Congregational Worship

Psalm 22, and I want to read just a brief section from verse 22. Psalm 22:22. These are words which are placed in the mouth of Jesus by the writer to the Hebrews. He actually says Jesus is saying these things. Psalm 22:22:

I will tell of your name to my brothers;
 in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
 All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him,
 and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
For he has not despised or abhorred
 the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
 but has heard, when he cried to him.

From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
 my vows I will perform before those who fear him.
The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied;
 those who seek him shall praise the Lord!
 May your hearts live forever!

All the ends of the earth shall remember
 and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
 shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the Lord,
 and he rules over the nations.

All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship;
 before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
 even the one who could not keep himself alive.
Posterity shall serve him;
 it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
 that he has done it.

And then in John chapter 4, in the context of the encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well, let me just read from verse 16. In the course of conversation, “Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’ The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You[’re] right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you[’ve] had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and [in] truth.’”

We thank God for his Word, and we pause for just a moment and ask for his help in turning to it:

Our gracious God and Father, we thank you for the privilege of singing these words of truth and encouraging one another in light of the wonder of who you are: triune God. And we pray now that as we turn to the Bible, that the Spirit of God will be our teacher—that we might have the reality of that divine dialogue where the Holy Spirit is at work far beyond the voice of a mere man, speaking into our lives and calling us to faith and to trust and to praise and to adoration. We ask this for the glory of your name. Amen.

Well, our task in these two sessions is to address this essential. I turn to somebody next to me and say, “Why is it ‘the last conference’?” I noticed it last night: “Welcome to the last one.” So I just got in at the tail end. I’m glad that I did. But I said, “What, have you run out of essentials?” And apparently, you have! And so I guess there should be encouragement in this, because the main things are the plain things, the plain things are the main things, and therefore, we have fastened on these essentials.

And in this first session this morning, I want to bring ourselves in a very topical way, really, to address not the vastness of worship, in that the totality of our existence in Christ is the expression of worship, if we take Romans 12:1–2 as a framework: “I beseech you therefore, … by the mercies of God, [to] present your bodies [as] a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable [to] God, which is,” in the King James Version, “your reasonable service,” “which is your spiritual worship,”[1] or “which is your reasonable service of spiritual worship”—in other words, all day, every day, our lives offered up to God.

Paul there is using a picture from the Old Testament. The propitiatory sacrifices gave way to sacrifices of thanksgiving, and so he appeals on the strength of Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice: “I appeal to you, therefore, on the basis of the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice of thanksgiving and of celebration and of praise.” So I’m taking it in this first session that we understand that, that we are committed to that, and that we’re thinking far more directly and simply about what that really means by way of expression when the congregation gathers on the occasion of the Lord’s Day and on other times to give voice to our praise and to our worship.

The prospect of heaven ought never to be brighter and the reality of heaven never closer than when we as the children of God are involved in acceptable worship.

The portion of Scripture that we’ve read, at least from John chapter 4, gives us from the Lord Jesus just a very timeless and definitive word of instruction concerning the nature of worship that is acceptable to God. And there really can be no more vital theme. I concur with what has been said: Here we are at the apex of things. There’s no more vital thing for the people of God to consider than this, because of two things, primarily.

Number one: Worship is the constant activity of the church in heaven. In Revelation 7, to which we’ve alluded in one of our songs this morning, John says, “I looked”—Revelation 7:9—

and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “… To … God who sits on the throne, [salvation,] and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing [round] the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

So, there you have it, at the great, final denouement, when all is gathered together. Those who have already been gathered to the nearer presence of Jesus have something of a foretaste of that. And so, when we sing, for example, in our Christmas carol, “Sing, all ye citizens of heaven above,”[2] many of us have occasion to think of those who have been taken to the Lord Jesus and that when we join our songs, we join with angels round the throne. It is the constant activity of the church in heaven. Consequently, the prospect of heaven ought never to be brighter and the reality of heaven never closer than when we as the children of God are involved in acceptable worship.

Second reason is because not only is it the constant activity of the church in heaven, but it is also the chief business of the church on earth. The chief business of the church on earth. “You did not choose me, but I chose you and [ordained] you … that you [would] go and bear fruit—fruit that will last,”[3] Jesus said to his disciples. He explains to this lady here not only the nature of the living water that he has to offer to her, but he then instructs us that in and beyond and behind her deepest longings there is the activity of God, who from all of eternity has been seeking worshippers—so that when we share the good news with men and women, as we have the privilege of doing, we do so in the awareness of the fact that God from all of eternity has planned to put together this vast company and that it is the utterly undeserved privilege of everyone to be added, as it were, to that choir.

