In worship
we look to him as our all-sufficient Lord and savior. Christ must be
inescapably prominent, pervasive, in every occasion of Christian worship.
He is the object of our worship. Imagine that, worshiping a man! The first
two of the Ten Commandments told Israel that they should never worship anything
in creation, only God. Worship of anything else is idolatry. But Jesus’ disciples, good Jews who knew the commandments, found themselves worshiping
Jesus and telling others to do so.
He is the subject of worship. As we meet, we celebrate his Resurrection and
thank him for all he has done for us. We encourage one another by the promises
of the Gospel. We challenge unbelievers to believe the Gospel.
The sacraments speak of his body and
blood, given for us on the cross. We eat and drink, knowing that his sacrifice
nourishes us, and that it gives us a little taste of the great banquet to come.
We offer prayer in his name, and only in his name. We love one another as
he has loved us. Jesus Christ defines every aspect of our worship.
And-- one more thing-- Jesus is our worship leader. Paul in Rom. 15:9,
citing the Old Testament (2 Sam. 22:50, Psm. 18:49; compare Psm. 22:25), finds
Jesus singing God’s praise in the worshiping congregation:
Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles;
I will sing hymns to your name.
Jesus himself is
present when we worship, singing to the Father and leading us in praise.
My only application is that our
worship ought to be absolutely full of Christ. You don’t need to worry about
becoming too Christ-centered. You do need to worry about substituting something
else for Jesus. Just as Satan tempts us to substitute tradition for God’s Word,
and works for faith, so he dearly loves to see us substitute the world’s wisdom
for the riches of Christ. This is a major theme of the Corinthian letters, for
example. When Paul came to Corinth, he resolved to “know nothing except Jesus
Christ and him crucified.” The Corinthians, however, thought that Paul was too
simplistic. So some of them checked out Greek philosophy and Jewish miracle
workers, and others preferred Christian teachers that were more sophisticated.
Similarly today, Christians seek answers to their deep needs from psychology,
economics, the arts and entertainments, history, and, as we’ve seen, Christian
tradition. There is value in all these things, but salvation is only in Christ.
And that salvation should govern our thinking in all areas of life. Whatever we
do, “whether in word or deed, “ we should “do it all in the name of the Lord
Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17). We should
“take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
In worship, we should learn how to
do this, and we should see how it is done. Preaching should show us how all of
life can be brought under Jesus’ Lordship, how psychology, economics, the arts
and entertainments, history, tradition, everything changes when we bring it
under the wisdom of Jesus. And in worship itself, we should use music that’s
been brought under Jesus’s Lordship: music that brings Him before us. We should
use words that reveal him: his commands, his love. We should express love for
him. And worship leaders should be like Jesus in the way they relate to the
congregation, showing love to church members and visitors alike. When we leave
the service, people should know that we have been with Jesus.
There are two dangers here. One is
that we will secularize our worship, substituting secular philosophy or
psychology, for example, for the wisdom of Christ. The other is that we will
present less than the full Christ. Some people think of Christ-centeredness as
focusing entirely on the biblical history of redemption and not at all on the
world we live in. They don’t like to talk about “application,” because they
think application will detract from Christ. They think that if we spend time
showing how Christ relates to politics or friendship or parenting that we are
not Christ-centered any more.
But the biblical Christ is the Lord of
all life. Scripture tells us not only to describe him, but to show how he is
Lord of all things. The purpose of the Bible is “that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). Christ makes a
difference to every square inch of human life. In worship we should learn what
difference he makes, and we should see how preachers, teachers, elders,
deacons, worship leaders, singers and musicians apply that difference to the
work of worship. If Christ cannot be applied to life, then he makes no
difference. If he makes no difference, he is not the Christ of Scripture.
Indeed, he makes a supreme
difference. The goal of all human life is Christ. Paul’s statement of the goal
of his life in Phil. 3 applies to everything we do, but if it doesn’t apply to
worship, what else can it apply to? Certainly when we worship God these
statements should fill our hearts:
NIV
Philippians 3:7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake
of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the
surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have
lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found
in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that
which is through faith in Christ-- the righteousness that comes from God and is
by faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the
fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and
so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
4.
Sola
Gratia
As I said, I like the idea of discussing worship in connection with the solas of the Reformation: only by
Scripture, only by faith, only by Christ, only by grace, only to the glory of
God. But it is sometimes difficult for me to decide what topic should go under
what heading. The three middle headings, especially, faith, Christ, and grace,
are so inseparable that they are nearly interchangeable. Most anything that I
discussed under faith could be discussed under Christ and under grace, and so
on. That’s because we are really dealing with one doctrine here, from three
different aspects: salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Salvation by
faith alone, after all, simply means salvation by Christ alone. There is
nothing special about faith, except that it receives Christ. And so the same
thing can be said about salvation by grace alone. Grace simply means that we’re
saved by God’s gift, not by any work of ours. And that gift is Christ, received
by faith.
