The Particulars of Worship (Part 3)

We’re a people who want to get it right, and that’s good, and right. Especially as Christians, we know that God is Lord, that the Lord has standards, and that we, His servants, are happily obligated to serve Him how He says. We want to get it right.

To say that worship is something He cares about is to say that the ground is down; it’s true and there’s more to it. If we don’t know what direction the ground is, or if we claim it’s in a different direction, the problem is ours and we have work to do. When it comes to worship, most of us aren’t saying it should go in a different direction, but sometimes we take for granted that we know enough (or everything) about it simply because we know God’s wants it.

So, in defense of this ongoing series, we’re trying to get it right. Stated differently, worship should be tasty; in it, we should taste that the Lord is good. If it’s not tasty, we messed something up in the recipe. While recipe study isn’t the end, it is necessary in order to prepare the meal properly. I’m eager to jump back into John’s Gospel but this series needs a little more time to bake before we take it out of the oven.

As I continue to work through the doctrine of worship and discuss it with the flock, more and more I’m convinced that one of the greatest obstacles to us getting it right is a covert but powerful dualism that shapes our thinking. Dualism is a confusing and fear creating master and we must not serve him.

What is dualism? Generally, dualism refers to the division of concepts into two opposed or contrasted sides. More specifically, in philosophical and religious discussions, dualism refers to the division between mind and matter, between the touchable and the invisible. Extreme expressions of dualism include those who believe that spirit and stuff have been in an eternal battle, with Spirit in one corner wearing the white hat (an imaginary hat, of course) and Stuff in the other corner covered head to toe in a suit of black. It was dualistic thinking that caused certain men to deny the Incarnation. If Jesus were truly God, they argued, no way would He take on flesh and soil Himself. If Jesus were truly man, they argued, no way could He be perfectly divine.

Our brand of dualism is not expressed like that, primarily because it is not so clear. Our dualism thrives in its subtlety; it thrives in the fog. Our version says, there are works of the flesh and fruit of the Spirit, so what we do with our hands doesn’t matter or is suspicious at best. However, the fruit of the Spirit doesn’t cut off our hands, the Spirit enables the work of our hands not to be fleshy. By the Spirit, we use our hands for worshipping the true God, not a false one.

Our brand of dualism insinuates that truly spiritual people sit on their hands, or lawfully use their hands to carry their Bibles, but the hands will never be as godly as our brains. Dualism reluctantly lets us out of quiet times in order to earn a pay check so that we can pay the mortgage and electric bills so that we have a place and light to read the Bible. But the rest of the day, dualism sits on our shoulder and whispers to us about how guilty we should feel for not doing the important, spiritual things.

That’s similar to saying that meaningful diaper changing happens in one’s mind, actually dealing with the mess is a necessary evil. Someone might object, “But serving my kid is different than serving God.” Sure, in ways, but isn’t it God who says to serve our kids? If God didn’t want to be served with our bodies, why did He make us with them? Are bodies just a necessary evil? Did the Trinity intend for our days to be filled with meaningless busy work? It’s His planet and He can make us with eyes that cry if He wants to. And why did the Second Person take on flesh, die in flesh, and be resurrected bodily?

Perhaps some of us grasp that God wants us to use our bodies Monday through Saturday while we work but have fallen into belief that our bodies don’t have anything to do on Sunday in worship. That’s dualism again, just riding a different horse.

We struggle with some of this because dualism is such an effective story teller. Dualism loves to tell tales of highly external religious hypocrites, clean on the outside but full of dead men’s bones inside: phylacterized Pharisees and pompous popes and your uncle that cleaned up nice for church and beat his wife as soon as they got home. Dualism parades pretender after faker before us. But why?

Is it not because Christians who serve God in their head alone are much less of a threat? If dualism can convince us that we are more godly the more time we spend meditating on a Bible verse in the corner, he can win a lot of ground while our eyes are closed. He also paralyzes us with guilt at how much time we spend doing “things.” “Shouldn’t you be back in the corner?” He paralyzes us with despair that all the “things” we do will just burn anyway. So good Christians sit around playing conscience tennis, beating themselves back and forth between feeling bad that they’re never doing the right thing.

Dualism presents a false dichotomy, it divides wrongly. Dualism says, “Pharisees were clean on the outside, dirty on the inside, therefore, a clean outside doesn’t matter.” Dualism says, “If your doctrine isn’t right then you can’t please God, so the only way to please God is with correct doctrine.” Applying Jesus’ words, these you ought to have done and not neglected the others (see Matthew 23:23). Or, what God has joined together, let no man tear asunder (see Matthew 19:6).

This is why the worldview wheel that Dave spoke about is so crucial. Our thinking, our Bible answers, our catechesis spoke matters. So does our lifestyle, what we do with our hands and with dirty diapers and stuff. So do our narratives, the sorts of stories and heroes we present. And so does our liturgy.

Dualism has infiltrated our worship so that, on one hand, we think that worship is mainly about our minds and, on the other hand, we think worship that can be seen or tasted or enacted is probably hypocritical.