And so we prepare on earth, as one of the slides on the screen said this morning as I was looking at it (and I’m sure you were too), we’re preparing on earth—I think it was a quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones—as a kind of rehearsal, he says. We’re rehearsing our singing and our praise in order that in preparing down here, we may be ready for activity up there—that man, renewed by grace, has been created to praise. In fact, the psalmist in Psalm 22, and then again in Psalm 102, points out, “Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord.”[4] So it’s fair to say that we were created to praise. We were created to praise. Therefore, God is not indifferent about this matter.

He is certainly not indifferent as to whether we worship. As to whether we worship. Worship, if you like, is a grace-filled obligation. It is not an option. It’s not an option for man in his nature, just by nature itself, to deny that God is to be praised.

Let me give you a quote from Charnock on this. He says,

Worship is a duty incumbent upon all men. It is a homage mankind owes to God …; it is [a] prime and immutable justice to own our allegiance to him. It is as unchangeable a truth that God is to be worshipped, as that God is.

You see what he’s saying there? It is as unchangeable a truth that he is to be worshipped as that he actually is, that he exists.

He is to be worshipped as God, as Creator; and therefore by all, since he is the Creator of all, [and] the Lord of all …. [Whatever] is due to God upon the account of man’s nature, and the natural obligations he has laid upon man, is due from all men, because they all enjoy the benefits which are proper to their nature.[5]

Hence you have the psalmist saying, “Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works [towards] the children of men!”[6] He’s looking out, as it were, beyond the assembled congregation. He looks out, as it were, from beyond the perimeters of the gathered assembly on the Lord’s Day, and he looks out onto greater Dallas, and he sees them with the newspaper, and he sees them with the sports, and he sees them with all of these preoccupations, and he doesn’t respond in a spirit of condemnation, but his heart lifts up within him, and he says, “Oh! Oh, that the whole of Dallas would praise the Lord for his goodness and for his wonderful works towards the children of men!” Because man by his nature is created to worship God.

That’s why, essentially, sin in its essence is the reverse of that. It is the great exchange of Romans 1: that “claiming to be wise, they became fools.” Their minds “were darkened,” says Paul. They began to worship “the creature rather than the Creator.” And as a result of that, “God gave them up.”[7]

So God is not indifferent as to whether we worship, nor is God indifferent as to the object of our worship. The object of our worship. God says, in the giving of the commands, he says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of … Egypt …. You shall have no other gods before me.”[8] “I am… You shall…” Because of the Godness of God, you see. “Because of who I am, I am able to issue this to you. Therefore, there are to be no substitute gods.” Hence, when his people in the Old Testament began to wander, began to stray, when Aaron comes up with a calf and so on, immediately you see the temptation of man to begin to move away from the true and obvious and desired object of worship: God alone—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And, of course, when Jesus is addressing these matters in his earthly pilgrimage… For example, in John 5, in the healing of the man at the pool of Bethesda, the reaction of the Pharisees to the statements of Jesus and the activity of Jesus is characteristically negative. They chide him because he has been doing this healing on the Sabbath, as they say; he deserves to die. Jesus says, “My Father is working, and I, too, am working.”[9] And then they’re even more infuriated. And Jesus goes on to say, “Listen, you need to understand this: that it is incumbent that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son in his personhood—coequal, coeternal with the Father and with the Spirit—he who does not honor the Son as revealed does not honor the Father who sent him.”[10] So when people say, “Well, I just like to worship God in my own way,” or “I have a concept of God that is my own,” what are we to say? Are we to say, “Well, that’s very nice; I’m delighted to hear that”? No, we’re going to say, “Well, you know, when you look at what the Bible has to say, Jesus stands, you know, right in the middle of that notion and challenges it.”

God is not indifferent as to whether we worship, nor is God indifferent as to the object of our worship.

When you’ve lived a little while, you see all these things come and go. It’s like the line from “San Quentin” with Johnny Cash when he says, “I’ve seen ’em come and go, and I’ve seen ’em die, and long ago I stopped asking why.”[11] And when you think about the challenges to the true object of God’s worship… I was just thinking this morning about Sun Myung Moon for some reason. He was dominant for a little while. He had some followers. I don’t know if there’s any left—certainly not in Cleveland. It’s too cold up there. But the Moonies, people were all churned up about the Moonies. And somebody somewhat artistically and maybe a little unkindly wrote a song that I had made a note of. It goes like this: “It won’t be old Buddha”—remember this?—

Who’s sitting on the throne.
And it won’t be old Muhammad
Who’s calling us home.
And it won’t be Hare Krishna
Who’s playing the trumpet tune.
And I’m gonna see the Son,
Not Reverend Moon.[12]

Now, that’s not just sort of unkindness. That’s actually biblical truth. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father. Our worship has to be triune worship. It is God the Father who plans our salvation. It is God the Son who procures our salvation. It is God the Spirit who applies our salvation. And when we gather to worship, there should be a trinitarian dimension to the totality of it. Otherwise, people will be able to ascribe to all kinds of people and all kinds of ideas the very songs that we’re singing, unless we sing in accordance with the object of our worship.