So what shall I say under the heading of sola gratia that I haven’t said under the others?
Let’s begin by observing that when people meet God in the
Bible, and remember that meeting God always puts us into worship mode, they
often have an overwhelming sense of grace. I think of the time Jacob met an
angel, and wrestled with him, and came away with the knowledge that the angel
was God. And he said with amazement, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life
was spared" (Gen. 32:30). The general rule was, as God said to Moses, “you
cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Ex. 33:20). But Jacob saw
him! He even saw God’s face!
Moses did as well. After God told him that no one can see
God and live, he put Moses in a cleft of a rock and covered him with his hand.
Then God passed by Moses, and Moses saw his back parts, but not his face. But
Jacob saw his face, and Moses did later, in Num. 12:8.
There are evidently some distinctions here that I don’t
entirely understand. We ask, how is it that we are told that we can’t see God
and live, even though Jacob, and Moses did see God’s face and live? A large
part of the answer is grace.
Why is it that our lives are in danger in the presence of
God? Think of Exodus 19, when the people of Israel were gathered around the
holy mountain to meet with God. They had to put barriers around the mountain.
If even an animal touched the mountain, they had to stone it to death. The Lord
said to them, “the priests and the people must not force their way through to
come up to the Lord, or he will break out against them” (Ex. 19:24). The Lord
almost sounds here like a wild beast.
What’s going on here? It’s not that God is some kind of monster,
certainly. And it’s not merely that God is great and mysterious, though he is.
The problem is sin. We dare not look on God’s face, because we are sinners, and
we can expect only judgment.
From that mountain, God spoke the law, the Ten
Commandments. And, as fitting special effects, he also showed the people
thunder, lightning, smoke, and the blasts of some kind of supernatural trumpet.
The people “stood at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we
will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Ex. 20:19). They
weren’t even thinking about the danger of seeing
God. Hearing him was bad enough. They
know that they had worshiped false gods, taken God’s name in vain, broken the
Sabbath, dishonored their parents, and so on.
Similarly,
centuries later, Isaiah saw the Lord, high and lifted up. Yes, he saw the Lord;
but the sight of God was devastating: “Woe to me!" I cried. "I am
ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean
lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty" (Isa. 6:5).
People sometimes say that they would like to see God. “It isn’t good enough,”
they say, “to hear his Word in the Bible. I want God to come and show himself
to me personally and to speak to me personally. I want my own personal, private
experience of God.” People like that have no idea what they are asking. When
God meets with man, the experience is devastating.
Meeting
God is so dangerous. You really can die from it. God told Moses that his
brother Aaron, the high priest, would die if he went into the holiest part of
the tabernacle at his own discretion. He could enter only once a year, bringing
blood for his own sins and those of the people Lev. 16:1-2, and if he doesn’t
do what he is supposed to do with the blood and the coals and the incense, he
will die in there (verse 13). And do you remember what Paul says about people
who take the Lord’s Supper unworthily? They can get sick and even die (1 Cor.
11:30).
But
sometimes, as I said, people do see God and live. That too is an overwhelming
experience. How amazed Jacob was that he had seen God’s face and his life was
preserved. How did that happen? That didn’t just happen. Nothing just happens.
We live in God’s world, not a world of chance. It was God himself who decided
to preserve Jacob’s life. God loved Jacob. He was gracious to Jacob. Did Jacob
deserve to live? Jacob didn’t think so. He got what he didn’t deserve. That’s
what was so amazing about grace.
Same
for Isaiah. After he cried “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips,” one of
the angels, one of the seraphs, brought a live coal, and touched Isaiah’s lips,
and said “Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged.” No sign that
Isaiah did anything to please God. He knew he deserved to die. But God’s grace
comes out of the blue and saves him.
Same
for Moses who observed—what was it?—God’s “back parts?” Remember that God hid
him in the cleft of a rock. Does that remind you of anything? Maybe the old
timers will remember,
He
hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock,
where
rivers of pleasure I see.
He
hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
That
shadows a dry, thirsty land.
He
hideth my life in the depths of his love,
And
covers me there with his hand,
And
covers me there with his hand.
