These are a couple by Rend Collective that I’ve been singing lately; they have something to say that I need to hear, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Sing it from the Shackles
Category Archives: Worship
The threat of idolatry in worship
The Devil hates it when we worship God. Any time the body of Christ gathers to give God glory and hear the gospel preached, the Devil loses, and so he’ll do anything in his power to keep us from worship. On an individual basis, he’ll try to prevent it by convincing people not to come, but that doesn’t work on everyone. For all the Devil’s best efforts, a lot of people do still show up on Sunday mornings. So what’s he going to do? Yes, he’s doomed to fail, but he’s going to take as many people as he can down with him, and we should never underestimate his cunning. If he can’t keep us from worship, he’s going to try to neutralize our worship. He will do everything he can to turn our hearts away from our Lord by tricking us into worshiping someone or something other than Christ.
Tim Keller pointed out at the Gospel Coalition conference back in 2009 that we all have idols and temptations to idolatry. Whether it be our spouses, our kids, our reputations, our jobs, or our possessions, anything that’s truly meaningful to us and that truly matters in our lives can become so important to us that it takes God’s right and proper place in our hearts. The congregation we attend can become an idol, as can our denomination or religious tradition. So can our nation and our patriotism. For many churches, style of music is a major idol, while for others, the chief idol is their building.
These are all good things which we rightly love and value. We ought to love our families and our churches. It is right that we love our nation and thank God every day for blessing us to live here. We should value the work he has given us to do. It’s good to love music, which is a wonderful gift from God, and naturally we will prefer some styles of music to others. But every last one of these things must—must—come second in our hearts to God. We don’t need to love them less, but we need to love Jesus Christ more than any of them. Our first and foremost desire should be to serve and honor and glorify him by giving him pleasure; our love for all those other people and things should fall in order behind our love for him. Our worship needs to be directed to God and God alone. For the sake of our souls and the souls of others, we cannot afford to let anything else creep in.
(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)
Photo © 2009 Wikimedia user Wattewyl. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
In uncertain times, worship
Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,
Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.
Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.
I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,
This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.
We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.
Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.
Song of the Week II
I posted Greg Scheer’s “A Mark of Grace” earlier because I admire what he accomplished in that song, but it’s far from the only new song I learned at the Worship Symposium last week; there were several, of which my favorite is this one, which is still stuck fast in my head from last Thursday morning:
Creation Sings
Creation sings the Father’s song;
He calls the sun to wake the dawn
And run the course of day
Till evening falls in crimson rays.
His fingerprints in flakes of snow,
His breath upon this spinning globe,
He charts the eagle’s flight;
Commands the newborn baby’s cry.Chorus:
Hallelujah! Let all creation stand and sing,
“Hallelujah!” Fill the earth with songs of worship;
Tell the wonders of creation’s King.Creation gazed upon His face;
The ageless One in time’s embrace
Unveiled the Father’s plan
Of reconciling God and man.
A second Adam walked the earth,
Whose blameless life would break the curse,
Whose death would set us free
To live with Him eternally.Chorus
Creation longs for His return,
When Christ shall reign upon the earth;
The bitter wars that rage
Are birth pains of a coming age.
When He renews the land and sky,
All heav’n will sing and earth reply
With one resplendent theme: The glories of our God and King!Chorus
Words and music: Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, and Stuart Townend
© 2008 Thankyou Music
Recorded on the album Awaken the Dawn, by Keith and Kristyn Getty
Song of the Week
The theme of this year’s Worship Symposium was “Great Stories”—sort of a loose theme, but they were highlighting a number of narrative passages from the Old Testament. The opening service Thursday morning was Neil Plantinga preaching on Genesis 4:1-16, the story of Cain; he titled it “A Mark of Grace.” Greg Scheer, who was part of the worship planning and leadership, wrote a song of that title specifically for the service (since, as he notes, the church is a bit short on congregational songs on that passage). He really did a remarkable job with it, I think; it has its flaws, but it’s a song well worth singing. (Click the title for an mp3 of the song.)