So he’s not indifferent as to whether we worship, he’s not indifferent as to the object of our worship, nor is he indifferent concerning the manner of our worship. The manner of our worship. Now, I’m thinking manner primarily. I’m not here to address the question of mode. There are all kinds of ways in which we worship, and depending on where we are in the world, by nature of culture and background and so on, things may be very, very different from the way in which we as a church family have decided to do them. The unifying factors will be, of course, that we are worshipping God as he is to be worshipped, that we’re doing so in this way.

But, for example, in the Highlands of Scotland, where my roots lie, when I preached there in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides a few months ago, the gathering that took place in Kenneth Street Free Church, all of the singing was psalm singing, and all of the singing was without musical accompaniment, and the reason being that they believe that God has only given us the songs to sing; the songs that Jesus sang are the songs that we should sing. And therefore, all we sang were the metrical Psalms. It was absolutely fine. But that would be a restriction that we do not hold to back at Parkside Church. Indeed, one of the men, who’s a great psalm singer, Tom—you’ll know because of Christian Focus Publications—McKenzie will be, God willing, at Parkside tomorrow morning. And I’m somewhat fearful of him even being there, because I’m sure he’ll be wanting to tell me at lunch that what I’ve done is a great violation. So… But that’s okay. I can live with that. That aside, we’re not talking mode, okay? We can talk about that at coffee and so on.

But let’s think in terms of the manner of our worship. We’ve already said that proper worship is tied directly to an adequate and to an accurate knowledge of God: God, as he has revealed himself in creation, in his Word, in the person of his Son—savingly in the person of his Son. Therefore, these things are to be the underpinnings.

So we can say three things.

True Worship Is Biblical

First of all, that in terms of manner, true worship is biblical, in that it is grounded in the truth of Scripture. It is grounded in the truth of Scripture.

This dictates the lyrics of our songs. It should, at least, dictate the lyrics of our songs, so that we’re able to say… That, incidentally, is the great safeguard of only singing the Psalms, because all you’re singing is Scripture; therefore, you can’t go wrong. As soon as you go beyond that, then, of course, we’re dealing with the abilities and gifts of man. But that’s why we want to pour all of those songs through the grid, if you like, of Scripture, just in the same way as when we pray, we want to pray in a way and worship God in a way that is biblical. If you listen to people pray, it’s amazing how untheological a lot of prayer really is—people ascribing to the Father that which is only true of the Son, referring to the Holy Spirit in terms of who Jesus is, and so on. And that’s okay, you know, for a little while, while they’re baby Christians. But if they’ve been listening at all, we would hope that somehow or another, they would begin to get this Trinity sorted out, and that there would be that which was biblical that framed their adoration of God, you know? That’s an aside.

Calvin, along the same lines, says, “All [our so-called] good intentions … are struck by [this] thunderbolt,” which tells us “that men can do nothing but err, when they are guided by their own opinion without the word [and] command of God.”[13] In other words, there’s just a temptation to deviate from course.

Now, it’s interesting to me, and I hope it is to you… I hope that when you read your Bible, you say, “I wonder what is interesting about this passage this morning,” or “I wonder what I can learn from this passage this morning that I’ve never seen before.” Some of us have read the Bible so much that we think we know everything about everything, and it really is not so good. You need to come to your reading of the Bible with a spirit of agnosticism—a spirit of discovery, you know: “Well, let me see, Lord Jesus. I’m going to read John 4 again.” “Oh, you mean, that passage about ‘Worship him in spirit and in truth’? We know that one. We did that one.” Of course we did. But this is now the eleventh of February, and we’ve never been here before, and here we are.

Now, that verse, which is really the verse that underpins all that I’m about to say to you—“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship [him] in spirit and [in] truth”—is set within a context. And the context, of course, is this conversation with the woman at the well. And Jesus is making clear that worship in spirit and in truth is actually the outcome of his person, insofar as he is the final revelation of God, and so that when he says what he says concerning the time and the hour, to what does he refer? “The [time] is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and [in] truth.”