You know how that song
begins: “A wonderful savior is Jesus, my Lord.” Paul speaks too about the Rock
that followed Israel in the wilderness. That’s interesting. There are several
stories of rocks during the wilderness period. God gave them water from the
Rock, Moses struck the Rock against God’s command. God hid Moses in the Rock.
Paul thinks of it as one Rock that followed Israel. And then he says, “the Rock was Christ.” It was Jesus that hid Moses’ eyes so that he would not die from the vision of God. And so we also sing,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in thee.
Let the water and the blood,
From thy wounded side which flowed,
Be to me the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
Jesus
can be frightening too. Once he gave his disciples some instructions on how to
fish, after they had been up all night and had caught nothing. They let down
their nets, and they caught so many fish the nets started to break. Then we
read, “When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, ‘Go away
from me, Lord; I am a sinful man’” (Luke 5:8). When Jesus showed his power,
Peter was frightened. He knew that this was no ordinary miracle worker. He knew
that the one who produced the miraculous catch was the same one who appeared to
Isaiah, high and lifted up. Peter knew he stood in the presence of God. And
when we stand in the presence of God, we recognize ourselves as sinners,
utterly unfit to stand in the presence of the holy God.
Jesus was that
holy God, come in the flesh. Indeed, to see Jesus was to see the Father. But we
know that he did not come that first time to judge the world, but to save it.
So Jesus said to him, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will catch men” (verse
10). That is grace.
We’ve
seen a number of people who met with God, who expected to die. But God himself
saved them from death, and even made them his representatives, not because of
anything in them, but only because of his great love. So when we meet with God
in worship, we meet him by grace.
But
it’s not so scary any more! Why is that? There is something different about
meeting God today. Oh, we do meet God in worship today, never doubt that.
Remember the unbeliever who visits the church in 1 Cor. 14:25 who falls down
and exclaims, “God is really among you.” God really is among us when we meet to
worship him. So why don’t we die? And if we live, why aren’t we afraid of
dying? Maybe we should be afraid. Some writers on the subject of worship think
we need more of a sense of fear and terror in present-day worship. They think
that worship is too happy, too joyful. They don’t like the idea of celebration,
because it detracts from the solemnity of worship, from the reverence and awe
that are due to God.
Well,
there are bad reasons for being fearless in worship. It is possible to
trivialize worship, to make it into just a happy social time. But let us never
forget that there are also very good reasons for not being afraid. We are not
going to die, because Jesus has died for us. And the Bible very dramatically
illustrates the implications of Jesus’ death for worship. When he died, the
veil of the temple, the curtain that separated the Israelites from God, the
curtain that only the high priest could enter, once a year, bearing blood—that
veil was torn open. It was torn from top to bottom: from heaven, not from
earth, by God, not man. And then the writer to the Hebrews said,
NIV
Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most
Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us
through the curtain, that is, his body, 21 and since we have a great priest
over the house of God, 22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full
assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty
conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold
unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And
let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. 25
Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let
us encourage one another-- and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Because Jesus has died
for our sins, the way to God is wide open. His throne is not a scary place any
more. We can enter boldly in prayer and in worship, in full assurance of faith.
Our guilty consciences have been sprinkled away. Our bodies have been washed.
There is no need to be afraid of God any more. That joy should motivate us to
go to church, to meet with God. Israel didn’t want to meet with God, for they
were terrified. Because of Jesus, we should be eager to meet with God and with
his people, for our encouragement.
I
must warn you here that there are some writers on worship who will really lead
you astray on this point if you allow them to. One critic of contemporary
worship actually objects to the idea that we should draw near to God and ask
him to draw near to us. He thinks that worship songs that talk about drawing
near are Gnostic: that they seek closeness to God apart from redemption. That
gentleman, in my estimation, needs to read his Bible more. The Bible continually
calls us to draw near to God (Psm. 69:18, 73:28, 119:151, 148:14, and of course
Heb. 10:22). Perhaps the gentleman believes that contemporary worship song
writers want us to draw near apart from Christ; but he has no right to presume
that. He has no right to suspect their motives, or the motives of worship
leaders who use those songs, or the motives of the people who sing them. This
writer to the contrary notwithstanding, God calls us to meet with him through
Christ, in joy, as well as in reverence and awe.
Now
God is still God. He is majestic and holy. He deserves fear, at least in the
sense of reverence, as the author of Hebrews says later (12:28). He is still a “consuming fire,” verse 29. And there are still bad things that happen in
worship when people come into his presence and despise him. Remember that you
can die from taking the Lord’s Supper unworthily. Like so many things in the
Christian life, it’s a matter of balance. God is our gracious Father, but he is
not to be trifled with.
