Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 7

This is the final posting in the series summarizing the booklet Looking for God in All the Wrong Places. If you would like to buy a copy, they are available from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service http://www.cvbbs.com/

What about Music?


We should not reduce a discussion of corporate worship to a discussion about music. Many problems would be avoided if we begin by locating music within the category labeled "the ministry of God's Word". (Col. 3:16) Music is to be a tool for teaching and admonishing one another, thus making it functionally similar to preaching.

Church music must answer the questions we put to church sermons:

1.) Is it doctrinally true?

2.) Does it display Biblical content?

3.) Is it excessively shallow?

4.) Is it theocentric (centered on God)?

5.) Does it accurately represent the character of God?

6.) Is the tone or mood reverential?

Good songs perform the essential service of distilling profound truths into memorable phrases, thereby planting truths deep in our souls. Good hymns remind distracted worshippers of the appropriate things to say to God in worship.

Professors D.G. Hart and John R. Muether point out that the contrast between the church and the world should perhaps be most obvious when the church is worshipping.

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 6

The Protestant Reformation as a Reformation of Worship

The Roman Catholic church, with its architecture, and the Latin mass with all the rituals, was nothing if not regal, mystical and moving. The church thought it was this ceremony that mediated to them the presence of God. One of the main things the Reformers did was to bring the Scripture back to the worship meeting. Luther's work of translating the Bible was done so people could know God in His Word.

Word-based worship leads to simple worship. Why? Because worship in Spirit and in truth is inherently internal and spiritual. The Holy Spirit presses scriptural truth upon the heart, which provokes a soul-level response of worship. The enemy of inward spiritual worship then, is external distraction. Rituals, novelties and visual props usurp the Holy Spirit's role of triggering worship in the heart. Excessive sentimentality and casualness also distract. Timothy Keller says, "Both spectacle and sentimentality [or what Keller calls folksiness] work directly on people's emotions rather than trusting God's Spirit to bring truth home." J C Ryle: "Simplicity should be the grand characterisitic of New Testament worship.....because.....the inherent wickedness of human nature is such that our minds are only too ready to turn away from spiritual things to visible things."

Does the Holy Spirit use means to promote true worship? Yes, but He uses means that have been revealed to us in the Bible.

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 5

Why do we not expect pulpit preaching to promote worship?

Two reasons are given. First, sermons have begun to be moral lessons, rather than expositions of God's Word. A God-centered, redemptive sermon will allow us to worship. A sermon of this kind will cause us to look heavenward and embrace by faith the God who redeemed us.

Secondly, we have become poor listeners with no expectation of seeing God. "Good listening requires good thinking and good thinking is a chore."

James Stewart: "If in a congregation one soul here and another there may be receiving, as the sermon proceeds, some vision of the majesty of God, some glimpse of the loveliness of Christ, some revelation of personal need beneath the searchlight of the Spirit, is the ministry of the Word to be minimized... Is not such preaching worship?"

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 4

How do worshippers experience God's presence?

The Scriptures mediate the presence of God to us -- the Bible not only teaches us, it produces spiritual effects when applied by the Holy Spirit. (Heb. 4:12, Acts 20:32, 1Cor. 1:18)

How does the Bible mediate God to us? -by creating, rekindling and promoting faith in us. (Rom.10:14,17, 1Thess. 2:13) Assurance and conviction grow from faith. (Heb. 11:1)

So then, the preached Word of God and the visible Word of God (displayed in the Lord's supper) are potentially electrifying corporate worship events. We can experience the spiritual presence of Christ and spiritual communion with God. These are realities, apprehended only by faith. Jonathan Edwards said God glorifies Himself before faith-filled men by "appearing to their understanding and communicating Himself to their hearts."

What is this "presence of God"? Remember, we walk by faith, not sight. (2Cor.5:7, Rom. 8:24-25, 1Cor. 13:12) We should not demand a full vision of now, but surely "God is more than just a logical deduction from Bible texts." We can expect God to speak (not audibly, but spiritually) when the Bible is proclaimed faithfully because we believe that the Bible is the supernatural and immediate revelation of God's mind to His people. The voice of God in the soul of man is the very essence of entering into God's presence. Albert Mohler: "Worship.....is the act through which the people of God direct all their attentiveness to hearing the one true and living God speak to His people and receive their praises."