Well, what is he saying? He’s saying that there is going to come a time when all that we’ve read of in Revelation 7 will come to fruition. That is going to take place as a result of Jesus’ death and his resurrection and his exaltation. But, of course, that has not yet taken place in his conversation with the woman. So it is, to use a big word, proleptically present in Jesus right now. “The time is coming, and has now come.” In what sense has it “now come”? Because “I who speak to you am he.”[14] “I am here.” In John chapter 1, we’ve already learned that there is the final sacrifice: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”[15] In John chapter 2, Jesus has explained that this temple will be destroyed, and it will be rebuilt,[16] coming to fruition in AD 66, AD 70. The people are trying to figure out what he’s saying. He said, “There is a final sacrifice, and there is a new temple, and that provides the basis and that constitutes the grounds for this true worship.”

Now, as Jesus says this, he’s not saying it at the Essentials Conference. He is not giving this information within the context of a seminary graduation or even a local church Bible study or a Sunday morning service. No, what is quite staggering about this is that this most vital and succinct instruction concerning the nature of worship comes, if you like, in the most unlikely of contexts. In John chapter 3, he’s had an encounter under darkness with a religious professional by the name of Nicodemus, whom he’s explained, “You need to be born again, or you’ll never see the kingdom of God.”[17] Into John chapter 4, he has another encounter, this time not under darkness but in the blazing sun of the midday. And this lady is a no-name lady. This lady is about as far on the other side of the social spectrum as could possibly be in comparison to Nicodemus. It all begins with a simple question: “May I have a drink? Could I have a drink of water?”[18] It’s the most obvious and intense natural physical craving: for water. Very simple. In the interchange that follows, as he intrigues her, she responds by saying, “Well, I would really like to have this water that you’re talking about”—in verse 15—“so that I won’t be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”[19]

So, the lady completely misses the point—which is encouraging—in the way that Nicodemus had completely missed the point. “You must be born again; you’ll never see the kingdom of heaven.” He says, “Well, how can you be born a second time? How could somebody like me enter my mother’s womb a second time and be born?” Jesus says, “I’m not talking about that. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don’t be surprised that I say to you, ‘You must be born again.’”[20]

“If you knew who it was who was asking you for a drink of water, you would ask him for a drink of water, he would give you a drink of water, and you’d never need another drink of water in your life.” Well, it’s understandable. She goes, “Okay, sign me up. I don’t like coming out here every day, and if we can get on that program, I’m interested in it.”[21] She responds in physical terms to spiritual instruction.

But she’s not alone in that. What about the disciples? They’re not exactly the brightest bunch, are they? A little later on, they come back with the sandwiches and say, “Jesus, you should really have something to eat.” Jesus says, “I have food to eat that you don’t know anything about.” And you would expect that maybe one of them would say, “Oh, this must have something to do with, you know, like, manna in the wilderness or something.” No, no. No. Someone goes, “Did somebody else get him sandwiches? How in the world did this… How does this program work? We’ve been gone for ages doing this.”[22] So, spiritual truth responded to physically—and the wonderful irony of it at the end of the interchange with the woman, when she says to him, “You know, I know that when the Messiah comes, we’ll get all this sorted out.”[23] What an irony!

Actually, once I get started on this, I can’t stop. You’ve got the same thing, don’t you, in Luke chapter 24, with the two fellows on the road to Emmaus? And they say to Jesus, “Are you the only person in Jerusalem that doesn’t know what has been happening here?”[24] That’s irony. That’s actually quite funny.

But the point is that it is in that context, where a woman is thinking about thirst, where she is now drawn along this line, that he finally says to her, putting his finger gently on the real issue in her life, “Hey, why don’t you call your husband and come back?” And she says, “I don’t have a husband”—which was technically true, but it wasn’t the whole story. And Jesus knew it wasn’t the whole story. And he says to her, “You know, you’re right to say that, ’cause you’ve had five husbands, and you presently have a live-in lover.”

Now, it is at that point, if you read the commentaries, that… From the first time I ever read anything in that book How to Give Away Your Faith by Paul Little—I loved that book. I still like it. But he says, clear as a bell, at this point, the woman issues a red herring.[25] Right? Now she is… She doesn’t like being asked about her husband. Therefore, she’s got to get Jesus off the subject. I don’t want to divert on this, but I just want to say to you: Why do we have to conclude that that’s the case? Why does this have to be a red herring? Why can she not actually be stirred in her heart with this talk of a thirst that would be quenched, with this awareness of the fact that this stranger, this prophetic stranger, has somehow or another unearthed the deep-seated longings of her broken life, and so she inevitably begins to think in terms of temples, in terms of worship, in terms of sacrifice, in terms of forgiveness? So it may actually be the first stumbling move on her part towards the answer that Jesus knows she desperately needs. I suppose we could say in passing that we need to be alert to these things when we’re engaging with people in conversation, not to necessarily assume that they are simply sideswiping our advances.

