Worship (Resolutions)
resolutions: worship
Jason Procopio
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen that God has a goal for our Christian lives, and that is to bring us to maturity in Christ. He uses mainly his own relationship with us to do this: as we grow in our relationship with God as our Father, we find ourselves growing in Christ. The spiritual disciplines, as they’re called, are means he uses to bring us into closer relationship to him.
We’ve seen how the regular reading of the Bible does this; and we’ve seen how prayer does this. Those two go together; they are a unit.
Today we’re going to start looking at other means at God’s disposal, starting with the practice we call worship. (Everything I’ll say today applies to both worship when we gather and worship when we’re alone, but I’ll be focusing mainly on worship when we gather together as a body.)
I’ll freely admit I’m in a bit of a rough spot for this message. If you look at any list in any theological work on the spiritual disciplines, worship is always included. Always. If the goal of the Christian life is to grow in maturity, to grow in Christlikeness, worship is one of the main disciplines God gives us to help us do that.
But in our day, the very idea of “worship” is loaded with baggage. It can vary wildly from one place to another.
Let me give you an example from my own life (which strangely mirrors the makeup of our church in a lot of ways). I grew up in a series of very charismatic churches in the United States. Worship in these churches looked like a cross between a concert and a football match: the music was excellent, and when the church sang, they sang with everything—with their voices and with their bodies. People would cheer, they always clapped. They would get out of their seats and sometimes run up and down the aisles (literally). They would jump. They would dance (and there were a thousand possible variations in these dances). It was fantastic for a kid who liked music and enjoyed watching people do weird things. You never knew what was going to happen.
Then, when I actually became a Christian and began learning what the Bible says, a lot of things about the churches I grew up in began to bother me. There were aspects of it that were good, but many of the reasons behind those good things were either vague, or completely unbiblical.
So I went the other route. I started studying theology, and I learned about liturgy—something I knew nothing about growing up, but that’s all around us whether we know it or not. Good liturgy is the series of practices that we repeat over a long period of time, which over time helps form our hearts and minds to love the truth. I learned that there could be a structure to worship, and that that structure is a good thing, something that helps us know and love biblical truth.
So when we planted the church, we talked a lot about the liturgy of the church: I always wanted to include a call to worship, a time of confession, the preaching of the Word, Communion, and a benediction—and as you know, we still do those things. I was (and I still am) convinced that the order we give to our worship services both helps us and honors the truth of the gospel. And it was important that the songs we sang clearly reflected the gospel as well.
But here’s the rub. Churches tend to swing between two extremes. There’s the kind of unstructured, concert/football match kind of worship on the one side. This kind of worship is highly emotional and makes you feel great things about God…but is often so random and vague that you feel a lot, but you’re not really sure why you feel it. (Often it has more to do with the “effet de masse” of the people around you than with the truths you’re actually celebrating.)
And on the other extreme, you have the very structured, very organized kind of worship, that relies heavily on liturgy and set patterns. This kind of worship is clear: you have no doubt why you are celebrating. But at the same time…often it doesn’t feel much like a celebration. It’s stilted and lifeless, and more closely resembles the kind of dour musical moments you find at a funeral.
If we look at the way the Bible describes worship, we see no such dichotomy. Worship is not structured or emotional; it is not liturgical or spontaneous? It’s not either/or, but both/and.
So that’s what I want us to see today. Our main text will be found in John chapter 4.
True Worship (John 4.7-24)
In this text, Jesus is traveling with his disciples through Samaria, and he sits at a well to rest while his disciples go to get food.
They were in hostile territory. The Samaritans were descended from Jews who had intermarried with foreigners when their leaders were taken into exile seven centuries earlier. So the Jews saw them as unclean, having abandoned the law of Moses. They had separate regions, separate places of worship. There was fierce animosity between the two groups, and and they rarely mingled.
All that is to say that the conversation which takes place in this passage, under ordinary circumstances, should not have happened.
It starts simply. Jesus is sitting by the well, and a woman approaches. V. 7:
7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
So right away, Jesus is surprising. She’s a Samaritan, and a woman, and he’s a Jew, so her question makes sense. She asks, “How can you ask me for a drink?”
But Jesus says, “How can you not ask me? I have living water.” He says after, in v. 13:
13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
So that’s the first thing we see. Jesus is offering something wholly different than what this woman could get anywhere else. He uses the picture of water, but what he’s really offering is life: full and vibrant and abundant and eternally satisfying.
