Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 3 - August 26, 2019
The style of music you use on Sunday mornings is incredibly unimportant.
Worship is our service to God. It is acting and thinking and speaking as if He really is who He says He is and we really are who He says we are. Worship is the creature (you and me) serving the Creator (God).
We will have more to say about this later when we consider the regulative principle of worship and its application to blended worship. In brief, we understand that the Bible, rather than our culture or personal preferences, should determine what we do when we publicly gather to worship God. The reading and preaching of God's Word, the celebration of the Lord's Supper and baptism, prayer, and the singing of God's praise are not options on a menu that we are free to pick and choose from.
But there is no reason it should be different. We are no freer to delete biblical elements from our worship, such as preaching and reading God's Word, than we are free to add non-biblical elements, such as liturgical dance or drama.
The problem with this approach, however, is not in the intention to communicate. The problem is that Christianity is fundamentally a religion of the ear, not the eye. The Word of God rather than the vision of God stands at the center of any true experience of God this side of heaven.
In our public gatherings, we should be careful not to decenter or marginalize the preaching of the Word, or our hearing and heeding of it.
So what do we mean by blended worship? Simply put, we mean corporate worship that consists of its biblical elements (prayer, singing, reading and preaching God's Word, the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper) but in a variety of styles or forms. Some of these terms, like worship, element, and form will receive more precise definition below. Let us begin by briefly describing the variety that we envision.
If our worship is to be Word-centered, then the form of the preaching should be one that draws attention to the Word, rather than the preacher's life, feelings, ideas, or preferences. And the best way to do this is through expositional preaching. Simply defined, expositional preaching is preaching that takes the point of the passage and makes it the point of the message.
Though never disconnected from the sacrificial system, Old Testament worship was an expression of reverence, homage, and service to God through the totality of life, summed up in the great command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deut 6:5).8
When we move from the Old Testament to the New, the external structure of sacrifice and temple finds its fulfillment, not in a new, restored building, or an improved sacrificial system, but in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus' point, however, is not the place of worship; it is the person who is worshiped. It is not about what we do but about who He is and how we relate to Him.
As David Peterson has put it, “In effect, the exalted Christ is now the ‘place’ where God is to be acknowledged and honoured. He, rather than a renewed temple in Jerusalem or on some other holy mountain, is the ‘place’ of eschatological pilgrimage for all the nations. The Father cannot now be honoured unless Jesus is given all the honour due to him as the Son.”11
Fundamentally, worship is faith “expressing itself in obedience and adoration”12 of the Father as He is revealed and known through His Son.
From the first commandment about having no other gods to the whole book of Malachi to Romans 12 it is clear that God cares how He is approached! If you have any doubts about that, ask Nadab and Abihu!
Nadab and Abihu may have been completely sincere in their worship. But neither their sincerity nor ours is the final measure by which worship is judged. God's Word is. God cares about how He is approached.
It is the Word of God, rather than the vision of God, that brings life to the dead.
Ligon Duncan has summarized it well when he has said that the Regulative Principle teaches us to “read the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible and see the Bible.”18
Of course, this principle can be taken too far. Some words, like justification, redemption, and atonement, are so central to the gospel that we cannot abandon them simply because a biblically illiterate populace no longer understands what they mean.
This concern for edification might seem a strange emphasis to those who are accustomed to thinking of worship as only an expression of our love for God.
Christians love God and one another in public worship by ensuring that the forms of their worship contribute to the edification of those present.
All of this is badly mistaken. As we have already seen, worship generally, and public worship particularly, cannot and should not be reduced to an experience.
The unrepentant adulterer who stands in church with tears streaming down his face as he sings “I Will Glory in My Redeemer” is not worshiping God, regardless of what he is experiencing at that moment.
Instead of defining our public worship by an identifiable style of music or liturgy, God's Word and the peace of the church compel us to define our worship in relation to God Himself. “What ought to make worship delightful to us is not, in the first instance, its novelty or its aesthetic beauty, but its object: God himself is delightfully wonderful, and we learn to delight in him.”26
As Jonathan Edwards said, “God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.”28
Things will have to look a lot more Jewish (and smell a lot more Middle-eastern) before we can say that our worship expression is more authentically “biblical” (or “right”) than another.
What I discovered, though, was that the Bible gives few guidelines on how to worship when the church meets. Rather, the Scriptures focused more on the heart of a worshiper.
Our English word worship is a shortened form of “worthship,” which means to attribute worth to whatever we are worshiping.
Second, almost all of the specific ways we worship in most churches today are neither directed nor informed by the Scriptures themselves, but rather evolved from people in church leadership, reflecting the culture of their time.
Third, we should be more concerned with how people's lives are being changed by the Spirit as they encounter God in worship than the ways we actually practice worship (provided we are not violating Scripture).
I am not saying that culture dictates worship, but what I am saying is that culture shapes how people learn, communicate, and express themselves.
I fully understand that culture should not dictate what we do. Yet the fact is that most of what we do in our churches today was originally dictated by the culture at the time it originated. We just kept practicing it, and it became the norm.
Thus, if we argue that we should not be influenced by culture, then we must recognize that most of us already have been (although the culture that influenced us might stem back to the 1500s).
According to Marlene LeFever, for every ten students in an average sixth-grade class, one will find:6 Two auditory learners Four visual learners Four tactile/kinesthetic learners Yet ninety percent of all teaching in our churches is auditory.
What is interesting is that most preachers are auditory learners.
We want to honor God in all we do, but some worship gatherings do feel so much like a performance that it comes across as being inauthentic, even if the hearts of those leading it are authentic.
We should be teaching people to “feed themselves” as adults should, not to be dependent on the preacher for their weekly feeding.
As I said, I still believe in preaching. We do it each week! Yet I am more concerned with creating a culture where people learn to feed themselves for more healthy spiritual development.
Emerging worship is similar to blended worship and could be classified as such. The difference seems to be a matter of degree.
It is a dangerous thing to experiment with the church of God as if she is one's personal plaything to shape according to one's own desires.
The history of American Protestantism suggests the emerging church will result in yet another “church” body. The American landscape is cluttered with competing denominations spawned by revivals and evangelistic movements.
By discounting history in such a way, he is asserting that his experience as a punk rock, nonchurchgoing Christian—an experience he appeals to in order to make his point—is more relevant than thousands of years of church history.
We should begin thinking hard about the next few centuries and what will actually last in what we are doing. How do we take care of, and disciple, the kids?). Kimball himself will have much more to say in thirty years, and it will be more seasoned than it is now.
Worship is not “just about God.” Rather, it is directed to God, is for God, and is inspired by God. Yet it flows from us, completing a circle of valuing and mutual love that involves the self-revealing personalities of both parties.