Anyway, I have to leave you there with that. But I think that if this lady could have come to the Essentials Conference, I’ve got a… I hope she would say, “Alistair, yeah, you’re onto something.” She may not. She may say, “No, Paul Little and all the other Littles were correct always, and you should not even engage in such conjecture.” I suppose I just wish it were so. But I think she would have been happy to sing with us, you know, the song that has been created out of the prophetic word: “I tried the broken”—Jeremiah[26]—“I tried the broken cisterns, Lord, [and] ah, the waters failed!”[27] That’s the story of her life. She’s “lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.”[28] She has worshipped idols. She has worshipped the idol of herself. She has worshipped substitute gods. The substitute gods have depleted her life. She lives in isolation. Nobody comes with her to the well. None of the other women want anything to do with her. “How would a Jew, how would a man speak to her in this way? What man is this? I can see that you are a prophet. People say this. People say that. What do you say?” He says, “Let me tell you what I say.” And then, you see, you have this great instruction.

I suppose if nothing else, it’s a reminder to us that as we seek to speak concerning these things, the confusion that is represented, if you like, between Gerizim and Jerusalem is not an unknown confusion in our day. In Gerizim, they had enthusiasm, but they were devoid of knowledge. In Jerusalem, they had all the knowledge that the prophets had proclaimed, but they were devoid of reality. Jesus says in Matthew 15, “These people draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”[29]

Now, all of that simply to say that when we’re going to think in terms of unpacking the notion of the true and meaningful worship of God, it has to be grounded in the Scriptures. It is biblical.

True Worship Is Rational

Secondly, it is rational insofar as it engages the mind. It is rational insofar as it engages the mind. And I think this is a truth that needs to be sounded out always when there is the temptation to establish some form of unity on the basis of sensation or of feeling or of similarity or of sentimentality. No, the Scriptures encourage us… Paul encourages the Corinthians, remember; he says to them, “Now, in your thinking,” he says, “I would like you to be mature. I want you to be mature in your thinking. Don’t be gormless. Don’t just settle for every wind and notion that comes blowing through your community. Learn to think properly.”[30]

In other words, worship is an act of understanding. Worship actually involves applying myself to the knowledge of God that is revealed within the Scriptures. Therefore, when Jesus says, “God is spirit,” what is he saying there? Well, he’s saying all kinds of things. But he’s saying, for example, God is immortal, and we are mortal. God is invisible and purposefully so. God is invisible, and we are visible. In other words, God is not like us. He is God. He is spirit. He is life-giving. He is, in his essential being, unknowable unless he chooses to reveal himself. We’ll come back to that in just a moment.

Now, when you think about the rationality of it, it has all kinds of pressing implications and practical implications. And I don’t want to delay on this, but I’ll just say a couple in passing.

If, then, understanding is involved—if our minds are involved, as they are—then we have to concentrate. Concentrate. There’s a verb, isn’t it? I remember years ago, I was in the YMCA in Hong Kong. I was speaking at the Hong Kong Keswick, and they had an exercise room. There was a bunch of treadmills up there, and I was up, and I was stumbling along on the treadmill. And it was looking out over the harbor there, where the Star Ferry is, at Kowloon. And there was a girl running beside me. She was completely focused on what she was doing, unlike myself. I’m just going along, just trying my best, and looking out the window and congratulating myself. And I tried to engage her in conversation a couple of times, and she ignored me. And I think the last thing I said was “This is a magnificent view from up here.” And without turning her head, she just said, “Concentrate!” It was such a put-down. “Concentrate!” And I was like, “Oh, okay, yeah. I suppose I should.”

Isn’t it amazing when you try and pray, you can’t concentrate? That when you come into the gathered assembly of God’s people, the distractions seem to be multiplied exponentially? We could almost believe that we’re in “a continual and irreconcilable war”[31] and that the Evil One would rather that we did not concentrate—which, of course, is actually true. We can’t worship without thinking. Therefore, our preparation for worship is important—a preparation that begins long before we arrive. The reason that it is often fairly stultifying praise that we experience on the Lord’s Day morning is because we have not arrived as worshippers. We have not been worshipping in prospect of worshipping together.

Worship is an act of understanding. Worship involves applying myself to the knowledge of God that is revealed within the Scriptures.

I don’t say that to chide you, but if you think about the transitions into something like this… You think about all the preparation that’s involved, for example, if you take the last hour and a half before somebody stands up and takes the first swing in a golf tournament. The fellow is not just chewing the cud. He’s not involved in phoning all of his friends. He’s absolutely focused, because the thing that happens next is absolutely crucial. So it affects what we read. It affects what we play in our cars. It affects all of these things. And it affects the moments that precede worship.