We’ve all seen hypocrites. It is easy to act righteous without be righteous all the way down. But, isn’t it even easier not to act righteous and not be righteous and protest, “You don’t know what’s in my heart.” In other words, hypocrisy has gotten smarter over the years, adapted her approach. She used to get herself in trouble with grand displays. Now she saves herself the hassle and weaves her clothes of inaction and indignation. Brilliant, really.

So how do we fix our problems? How do we fight dualism? How do we avoid hypocrisy? How do we get it right?

We worship. We meet with God. We hear His Word and taste His goodness and bow before Him and stand and lift up our hands to Him. As Paul urged the Romans, we present our bodies as living sacrifices which is our spiritual worship. That’s all of life and that includes liturgy.

As we’re moving through the particulars of our liturgy, we’ve talked about how happy handshakes and hugs are part of the assembly gathering. With the votum, the assembly stands together and verbally acknowledges the beginning of our corporate privilege. We hear God call us into His presence, we cry out for His help, and then we sing and shout our praise.

That call to consider God’s glory, to give thanks to His holy name (cf. Psalm 30:4), to come into His fellowship in light (cf. 1 John 1:5-7) will have the effect of humbling us and causing us to want to get it right, to be right before Him so that we’re not consumed (cf. Hebrews 12:28-29). That’s why confession is next in our liturgy.

Exhortation to Confession

Following the same pattern can be done helpfully or hypocritically. Because we recognize that confession is a crucial step as we draw near to God, we want to do it regularly without it becoming rote. To keep ourselves from mouthing confession mechanically, we include a freshly prepared exhortation every week rather than use a historical holdover from previous centuries. If you prefer a different illustration, there are a variety of spoons that can scrape the burnt parts off the bottom of the pot.

Until our glorification, we are in a fight to mortify our sin. God calls us to this battle for our good, otherwise He could transport us to heaven immediately after we “pray the prayer” (which, if it worked like that, would make it easy to tell whether not you really meant it). Or, He could sanctify us completely and leave us here as perfect witnesses. But He doesn’t, so somehow the process of confession and repentance followed by forgiveness and reconciliation makes the fellowship sweeter.

When we love our sin we do not have a hearing with the Lord.

If I had cherished iniquity in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened.
(Psalm 66:18, ESV)

Yet we don’t confess each week because we are uncertain about His willingness or gladness to forgive us and receive us into fellowship. Just the opposite. We confess because we believe.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:8–10 ESV)

We believe Him for two things. First, we believe Him when He says we have sin. Verses 8 and 10 say that Christians have sin and have sinned. If we don’t believe that, we’re deceived and we’re blaspheming, calling the true God untruthful. We confess our sin because we believe He’s truthful about what’s wrong with us, about what keeps us from fellowship. We also confess because we believe He is faithful to forgive our unrighteousness and to cleanse us. He loves to do it.

The exhortation to confession addresses a variety of ways Christians get dirty, and doing it corporately reminds us that Christ loved the church. His Bride is corporate, and “he gave Himself up for her that he might sanctify her…that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27).

The church has some trouble spots, some blemishes that He’s restoring. There’s plenty for Him to work on.

At the same time, we don’t spend the majority of our liturgy here because Christ is risen and forgiveness is secure. Our feet need cleansing (cf. John 13:10), but we don’t require a full body bath every time.

Prayer of Confession

After the exhortation to confess, we confess. We confess sin both as individuals and as an assembly because we are many and one. I have my blemishes and we have ours.

Many prayers in the Bible are for the sin of the people (Daniel 9 is a great example). It’s good to consider our connectedness and how our corporate witness to the world falls short.

One biblical and beneficial part of our prayer is still missing. I’ve become increasingly convicted about it over the last 14 months and believe we would do well to consider it. Namely, we ought to consider kneeling before the Lord when we pray.

Our bodily position matters, not exclusively, but neither is it excluded. We necessarily embody what we believe, one way or another. We stand out of respect when God’s holy Word is read, probably because we don’t know of a theological tradition that has abused that practice. Perhaps some day, Christians will refuse to stand when Scripture is read because they saw so many “truth-tubers” play at honoring it. “They must not really respect God’s Word. If they really did, they’d obey it.” In the Russian churches I’ve worshipped with, they won’t pray without standing. The point is, we embody our respect in various ways, why not take the opportunity to embody our submission by kneeling before His holy majesty?

Though not limited to confession, when we come into the presence of our great God, the “great King above all gods,” we are appropriately called:

Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!
(Psalm 95:6)

Interestingly, one of the common words in the NT translated “worship” is προσκυνέω which means “to gesture one’s complete dependence on or submission to a high authority figure, to fall down, to prostrate oneself before” (BAGD). In Scripture, when men realized that they were in God’s presence, they usually fell down or bowed before Him.

Especially when we get a sense of our sin, our body responds.

