Course: Spiritual Life of the Leader

Lecture 20: Biblical Worship

The Church needs you to present what Scripture says, not your own ideas. Worship means to kneel before someone out of respect or honor. We owe it to God as an act of service to sit at his feet and worship him. Spiritual worship is to place our physical bodies at God’s disposal. Are we leading people to worship God, or just providing religious goods and services to them? Solid biblical teaching is important. Structure follows purpose. We are failing to dig down into the revelation of God and let the revelation of God set the compass. If you are not careful, your program sets your agenda.

I. Worship

A. Definition of Worship

We want to go deeper into the New Testament idea of worship. The reason for this is that the Word sets the agenda. It sets our work and responsibility. As leaders, this is where we get the inspiration for what we do. The world doesn’t need your ideas; that is not the purpose of the church. Our purpose is to unveil the redemption of God’s salvation history. We are to demonstrate who God is and who we are and where our place is and who we are to serve and how we are to live in love and worship. Worship in Scripture is to kneel before another out of respect and honor. The word in Greek is proskuneo and it is found 59 times in the New Testament. When the disciples saw Jesus for the first time after the resurrection in Matthew 28:9, ‘But Jesus met them, saying, ‘Greetings!’ they came to him, held on to his feed and worshiped him,’ they literally bowed down to him. This type of worship only goes to God. We worship only the Living God; ‘away with you Satan,’ Jesus says, ‘for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’

B. Service that We Owe to God

That is another New Testament verb which is called latreuo which implies service that we owe to God. In the song of Zechariah quoted in Luke’s Gospel, God has shown mercy upon us. Luke 1:74, ‘that we, being rescued from the hand of our enemies, may serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him for as long as we live.’ This word serve has to do with our religious responsibility to minister to God by worshipping. Since we belong to God and redeemed by Christ and filled with his Spirit, it is proper to understand our lives in terms of serving God. We serve God by worshipping him and loving him. This breaks down when a person spends 60, 70 or 80 hours a week being busy and their lives starts to come unhinged. All sorts of negatives things begin to unfold. You go in and talk with them and love them and ask how much time they are actually receiving God’s love in their life. Inevitably you will hear that it isn’t much. We owe it to God to sit at his feet with Mary. This is our service as leaders and our true worship. The author of Hebrews gives us an excellent understanding of this movement of service by saying, ‘since we are receiving the kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks by which we offer to God an acceptable worship. That term for worship there is service with reverence and awe. It is my duty and responsibility to worship the Living God. We see much of the same type of instruction in Romans 12:1 by Paul saying, ‘therefore I appeal to you by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God which is your reasonable service. As leaders we have to eat what we sell! We have to ingest what we are giving to others. We have to have this at work in our own lives.

So, spiritual worship is where our physical bodies are at God’s disposal. Dualism is still alive; you do service on Sunday and then go live like hell during the week. No! It doesn’t work that way. You, as a leader must bring your people to realize that this is whole, my body is presenting to God in worship. All of this is based on Pauline thought of the mercies of God. What a great privilege to know that all we are belongs to the Lord and we offer this type of worship daily. All that I am and have is at your disposal. There is movement here; we have been so burned by some parts of the church that we are afraid to enter into the movement; the movement of bowing hearts. It is okay to present the totality of our lives in worship in service and sacrifice. We are responding to the majesty and the goodness of God through returning love of him. He loves us and we return that love to him and to others. I love what N.T. Wright, a great New Testament Theologian, says about this; worship is nothing more or less than love on knees before the beloved. But what do we have today; and here my heart is saddened. Through my interaction through hundreds of congregations and through speaking into the mindset of contemporary leaders; there are a lot of good people with good hearts who are seeking to faithfully serve the Lord. While we are observing, an alarming number of leaders are following hard after directives that are not necessarily aligned with classical Christianity.

C. Priorities

Tim Keller commented in his book, Center Church Doing Balanced Gospel Centered Ministry in Your City; there is a sense that religion is to provide spiritual goods that meet individual spiritual needs for freedom from guilt and bondage. This is a by-product; we do get freedom, but if you put that up front; it is the primary reason why you are in worship and your leadership centers around that, then you are short circuiting the whole thing. Our purpose is to worship the Living God and he will produce all sorts of fruit, but if you invert that. If you put meeting needs first as the primary point of worship, you have inverted the purpose of God. Are you there as leader to provide a service; are you there to provide religious goods and services? Are you there to grow an organization, to promote a cause? None of this may be bad in or of themselves, but all of which may miss the great point. I believe that as a leader in a local congregation that we have to intentionally review whether we are leading our people into transforming relationships with the Living God where we are leading them to worship God or whether we are providing religious goods and services to them. Every congregation is going to courageously press into this question of whether worship has become commodified to where you come to get the good things in life rather than offer your life and bow down in love and honor our Living God.