A Mark of Grace
From the waters of creation to the waters of the flood
Flows a stream of human failure and an ocean of God’s love.
From the first sin in the garden to the first son’s jealous rage,
The whole human family follows a legacy of sin and shame.
A covering for Adam, a mark for banished Cain,
A rainbow in the heavens—in God’s love there’s always been
Chorus:
A mark of grace, a sign of love—
The love of God in flesh.
In your strong hands, the curse of sin
Is turned to blessing without end.
You’ve sealed us with a mark of grace.
From the tree of good and evil to the tree of Calvary,
We’ve been slaves to sin and suffering; we’ve been longing to be free.
But no offering could free us—and no sacrifice of blood—
Until God in tender mercy offered up his only Son.
Jesus Christ, the second Adam, raised on the second tree:
A sacrifice of mercy for all humanity.
Chorus
From the first light of the garden to the endless city’s rays,
God in mercy has been calling, and we’ll answer him in praise.
We will praise our risen Savior, who ascended to God’s side.
We await his coming glory, when we’ll live in his pure light.
We’ll sing of our Redeemer—the holy, spotless Lamb—
Who holds our lives forever within his wounded hands.
For the blessings of the evening
Every once in a while, I hear a sermon that really shifts me, one through which God speaks to me and works in me in such a way that I know I have been changed. I had that privilege this morning at the Worship Symposium as Laura Truax brought us the word of God; I’m going to listen to this one again once the audio is up, and take some time to reflect on it. For now, I’m just thanking God for a truly blessed day.
Dr. Jeremy Begbie’s plenary address was also exceptional (as I expected); he’s also giving the plenary address tomorrow, so I’ll probably wait to write about that until I’ve heard both of them and had the chance to consider them together. I think what he had to say may well produce significant change in my sermon this Sunday, though. The three workshops I attended were also all excellent (I probably won’t write about all of them, but all three were very helpful); and then I get to spend the evening with my brother-in-law and his family. God has definitely poured out riches on me this day, and for that, I am humbly grateful.
Liturgy as the gospel form of worship
I’ve been meaning to post on Collin Hansen’s interview with Brian Chappell (the president of Covenant Seminary in St. Louis) for several weeks now, ever since Jared posted a chunk of it on his own blog. The interview is in relation to the Rev. Dr. Chappell’s latest book, Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice, which I have not yet read but definitely intend on reading, and allows him to make some good points on the subject. For instance, I appreciate his note that there is no such thing as “non-liturgical worship”—every church has a liturgy, only the form of that liturgy varies—and his insistence that what matters is whether the liturgy we use communicates the gospel and directs our attention to Christ.
Liturgy is simply another term for the order of worship. Every church has a liturgy, although it may vary from being quite simple to very ornate. Understanding the gospel-shape of worship allows us to make Christ-centered choices about how the aspects of each church’s liturgy—an opening song, a prayer of confession, or a benediction—are furthering the gospel message in our services. There is no “one right way” to acknowledge the goodness and greatness of God. But knowing that the beginning of the service has this goal allows us to make appropriate liturgical choices about the songs sung, the scriptures read, and/or the prayers offered in the opening phases of a worship service. The same will be true for those aspects of worship that involve confession, assurance, thanksgiving, etc.
The key here is that worship is for God, and thus that everything we do in worship needs to serve that purpose. This isn’t just a matter of the content of our worship, either, but also of its form; as Dr. Chappell puts it,
Christ-centered worship is not just talking or singing about Jesus a lot. Christ-centered worship reflects the contours of the gospel. In the individual life of a believer, the gospel progresses through recognition of the greatness and goodness of God, the acknowledgment of our sin and need of grace, assurance of God’s forgiveness through Christ, thankful acknowledgment of God’s blessing, desire for greater knowledge of him through his Word, grateful obedience in response to his grace, and a life devoted to his purposes with assurance of his blessing.
