Tag Archives: Christian worship

Worship As Teaching (In Spirit and Truth – Part 3)

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Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

Colossians 3:16, NKJV

In his book, The Reset, Jeremy Riddle writes that worship team members and worship songwriters should be among the most spiritually disciplined and theologically minded in our churches. Worship is treated as a task that any musician can do, while preaching and teaching are reserved for those with special gifting, if not licensing or ordination. If we understood the profound influence of worship on our theological imaginations, we would reckon the influence of worship teams as not so far behind that of preachers. Worship teams need accountability, not just in their performance and production, but in their spiritual lives and discipleship.

Worship reforms the imagination of the church.

When Jesus told his disciples to drink the cup in remembrance of him, he requires us to believe that the cup is his blood. Baptism requires us to believe that we are being reborn from the dead in that act of washing. As we inhabit these metaphors, the sacraments span the gap between imagination and belief: we believe the cup is his blood because it is true in a spiritual sense; we imagine the cup is his blood because it is not materially true in another sense. To debate the transformation of the cup into blood is to miss the point, which is the act of remembrance. All sacraments necessarily have the same sort of ambiguity because they are themselves points of continuity between the physical world (represented to us in the sacramental elements) and the spiritual world (represented to us in our imaginations). Much of what worship does—no matter in what sect—is capture and transform our imaginations.

Worship music initiates believers into theology.

Worship is not the end of the pathway from the Word to theology; it is the beginning. Those who can’t understand sermons can understand songs and sacraments. Children of Christian parents are weaned from lullabies to hymns. Many a born-again believer “cuts his teeth” spiritually on his church’s worship lyrics.

It is not enough for worship to say something that is true about God. It should be saying something distinctively Christian about God. We should ask ourselves whether our sermons and our worship music are saying the same things about God. If someone only attended the music portion of our services, what kind of God would be portrayed to them? If our worship merely states that God is nice and that he has blessed us abundantly, we should evaluate whether our music could just as well be sung by adherents of other faiths.

Worship music should be examined the same way sermons are.

Some church members are theologically critical of all aspects of church, including music; most receive sermons critically and song lyrics uncritically. We may notice that we don’t like the rhythm or melody of a song, but we rarely analyse the lyrics. But if worship is itself a form of teaching, as I suppose it is, we should examine our music as closely as our sermons to find it acceptable before God.

Many make wide allowances for music that they do not make in other forms of teaching. Many would gladly sing “In Christ Alone”, never noticing that it consciously promotes several core tenets of Reformed doctrine. Worship, after all, is both in spirit and in truth. Pentecostals in particular focus on creating an attitude of love more than finding theologically acceptable songs. I believe, though, that we have lost balance completely.

Pentecostals and Charismatics are focused on worshipping God in spirit and are progressively placing themselves in the hands of a music industry that has put Mammon at the helm. Cessationists are focused on worshipping God in truth and little room is left for spontaneous expression, personal testimony, or the gifts of the Spirit. We have become polarized in our churches, and we desperately need a renewal of theologically informed songs that capture personal testimonies. Such songs will have the power to prophetically transform the imagination of the church.

Worship As Testimony (In Spirit and Truth – Part 2)

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Christian worship is a way of embodying our personal and corporate testimonies. In song, we express what it means to us that God has saved us, changed us, heard our prayers, and formed us in the glorious likeness of his Son.

Not all worship is congregational worship.

Some of the testimonies we put into song are personal, individual, not suited for use in the congregation. This does not make them meaningless. There are plenty of lines in the Psalms of David that would be quite out of place in a Christian gathering! And even songs that are sung in gatherings are grounded in personal testimony. Psalm 18 begins with a long explanation, historically grounding the song in David’s biography:

To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David the servant of the LORD, who spoke to the LORD the words of this song on the day that the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul . . .

Psalm 18:1, NKJV

Personal testimonies become corporate testimonies.

The modern worship song “How He Loves Us” is a great example of the shift from a personal testimony to a corporate testimony. It became a radio hit for David Crowder in 2009, reaching number 8 on the Billboard charts and receiving a nomination for a Dove Award. (The album did win the Dove Award for best worship album.)

But many of us first heard that song in a viral YouTube video from 2005 by John Mark McMillan, who wrote the song. The lyrics are slightly different, the song is several minutes longer, and there is a whole verse about “the day Stephen died”, referring to McMillan’s friend who had died in a car accident. It is an intensely personal story, and the original song doesn’t make sense without knowing that testimony. Crowder repackaged the song for a broader audience—famously scrapping the “sloppy wet kiss”—and in the process transformed the song for corporate worship. Both types of song are indispensable in Christian worship.

Personal songs can be honest about suffering without shame.

The Psalms teach us that the variety of spiritual experience is great. Biblical commentators such as John Calvin have stated that this is practically one of the most important things we can glean about the Psalms as a whole. Christians are not aloof from the whole pageant of human life, ranging from lament to ecstasy.

My soul faints for Your salvation,
But I hope in Your word.

My eyes fail from searching Your word,
Saying, “When will You comfort me?”

For I have become like a wineskin in smoke,
Yet I do not forget Your statutes.

How many are the days of Your servant?
When will You execute judgment on those who persecute me?