The woman hears him and still doesn’t quite understand. So Jesus gives her a little more: in v. 17-18, he tells her that she has been married multiple times, and that now she’s in an adulterous relationship—something he could not possibly have known. The woman is amazed, obviously, so tries to find out more about him, what kind of prophet he is. V. 19:
19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
This phrase—worship in spirit and truth—is simpler than it sounds at first, if you know what comes afterward.
Jesus says that true worship is “in spirit”. That is, it’s not simply a physical or an intellectual act, but a spiritual one. And if we know what comes after, we know that the only way we can have a spiritual life that pleases God is by the Holy Spirit, through the work of Jesus Christ: the Spirit gives us faith and causes us to live out our faith. In other words: only true Christians, who have been granted faith by the Holy Spirit of God and who now live in the the Spirit, can worship God in spirit.
And if true worship happens by the Spirit, that means you don’t need to go to a temple to do it. Now, in Christ, true worship is not limited to a location or a time; it happens wherever God’s people happen to be, because wherever they are, the Spirit is in them and with them.
So true worship is in spirit, and it is in truth. This is even simpler. In v. 22, Jesus says, We worship what we know. God revealed himself to the Jews, so we, the Jews, worship God according to who he says he is—according to the truth.
True worship happens by the Spirit, and according to the truth.
As far as that goes, I know that 100% of you—of you who are Christians at any rate—are on board. No one has a problem with this.
But here’s what we often forget, and it’s essential. What has Jesus been talking about up to this point? He hasn’t been talking about the proper way to conduct worship services; he hasn’t been talking about liturgy. We’ll get there, but that’s not the context of this discussion.
Up to this point, Jesus has been talking about what it is like to drink the living water Jesus offers his people. What it is like to be satisfied in the salvation that God gives: to come to God to drink…and to never be thirsty again.
Think about what it’s like in the summertime. You’ve been walking around the city all morning. You’re hot, your sweating. You’ve just had a sandwich and a bag of chips and you’re desperately thirsty…and you realize your water bottle is empty. So you walk for what seems like forever and wait in a long line filled with tourists and you finally get to the counter and order another bottle of water, and they give it to you—ice cold, clean water.
What is it like to open that bottle and drink at that moment? No matter what kind of day you’re having, that moment is glorious: you feel relief and happiness and delight at something as simple as a bottle of cold water. No one is indifferent, no one is blasé, when they are that thirsty, and they can finally drink.
That’s the experience Jesus is describing when he’s talking about worshiping in spirit and in truth. It is not an intellectual experience, but an emotional one—it appeals to our desires and not our reason. He describes the quenching of thirst, the joy of experiencing life—a spring of water welling up to eternal life. And where do we find it? Not in Jerusalem, or on this mountain, but in the Father, whom we worship in spirit and in truth.
So I have two main points or us today, and they’re simple, but hopefully they’re going to pull all of us in one uncomfortable direction or another. And they are that the spiritual discipline of worship both trains us in truth, and stirs the affections.
Worship Trains Us in the Truth
It’s important for us to know this, because some of us will prefer our worship—the songs we sing to God, the prayers we pray to God—to be filled with emotive language rather than theological truths. Think of some of the songs Christians sing today, and ask yourself some questions. Here’s one example (from a song that is beautiful, but, I think, problematic):
And He is jealous for me
Love’s like a hurricane. I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden,
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me…
And we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes.
If His grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
And Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss.
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest.
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about the way…
That He loves us…
(“He Loves Us”, John Michael McMillan - fr O combien il nous aime)
Now there’s nothing heretical about these words; they’re not necessarily false. But in many church contexts, songs like this make up nearly all of the songs their members sing when they worship.
So here are some questions we should ask, with the lyrics in front of us:
• Is this song focused on me, or is it focused on God?
• Is its language vague, or precise?
• Does it explain why God is worthy of being celebrated?
• Does it describe acts of God, or feelings God gives us?
This song is mainly focused on us, on how much God loves us. Its language is extremely vague; it says grace is an ocean and we’re all sinking, love’s like a hurricane and I’m a tree… But it never says what God’s grace actually looks like, how his love manifests itself, beyond making us feel all warm and fuzzy.
You see? There may be a place for songs like this, occasionally. But if that’s what we sing most of the time, what does that teach us? That God is…something, and he does…something, and he does it because we’re awesome, and that’s why he’s awesome.
True worship honors the truth, and true worship trains our hearts in truth. True worship teaches us who God is, what he has done, and how we are to respond.
Let me give a contrary example, from a song we sing often:
When Satan tempts me to despair
And tells me of the guilt within
Upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end of all my sin
Because the sinless Savior died
My sinful soul is counted free
For God the Just is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me
Behold him there, the risen Lamb,
my perfect, spotless righteousness,
the great unchangeable I AM,
the King of glory and of grace.