So
writers on the subject of worship have a little battle going. Should we conduct
worship in great solemnity, singing long Psalms in minor keys, with scripted
liturgies and somber demeanors, to remind ourselves of God’s awesome
transcendence and holiness? Should we come into his presence with an
overwhelming awareness of our own sin and spend time in confession, repentance,
and absolution, before expressing, perhaps, some joy, but always with
restraint?
Or
should we make worship a great celebration, a joyful, happy reunion with our
Heavenly Father and our brothers and sisters, thanking him for forgiving our
sins in Christ and opening the veil through Jesus' death and Resurrection?
Should it me a friendly time of encouraging our brothers and sisters in Christ
who are there to celebrate with us? Should our music be more happy than sad,
music fit to express the extremity of
joy that we experience through Christ, using the loud, rhythmic instruments of
Psalm 150?
You
may guess from my language that I’m tilted more in the second direction than
the first. It is a balance. And I can still be moved by worship of the first
type. That kind of worship is authentic worship. But I think the second kind of
worship is more in keeping with the fullness of divine grace and with the New
Testament emphasis on worship as a celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection: worship
on the first day of the week, rather than the last.
There
is, I think, a place in worship to mourn for our sins and to seek God’s
forgiveness. Jesus said that even if our whole body is clean we still need to
wash our feet. And there is a place in worship to recognize God’s awesomeness
and to sense something of the fear that Isaiah and Peter experienced in the
presence of their judge. Indeed, if we don’t have some sense of that, our sense
of joy and celebration won’t be as great. Christian joy is extreme because
Jesus has saved us from the wages of sin, which is eternal death. If you don’t
think of yourself as a sinner, you won’t be as thankful, you won’t be as full
of celebration and joy. So perhaps we who emphasize joy and celebration need to
be careful to remind ourselves more often of the pit that God has brought us
out of. But I still think the dominant note should be joy. And, as the writer
to the Hebrews says, the worship meeting should be a friendly place, where we
encourage one another.
That
transition from abject fear to joyful celebration. That is grace. Like Jacob,
Moses, the Israelites, Isaiah, and Peter, we experience that grace in worship.
And
there is still another way in which we should experience grace in worship.
Remember how Jesus, before he died, washed the feet of his disciples (John 13)?
This amazed them. Here was their Master and Lord, washing their feet, taking
the lowliest role at their supper. And so, Jesus said to them, you also ought
to wash one another’s feet.
The disciples had a long
history of arguing about who would be the greatest in Jesus’ Kingdom. In Matt.
20, Jesus told them they should not be like the Gentile rulers, who “lord it
over” their subjects. Rather, the greatest should be the servant, the minister.
Here too, Jesus is the example: “just as the Son of Man did not come to be
served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (verse
28). Remember too what Paul says in Philippians 2, that Jesus took on himself
the form, the very nature, of a servant, “he humbled himself and became
obedient to death-- even death on a cross!” (verse 8).
Indeed (and this fact boggles the mind), even after
Jesus returns in glory, when we partake of the great wedding feast that the
Lord’s Supper foreshadows, he will be there as a servant: “he will dress
himself to serve, will have them recline at table, and will come and wait on
them” (Luke 12:37).
That too is grace. In our worship, the Lord serves
his people. And he calls us, especially the leaders—the pastors, the elders,
the worship leaders—also to be servants.
I’ve been in too many churches where there are
battles over worship, often between the old and the young, between traditionalists
and contemporary-types, between those who like drums and those who don’t,
between those who like sophistication and complication and others who like
simplicity. Usually in these battles, one group simply lays down the law to the
other, assuming that their position is the mature, spiritually minded one, and
the others are selfish, immature, and so on. And as I try to look objectively
on the problem, I see immaturity and selfishness on both sides.
In my next message I will talk a bit about why we need both simplicity and complexity, tradition and contemporaneity. For now, let me just exhort you to serve one another. So many of our worship battles are far worse because of a shortage of servant hearts. Young people (I assume that young people are usually the advocates of contemporaneity), can’t you see that your fathers and mothers in the Lord need to have their old songs? Using only the new ones is hard for them—just as hard as it would be for you to use only the old ones. Older people, can’t you see that the young people speak a different musical language from you, that they can’t express the extremes of their praise for God using the sedate tunes of an earlier generation. Older people, can you love your children in Christ, enough to understand this need and meet it? Can’t you allow them to worship in their own language? Young people, can’t you honor your fathers and mothers in the Lord and understand their loss at having all their songs taken away from them? Bend to one another, serve one another, love one another, as Christ for his sake loved you. Maybe the young people don’t deserve such consideration from the old, or vice versa. But none of us deserves anything. That’s what grace is about. The Lord became our servant, unto death. That is grace. Can’t we show more grace to one another? He chose us when we were foolish, sinners, without hope. Can we not bear with the foolish in our own fellowships? That is worshipping in grace.