Our participation in worship is the same thing: learning, then, to leave what is, you know, transient out in the lobby, not bringing it in with us; learning to concentrate on the words of the hymns and the prayers; learning to view the offering, if there is an offering, not as halftime, somewhere to just chew things for a little while, but rather to face these things carefully. And when it comes to exposition, the priority of the expounding of Scriptures has to be viewed with concentration, has to be viewed in this way. Because preaching the Word of God is worship.

People will say to me, say, “Pastor, when do you worship?”

I said, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “I worship throughout the whole service. I hope you do too.”

“Yeah, well, but we have worship, and then you have preaching.”

I said, “No, you don’t. There’s no gap between worship and preaching.”

In fact, that’s why I read from Psalm 22. Because Jesus there—the words are put in Jesus’ mouth. In Hebrews chapter 8, he is described as the “minister,” the leitourgos.[32] That word leitourgos gives us our word—it’s the same word as liturgy or liturgist. And what the writer is saying is that Jesus Christ himself is the one who proclaims God’s Word and who leads God’s people.

You must check this for yourself, but you can read it through, and you will understand it—so that in actual fact, what is happening when we come together and the Word of God is opened up… Where the Word of God is truly preached, Jesus preaches. “I declare it in the assembly of the congregation. I proclaim my words,” he said, “in the assembly of the congregation.” When Paul in writing to the Ephesians says Jesus “came and preached … to [those] who were far away and … to those who were near”[33]—what? Jesus came and preached in Ephesus? We didn’t know that! Well, he did, but he didn’t. He didn’t physically come and preach in Ephesus. But Paul says, “And he came, and he preached to those of you who were far away—to the gentiles—and to those of you who were the Jews, who were close up.” In what way did Jesus come and preach? He preached through Paul and his companions. When Paul preached, Jesus preached.

And he says, “I will sing your praise in the assembly of the righteous.”[34] This is a staggering thought—that when we assemble, we assemble in the presence of Jesus. Everybody loves to sing “Before the throne of God above I have a strong and perfect plea.”[35] I love to sing it too. It’s terrific. It’s a wonderful thought: that there Jesus intercedes on my behalf. But equally wonderful is this thought: that he who is there is here. When someone says, “Let us sing together,” Jesus sings. Jesus leads the praise. We are in the presence of Christ, who is our leitourgos. Therefore, I think we would want to make sure that we are engaged in what we’re doing.

What a privilege to sing along with Jesus! Jesus declares the great truths of God in and of himself. And so, when we gather as we gather, it is important that the knowledge of God is present. For, as Calvin says, unless there is this knowledge present, it is not God we worship but a specter or a ghost.[36] All right?

True Worship Is Spiritual

Thirdly and finally, as to the manner of our worship: it is not only biblical insofar as it must be grounded in Scripture and rational insofar as it engages our minds, but it is also clearly spiritual. Spiritual. And it engages our hearts. And when we say “hearts,” of course, we’re not talking just in terms of emotion. We are talking in biblical terminology. The heart is, if you like, the essential us, the center of us. When the Bible speaks about it, it speaks in terms of our mind and of our will and of our emotions. So in other words, the true worship of God is not something that is simply outward and external and functional. Indeed, all of that is only of significance insofar as it is an expression outwardly of a reality that is there inwardly.

Let me quote Charnock again for you. He says,

Diligence in outward worship is not to be rested in. Men may attend all their days on worship, with a juiceless heart and unquickened frame, and think to compensate the neglect of the manner with abundance of the matter of service.

So, “As long as I do a lot of it, then that will compensate for the fact that my manner is not as it should be.”

What do a thousand services avail, without cutting the throat of our carnal affections? What are loud prayers, but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, without Divine charity! A pharisaical diligence in outward forms without inward spirit, had no better a title vouchsafed by our Saviour, than that of hypocritical. God desires not sacrifices, nor delights in burnt-offerings; shadows are not to be offered instead of substance. God required the heart of man for itself; but commanded outward ceremonies, as subservient to inward worship, and goads and spurs unto it: they were never appointed as the substance of religion, but auxiliaries to it.[37]

And that, I think, speaks again to this question of mode. As soon as we begin to say that the external framework is the key to this, Charnock says you might want to just think about that for a minute or two. Because it is possible to come up with all kinds of liturgical structures—or nonliturgical structures, for that matter—and for people who think that because they, for example, raise their hands way, way high in the air or they sit on their hands to cut off the circulation from the rest of their body, whatever they do, that this is the great key to it all. No, it’s not. No, it’s not. That’s the point.

It’s not only that we think deeply but also that we feel these things. And in order that that would be the case, we must worship in spirit and in truth. The two things go hand in hand. It’s not you can do one, or you can do the other, or you can have a crack at both. And what is Jesus saying when he says, “Listen: Eventually—sooner than you think, ma’am—that’s not going to be the question. Because the Father is seeking worshippers, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” That does not mean—Jesus is not saying there—that anyone can worship God anywhere as long as they’re genuine and sincere. When you hear people tackling this passage, that’s usually what they say. They say, “Nothing really matters. Sincerity’s all that matters. He said it doesn’t matter about Gerizim. It doesn’t matter about Jerusalem. All that matters is that it doesn’t really matter.”