At one with him, I cannot die;
my soul is purchased by his blood.
My life is hid with Christ on high,
with Christ my Savior and my God,
(“Before the Throne,” Charitie Lees Bancroft)
This song is entirely focused on God; I’m in there, but the reason I’m in there is to explain my need for a Savior, and how Christ is that Savior. It is specific: it speaks of Christ’s death on the cross in our place, for our sin, and the sinless life of Christ placed onto me, so that I might be pardoned by God and assured of eternal life with him.
True worship honors the truth, and true worship trains our hearts in truth.
My kids learned this song very early, when they were still babies; they had no idea what it meant. But as they grow older, what will they have memorized, ready to be picked up in a moment’s notice? The truth that they need a Savior, that Christ is that Savior, and exactly what he did to save them. They will be able to explain not only what Christ did, but why and how he did it.
When our worship celebrates who God is, as he has revealed himself in his Word, it honors him as he is. It honors the truth of who he is, and it trains our hearts to recognize truth when we hear it.
And this doesn’t just apply to the lyrics of the songs we sing. Everything we do when we gather for worship is meant to train us in these same things. This is why we have an established liturgy in the church. We keep it fairly loose, but there will always be a call to worship (a reminder of why we worship God), a time of confession and assurance of pardon (a reminder of our need for a Savior and God’s provision of a Savior in Christ), a time of preaching (a reminder that what we need more than anything is God’s Word to us), a time of communion (a reminder that Christ’s finished work has established a perpetual new covenant with us, his people), and a benediction (a reminder that just because we leave this place, doesn’t mean God leaves us).
The very structure of the service itself trains our hearts in truth.
But here’s the rub—here’s the problem many church run into, and it’s a problem I think we run into more often than I’d like.
True worship doesn’t just have one goal. Its goal isn’t just to train our hearts to know the truth, but to train our hearts to respond to the truth. Its goal isn’t just to teach us about God, but to stir our affections for the God we’re celebrating.
Worship trains us to respond to the truth
We worship in spirit—through the Holy Spirit who brought our spirits to new life—and we worship in truth.
But listen (and fair warning: this is where I might make some of you uncomfortable)… If we have been saved by the Holy Spirit of God, if he has given us new hearts and faith in his Son, if he is illuminating our hearts to see the truth proclaimed in his Word, then it is not normal for us to sing about these truths, and to not be moved by them. It is not normal for us to sing about the most glorious truths imaginable, and to be bored.
Almost no one in the outside world can sing as dully as Christians in church. Loanne and I actually discussed this earlier this week: who else, in the rest of the world, can be this bored when they’re singing? The only people we could think of were people in a restaurant singing Happy Birthday to someone at another table. They sing because they feel like they have to, because the waiters said, “Come on, everyone, let’s sing!”, but they don’t the person, so it’s halfhearted.
That’s all we could come up with: the only other context in which singing can be so dull.
Singing makes us emotional, and it happens instinctively. We sing the national anthem with more passion than we give to God. We sing karaoke with more passion than we give to God. We sing stupid songs in the car with more passion than we give to God. Somehow, when Christians gather together, this instinct kicks in that says, “This is supposed to be serious, it’s supposed to be somber, and I don’t want to look stupid.”
They know they should come to God with reverence—and they absolutely should—but they mistake reverence with emotional lethargy: those are not the same things. If anything, the reverence we see in the Bible drives God’s people to even greater emotion than they felt before.
Just look at the psalms. You will not find a single psalm that is irreverent. At the same time, you will also not find a single psalm in which strong emotion is not expressed, either evocatively or explicitly. The psalms—the template for the worship of God’s people—all respond to the truth of who God is with profound reverence and striking emotion, because that is the right way to respond to the truth of God, illuminated by the Holy Spirit. The emotion shown—whether lament or anger or desperation or joy—depends on the context, but it is always present, and it is always expressed.
Listen, I know this is a Baptist church, and that any talk of emotion makes us nervous, because of how easy it is to confuse emotion with conviction. And it’s true, they are not the same things. You can have strong emotion, with no conviction. But I would say, from everything we see in the Bible, that it is not possible to have conviction without strong emotion, because that’s the first thing conviction produces: feeling about what we believe. That’s what makes people ready to give their lives for their convictions.
This kind of talk also makes us nervous, because we don’t like the idea of expressing emotion that isn’t 100% spontaneous. We have this idea that if we have to decide to express emotion, it must be phony. I understand why it feels that way, but if that’s the case, I don’t know what to do with the many texts that command God’s people to do just that.
Philippians 2.18: Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.
Philippians 3.1: Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord.