5. Soli Deo
Gloria
We come now to the final point, the ultimate point: worship
should bring glory to God alone. This is what worship is all about. Indeed, it
is what all of life is all about: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you
do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). In one sense, you see, all of
life is worship:
NIV Romans 12:1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers,
in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and
pleasing to God-- this is your spiritual act of worship. 2 Do not conform any
longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your
mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-- his good,
pleasing and perfect will.
In all of life, we live sola Scriptura, by God’s Word alone as
our final standard; we live by faith, as Abraham did, believing God’s promise
despite evidence to the contrary; we live by Jesus, for without him we can do
nothing; we live by grace, without which we would die eternally. And in all of
life, including our public worship services, we live to the glory of God alone.
So clearly our worship must be God-centered. That should
be obvious. It is God whom we worship. We worship to please him, not ourselves.
So in worship, we should be full of words and thoughts and emotions honoring
his greatness. Think of how the apostle Paul breaks away from his
closely-reasoned argument about God’s dealings with the Jews, to worship:
NIV
Romans 11:33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 "Who
has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?" 35
"Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?" 36 For from
him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever!
Amen.
We might think that
after Rom. 1-11 he might conclude by saying that he had answered all the
theological questions, and now he could move on to the practical matters of
chapters 12-16. But, to the contrary, his long, logical description of God’s
saving work fills him with a sense of his own ignorance. It humbles him with a
vision of God’s greatness. So he pauses to worship. Our hearts, minds, and
mouths should be full of such words in our worship. Even though God has opened
the way for us to enter boldly into his presence, that privilege should
overwhelm us. God’s greatness should mix our joy with reverence and awe.
People
sometimes ask how we can achieve a balance between reverence and joy. In our
experience, there is often a tension between the two. But we should be able to
understand now that the solemnity of meeting with
our creator and redeemer only makes our joy more intense, and
vice versa: the joy is so intense that we are humbled by the
greatness of the one who makes us joyful. Sometimes joy can be
so surprising (recall the title of C. S. Lewis's book Surprised by Joy), so thorough, so overwhelming that it
transforms and humbles us. Consider a friend or relative whom you barely
know, but who out of the blue gives you the most wonderful gift you had
ever received. If you have any sensitivity, this kind of gift
will humble you and give you a certain awe for this person.
Magnified to the nth degree, this is the kind of awesome joy that
permeates the true worship of God. You see how grace brings us into God’s
presence with joy, and fills us with reverent awe at the same time.
So
biblical worship is filled with grace: praising God for deliverance and
redemption. After they crossed the Red Sea on dry land, Israel sang to God,
“I will sing
to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
The horse
and the rider
He has hurled into the sea.
The Lord is
my strength and song
He has
become my salvation.
He is my
God, an I will praise him,
My father’s God, and I will exalt him.“ (Ex. 15:1-2)
The song speaks of the greatness of
God himself: he is “exalted,” and also of God’s grace in saving Israel and
destroying the Egyptian army. Grace and glory. Thanks and praise. God as highly
exalted, and God as my God, my father’s God. God as transcendent, above us, and
immanent, as our God.
Don’t
ever pit God’s transcendence against his immanence. Worship is nothing if it is
not worship of a transcendent God, the God of heaven. And it is nothing if it
is not worship of God immanent; God with us, Immanuel, Jesus Christ. Worship is
nothing if it doesn’t reveal the glory of God to us; and it is nothing if it
does not reveal his grace.
At
the end of history, the glory of God and of his Son Jesus will be plain for
everyone to see. But even then, we will be praising him for his grace as well
as his glory:
Worthy is
the Lamb, who was slain,
To receive
power and wealth and wisdom and strength
And honor
and glory and praise! (Rev. 5:11)
So worship is God-centered, but its God-centeredness
focuses on his grace to us. So in a way, we get into the picture too. We, the
worshippers. We, the recipients of grace. In focusing on God, we also think
about ourselves. For we see ourselves as sinners, saved by God’s grace. If we
don’t think a bit about ourselves, we won’t understand the greatness of God’s
grace. So Calvin said on the first page of his Institutes that he cannot know
himself without knowing God, or know
God without knowing himself. And he was not sure which came first.
