Biblical
Worship: Individual and Corporate, Rev. 5:11
Worship is one of those doctrines that is genuinely vital to the
spiritual life of every believer. Often that has not been so emphasised. On the
other hand there are people who take this concept of worship and make something
of it that is not really biblical. They transform it into something that has to
do with their own inner feelings, their emotional state, and it almost becomes
a form of idolatry. That, unfortunately, is the case that we find today in too
many aspects of Christianity. This is a failure to properly analyse what God
has revealed in His Word and it also helps us to understand how the various
trends of thought that take place outside of the church in the general culture
of any particular civilisation has an impact on ideas of worship, music and
praise within the church. And so by failing to think very deeply, very
profoundly, the church is too often affected and infected by subtle forms of
what the Bible calls worldliness which really creates a contradiction within
the worship and teaching of the church. On the one hand there is the desire to
be Scripture-based and theocentric and on the other hand there are
methodologies and ideas that are brought into the church because it seems to
make the church a little less distinct from the culture around them so that
unbelievers might feel a little more comfortable with what is going on in the
church, and so the message and method of what goes on in worship is often
diluted by a lot of false thinking.
Words for worship are used many times in both the Old and New Testaments
but, as we have seen when we come to Revelation, there is a lot said about
worship and we get pictures of what worship is objectively as we see it
happening in heaven in the future. So from an understanding of what worship
looks like in the presence of God where there is no influence from human
viewpoint, pagan thought, or various ideas of emotion and subjective thinking,
then we can take those principles and apply them to what we do.
So what does it means to worship God biblically? We need to investigate
what happens in the Scripture.
When we look at the Scripture, while much of it is descriptive of what
took place in the Old Testament in terms of worship; it is not merely descriptive,
it is prescriptive in the sense of establishing certain patterns and parameters. The reason for using that
terminology is because we will hear sometimes that people today, especially if
they are coming out of an emerging church or church growth type of background,
who will say all of that which goes on in the Bible is merely descriptive, it
just tells us what they did; it is not prescriptive at all.” In other words, we
can invent and come up with our own forms of worship, our own kinds of music, whatever
appeals and interests our generation and makes them feel as if they are closer
to God and can worship God. This is completely wrong. The Bible gives
descriptions and patterns in which parameters are established, boundaries are
set, and we have freedom to move around within those particular boundaries. So
we need to ask what are the parameters to biblical worship are and how that
applies to every area of worship. Worship isn’t just coming together and
sitting down under the teaching of God’s Word. That is the core of worship
because worship fundamentally focuses our attention on God. As we have seen in
these hymns that are sung by the angels and the 24 elders in Revelation
chapters four and five the focus is always on God, who He is, what he has done,
on Christ and who He is and what He has done. And the second observation is, we
don’t find the focus of worship anywhere in the Bible on the Holy Spirit. And
that impacts a broad segment of contemporary Christianity. The Holy Spirit is
the one whose role it is to energise and empower the worship that is directed
to the Father and to the Son. So even though He is full deity and fully worthy
of worship, in the Scripture the Holy Spirit is not the focus of worship, it is
the Father and the Son.
We need to recall that they key words that emphasise worship are service
and submission—service to God and submission to His authority. If we remember
those two words we have the core idea of worship throughout the Old and New
Testaments. A key element in worship, in our thinking, our attitude, is that we
understand what God has given us and we recognise that all that we have is from
Him, and so we are expressing that gratitude and thankfulness to God in all
things. That is part of authority orientation because we recognise that what we
have is not the result of our hard work, our labour, our natural talent;
ultimately it is from God. It is recognising that God is the one who is in
control and He has the right to tell us what to think because He is the one who
created reality and He defines it.
Worship is the same basic concept that we find in 2 Corinthians, that we
are to be “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” We are
capturing strongholds. Those strongholds are human viewpoint thinking in every
area of our life. These things connect together, they are part and parcel of
our spiritual life and spiritual growth—being willing to submit everything
under the authority of God, and that is expressed in His Word. That is why
studying His Word is the centre of worship. And when we construct church
services where we spend forty or forty-five minutes singing, and people become
emotionally weary after that much time singing, they can’t focus on teaching.
And if they sing the wrong kind of music in that initial 40-45 minutes it
further limits their ability to focus and concentrate and think.
The next element we add is that worship is a complex idea which involves
a number of aspects from private prayer to public expressions of thanks, the
singing of hymns which reinforce and reflect on God, His person and His works.
It also includes a bringing of sacrifice, gifts, and personal Christian
service. So there are a lot of ideas: private worship, individual worship,
public worship. Worship involves singing, public prayer, music, listening to
someone else sing—if we listen to the words it helps focus our attention upon
God.
Worship can be both individual and corporate. We may sometimes be
emotionally stimulated by worship. If we really think about the words of the
songs that we sing, e.g. A might fortress is our God; And can it be that I
should gain and interest in the Saviour’s blood? What a tremendous comment on
how undeserving we are of the grace of God! If we think about the words
sometimes we can be quite moved emotionally. What happens is that the next time
we come and we hear that we may be coming from a different frame of reference
in our mind and it doesn’t have that same emotional impact. So we walk out
thinking we didn’t really worship this morning because we didn’t have that same
emotion and feeling. Then what happens is that we try to find music and songs
that can reduplicate that feeling that we had that can’t be reduplicated. But
each of these experiences happens to each of us at different stages in life
because of where we are in our growing process, and what happens is that these
experiences seem to be so rich and so meaningful and profound that we then turn
them into a form of idolatry and elevate them in such a way that we begin to
worship the emotion and the feeling and the response of it to the doctrine or
the content that should be generating that response. There is nothing wrong
with it being emotionally stimulating if that is coming from our soul and not
being manipulated by the music.
The central idea is that worship is submission to God as the sovereign
creator—in expressing that authority orientation through gratitude, songs which
refer to His person and work, rituals of remembrance (the Lord’s table), and
teaching His Word. The result of that as the Word produces growth in our lives
through the ministry of God the Holy Spirit we serve Him in all that we think
and do. Service is the outgrowth of an inner soul transformation that comes
from the Spirit of God and the Word of God.
There are two broad categories of worship: corporate worship and
individual worship. Historically in Genesis the first form of worship that we
see is individual worship. There are the sacrifices that Abel brings to God in
Genesis chapter four. He has the right kind of worship; Cain has the wrong kind
and it is rejected, illustrating that we can come with genuine feelings of
sincerity and feeling good about ourselves with what we have brought to God in
worship and if it is not biblical it is not worship. We see the worship of Noah
and his sons as they come off the ark in Genesis chapter nine. We see the
worship of Abraham as he sacrifices to God at various places and at
Key passages: Genesis 24:6, 28, related to personal thanksgiving and
gratitude to God. Judges
Corporate worship begins to develop after the exodus at