D. Four Obstacles to Leadership in Worship

We find at least four major obstacles to leadership in true worship. The first obstacle in behind the scenes in working with pastoral leaders and ministry leaders is that numbers trump worship. In other words, the way we count success is by how many sheep or goats are coming in, not by the quality of love and life and worship that is being produced. This will drive leaders. Why? It is because numbers will project that something good is happening. Are we against numbers? No! In a society that is falling apart, we ask the Lord to bring in the harvest. We want number for that represent people and souls, but when that leads the charges a deep cancer starts eating at the organization. The second obstacle is very dangerous for you as a leader. Self-exaltation is substituted for God. This can happen with deep gifted people; it can happen in worship where the worship leader starts drawing people into his or her giftedness. They start taking honor; the worship leader has to be invisible; they point beyond themselves. This is the same for the speaker; they start drawing people into the gifts they have. We are to point beyond ourselves. Who are we exalting here; what is the point here? All of us, sheep and shepherds alike are called to worship and adore the lamp of God and remember not to us give glory! Sometimes in leadership, people who have a need to be needed are drawn into pastoral leadership. So, this idea of standing before people becomes paramount for you. That is what defines your life. For leaders, what defines our lives is leading people to worship the Living God. Thirdly, we are deeply alarmed at the lack of participation that we see in contemporary evangelical services that voids the call to worship with all that we are.

Of course, there are exceptions to this, but in many locations people come to worship with no expectation of significant involvement whatsoever. They just sit there; they are not throwing their lives into worship. They are not being led to worship the Living God. They are not being led to exalt God and lift his name high. This is not a spectator sport. This is full participation in the body of Christ. We are also very concerned about how glorifying God seems to take second place to addressing human need. We know that Jesus spent a lot of time addressing human need in bringing healing to the people. We are not denying that at all. What we are saying here is that the priority of worship is ascribing worst and praise to God and meeting needs is a result that flows from that. Anytime we move into the very presence of God, he is free to address the whole spectrum of human collapse and hurt. When the major attempt of worship is reduced to make people feel better about themselves or for meeting pressing needs in their lives, then the spirit is literally hindered in bringing about the full redemption that God has for them. As God is exalted and thanked and praised in worship, our lives are linked to him in such a way that he is able to bring his healing and his love into us.

Decades ago, a worship expert by the name of Robert Weber; he is now in the Kingdom also. Weber said that we need to let go of our intellectual idea of worship and realize there is more to worship than in a sermon; we have to let go of our evangelic notice of worship and recon with the fact that worship is not primarily directed toward the sinners who need to be converted. We must let go our entertainment expectation and remind ourselves that we are not in church to watch a Christian variety show. This is an absence of clarity in leadership. That is what we are addressing here and that is a spiritual issue. This confuses your heart, your compass isn’t set. In fact, the compass may even be set by the values of society or by the values of contemporary and populace ideas saying that this is how you ought to do church. We get values that are based more out of a fallen culture even within the church itself. So, we get taken over. In worldwide Christianity, there is an important issue regarding worship. The biblical call to love and adore Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a call to lift in praise to the trinity, not ourselves. As such, many of us have to learn the very true nature of worship for the first time. We are going to have to repent on how we have neglected this and how we have lost our way. For myself, I am guilty of doing everything I have talked about here. I want to be transparent, but I want to press on the concern that in much of the church today there is evidence lacking of why the church is here. I think we need to hear the call of Scripture again.