In the corporate life of the church this same gospel pattern is reflected in worship. Opening moments offer recognition of the greatness and goodness of God that naturally folds into confession, assurance of pardon, thanksgiving, instruction, and a charge to serve God in response to his grace in Christ. This is not a novel idea but, in fact, is the way most churches have organized their worship across the centuries. . . .
Just as the sacraments re-present the fundamental aspects of the gospel in symbol, and the sermon does so in words, so also the worship of the church re-presents the gospel in its pattern.
This means that our worship practices need to be based not on pragmatic considerations and personal preferences, but on the gospel. Dr. Chappell puts it well when he says,
If church leaders try to establish a style of worship based upon their preferences or based upon satisfying congregants’ competing preferences, then the church will inevitably be torn apart by the politics of preference. But if the leadership is asking the missional questions of “Who is here?” and “Who should be here?” in determining worship styles and practices, then the mission of the church will enable those leaders to unite around gospel goals that are more defensible and uniting than anyone’s personal preference. These gospel goals will never undermine the gospel contours of the worship service, but rather will ask how each gospel aspect can be expressed in ways that best minister to those present and those being reached for Christ’s glory.
It’s a great interview, with a lot of important insights. Go check it out.
Crown and throne
Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.
Worship isn’t about our experience, but that doesn’t mean our experience is meaningless; and I will tell you that standing to sing that Tuesday night with 3300 brothers and sisters in Christ, all of us singing at the top of our lungs, gave me chills. I have a sense of what it means that the Lord is enthroned on the praises of his people, because I could feel it, just a little.
All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou has died for me;
Thy praise shall never, never fail throughout eternity.
Pastoral subtext
Of all of the workshops I attended at Calvin’s Worship Symposium this past January, my favorite was the one led by Craig Barnes, working out of material from his book The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Pastoral Life. I was glad, a week or so ago, to see the audio go up on the Symposium website; it’s from the Friday session, not the Saturday one which I attended, but that’s fine. (Warning: there are some glitches in the audio.)
The Rev. Dr. Barnes defines “subtext” this way: “not the reality of what is said but the truth of what is meant”—the truth that lies beneath the surface, if you will. There’s a lot in his talk, so I’m not going to try to post on all of it at once, because he looks at the movement from text to subtext in a few different (though connected) areas.
He starts off with the subtext of the pastor—the truths that lie beneath the surface of the pastoral life. He uses the example of the little Apostle Paul flannelgraph figure from his childhood Sunday school—worn from overuse, purple from Kool-Aid spilled on him, taped together after two kids, fighting over him, tore his head off—as a parable of sorts of how hard God can be on those he uses.
What I particularly appreciate about what he has to say here is that he sees meaning in this—which can be hard to do from the inside. If the subtext of the call to be a pastor is, “You’re going to look purple and taped-together by your retirement party,” there’s a purpose to that:
That’s how you know how to do better ministry. How could you possibly provide ministry to the subtext of people’s lives unless you knew about brokenness yourself? . . . God breaks apart his people by putting them into ministry, precisely so that they’ll be better pastors—if they respond well, as the invitation always is, if they respond well to that brokenness.
This is a profound truth about ministry, and one which has profound implications for every part of pastoral work and life (including, as he goes on to discuss, preaching). One of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how this fits together with Andrew Purves’ pastoral wisdom about the crucifixion of ministry, John Berntsen’s understanding that ministry must therefore necessarily be cross-shaped, and Steven Seamands’ insight that ministry is equally necessarily trinitarian in form; I have the sense that if you put all these concepts together, at the point where they cross, there’s something important about the nature of ministry and human brokenness, but I’m not quite sure what.