That’s not what he’s saying at all. What he is actually saying is the only way we can truly worship God is by the power of the Holy Spirit—that it is in the Spirit of God. To worship in the Spirit is not to worship with the capacities of human flesh. Anybody can sing songs. You have the same thing, for example, if you’ve ever thought about it: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except [by] the Holy Spirit.”[38] You’ve read that verse, right? I could go to a man in the street and tell him, say, “I’ve got something written on a page here. Say it!” And he could take it and read it and say, “Jesus is Lord.” And you could then say, “Oh, look at that. We just disproved the Bible.” No, we didn’t.

The reality of it is that nobody can declare Christ as Lord, King, Savior, Friend, and so on except by the enabling of the Spirit of God. Because the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit; they’re foolishness to him[39]—so that even when there is even an inclination of it, it is because God is at work. “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto me and rest.’”[40] “What do you mean, you ‘heard the voice of Jesus say’? Where did you hear the voice of Jesus?”
My pastor. My Sunday school teacher. She read to me. She read the Bible to me, and I heard the voice of Jesus. At first I didn’t realize it was the voice of Jesus. It was like when I waken up in the morning, and it’s just like there’s a voice: “Somebody’s talking in here, or what?” And then suddenly you realize: Somebody’s using your name! And then you realize: “They’re actually calling me: ‘Get up!’”

That’s what happens, you see, in the preaching of the Word. The Word of God goes out. People sit and listen. Nothing’s happening. Fourteen Sundays later, the fellow goes out, and he says to his wife, “You know, it was almost as if I could hear that this morning!” Two Sundays later, he says, “You know, I got a feeling that God is calling me.” And finally he says, “I get it. I get it.”

You see, the wonder of these things is on account of God’s enabling. The flesh, the world—organized, autonomous man—does not have the Spirit of God, does not accept the Spirit of truth, Jesus says, because he neither sees him nor knows him.[41] Doesn’t! So as soon as the Spirit of God enters a man or a woman, they then cease to be part of that autonomous, self-ordered world. Nobody who has not the Spirit of God sees a jot of what is in the Scripture. Only God opens blind eyes, and only God softens hard hearts.

Therefore, if there is going to be authentic praise in the gathered assembly, it involves the heart. Therefore (and with this I will close), number one (and I’ve said it; we’ll just reinforce it): One has to be spiritually alive. Spiritually alive. We have to first drink of the living water before the streams of living water will flow from our hearts.[42] I’ve done a lot of funerals over the last forty-plus years, and none of the people in the funeral home, when I was left in there by myself with the undertaker, none of them ever spoke to me. They never spoke to me. I’ve made an amazing discovery (I’m really quite clever on this stuff): that dead men don’t sing. Dead men don’t sing. I never sat beside a corpse in a funeral home and found that all of a sudden, he burst into song. Never happened. Can’t happen. Dead men don’t sing.

So when I look out on the congregation and I see a number of men, and they’re just standing there jingling their change, it may be that they have a bad cold. They may have laryngitis. They may have had a fight with their wife. I don’t know. But it may well be that they’re just dead men. They’re dead men.

We had a joke last night. I won’t go back down it. It was peripheral. But I was pointing out that the way they do that stuff in the baseball games here, they have the fellow go, “Do-do-do-do do-do! Do-do-do-do do-do!” and then you respond, “Charge!” and then “Do-do-do-do do-do!” Then everyone goes back to sleep again for another fourteen hours. And then “Do-do-do-do do-do!” “Charge!” Said, “What’s up with these people? Is that what it takes? You’ve got to have somebody doing this for you?” Have you ever been to England? Have you ever been to a soccer game? What is it with those people? What is it? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a religion. It’s a religion. That’s church. Look at the banners. Look at the declarations on the banners. And these men sing. Nobody knows how it starts—twenty-five-thousand men singing! They’re doing it right now while I speak to you, all across England, I guarantee it—singing all kinds of songs, unashamed, completely unashamed, holding up banners, singing, some of them with tears running down their faces for the sake of chasing a football. It’s amazing!

So when those men get converted in England, they sing. When the average American who’s been the “Do-do-do-do do-do,” he don’t sing, ’cause he never sang before. All that happens in England is you change the melody and you change the words. Over here, you’ve got a much harder job. “’Cause I’m a man. I don’t sing.” Jesus gets ahold of your heart, I guarantee you’ll sing. You may not sing well, but you will sing. You will sing. Because if you can go through a lyric like

And when I think that God, his Son not sparing,
Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in—
That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to [bear] away my sin,

and you cannot then go,

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee:
How great thou art![43]

You see? It is theology which gives rise to doxology—which is to take me to my second talk, to which we need to get to very quickly.