Psalm 95 gives us a very clear call, ‘come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our maker for he is our God and we are his people; the People of his pasture and the sheep of hand.’ We need to hear the warning from Psalm 95, ‘Oh, that today, you would listen to his voice. Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, like they were that day at Massah in the wilderness.’ In worship, our hearts are set on worshipping God and exalting him. Jesus taught us through his own personal example to honor both the Father and himself, because we worship Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You see this in John 5:19-23; and in honoring God, we turn away from false worship that can get us so quickly. I am not saying that numbers don’t count for the Lord, for they do. Every person is counted as sacred in the eyes of God and worthy of the redemption of Jesus. The redemption of Jesus is universal; we want any positive response in worship as long as you are not preaching and teaching just for the praise. Sometimes you will have rejection where the Holy Spirit is trying to work. I am not saying that the Word of God should be minimized in worship. If anything, we need to increase in providing a strong exegetical expository preaching and Spirit anointing messages. We want this and I am not saying that we shouldn’t address the needs of people. They should be robustly addressed. Bishop Robert Solomon in Singapore says that we come into God’s presence to remember who he is and what he has done for us (Psalm 107:22). We come to celebrate his presence in our lives and to thank him for all that he is and does and then to express our Love to him and our love for him. From the beginning to the end, he writes, the worship service should be grounded in our relationship we have with God and should be characterized by the joy that comes from it.

II. Joyful Self-forgetfulness

In the worshipping community and also within our private adoration of God, there is an important aspect of joyful self-forgetfulness that unfolds. That needs to reverberate in the body of Christ. While we thank God for all that is accomplished for us in Christ. In worship, we do not approach the trinity with self-interest in mind. This is a major issue in the church today. Here, I refer back to the subject of functional transcendence where I approach God for what is in it for me. In the truest sense of worship, I am not approaching God with self-interest in mind. God is not there to give us the best imaginable things that we can dream of. He is not there to enhance everything about us; through indeed, he will bless us in ways we can’t even imagine. Like Paul in Philippians 3:13-14, we go forward to the heavenly call of God in Christ, Jesus. Therefore, refusing to use God for self-interest and the people of God to promote ourselves, we acknowledge what Evelyn Underhill says that worship is essentially disinterested which means only God. There is a proper place and time for prayers of petition that seek God for genuine needs. When the early church came together, they spent a large amount of time praying for needs, but that was secondary. In Christian worship, we always remember that is only one object of adoration in praise, God and God alone, blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us set our hearts on the one God and true worship of him.

III. Questions and Answers

A. Worship is for an audience of one; why is there such a huge resistance to transcendent functionalism?

You may have better insights that I do here. I don’t think that we are being taught about this. Who is teaching this now? Another aspect has to do with our models; it is important who you model. Who is you hero? Who are the solid biblical people grounded in the Bible? What are you chasing after and what is driving all of this? If this is all about building a bigger audience; it is all about the crowd. Why are we not grounding ourselves in the Word of God? There are even larger issues. At the time of the reformation, the Word of God had been neglected for centuries. It was really important at the time of the reformation for the sermon to start taking the primary place in the worship service. When you read about the schedules of some of the great preachers we now know. I am including John Wesley as part of the reformation. They were preaching on a daily basis many times. We needed to exalt the sermon and the sermon today needs to have its rightful place, solid biblical teaching. Why would I go to some place where I am hearing what somebody thinks rather than the mind of Christ? When I got out of seminary, I accepted the evangelical thought that my primary job was to preach great sermons. And if I did that, people would come from all over and I would not have to worry about anything else. That is a partial truth. I didn’t really have my compass set. Now, I am not devaluing the Word of God at all. If anything, I want to see that sermons take a stronger place in evangelical Christianity today. But the primary purpose why you are in that worship service is not to meet human needs, not even to preach a sermon but to worship the Living God and to hear from God through his Word and to receive his goodness through his gifts of love.

B. Obligations that affect These Issues

You have named several obstacles which seems from your survey and observations. Behind those, the structure of modern churches, the leadership structure, the financial obligations and how to meet those.

Structure follows purpose; this makes your question very critical for the spiritual life of leaders today. This question will push a lot of us against a wall. What we tend to do is invert it and let contemporary structure determine purpose. Luther and others were really clear that the church was always in need of reformation. If you start out from England coming to the United States and on your compass which has 360 degrees on it and if you are off by one degree, you are going to miss where you want to land by thousands of miles. We are always resetting and bringing the boat or airplane by in alignment with the compass. What we are failing to do today; we are failing to dig down into the revelation of God and allow the revelation of God to set the compass. You get bricks and mortar and programmatic approaches to ministry which takes time and money and energy. So before you know it, the program itself sets the agenda. Part of the response is, we are called to transform systems. The real issue is how do you do it without blowing it up along the way and destroy people’s lives. It can be done and we will slightly mention this as we go further into our leadership. The answer is, form follows purpose. I have to set what my form is and that is the courage that leaders have to take on today. Leadership bodies need to recognize that this isn’t about ‘my’ vision; this is about God’s vision for his church.