Philippians 4.4: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.
Psalm 71.23: My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed.
Psalm 132.9: Let your priests be clothed with righteousness, and let your saints shout for joy.
Isaiah 12.6: Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
The Bible commands us to feel the weight of the truth we know, and to express that feeling. It does not say, “Rejoice if you’re in a good mood.” It says (Psalm 33.1):
Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous!
Why? Because:
Praise befits the upright.
He tells us (Psalm 33.2-4):
2 Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre;
make melody to him with the harp of ten strings!
3 Sing to him a new song;
play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.
Why?
4 For the word of the Lord is upright,
and all his work is done in faithfulness.
God commands us to rejoice—to choose to open our mouths and shout for joy and play instruments and sing—because that is the proper response to seeing God as he is.
And it is no accident that God commands us to do all of this to music. It was this way for the people of Israel in the time of David, and it remained true for God’s people in the New Testament. What did God’s people in the New Testament do when they gathered together?
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
They gathered in fellowship, they submitted to the Word, and they responded in song.
Here’s my point in all this: true worship cannot be truth to the detriment of feeling, or feeling to the detriment of truth.
I know we all want to hyper-spiritualize worship. But worship in spirit and in truth is not something that happens to us. Worship is something we do, through the power of the Holy Spirit and in response to the truth. It’s a virtuous cycle: the Father speaks to us in his Word; we respond to him in prayer; our growing relationship with the Father creates joy in us, which leads us to worship, both individually and collectively; and the feast of our joy in worship makes us want to spend even more time with God, to know him even more deeply. So what do we do? We go back to the Word. And so on.
If we take John 4 in its context, we have to see that the way we often worship God is completely incongruous to the reality of what’s supposed to be happening. We’re supposed to be people who were thirsty and who now find ourselves satisfied by the living water that God has given us to drink, rejoicing that we now have in us a spring of water welling up to eternal life, standing in God’s presence and worshiping the God we know, who took the broken creatures we were, and made us whole again.
Application
Now here’s our difficulty at Église Connexion… We have a lot of people who have come from a lot of different church backgrounds. Many of you grew up in strict, somber Baptist-type churches, where everything stays very contained: hands by your sides, eyes on the page (or slides), lips kept in a straight line.
And some of you grew up on the other extreme: in the kinds of charismatic churches I myself grew up in, where service was basically a two-hour party.
What happens when you take this mix of backgrounds and put them together in a church that holds the conviction that liturgy should be an integral part of our time together? If we’re not careful, we end up with one group overpowering the other. In our church, people have a hard time clapping their hands during worship, because not many people do. People have a hard time raising their hands during worship, because not many people do. And people feel uncomfortable expressing any feeling during worship, because not many people do.
In other words, the natural instincts of one group squash the natural instincts of the other.
But guys, I think it’s entirely possible that in God’s providence, he has brought us from these different backgrounds together, not so that we might settle into a kind of flatness—like bread dough that’s been sitting out too long and collapses—but so that we might help one another to worship God better and respond to God rightly.
Because if we look at what the Bible says about worship, we have to see that both of these instincts are good. The instinct toward order and truth and structure in worship is a good instinct, because worship honors the truth and trains our hearts to know the truth. And the instinct to respond to that truth with great emotion in worship is also good, because that’s what these truths should be producing in us—worship trains our hearts to love the truth. In fact, I would argue worship as a spiritual discipline only produces its intended effect if both of these instincts are present and accounted for.
So two final words of application.
If your natural instinct is to shy away from expressing any emotion and only thinking about the truth, take time this week to pray. Come to next week’s service prepared, having prayed beforehand. Ask God for help, that the Spirit of God would help you respond to the truths you love. It doesn’t matter what that looks like—how that works itself out will be different for everyone—but if we’re really loving the truths we’re singing, it will not leave us indifferent. Pray that God would use the spiritual discipline of worship to train your heart to love the truth more deeply, and to respond to that love in more worship.
And if your natural instinct is to be expressive and emotive in worship, let me be as clear as I can. Do it. You have the official green light from me to clap your hands, to raise your hands, to sing loudly, to make your neighbors uncomfortable. Please—if this is what’s natural for you, then do it. But I’ll say the same thing to you as I said to your more reserved brothers and sisters. Take time this week to pray. Ask God for help, to never be emotional simply for the sake of emotion, but pray that he might orient your hearts to be moved by truth. Ask God to help you know the truth more fully through the songs we sing, and the different parts of our service, and to respond to that.
Let us know our God as he has revealed himself to us. And let us respond to our God without reservation, because he has given us living water to drink, a spring of living water welling up to eternal life.