So there is a human side to
worship. Some may think that a focus on the humanness of worship detracts from
its God-centeredness. Some may think that the very idea of talking about the
human side of worship is inappropriate. People have sometimes taught that in
worship we should be so focused on God, so passionately obsessed with him, that
we never even think of ourselves or of our fellow worshippers. Worship, they
say, should be “vertical,” and not at all “horizontal.”
That idea sounds pious, but it’s
not biblical. There is some truth in it. Certainly our worship should be
God-centered. So far as the object of
worship is concerned, the one we
worship, that is entirely vertical and nor horizontal at all. We worship God
and God alone, not ourselves, not our fellow worshippers. But that fact doesn’t
imply that there is no horizontal dimension at all to worship. It certainly
doesn’t imply that all our thoughts should be of God and none at all of people.
According to Scripture, you can’t
honor God without honoring his image. His image is us, people. Scripture is
about God, but it is equally about people. The first commandment of the Ten
tells us to honor God alone, but the fifth teaches us to honor our fathers and
mothers. The first Great Commandment, according to Jesus (Matt. 22:37-40),
tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind;
the second tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. (Paul says that the
second is enough to sum up the whole law, Gal. 5:14.) The New Commandment Jesus
gave his disciples is the “Love one another, as I have loved you.” And that
love is what marks Christians off from the world: “By this shall all men know
that you are my disciples, if you love one another,” John 13:34-35. Textbooks
on the doctrine of the church will tell you that the marks of the true church
are the Word, the Sacraments, and church Discipline. True enough. But the Bible
doesn’t explicitly mention those marks. The mark it mentions is love. Paul says
in 1 Cor. 13, in the middle of a passage dealing with worship, that everything
we do, especially in worship, is nothing if we don’t do it with love. True
faith, says Paul, works in love (Gal. 5:6).
So the Bible says that in worship
we should think of one another. Not like the Jews of Isaiah’s day, who spent
their solemn fast days plotting how to take advantage of widows and orphans. On
the fast day, they should have been sharing their food with the hungry,
providing wanderers with shelter, clothing the naked (Isa. 58). Similarly, the
apostle Paul tells us that when we take the Lord’s Supper we should see that
there is enough for everybody (1 Cor. 11:17-22). And James says that in worship we need to be
concerned that the rich not get better seats than the poor (James 2:1-7).
Jesus said that if we are bringing
a gift to God’s altar and there remember that a brother has something against
us, we should leave the gift there, be reconciled with our brother, and then
offer the gift (Matt. 5:23-24). Reconciliation takes priority over worship. So
when we worship we should be thinking about our relationships, about other
people.
I’ve been to churches where they
take no notice of strangers like me, where they go through elaborate rituals,
but make no effort to explain to this stranger what they are doing, or how I
can find out what to do. Perhaps people in these churches consider themselves
God-centered. I think they need to have a better understanding of biblical
worship, and a better idea of what it means to be God-centered.
So we should think of one another
in worship. Is there any place in worship for thinking about ourselves? If you
read the Psalms, you know the answer. The Psalmists speak of themselves over
and over again. They bring their needs, their laments, their disappointments,
their ambitions, their anxieties, their joys into their Psalms. They lay
themselves completely open before God.
People sometimes criticize
contemporary worship songs for being focused on the self, on “I” and “me.” They
consider such songs narcissistic, actually the worship of self rather than of
God. But in Psm. 18, which contains 50 verses, there are at least 73 forms of
the first person singular pronoun. It begins,
I love you, O LORD, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
My God is the rock, in whom I take refuge.
He is my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call on the LORD, who is worthy of praise,
And
I am saved from my enemies.
Is this a man-centered Psalm? Does it bring glory to man
rather than to God? Is it unworthy of worship? Certainly no all these
questions. You see, the issue is not how many times we use the word I or the word me; the question is how
we use these words. When we come to worship confessing God as our God, my God, we are honoring God as he wants to be honored. He wants to
be our God. Not only did he create us
in his image, but he loved us in Christ from before the foundation of the
world. And he became God with us,
Immanuel, to save us from our sins through Christ. He wants us to praise him,
not only for his attributes, but for what he’s done for us. And he wants us to trust him, to have faith in him, enough that
we will bring all our other needs before him and expect him to meet each one.
Not only our objective needs, but also our subjective feelings, our emotional
needs. We worship him by confessing that he and he alone can meet those needs.
To confess that is not narcissistic. It’s not worshiping ourselves. It is
worship of the one, true God, biblical worship in the fullest sense.
And there is another aspect of
worship that focuses on the worshipper. For in worship, God wants to teach us, to edify us. Note that a number of Psalms are not addressed to God,
but to the worshippers. The very first Psalm, Psalm 1, is a teaching Psalm.
