How should we worship?

Question 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 offering that was not accepted. In every case the sincerity was real and the manner was the problem, which should make us slow to assume that any approach will do so long as the heart is warm.

God has always had something to say about how we worship God

The consistent pattern of Scripture is that God does not leave the manner of his worship to human preference. He gave Israel detailed instruction about the tabernacle, the priesthood, the offerings and the calendar. He was not being fussy. He was teaching a people that approaching a holy God is not a casual matter.

That does not mean the Mosaic regulations bind the church. I hold firmly that believers are not under the Mosaic Law in any part, as I set out when discussing whether Christians are still under the Mosaic Law. But the principle behind those regulations did not expire. God still cares how we worship God.

The New Testament instruction is less about procedure and more about character, but it is instruction all the same. Do everything for building up. Let all things be done decently and in order. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. These are not suggestions.

Worship God in spirit and truth

Jesus gave the governing principle in John 4:23-24: the Father seeks worshippers who worship him in spirit and truth. That single sentence rules out two very common errors at once.

The first error is formalism, going through motions with the inner person disengaged. Isaiah confronted a people who honoured God with their lips while their hearts were far from him, and Jesus applied the same charge to the religious leaders of his own day. You can sing every word and worship nothing.

The second error is emotionalism, mistaking intensity for spirituality. Feeling is not the enemy, and I have no time for worship so restrained that it would embarrass a funeral. But feeling detached from truth is weather, and it changes as fast as weather does.

The place of the word

If we worship God in truth, then the word of God must govern the gathering. Reading Scripture publicly, preaching it, singing it, praying it. Paul told Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture, which in many churches has quietly become the shortest item on the order of service.

This is why what we sing matters so much. Songs teach. A congregation will remember the theology of its hymns long after it has forgotten the sermon, so thin lyrics are not a neutral choice. If a song would not survive being read aloud as a statement of belief, it probably should not be sung as one.

I have set out the wider question of what governs a service where I discuss the regulative principle of worship. My own position sits between the strictest and the loosest readings, but I am unembarrassed about the direction of travel: the further a service drifts from Scripture, the less it can be called worship at all.

Reverence and gladness together

Scripture holds two notes together that we tend to separate. Worship the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing. And also, serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Both are commands, and neither cancels the other.

Some traditions have kept the reverence and lost the gladness, producing services that feel like a solemn duty discharged. Others have kept the gladness and lost the reverence, producing services that feel like a warm event that happens to mention God. Neither has understood who we are dealing with.

The picture in Revelation is instructive. The elders fall down. There is no shortage of joy in that scene, and there is no shortage of awe either. Nobody there is relaxed and nobody there is miserable.

Corporate worship is corporate

Much modern practice trains us to treat a gathering as a room full of individuals having private experiences simultaneously. Paul assumes something different. When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation. Let all things be done for building up.

That means my singing is partly for my neighbour. Teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, Paul says. If the lights are so low and the volume so high that nobody can hear anyone else, something has been lost that Paul thought worth mentioning.

It also means that turning up matters. You cannot build up a body you are not part of, and worship God is a plural command far more often than we notice.

Preparation and the ordinary week

How we worship God on Sunday is largely determined by how we lived on Thursday. A person who has not thought about God for six days does not suddenly arrive attentive, and no amount of skilled leading from the front can compensate for a week of spiritual absence. The gathering gathers what is already there.

This is not a call to intensity so much as to continuity. Reading a psalm on the train, praying while the kettle boils, keeping a short account with God over the day: these small habits mean that Sunday continues a conversation rather than starting one. Colossians 3:16 assumes the word of Christ already dwelling in us richly before we teach and admonish one another in song.

It also affects how we handle a bad service. When your week has been rooted, a flat sermon or an awkward musical moment does not derail you, because you did not arrive needing the hour to do everything. When it has not, everything depends on the performance, and disappointment is almost guaranteed.

Worship God with the whole congregation in view

Paul’s governing principle in 1 Corinthians 14 is that all things be done for building up. That means the question of how we worship God is never only about my preference or my experience. There are elderly believers, new converts, visiting unbelievers and distracted parents in the room, and a service is answerable to all of them.

Practically, this affects volume, length, vocabulary and pace. Language that assumes twenty years of church attendance excludes the very people we hope are there. Songs pitched for a trained voice exclude most men. None of that is a small matter when the goal is a congregation actually participating rather than watching.

The same principle governs how we treat those who worship differently. Paul was willing to restrict his own liberty indefinitely rather than wound a weaker brother, and applying that to a service means that being right about a matter of taste is a poor reason to divide a room. I take this up further where I discuss worship styles.

Worship God when you do not feel like it

There are seasons when the whole thing feels dead. Grief, depression, disappointment with God, a marriage under strain, a diagnosis. In those seasons the temptation is to withdraw until the feeling returns, and the feeling does not return, because it was never going to return in isolation.

The Psalms are the answer here, and they are startlingly honest. My tears have been my food day and night. Why are you cast down, O my soul? How long, O Lord? These are not the prayers of people having a good week, and they are in the hymnbook of God’s people because God expects to be worshipped by people in that condition.

So worship God with what you have. Sing the words you cannot feel. Turn up when you would rather not. This is not hypocrisy, since hypocrisy is pretending to be better than you are, and obedience without emotion is simply obedience. The feeling usually returns to those who kept coming.

So, now what?

Come prepared. Most of what makes a Sunday flat was decided on Saturday night. Reading the passage in advance, praying for the preacher, arriving without a rush: none of that is spiritual heroics, and all of it changes the hour considerably.

Watch what you are actually asking for. If you leave a service assessing whether you enjoyed it, gently retrain the question. Did we worship God? Was he honoured? Was his word heard? Those are different questions from whether the music suited you.

And be patient with churches that are trying. Very few congregations get the balance of reverence and gladness right in every season, and the person most convinced he has it sorted is usually the one causing the most trouble. Where might God be asking you to give more, rather than expect more?

“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.”

Hebrews 12:28 (ESV)