Heart of Worship
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Heart of Worship
Many churches today are struggling with the proper form of worship
and therefore have divided into two services on Sunday mornings. As
many of you know the one service will consist of more traditional music,
like hymns and only the piano and organ are used while in the other service
more contemporary music is played, the youth is casually dressed and
the music is very loud!
Let's speak about the heart of worship. The heart of worship is
essential for true worship in the church or any other gathering
place for that matter. Jesus predicted the end of worship form (as
we know it) when He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well in John, chapter four. “Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father…an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:21; 23-24
(NASB).
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The New Testament reveals a silence about the outward forms of corporate worship and a radical intensification of worship as an inner, Godward experience of the heart. The silence about outward forms is obvious in the fact that the gathered life of the church is never called “worship” in the New Testament. Moreover, the main Old Testament word for worship is virtually absent from the New Testament letters.
Its usage appears in the Gospels (26 times) and in the Book of Revelation (21 times). But in the Epistles of Paul it occurs only once, namely, in I Corinthians 14:25 where the unbeliever falls down at the power of prophecy and confesses God is in the assembly. It doesn’t occur at all in the letters of Peter, James, or John.
The Old Testament idea, captured in the Greek word
'proskuneo', implied a physical falling down in reverence before a visible majesty. This happened as people came to the visible, incarnate Christ in the Gospels. And it happened in Revelation as the saints and angels and elders were actually in the presence of the visible, risen Christ. But in the age between the ascension and the second coming Christ is not visibly here to worship.
Therefore, worship is radically internalized and delocalized. In Matthew 15:8-9
Jesus says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they
worship me.” Worship that does not come from the heart is vain
and empty.
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TODAY'S NEWS:
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly begins its 12th broadcast season Friday on PBS.
Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new national survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters.
Arnold Graf, a white Jew, built a striking track record organizing alongside black Christians for urban renewal.
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Consider what Paul does to some of the other words related to Old Testament worship. For example, the next most frequent word for worship in the Old Testament (after proskuneo) is the word
'latreup' which is usually translated as “serve” as in Exodus 23:24, “You shall not worship their gods, nor serve them” (NASB). When Paul uses this word for Christian worship, he goes out of his way to make sure that we know he means not a localized or outward form for worship practice but a non-locallized, spiritual experience.
He takes it so far as to treat virtually all of life as worship when lived in the right spirit.
We find another example, in Romans 1:9 where he says, “I serve [or worship] [God] with my spirit in the gospel of his Son.” And in Philippians 3:3, Paul says that true Christians “worship” [God] in the Spirit of God…and put no confidence in the flesh” (NASB).
He also says in Romans 12:1, for Christians to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Paul sees all of life and ministry as an expression of that inner experience of worship.
Do not think that you only worship God with your lips, but mostly
important you serve Him with an attitude of your heart.
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