Before we can properly prepare our hearts for public worship, we must first and foremost understand what worship is. Sadly, present-day churches are rife with confusion regarding worship, and this has led to much discord and division among congregations, families, and friends. Worship should unite Christians, not divide them (see Romans 15:6; Eph. 5:19-21).
A big part of the problem is that Christians are locking horns over worship styles or preferences that please themselves rather than honestly and carefully exploring what constitutes biblical worship that pleases God. It is not uncommon to hear believers say something like: “You worship in your way, I’ll worship in mine … As long as we are sincere it doesn’t really matter.” Not only is this statement audaciously relativistic, but it is also theologically remiss. God has not left us without direction concerning the most important and sublime activity of the Church. On the contrary, as I hope to show in the following pages, God has provided clear instruction on how His people are (and are not) to worship Him. The following are some points which have helped to shape my own thinking on the nature and practice of Christian worship.
1. Biblical Worship is Biblical Yes, I know … a clear redundancy. But, dare I say, a necessary one. Indeed, in the minds of many believers, biblical worship embodies not so much what the Bible commands as rather what makes believers happy or seekers comfortable. Worship must, however, in its form and content be rooted in the authoritative Word of God. Theology, and not a pragmatic philosophy for church growth or the weekly quest for a mountaintop experience with God, must drive our worship.
In the Reformed tradition, Christians have generally held to what is called the Regulative Principle of Worship. The Regulative Principle states that Christians are to do nothing in worship except that which has been prescribed or commanded in Scripture. Not only does this principle underscore the fact that God has revealed in His Word how He desires to be worshiped, but it also wonderfully safeguards worship from the innovations of sinful mankind. Calvin once remarked that our minds are idol factories, always inventing new objects of worship and dreaming up new ways in which to worship. The Regulative Principle takes very seriously both the truthfulness of God’s Word and the deceitfulness of men’s hearts.
In Leviticus 10:1-11 we are taught a sobering lesson concerning the seriousness with which God takes worship. Nadab and Abihu, ordained priests and sons of Aaron, offered strange or unauthorized fire in their censors before the LORD, fire which God “had not commanded them” (v. 1). As a result, “fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD” (v. 2).
Lest we think that God regarded these matters differently in the Old Covenant, the writer to the Hebrews reminds us that God continues to command acceptable (read: biblically-regulated) worship in the New Covenant, when he states: “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29). Commenting on this passage, John Owen, the seventeenth-century English Puritan, asserts that “it is religious worship, both as unto outward form of it in divine institution, and its inward form of faith and grace, which God requires” (John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, vol. VII, 378). In other words, God requires worship that is both outwardly biblical in form and inwardly sincere through faith.
In addition to these illuminating passages, the second commandment reinforces the Regulative Principle of Worship. In it God states: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is under the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:4-5a). What is God more jealous for than anything else? His own glory. Indeed, to worship God in a way not prescribed in His Word is to undermine His divine authority and rob Him of the glory due His Name. Commenting on the second commandment, the Westminster Divines wrote that “the sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counseling, commanding, using, and any wise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God Himself” (Westminster Larger Catechism, A. 109). In other words, what we do in worship must be regulated by God, in His inspired Word—nothing less and nothing more. No one’s conscience should be bound in a worship service to do anything more or anything less than what God requires in Scripture. Thus, for a liturgy to include, for example, drama, the lighting of Advent candles, or the singing of a patriotic hymn is to ask worshipers to participate in elements of worship that are not prescribed by God in His Word.*
*Payne, Jon D. (2008-05-01). In The Splendor Of Holiness: Rediscovering the Beauty of Reformed Worship for the 21st Century (Kindle Locations 169-212). Tolle Lege Press. Kindle Edition.
wholeheartedly agree :)
ReplyDelete-Felipe Diez