My wounds stink and fester
because of my foolishness,
I am utterly bowed down and prostrate;
all the day I go about mourning.
For my sides are filled with burning,
and there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am feeble and crushed;
I groan because of the tumult of my heart.
(Psalm 38:5–8 ESV)

Historically, the Reformers knelt in their worship at a time when their battle with Rome’s ritualism was the fiercest. It appears that kneeling fell out of practice as some of the Puritans objected to ongoing abuses and feared the power of ritualism. But this is a sad example of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Can a person kneel on the outside and yet stand with their fist raised toward God on the inside? Of course! It happens all the time. But in response to that, we’ve basically taken the approach that God doesn’t care how we show respect as long as we’re thinking respectful thoughts. “God, we think so highly of You that we will think highly of You.”

We don’t try that with our employer. “I know it looks like I was sleeping, but I was working really hard in my head.” Or with our spouses, “I know it seems like I was looking around at other ladies, but the whole time I was thinking about you.” We don’t let our kids slouch or sleep at the dinner table. Our posture, our eyes are part of us.

So are our knees. When every tongue confesses and every knee bows (cf. Philippians 2:10), those tongues and knees aren’t virtual or figurative or mental. His throne, His rule, and our submission to Him are as real as our knees. Maybe we should use them.

A few more things, because liturgical baby steps can be wobbly and the coffee table corners hurt.

First, the fact that people can fake and do fake does not mean that they should fake or that they are faking.

Second, if a person doesn’t feel like doing something, we don’t want them to violate their consciences. We do want to give them opportunity to have their consciences changed by the gospel. Similarly, if someone doesn’t feel like standing to hear God’s Word, if someone doesn’t feel like responding in the votum, if someone doesn’t feel like walking forward for communion or eating and drinking the Lord’s supper, if someone doesn’t feel like showing up for a 10:00 start, that person shouldn’t.

But these are all opportunities we have to meet with God and participate in worship as a corporate Body. These are opportunities to present the bodies God gave us as living sacrifices. Whether we kneel or not, sing loudly or not, stand when Scripture is read or not, we must worship in body somehow. I’m arguing that the body has more to do than transporting the brain.

Third, some won’t be able to kneel for physical reasons and those persons shouldn’t kneel and they shouldn’t feel bad about it. Some can’t assemble for physical reasons and there is no judgment. It isn’t a rule, it is a way to express our hearts. It’s not a have to as much as a get to because we are persons, not minds. But again, if you can’t, that’s different than saying you won’t.

Related to personal ability, not all church buildings allow for it. For example, if the pews are too close together or if a congregation uses bleachers, these make it more difficult or even prohibitive.

Fourth, the elders believe that this is an appropriate liturgical opportunity AND we plan to discuss it at Men to Men tomorrow night, to encourage the Life to Life groups to discuss it this week, and we’ll talk with the Life to Life leaders at our our meeting next Saturday. We’re interested in developing the desire to do it, not to develop a ritual for external sake. For some the idea may already resonate because you’ve read all the verses about kneeling and they body’s positions before the Lord. For others, the bitter taste of their background brings up serious concerns.

We don’t have a tradition in mind. We’re ritualistic in our hatred of ritual for ritual sake. But we want to get it right. We also want to avoid exegetical gymnastics that turn the literal meaning of certain verses into spiritualized imagery.

Declaration of Forgiveness and Cleansing

Without this part, the worship service cannot go on in gladness. Without the proclamation of the gospel, we have no relief, no confidence to draw near to Him. So we need to hear Him say that He forgives sinners through His Son by His grace.

The first few weeks of our corporate worship (a year ago) I wrongly failed to include this crucial part. Not only that but, after more thought, I’ve decided to put the Scripture promises in the bulletin as another way to emphasize it. Printing the passages demonstrates the importance of God’s Word throughout the service, not merely in the sermon. Even more, it emphasizes that God declares His forgiveness. We stand to be received by Him into fellowship and reconciliation.

It isn’t that the minister forgives. However, the minister declares God’s part, His certain forgiveness for the assembly.

Conclusion

We tend to confess the bodily manifestations of our sin more, the sins others might see, and less the mental motivations for sin. Yet we tend to measure our worship more by mental motivations and less by bodily manifestations. Why? Because sin divides and hides. Sin separates what should be together and makes excuses for it, even with Bible verses if it can.

When this series is over, and it’s 20 years from now, what will our kids remember if we start kneeling or lifting our hands or responding in reading? The thing is, they’re going to remember something, they will have a taste of something no matter what we do or don’t do. They will learn what’s important by watching us. “My dad was a really good sitter when he listened to sermons.” They will also know if we’re just fakers, and there is more than one way to feign. I realize that we have hardly any good examples to imitate which, incidentally, shows the limits of sentences. Let’s give our kids, and the unbelieving world, an example of no spin confession and full-bodied worship.

We are transformed by the renewing of our minds, especially by the word, and our bodies, our lives, are presented in worship. One day we will fellowship with Him, not mind before Maker, but rather face to face.