Worship in Today's Church: Five Articles

Worship in All Directions

At some point in your life, you may have been as I was (and so many in our churches still are!). Anytime you heard the word worship, you assumed that word mostly referred to singing, clapping, and talking to God. Worship is actually much more than that: True biblical worship encompasses our entire lives. In fact, in his book The Ultimate Priority, John MacArthur Jr. explains that for our worship to be “whole-life” it must include three aspects or directions. Most certainly, we worship God when we focus directly on him, pointing our worship upward (as we normally think of worship). However, we should also worship God inwardly. The third direction we should worship him is outwardly, to those around us. Read more

Lies the Enemy Whispers during Worship

“We have come to worship Him” (Matthew 2:2).

The devil’s first plan of attack is to get us to worship him. He tried that with our Lord, as recorded in Luke 4:7. “All these things will be yours if you will worship me.” He soon found the futility of that. Not then and hardly at all since has anyone wanted to bow down and worship this foolish fallen angel.

But such a persistent enemy always has a backup plan. Plan B is to interfere with our worship of the living God. Satan will do anything to throw a wrench into the works and shut down or hinder our daily submission to the Lord Jesus and all that involves (prayer, commitment, study of the Word, service, etc).

Not long ago, while sitting in church listening to a friend preach, I began a list of the lies Satan whispers to God’s people who gather to worship Him.... Read more

The Priority of Praise

Have you ever looked out the window of an airplane just before it pierces the clouds and noticed how much of the terrain you could see from that one vantage point? You suddenly begin to realize just how enormous this earth of ours really is.

Imagine with me now that we’re “flying over” and looking down at praise. As we take a broad view of praise, we’ll begin to notice two things that show just how important to the Lord praise really is. First, we’ll realize that praise, like land and water seen from an airplane, stretches as far as the mind can perceive in all directions. It is infinitely vast. Read more

A Missing Piece in North American Worship

Imagine you're going to church. The worsip band is on stage. You see on the screen all the normal information: Copyright Vineyard Music, 1998; in the key of B flat, written by Brian Doerkson. The worship band starts up, but you notice something strange, because the song says a lot of things to God that sound rude: Lord, how could you let that happen? Why did you abandon me? I'm one of your own. Why didn't you protect me? If you had been there, this never would have happened (John 11.21)! And this hurts your cause too, Lord. People are scoffing at you in your absence. Come and visibly intervene for me! But no matter what, I will trust you forever. No matter what, you are my God forever.

That's the situation we get in the Book of Psalms: a miktam, of David, to the tune of "Doe of the Dawn"—those titles head the hymns we approve and also the laments that strike us as rude. But both equally count as worship in the Bible, even though for many of us, asking lament-type questions sounds like the opposite of worship.

Could I suggest, knowing I'm generalizing, that we in North America need to "biblicize" and complicate our worship by making lament a regular feature? To be a real biblical lament, it has to include a confession of trust and unconditional loyalty from the lamenter; without that, it's just complaining. But I also want to emphasize that, unless we lament, we're being unbiblical and unhelpful. Read more

What Does “Amen” Mean?

And all the people said … “Amen!” The “amen corner” has had an important place in the life of the church throughout the ages. However, it is rare to find such a spot among Presbyterians. We are known as God’s frozen chosen for a reason. It has been said that the Methodists like to shout “Fire,” the Baptists like to shout “Water,” and the Presbyterians like to softly say, “Order, order.” Nevertheless, in spite of the idiosyncrasies of various ecclesiastical persuasions, the function of the word amen far transcends denominational usages in the modern era. Read more