Veroni's Views

ESSENTIAL ASPECTS OF THE CHURCH
This is an excerpt from a book on the Church that I am working on. Let me know what you think

WORSHIP

The whole life of the believer is an act of worship towards God. Every thing we do ought to be directed to God, and should be intended to bring glory to Him. There is also a liturgical sense of worship. The whole church service should be directed to God. There is another, specific sense of worship and that is the one that I want to pay attention to now.

Perhaps the best way to show clearly what I mean by worship in this sense, is to give a definition.

Worship takes place when those who are born again come by faith into the presence of God in love, respect and wondering amazement with the exclusive desire to please the Lord.

This definition presupposes that the person who worships will not have any fear of the Lord in the negative sense, because that person will have experienced the forgiveness of sins. It also presupposes a great degree of gratitude, for the same reason, namely that the person’s sins have been forgiven through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ.

I found the following remarkable statement in a very old book that has been republished many times. Torrey, in his book What the Bible Teaches, (Torrey, 2004) in an unacknowledged quote, makes the following distinction: “in prayer we are occupied with our needs, in thanksgiving we are occupied with our blessings, in worship we are occupied with (God) Himself (parenthesis mine)”.

What Torrey refers to as being “occupied with God Himself”, as compared to focusing on our blessings (i.e. our fulfilled needs), is what the last part of my definition covers: “with the exclusive desire to please the Lord.” This, in turn, will increase our “wondering amazement”. Contemplating God’s grace in making it possible for us to be reconciled with Him, and being born again to become his children, necessarily generates love and respect as well as amazement. Our awe at Him increases as we focus on Him entirely, without considering our needs.

The difference between focusing on the needs of people, whether our own or the needs of others on the one hand, and focusing entirely on God on the other hand, is the difference between earth-centeredness and heaven-centeredness. It is what Paul is talking about in Colossians 3.1-3: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” Ultimately, it is the difference between self-centeredness and God-centeredness. This should be the principle of our lives, i.e. to be God centered, rather than self-centered. Worship is the focal point in the application of this principle. It is an opportunity for us to practice the principle by which we live, in a concentrated manner. At the same time the interaction between ourselves and God when we worship in this manner gives us a foretaste of that blissful state to which we look forward, when “God will be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15.28).

Let us now look at some examples from Scripture that illustrate this. The obvious place to start looking is the Psalms.

A comparison between Psalms 103.1-5 and Psalms 95.1-7 demonstrates clearly the distinction I am talking about.

Psalms 103.1-5
Praise the LORD, O my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
Praise the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

It is quite clear that the focus in these lines is on the person who is pronouncing them. This is clearer in the original, and clearly so indicated in other translations by the repetition of the first person pronoun. Here is one example (underlining is mine).

He forgives all my sins
and heals all my diseases.
He keeps me from the grave
and blesses me with love and mercy.
He fills my life with good things,
so that I stay young and strong like an eagle.
(Psalms 103.3-5, TEV)

Compare now the different focus of Psalms 95.1-7.

Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
For the LORD is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.

Clearly, the emphasis is on God. In all prayer, praise and worship, the persons of the worshipper and God are the two main participants. But it is obvious that there is a difference in the prominence of the two, between the examples from Psalm 103 and that of Psalm 95. In literary criticism, the term “foregrounding” is employed to describe the kind of prominence that is given to the person of the “worshipper” in Psalm 103. In Psalm 95, that foregrounding belongs to God.

This is the difference between the kind of focused worship I am talking about, as compared to the self-centered thanksgiving and praise that we often equate with worship.

Torrey, R. A. (2004). What the Bible teaches. New Kensington, PA, Whitaker House.