It seems clear that we must be broken if we are to minister—broken before God and before his people—and perhaps even that the awareness that we aren’t qualified to do the work is the first qualification we must have; it is, I think, the complete eversion of the kind of attitude Jared Wilson was talking about last week that sees pastoral ministry as a form of worldly achievement. I think the key here is that ministry isn’t something we do, but rather a way that we live, and that in particular, it isn’t something we do to other people.
Instead, it seems to me that ministry is primarily a matter of identification—identifying with Christ, and particularly in his crucifixion, and with his people. It requires the recognition that it is Christ who is qualified, it is Christ who is adequate, it is Christ who is capable; we aren’t any of those things, and it isn’t our job to be any of those things. Our job is to be conduits of a sort, to be open to whatever God wants to do in us by his Holy Spirit, and to be open to our congregations to understand and identify with the subtext of their lives, the part they don’t want other people to see, so that Christ can exercise his ministry through us by the power of his Spirit. It’s something we have to do to understand—it only makes sense when lived.
Thought on worship
I’ve been trying to work this thought into a fully-developed (and fully-coherent) post for several days now, and for one reason and another just haven’t managed it; I still want to do more with it, but for now, I think I’ll just put this out there as best I can at the moment. There is the assumption in most churches, I think—even in many that would deny it consciously, I think it’s still there, unexpressed, at the level of subconscious expectation—that the pastor’s/worship leader’s job is to give people what they want in worship. All our thinking is organized around that, and much of the language we use in describing our worship supports and contributes to that assumption. I think the reason for that is that in the attractional paradigm for church growth, the “worship experience” is the core of the “attractional” part. It seems to me that whatever the message the preacher is selling, be it self-help or social justice or self-realization or what have you, the worship—by which is usually meant the music part of the service—is the bait on the hook. It’s the free weekend in Vegas to get you to come and listen to the pitch for the time-share (if they’re still doing that in the current economy; I’ve had people try to get me to take one of those trips more than once, but never wanted to): the worship is the fun time, and then the preacher gives you the pitch. If the music’s good enough and you like what he’s selling, you come back; but the emotional experience of the worship is definitely the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.This has taught us in the American church to see worship in this way, as what we get out of church in exchange for whatever we’re asked to put in. Even in liturgical churches, people evaluate it that way—does the liturgy comfort me, do I like doing the same thing every week, do I not like doing the same thing every week, does the form help me do x, does the routine bore me, and so on. What we miss is that liturgy is a discipline—and it’s a discipline because worship is a discipline. It’s not about what the liturgy does for us, because it’s not about what worship does for us: it’s about what the liturgy invites us, leads us, calls us, instructs us to do.It’s the discipline of recognizing that we don’t come to worship on our own initiative, but only in response to God’s call; of recognizing, as we praise God for his glory and holiness, that in comparison to him, we don’t look that great, and that no matter how wonderful we may think we are, we are in fact broken messed-up sinners just like everyone else—and need to humbly confess that fact to him, to each other, together. It’s about the discipline of sitting ourselves down in his presence to receive his Word with open ears, open minds, open hearts—not to use it to get what we want, but to accept it and let him tell us what we need. It’s about disciplining our hearts to receive his sacraments in that spirit, and to respond to Word and sacrament by affirming our faith, standing together to pledge our allegiance as a people to the King and Kingdom of Heaven, than which we owe no greater allegiance. It’s about the discipline of intercessory prayer, which is our confession that we aren’t strong enough and great enough to make it all work on our own, and of the offering, which is our confession that we owe God everything, not least gratitude for all that he’s given us. Even receiving the charge and benediction is a discipline: it’s the acceptance of the fact that we are not our own and our lives are not our own, and that what we do and hear and say on Sunday mornings ought to form the lines of everything we do and say and think across the other six and a half days.As we look at the form and content of our worship services, “Is this what I want?” really ought to be the last question on our minds; what we need to ask is, “What is this asking me to do? How is this forming me as a disciple of Christ?” To mangle a line, ask not what your worship service can do for you; ask what you can do for God through your worship service.