Understanding biblical worship—what it means to worship God in spirit and truth.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11052. Intercessory prayer is simply praying for somebody who is not you. That definition sounds almost disappointingly plain, and yet the practice behind it runs through Scripture from Abraham on the road to Sodom right up to Jesus at the right hand of the Father. It is one of the most ordinary things a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11051. The length of prayer is one of those questions that makes people squirm before they even ask it. Somewhere in the back of most Christian minds sits a suspicion that real believers pray for an hour before breakfast and we are all quietly failing an exam nobody set. I want to take the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11031. The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position. Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11030. Whether Christians should be raising hands in worship is a question I have been asked more often by people who feel awkward about it than by people who want permission, and that itself tells you something about how tangled the issue has become. In some churches raising hands is so normal that not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11029. Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an important thing to face honestly. Organ or band, hymnal or screen, choir or worship team, robes or jeans. These questions are not nothing, but they…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11028. Asking how we should worship God is a more dangerous question than it looks, because Scripture contains several accounts of people who worshipped God enthusiastically and wrongly, and it did not go well for them. Nadab and Abihu offered unauthorised fire. Uzzah steadied the ark with the best of intentions. Cain brought an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11027. Biblical worship is far larger than the hour we spend singing on a Sunday morning, and that single misunderstanding has probably done more damage to the church’s worship than any argument over music ever has. When Scripture speaks about worship it reaches for words about bowing, serving, and giving God his due weight….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11015. Private worship is what happens between a believer and God when nobody else is in the room and nobody is going to ask about it afterwards. It is the least visible part of Christian life and, I would argue, the part that shapes everything else. It also carries a good deal of guilt….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11014. People usually ask about worship outside church for one of two reasons. Either they have felt God on a hillside more powerfully than they ever have in a service and want to know whether that counts, or they have stopped attending and would like to know whether the walk on Sunday morning will…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2072. Divine beauty is not a category Christians spend much time thinking about, next to holiness, love, or justice, yet Scripture reaches for it often enough that I think it deserves a proper place among the attributes we teach. David’s one great request was ‘to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD’ (Psalm 27:4),…