Spiritually alive, spiritually assisted. Spiritually assisted. We need the assistance of the Spirit of God. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.”[44] We sang it already this morning—prone to get coldhearted, prone to be distracted, all those things. “Be filled with the Spirit, [and speak to] one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”[45] “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly”[46]—Colossians 3, the same thing. It’s really a synonym.

Spiritually alive, spiritually assisted, and spiritually active. Spiritually active—in other words, making a commitment, thinking as we attend the congregation and say, “What will I be able to contribute this morning? What am I going to… ‘What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward[s] me?’”[47]

In Charnock, in my last quote from Charnock, he says, “We are logs, unable to move ourselves, till he [raise] our faculties to a pitch agreeable to God.”[48] In other words, we need the fire that comes from heaven to kindle our affections. There are seasons in our souls. Not all of us are in the springtime. Therefore, we can be encouraged by the person who is enjoying the flush of summer. We can be sensitive to the person who it looks as though there’s nothing going on in their life at all—looks like the winter has come, and there will never be a spring.

But you see, it, again, is in our company with one another, so that we’re able to say, “Well, let’s make sure that our approach is biblical, in that it is grounded in the Scriptures; that it is rational, so that it’s not that we take our brains out and put them under the seat in order that we might enter into this experience—it engages our minds; and also that it is spiritual, insofar as it is not an exercise that we’re able to get to in our own unaided ability but only as God by his Spirit quickens us.”

Well, Father, we thank you that we have our Bibles so that we can go and read them and see if these things are so,[49] that we can think things out, that you have given us the faculty of mind, that you’ve given us the gift of praise and worship and music. And so, bless your Word to us, we pray. Help us as we go through this day and this weekend, that we might live to the praise of your glorious grace. For Christ’s sake. Amen.

[1] Romans 12:1 (ESV).

[2] Frederick Oakeley, trans., “O Come, All Ye Faithful” (1841).

[3] John 15:16 (NIV).

[4] Psalm 102:18 (ESV).

[5] Stephen Charnock, Upon the Existence and Attributes of God (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1840), 1:274–75.

[6] Psalm 107:21 (KJV).

[7] Romans 1:21–22, 25–26 (ESV).

[8] Exodus 20:2–3 (ESV).

[9] John 5:17 (paraphrased).

[10] John 5:23 (paraphrased).

[11] Johnny Cash, “San Quentin” (1969).

[12] Mike Farrow, “Oh Buddha” (1979). Lyrics lightly altered.

[13] John Calvin,Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), 1:159.

[14] John 4:26 (ESV).

[15] John 1:29 (ESV).

[16] See John 2:19.

[17] John 3:3 (paraphrased).

[18] John 4:7 (paraphrased).

[19] John 4:15 (paraphrased).

[20] John 3:3–7 (paraphrased).

[21] John 4:10, 14–15 (paraphrased).

[22] John 4:31–33 (paraphrased).

[23] John 4:25 (paraphrased).

[24] Luke 24:18 (paraphrased).

[25] Paul E. Little, How to Give Away Your Faith (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1966), 44.

[26] See Jeremiah 2:13.

[27] [Emma Frances Bevan?], “None but Christ Can Satisfy.”

[28] Bob Morrison, Patti Ryan, and Wanda Mallette, “Lookin’ for Love” (1980).

[29] Matthew 15:8 (paraphrased).

[30] 1 Corinthians 14:20 (paraphrased).

[31] The Westminster Confession of Faith 13.2.

[32] See Hebrews 8:2.

[33] Ephesians 2:17 (NIV).

[34] Psalm 89:5 (paraphrased). See also Hebrews 2:12.

[35] Charitie Lees Bancroft, “Before the Throne of God Above” (1863).

[36] Calvin,John, 1:159.

[37] Stephen Charnock, Existence and Attributes, 1:277.

[38] 1 Corinthians 12:3 (ESV).

[39] See 1 Corinthians 2:14.

[40] Horatius Bonar, “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say” (1846).

[41] See John 14:17.

[42] See John 7:37–38.

[43] Carl Boberg, trans. Stuart Keen Hine, “How Great Thou Art” (1885, 1949).

[44] Robert Robinson, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (1758).

[45] Ephesians 5:18–19 (ESV).

[46] Colossians 3:16 (ESV).

[47] Psalm 116:12 (KJV).

[48] Stephen Charnock, Existence and Attributes, 1:245.

[49] See Acts 17:11.