It’s not praise or adoration, except indirectly. It teaches us the difference
between the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked. Psalm 2 teaches us
about the futility of rebellion against God. Even the most powerful human
beings, the kings, had better bow before the Lord in worship, lest his wrath
flare up against them.
New Testament worship, also, has a
teaching purpose. When the Christians sang psalms and hymns, they “taught and
admonished” one another (Col. 3:16). They also brought words of instruction,
revelations of God, tongues, and prophecies (1 Cor. 14:26). I will not discuss
whether all these gifts are present in the church today. But I do want to
emphasize Paul’s concern in this passage for intelligible communication in worship. One problem in the
Corinthian church is that many of the people had the gift of tongues, that is
the ability to speak languages that they had not learned naturally. Some people
also had the gift of interpretation, the gift of explaining what was said in
these supernatural tongues. But those Corinthians who had the gift of tongues
often liked to use that gift in worship whether or not there was anybody around
to interpret. The result was that much of their worship was unintelligible.
Paul’s whole emphasis in 1 Cor. 14, is that this is wrong. Worship should be
intelligible, because it should be edifying
(verse 26), or as some
translations say, for the strengthening
of the church.
Sometimes this edification is
called “encouragement:” Heb 10:25, again, says,
NIV Hebrews 10:25 Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the
habit of doing, but let us encourage one another-- and all the more as you see
the Day approaching.
When we meet for
worship, we should encourage one another, build one another up. That is not
inappropriate to worship. It is not man-centered in a bad sense. It brings
glory to God. It’s what God wants.
The tongues speakers in Corinth
might have thought that edification doesn’t matter. After all, they may have
said, worship is directed to God, not people. We can talk to God in tongues
without interpretation, and he will understand. But Paul says no. Worship is
not only for God; it is also for the worshippers. Every bit of worship should
be understandable.
Even a visiting unbeliever should
understand what is going on. In verses 22-25, Paul reflects on the possibility
that an unbeliever might visit a worship service. If he hears people speaking
in uninterpreted tongues, he will think the Christians are crazy. But if he
hears intelligible prophecy, he will be confronted with his sins and he will
exclaim that “God is really among you.”
Especially because of our
Reformation emphasis, let me point out that this principle was very important
to the Reformers. They insisted that worship should be, not in Latin, but in
the vernacular languages, and that the Bible should be translated in all those languages
so that everybody could understand it. There was preaching in the medieval
church, but preaching became far more central in the worship of the
Protestants. The Roman Catholics may have complained that this emphasis was
man-centered. But the Reformers knew that when God meets with people he wants
to bless them, to teach them, to strengthen them.
So when we plan worship, we need
to think of people. We need to ask, what will they understand? What must be
explained? We need to speak language they understand, or, if we use strange
language, to explain it. We need to take account of all the different levels of knowledge that exist among our
worshippers: There are people of different ages: babies, children, teens, young
adults, middle-aged, seniors. There may be people of different levels of
education, different socio-economic levels, different types of neighborhoods,
different occupations, different cultures and races, different attitudes,
different besetting sins. And there are people at different levels of spiritual
growth: new Christians, people who have become spiritually dry and indifferent,
people who are growing rapidly, mature Christians, elders and deacons. And
there may well be, in your congregation as at Corinth, some unbelievers
present. They should hear the Gospel and hear it clearly.
Worship is basically a meeting of
God with his own people, a meeting of believers. It is not primarily
evangelism. But evangelism is part of it. Teaching a congregation is, to a
great extent, teaching them the Gospel over and over, teaching them to repent
and lay their sins on Christ. And that Gospel should be clear enough that when
an unbeliever shows up, he won’t miss it.
To communicate with contemporary
people, you need to use contemporary language. I’m not saying you should never
use an old hymn, or that you shouldn’t ever do things to express unity with the
saints of the past. But when you do that, you need to explain to your
contemporary congregation what you are asking them to do. Since we don’t want to
spend too much time explaining things, I should think that most of the time we
should use contemporary language.
Music is part of all this. Like
language, music also communicates. It enhances the power of language, when we
set hymns to music. It also communicates on its own. Certainly at the very
least it communicates moods and emotions. And, like language, some kinds of
music are unintelligible to some people. In planning worship, we should treat
music like language, seeking music that communicates to everyone in our
congregation.
