A Closer Look at Worship—Introduction A Four-Week Teaching Series on Worship

This is part of the worship series
"A Closer Look at Worship"

Series Introduction
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

Introduction

Sermons on praise in the narrow sense (e.g. Psalm 95) and on worship in all of life ( e.g. Romans 12) are immensely important to preach. But suppose that you want to preach about the worship service, the liturgy, the event of gathering in Jesus’ name (see the article "On Three Meanings of the Term Worship"). Perhaps worship has become a source of conflict in your congregation. Perhaps you want to deepen the congregation’s experience of common worship. To preach about worship, what text would you preach? Where in Scripture would you look?

One problem is that so few places in Scripture give us explicit instructions about Christian worship services. In contrast to all the detailed instructions given for worship in the Old Testament, we don’t have a liturgical manual anywhere in the New Testament (wouldn’t it be easier if we did!).

But we do have lots of passages that relate to our practice of worship. These include
—Old Testament prescriptions of worship practices (for tabernacle and temple worship). Even if these worship practices don’t continue in the New Testament, these texts still have much to teach us about the relationship between God and God’s people. For example, they teach that holiness is a central divine attribute to which we also are called.
—descriptions of various worship services, including Old Testament covenant renewal liturgies (Joshua 24), New Testament baptism celebrations (Acts 8; Acts 10), and New Testament preaching services (Acts 20:1–9).
—sample liturgical texts, including Old Testament psalms, canticles, and prayers (1 Chronicles 16; Nehemiah 9), and New Testament hymns and prayers (Luke 1; Philippians 2; Revelation 5, 7; Acts 4).
—strong prophetic critiques against false worship (Isaiah1). The prophets railed against superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy, three sins that still plague the church.
—a few specific New Testament guidelines for worship, such as the mandate that worship practices should build up or edify the body of Christ and that worship should be “in Spirit and in truth” (1 Corinthians 14; John 4).

These are the most obvious passages that could be used to produce sermons on what happens in the worship service and why. The diversity and complexity of these texts makes me a bit fearful of setting up any kind of series on worship. We will leave so much out. We might wrongly imply that that is all there is!

So one key concern when teaching or preaching about worship is to explain how rich and deep the connections between biblical teaching and worship practices are. Our approach must not even imply that it can all be boiled down into a phrase, three alliterative words, or one five-step method. Worship is like a diamond. No one viewpoint gives us a complete picture of what it’s all about.

To say it another way, worship is so rich and deep because it is not an end in itself. We don’t gather for the sake of the event itself. We gather because this event expresses and deepens something more important, the relationship we have with God in Christ. Just as a wedding exists for the sake of the marriage that is being established, so too a worship service exists in order to express, deepen, and enrich the relationship that God has with us in Christ. Sermons about worship should focus less on liturgical techniques than on the God we worship. Or, to say it in a better way, sermons about worship should point out how particular liturgical techniques are fitting expressions of the kind of relationship we are privileged to have with God.

So what follows is not merely a sermon series on the worship service. It is a series about our relationship with God in Christ, of which worship is a natural outgrowth and expression.

Worship as Covenant Renewal

One central biblical image or metaphor for describing the relationship that God has established with us is the image of covenant. This pattern is as old as the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, and has been made new with the “new covenant” that God makes with us through Christ (Jeremiah 31:31–34; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Hebrews 8–9). This is a relationship that depends on promises: first God’s promise to us and then our promise to God.

A covenant relationship can be established and confirmed by a ritual, a gathering, an event. In the Old Testament, the people gathered when God established a covenant (Exodus 24), and they gathered again several times to renew or reaffirm that covenant (see Joshua 24; Nehemiah 8–10). So too, in the covenant of marriage, a bride and groom speak their covenant vows in a public ritual to establish their relationship. Sometimes they will reaffirm those promises in a public renewal of marriage vows.

Just as the people of Israel gathered together to renew their covenant with God (i.e., Joshua 24), so we gather to renew the new covenant God has made with us in Christ. Christian worship is like a covenant renewal service. It’s like reaffirming the marriage vows that we have with God in Christ. Think of all the places in which marriage is a metaphor or image to describe the church’s relationship with God (Isaiah 62:5; Jeremiah 2:2; Hosea 3:1; Revelation 19:7; 21:2, 9). In a liturgy, in a worship service, we renew the promises we make to God, and we hear again the promises God has made (and kept!) in Christ.

This four-part series on worship explores four dimensions of this covenant-renewal image. The primary focus will be on the new covenant relationship God makes with us in Christ. The secondary focus will be on the ways in which worship expresses, deepens, and shapes that relationship through the working of the Holy Spirit.

Series Outline

Observations

• Praise is one (essential) form of covenant communication. But praise isn’t the main point of worship. The point is the relationship. Nor is praise the only form of covenant communication. In a full-orbed covenant relationship, praise is joined by confession, lament, intercession, and listening. In a marriage relationship, conversations marked by exclusive praise would feel like false flattery. They might start out fine, but soon they ring hollow.
   
• This (covenant) approach does not suggest that we, by ourselves, can make worship happen. This relationship with God is a gift! It is Christ’s work through the Spirit in our hearts and in the life of the congregation. No liturgical technique will make this relationship happen. The ultimate success of a worship service depends on something that worship leaders can’t engineer or produce, our (collective) personal relationship with God in Christ.
   
• This basic image of covenant provides a way of understanding many acts of worship, even if they aren’t covered directly in one of the sermons in this series. For example, an offering is like a gift given in return for a prior gift. The benediction is like a divine covenantal smile on the gathered congregation. A testimony is a like a recital of God’s past covenant faithfulness. Each act of worship finds its place as part of the script of covenant renewal.
   
• Not a word in this series focused on the style of worship. The goal here is to get beyond style issues. But thinking along these lines may, in fact, help some congregations with style issues. A congregation should not choose a worship style on the basis of what style most people like. Rather, a congregation should choose a style on the basis of what will help them, as the gathered people of God, to renew their covenant in the most honest, relational, Christ-centered way. It is precisely when discussions about style become divorced from this deeper thinking about worship’s meaning and purpose that they become so divisive and problematic.
   
• The idea of worship as covenant renewal is not the only biblical way of getting at worship’s meaning and purpose. I present it here because I believe that it is one faithful and fruitful way that has been recognized more or less explicitly by theologians and preachers for two thousand years. But because there is so much more we could say, I hope that we will not let ourselves think of this as the only way of approaching it!
   
• We need a way to think about worship that is direct and simple enough to wrap our minds around, rich enough so that we will never exhaust it, tangible enough so that we can sense what difference it might make as we prepare for Sunday worship, and true enough that we would stake our lives on it. We need a biblical approach to worship that can be preached and lived today. The idea of worship as “new covenant renewal” is not the only valid approach. But its deep scriptural resonance and its power to evoke deep liturgical participation make it a beautiful place to begin. May this series be an instrument of God’s Spirit to deepen and nourish your congregation’s experience of worship.      

Series Images

Using the simple shapes of two hands touching, this design represents the relationship that is established and strengthened when God's people gather publicly to worship. Both the original banner design image and the black and white image intended for a bulletin cover are available to download in the resource section at the end of the article. Either can be used in bulletins or slides with the following copyright statement: © 2000 ReformedWorship.org CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Banner Design: Use a dark color the the outline and two contrasting colors for each hand. Where the hands intersect, use a color this is complementary but different from each of the hands. If you are ambitious, add the text from the bulletin cover to the banner.	Bulletin Cover