Hearing God this way is actively offering Him worship. It is presenting to God a broken and submissive heart. It is honoring God with an expectant faith. It is reverencing God by displaying dependency. Intentional spiritual engagement like this is not a passive experience; it is the deliberate hungering for and hanging upon God's very words that marks Word-based worshippers (Matt. 4:4).

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 3

"Sitting in the presence of the Holy One of Israel and engaging Him in the holy dialogue that we call worship should surely excite the worshipper's emotions." - (pg 6)

"Worship is an act of the understanding, applying itself to the knowledge of the excellency of God, and actual thoughts of His majesty. It is also an act of the will, whereby the soul adores and reverenceth His majesty, is ravished with His amiableness, embraceth His goodness, enters itself into an intimate communion with this most lovely Object, and pitcheth all his affections upon Him" - Stephen Charnook

One of the most-discussed elements of worship is the role of feelings and emotions. Surely, emotions are affected in our worship. "The problem comes when emotional stimulation is mistaken for true worship. This leads to emotional experiences being sought as ends in themselves, rather than Holy Spirit-inflamed emotions experienced as a by-product of God-directed worship." - (pg 7)

Healthy worship, in contrast, results in the Word of God arousing faith in the worshipper, in part by promoting confidence and certainty regarding things not seen. "That faith causes the believer to worship; he thanks God, praises God, prizes God, and adores God. Word-driven thanking, praising, prizing and adoring erupts from the heart and mobilizes the affections." - (pg 7)

What is the worshipper's ultimate goal? It should not be to achieve a feeling or emotional high, rather it should be to render unto God the glory due His name. "The worshipper worships as an end in itself, not as a means to the end of being emotionally happy." (pg 8)

The role of the Word of God in worship cannot be overstated. "The Holy Spirit normally works in conjunction with (and not independent of) God's Word. If we want the Holy Spirit to move in our worship services then we must have Word-saturated worship services. How do we quench the Spirit? By quenching the Word!" (Eph. 6:17; compare John 3:5-6 and 1Pet 1:23-25; compare Eph 5:18-19 and Col 3:16-17; compare John 14:16-17, 26, John 15:26, 16:13-14, 17:17, Ps 119:142, 160 and 2Tim 2:15) - (pgs 7-8)

"A consequence of Word-based worship is that we sometimes meet with God in surprising ways - it may not be a comfortable emotion - it may be conviction of sin before a holy God. When this does happen we will see that God's rod and staff do comfort us (Ps 23:4) and God's sin-exposing holiness posesses its own soul-arresting beauty (Ps 50:1-3)." - (pg 10)

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 2

What is true worship? Who is worship for? Worship is not something to be experienced, rather it is something to be offered. God is the object of worship; we present it to Him. (Psalm 95:6, 109:30,34:3)

Worshippers do the worshipping; God receives the worship. Worship is not about what we like but rather about giving God what He desires. Many people are looking for emotional stimulation and spiritual feelings, but these feelings are not necessarily evidence of the Holy Spirit's work.

The Holy Spirit's presence and activity is evidenced by conviction of sin, repentance, world-forsaking faith, doctrinal maturity, growth in grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Regarding ourselves instead of God as the object of worship is scandalous and disastrous.

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places - A Summary, Part 1

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places, An Appeal for Word-Based Corporate Worship, by Robert G. Spinney, is an excellent little booklet that summarizes much of what we believe about worship. The following few posts are a summary of this booklet put together by one of our members. Many of the phrases and sentences in this summary are taken directly from the author, and most are put in quotation marks, but there may be instances where a sentence was taken directly from the booklet and accidentally not put in quotation marks.

Introduction:

In the past 40 years Christians have begun separating praising and worshipping from preaching and teaching. Why?

There are two main reasons. The first reason is a growing sense that worship is exclusively emotional. Singing stirs the emotions, but preaching does not. The second main reason stems from the Word of God being deemphasized.

The author's main thesis is "to reclaim an approach to worship that could be called Word-based worship; this helps to create what could be called a Word-driven church; this calls for Word-based worshippers."