Tag Archives: worship

It’s Good to Sing Together

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I think the weekly corporate gathering of the church, i.e., the church service, has been overemphasized. For many, at least in the American South [my majority experience], the Sunday gathering is the totality of the Christian life. Sunday and Wednesday nights are bonus points. And even for those who would check the right answer when asked, the church service can still be an event that drains energy, subtly eases the conscience about Christian activity, and inadvertently distracts from mission to our neighbors.

The simple adjustment (at least in words) is to make the corporate gathering a sabbath. Make it the weekly culmination and commissioning of the church’s calling to the world. It’s very important, just not the be-all, end-all of Christian existence.

With this qualifier in place, I love what Bifrost Arts are saying and doing. . .

(HT: JT on the video)

The Primacy of the Word in Worship

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… And the full revelation of God is absolutely clear: if there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ, then faith in Jesus Christ is certainly the basis of worship…

Worship begins with the response to divine revelation. But if little time of attention is given to the revealed Word of God, read, proclaimed, or taught, then to what do people respond? The result is that worship becomes superficial or sentimental. If the church is truly interested in recapturing the spirit and nature of the prophetic and apostolic ministry of the Word in worship, then there will have to be a greater emphasis placed on reading, teaching, and preaching the Word of God, but it has to be with clarity, accuracy, power, and authority.

Allen P. Ross, Recalling the Hope of Glory, 419, 429

The Hope of Glory

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True worship is the celebration of being in covenant fellowship with the sovereign and holy triune God, by means of the reverent adoration and spontaneous praise of God’s nature and works, the expressed commitment of trust and obedience to the covenant responsibilities, and the memorial reenactment of entering into covenant through ritual acts, all with the confident anticipation of the fulfillment of the covenant promises in glory (67-68).

But the ultimate picture of worship after the end of this age is one of eternal worship. It will be centered on the marvelous reality of the presence of the Lord with his people and his provisions for all their needs. It will be the true Paradise, of which the earthly was a mere shadow. And in this glorious new creation, the people of God will serve the Lord and worship him forever. That is the hope of glory (500).

Allen Ross, Recalling the Hope of Glory, 67-68, 500

What Being A Man Has To Do With Phineas And His Spear

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Numbers 25:1-13. The narrative is short but it is one of my favorites… it starts following the LORD’s determination to bless Israel (despite Balak). The people of Israel apostatize. The men whore with the daughters of Moab. The men who were supposed to be leading their families in the worship of the true God have instead  been seduced to go to bed with Baal. The picture in verse 6 seems odd. What that guy did in bringing the Midianite woman along was evil. The text implies that he was flaunting his idolatry.

Then comes Phineas. He rises up to play the man. He chased the couple down and slays them both with a spear. It is a gruesome scene. But Phineas doesn’t waste time. He goes straight for the problem. It is a sober rage. It is a logical fury with the glory of God at stake, and the good of the people (vv. 10-11). The idolatry was putting the previous oracles in jeopardy. They were up to thwarting God’s promise. And where there were no men, Phineas was a man. I want to be like Phineas.

I don’t want a spear and I hate ultimate fighting (it is nonredeemable), but I want to be a man like Phineas. That means, I want to lead my family well in the worship of the triune God. And that means that sometimes you have to slay the inhibitions, you have to put to death those things that contradict the reality of the gospel.

Our situation is not like Numbers 25. But what is it in your camp that is impeding your worship of GOD? What is it in your tribe that is derailing your family from living in light of the gospel? Is it your TV addiction? Is it your disproportionate affection for sports? Is it your preoccupation with Twitter and Facebook? Maybe your lazy? Whatever it is, we all have something in our lives, in the life of our family, that needs to be impelled (metaphorically, of course). We are surrounded by things that aim to knock us off track. Be a man and get rid of those things, for the glory of God and your family’s good.

Doctrine as Derivative and Directive

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The Pharisees and scribes were teaching wrong (Matthew 15:16). They contradicted the Scriptures and led people astray. Jesus called them blind guides (15:14). Isaiah nailed it. He prophesied well when he said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Isa. 29:13).

There is a relationship between their vain worship and the subsequent participle of them teaching the commandments of men to be the doctrine of God. Doctrine is directive preeminently in that it shows us the way of true worship. The Pharisees ordered their lives around the wrong stuff. We can learn something important about doctrine here, namely, the commandments of men propped up as the doctrine of God is a miserable endeavor that results in the worse kind of vanity.

Doctrine is holy because it is derived from God, it is of God. It is the Spirit-empowered exposition and articulation of the Holy Scriptures in the midst of life.  It leads us in all truth because it is the repetition of the gospel– it is sang, prayed, preached, taught, cried… generating, ordering, validating, refining true worship of the triune God.

On Brian Brock’s ‘Singing the Ethos of God’

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I can’t read another book right now. One book at a time demands enough of me. That is okay.

This morning I casually opened up a newer book that a friend recommended that I purchase and read–Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture by Brian Brock. I folded back the paperback and planned to just browse. The browse became a perusing as I settled into the Introduction. My guard was up, in a discernible and generous way. But initial uneasiness dissolved into doxology as I read on. My soul was moved to worship, to the praise of God in Christ. This page glows of yellow highlight…

In the final analysis, it is not our historical or moral distance from the Bible that renders it foreign to us, nor the gap between time and eternity, but the gap between the ways of God and those of humanity. God is not foreign to us on some general criterion, but as another person: it is precisely in God’s incarnation that God’s difference from us becomes visible (John 1:14). The Psalms are foreign because they open into the manifold life of the trinitarian God; and this conclusion allows us to theologically clarify how they are foreign. The foreignness proper to faith is an eschatological foreignness. Christ is the chorus of a new song that, in its announcement of good news to the world, unleashes a critical impulse within history. Singers are made “strangers and aliens” in a rebellious world by having their eyes opened to the profundity of the Godhead and the perfection of God’s works…

In being part of God’s path to us, Scripture is foreign with Christ’s foreignness, but not a stranger that we cannot come to know, not an otherworldly alien… Its foreignness finds its origin in God’s inexhaustible holiness rather than Scripture’s effectiveness as a moral source of guide. Because it is outside us, the verbam externum, it can, as gospel, console and teach us.

Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God, xvf

This is the Epiphany That I Pray You Have…

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Jeremiah describes the kind of repentance that we all must go through. We have to see the futility of all the stuff that we worship instead of the true God. Verse 20 is the exclamation of leaving one kind of life in order to have the best…

“O LORD, my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in the day of trouble, to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth and say: “Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit. Can man make for himself gods? Such are not gods!” 

“Therefore, behold, I will make them know, this once I will make them know my power and my might, and they shall know that my name is the LORD.””

(Jeremiah 16:19-21 ESV, italics mine)

Holy Week Worship: Look to Him!

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Mike and Catherine Tong are hosting a time of meditation, singing, and prayer at their house from 9:30PM to 10:30PM every night this week. This time of worship is in fulfillment to Pastor John’s encouragement to set apart Holy Week. 

We are reading through chapters 26-28 of Matthew’s narrative and we are meditating on Psalm 22. The Scripture reading and meditation is followed by singing and a sweet season of prayer. 

The explanation for why we are meditating on Psalm 22 is found here.

This is an open invitation by the Tong’s– “Oh, magnify the LORD with us, and let us exalt his name together!”