Marva Dawn, in her Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down,
argues that if worship is to edify, it should challenge the minds of
worshipers. We should not, in her view, restrict ourselves to simple language,
ideas, and tunes, but we should present ideas and songs that help them to grow
in their understanding. I agree. Worship should be educational. It should not
leave people where they were, but should take them from where they are to a
deeper understanding. But that’s the point: in education, you must begin where
people are. You must begin with what they do understand, and move from there to
something they need to learn. That means that there should be, in every
service, some words and some music that are relatively simple, other elements
that are more challenging.
We should remember too that not
everybody in a congregation starts at the same place, or learns at the same
rate. We sometimes think of a healthy congregation as a church where everybody
has reached a very advanced level of spiritual sophistication. But a church
like that would be a church where there are no new believers. It would be a
church that has neglected its basic task, the Great Commission. A healthy
church is a church with believers at all levels, from spiritual babies to
spiritual fathers and mothers. And in worship there should be something for all
of them. No congregation should ever reach a point of maturity—or think it has reached a point of
maturity—where they no longer need to hear the simple Gospel in word or song.
Let’s
do a thought-experiment. Let’s imagine that instead of me speaking to you, God
himself were to speak to you in person, as he did to Israel from Mount Sinai.
What would you say to him? Many great poets have expressed wonderful eloquence
in praising God. I think of William Cowper’s hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious
Way,” which reads in part,
Deep in unfathomable mines of never-ending skill,
He treasures up his bright
designs, and works his sovereign will.
A great poem, a great hymn. I’ve often been moved by it. But
if you were face-to-face with God, I don’t think you’d remember it. What would
you say? Nothing at first; you’d be too overwhelmed. But perhaps eventually
you’d see the face of Jesus in his presence, and you’d be moved to say something
in praise. Then what? I think what would first occur to us would be simple
words, children’s words, since we are all children before him, even the
smartest of us. And we’d say, maybe, “praise to you, Jesus.” “You are worthy.”
“Thank you for dying for us.” “O Lord, you are very great.” Now, remember that
in an important sense, God is always with us in worship. And we need to
remember more often what it is like to stand in the presence of the living God.
So consider that even for the most sophisticated among us, there is a place in
worship for simple songs.
Of course
in a way the debate has now passed on to another stage. Contemporary worship
music isn’t so simple any more. It too is maturing, and it is producing works
of great rhythmic, melodic, and verbal complexity. I applaud that development.
But I hope the contemporary worship movement will never turn away entirely from
simple songs.
A word about entertainment. When
we focus on the horizontal aspect of worship in this way, some people worry that
we are equating worship with entertainment. There is a real danger of confusing
the two. Church auditoriums are very much like theaters: we sit around watching
somebody do something up on a stage. But of course worship is very different
from entertainment. We seek to honor God, not to please ourselves, as with
entertainment. To be sure, we seek blessings for ourselves as well, but those
blessings are the blessings of edification, teaching, spiritual strengthening,
not entertainment. Bonhoeffer brought out the difference when he said that if
you insist on a theatrical metaphor, the audience is actually God, not
ourselves. We are the performers, not the audience, and the minister is the
prompter, not the performer.
On the other hand, there is
overlap between worship and entertainment. There is music both in worship and
entertainment, and in both of these the music is to be done “skillfully” (1
Chron. 15:22, 2 Chron. 34:12, Psm. 33:3). Both worship and entertainment
require intelligible communication. It would not be right for us to try to
eliminate everything in worship that could possibly be construed as
entertaining. The difference between the two a difference of overall purpose,
not necessarily of musical or verbal style.
Worship is not entertainment, but
it is edification and encouragement. That brings glory to God. For when we
edify one another, what are we trying to do, after all? We’re trying to show
one another the greatness of God, the riches of his grace, the love of Christ,
the life of faith, the truth of the promises of Scripture. Edifying one another
is helping one another to draw near to God, as he’s revealed in the Gospel. So
there is no contradiction between God-centered worship and edifying worship.
Worship that is not God-centered will not be edifying, and worship that is not
edifying will not be God-centered.
I’ll close with this: One area
where Christians need edification is when personal tragedy strikes, and they
ask how a just and good God could bring them so much trouble. I find that when
I ask questions like that, the best help I can find is in Rev, 15:3-4. I
learned this passage through a contemporary Scripture song. It is thoroughly
God-centered; but it speaks to the most profound human need. It show how after
all our history is complete, we will look back and confess with joy that all
God’s works have been righteous and good. These verses edify, because they give
all glory to God.
NIV Revelation 15:3 and sang the song of Moses the servant of God and the
song of the Lamb: "Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty.
Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. 4 Who will not fear you, O Lord,
and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and
worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed."
May God put that song in
our hearts, to praise him in all the worst and the best of circumstances, to
begin here and now that song that will echo through the vastness of eternity.