Psalm 119:81–84, NKJV

Psalms like Psalm 13 and Psalm 42, along with many passages from the Prophets, show us that the lament is a legitimate form of worship. We miss much by making worship that pretends that Christians are always happy people. Jesus himself prayed to be delivered at Gethsemane, and asked God why he was forsaken at the cross—quoting Psalm 22 in doing so. Astoundingly, God himself fellowships with us in our unanswered prayers, which is in itself better than answering them.

Corporate testimonies become personal testimonies.

Testimonies are not just joyful expressions: they also serve to stoke our memories of God’s goodness when we cannot remember. When we are in a place of joy, corporate testimonies can remind us how to live in lament, and vice versa. We need these memories to rekindle our joy in the Holy Ghost.

When we are least attracted to worship, we are most in need of the collective memories that are preserved for us there. Worship changes our perspective and helps us to reorient our lives around God’s story that is happening all around us every day, even on the days that we do not sense that we are a part of that story.

What Is Worship? (In Spirit and Truth – Part 1)

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The fact that our worship underwhelms us is a signal of how much we are in need of true worship. We need true worship to honor the Father rightly. We need true worship to change our perspective.

To worship means to bow.

“Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”

Matthew 2:2, NKJV

The word “worship” has come to signify an entire industry of music, often represented by record labels that are not even run by Christians. But even the English word outside of the modern church has little or nothing to do with music. To “worship” originally means to proclaim a person’s worth by bowing to them as an act of love and allegiance. In some biblical contexts, the English word “worship” means the physical act of prostrating oneself before another in expression of obedience (though biblical languages have several words that may be translated “worship”, and not all of them can mean this).

Worship does not depend on where we are.

“Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you [Jews] say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father.

John 4:20–21, NKJV

This may be the clearest New Testament teaching about worship, and yet we often hear mellifluous talk from the pulpit about how great it is to come into “God’s house” to offer worship. We are God’s house, we can offer our worship anywhere, and worship is much larger than the musical portion of our public services. We gather together to learn from each other, to receive teaching, and to remember Christ’s death, not because any institutionally-recognized location is a condition of acceptable worship. In fact, Jesus explicitly denies this idea. It is a Christian distinctive that we can worship God anywhere (see Acts 16:25!); we gather together and sing as one of many acts of worship.

Christian worship usually includes music.

And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

Mark 14:26, NKJV

Since the days of Moses, music has been a distinctive element in Judeo-Christian worship. The Muslim may well be perplexed that the Christian reads (rather than recites) his holy book, and sings (rather than performs in ritual) his worship. Music is powerful in its ability to engage the mind, memory, and emotions. Christian worship is not a purely intellectual exercise. It involves our whole soul, and Christian music is a key expression of that fact. The memories of the earliest songs of our childhood show us the formative power of music. Music also has the power of disarming us, allowing us to understand a new perspective without argumentation. This makes it a powerful tool for teaching, for good and for ill.

Worship is more than music.

. . . speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord . . .

Ephesians 5:19, NKJV

Paul and Silas did not only sing songs in prison; they also prayed and spoke and evangelised. Even Christian songs themselves are a form of teaching. Jeremy Riddle writes that we have grossly underestimated the teaching role of Christian worship songs. Our worship leaders and songwriters should not be spiritual novices with thorough musical training; whatever their musical training, they should be theologians, capable of mediating and transferring spiritual truth through both word and song.

Worship may be addressed from us to God, from God to us, or from us to one another.

There are not one but three patterns of Christian worship: praise, prophecy. and exhortation. Some psalms may use two or three of these in turn, signfiied by changes between first, second, and third-person pronouns (“I”, “you”, and “he”). It goes without saying that we may freely address praise to God, directly:

. . . To You, O LORD, I will sing praises.

Psalm 101:1b, NKJV

In addition, a few modern Christian songs include lines that are written from God’s perspective, speaking to us words of encouragement. This may seem overly bold to some, but David’s psalms often included prophecies along with prayers. Worship as prophecy is an established, biblical pattern:

“For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy,
Now I will arise,” says the LORD;
“I will set him in the safety for which he yearns.”

Psalm 12:5, NKJV

Thirdly, worship can include words of exhortation between believers. Psalm 91, one of the most remarkable and memorable psalms, never addresses God directly. Verses 3 to 13—nearly the entire psalm—are in the second person:

He shall cover you with His feathers,
And under His wings you shall take refuge;
His truth shall be your shield and buckler.

Psalm 91:4, NKJV

Worship is about God.

I will sing of mercy and justice.

Psalm 101:1a

Worship, in the end, is not about how happy or despondent we feel, but about God’s wondrous attributes. Worship is an act of grounding our finiteness in God’s infinitude. It is for this reason that it is so important that those who prepare Christian worship of all kinds—whether in song, prayer, prophecy, or exhortation—must be seasoned disciples, trusted teachers, and grateful prophets.

Worship is for everyone.

Praise the LORD, all you Gentiles!
Laud Him, all you peoples!

Psalm 117:1, NKJV

Worship is not a musical performance put on by a few special saints. It is the prerogative of all Christians. When I write about worship, I don’t want anyone to misconstrue my words as only applying to worship leaders. The condition of our worship will improve when Christians everywhere realise that it is their responsibility to reflect God’s glorious image in their services and sacraments.