I love to worship God.
No activity is more important for the redeemed sinner than worshipping God.
So, I love to think about how we worship God. This is why I often write about it, eg. here.

I want to consider four further important features of the worship of God – they are:

• Unity
• Continuity
• Spirit
• Truth

UNITY

In “A Sad Birthday” I referred to Ephesians 3:14-15, and how “the whole family in heaven and earth” worships, “bowing the knee to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
“The whole family” there highlights the importance of unity between Jew and Gentile, worshipping together in the one body, as the church.

We are not to be divided in our worship:

• according to either race or culture.
• or by status or sex (Galatians 3:28).
• or, we could add, by age !

Jesus implies, in John 17, that without unity, that church loses all credible witness before an unbelieving world.

Also, without unity the church loses worship itself.
Paul rebuked the Christians in Corinth for their divisions (1 Corinthians 1:10ff). The Christians there were meeting for worship (specifically, to partake of the Lord’s Supper, in ch 11), but they were divided from each other.
These divisions were coming out in a particularly nasty way: Each one was just selfishly thinking about his own agenda – what he wanted and how he could get it.
Because of this the Bible says: “when you come together in one place, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper.”
They were physically “together in the one place”; they thought they were eating the Lord’s Supper; they were certainly going through the outward form of eating the Lord’s supper.
But Paul says, “No. As long as you are divided from one another, you are not eating the Lord’s Supper.” You are not worshipping!
We may physically come together, going through the outward form of worship. But if we are divided from one another, there is no worship.

Much less can we be worshipping if don’t want to come together, if we won’t come together, because we all want to worship in our own way!

Unity is vital to worship.
To be in communion with God, we need to be in communion with each other: “If someone… does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20)

CONTINUITY

It is not only important to practise our unity with the saints today. We need also to demonstrate our unity with the saints that have gone before.
True ecumenicity is historical through time, as well as geographical in the present.

This is where the Ecumenical Movement of the 60s and 70s well and truly missed the boat. They claimed they wanted to unite “all Christians” (by which, they meant: “all who make any sort of claim to be Christian”) in the world today, and bring them all into one church.
But, to achieve this, they had to cut themselves off from the historic, distinctive beliefs that Christians throughout history have believed.
They cut themselves off from the great Confessions of Faith – like the Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene Creed etc; not to mention, the Westminster Confession of Faith.
To create something “new” today, they had to make a break with the past. They strove for unity in Christendom by destroying unity with true Christians in the past.

Carl Trueman (Reckoning with the Past in an Anti-Historical Age in The Wages of Spin) notes:

The evidence of a collapse in historical rootedness is evident for all to see. We can start by looking at… the kind of songs that are sung, prayers that are prayed, and sermons that are preached.
When looked at in these broad terms, the last twenty or thirty years have seen a veritable transformation of Christian practice, with many churches abandoning traditional hymnody and worship service structures in favour of songs that are more contemporary and service styles that are more conducive to modern sensibilities.
More often than not, these changes are implemented with more than a passing reference to the need to attract young people to church – a most legitimate aim but also perhaps a significant modification of the emphases contained in the Great Commission where the category of age receives no specific mention.
It is also interesting that a clear connection is being made between attracting youth and breaking decisively with the past in key areas. The ideology of consumerism, with its emphasis on novelty, youth markets etc., clearly lies just below the surface…

What is lost by doing this? Carl Trueman continues:

The language and the practices of the Christian community, tried and tested over the centuries, while not in themselves absolutely sacrosanct, should not be casually abandoned or lightly cast to one side.
They are an important element in the identity of the church; and to break decisively with them on the purely pragmatic grounds of enhanced marketablity risks the displacement of the church’s historic identity.
[I’ve expressed my concern for the current emphasis on “marketability” in churches elsewhere.]

We need to preserve continuity with the past.
This does not mean refusing to sing newer hymns: there are many good, newer hymns being written today. Let’s sing them!
But where worship today makes a complete break with the past, we will be the poorer for it, because we cut ourselves off from the church that has gone before us.
We will lose a sense that we are part of something wonderful that has continued for the last 2,000 years and before.

That is happening in many churches today.
Many churches today are seduced by the contemporary worship scene, and have lost all sense that they are part of something wonderful from the past.
They have destroyed their roots. They have destroyed their unity with millions of Christians who have gone before.

For example, take a hymn like: “O sacred Head now wounded” :

• It was first composed (it is thought) by Bernard of Clairvaux, 900 years ago.
• It was picked up by Paul Gerhardt, 400 years ago, and translated into German, at the time of the Reformation.
• Two hundred years ago, it was translated into English by James Waddell Alexander (son of Archibald Alexander, the first Principal of Princeton Theological Seminary).

For 900 years the Church – French, Germans, English, Americans, and many others – have been singing this hymn.
But in many churches today you won’t hear this hymn? Why not?
– For starters, it is a “hymn”.
– And worse, it was composed before 1970 (or, 2000)!

I am not arguing for this particular hymn to be used as a litmus test, or that it must be sung in worship. But where a church completely ignores similar great hymns from the past, it cuts itself off from believers from different cultures who have been singing great hymns like this for the last 900 years.
True ecumenicity is historical through time, as well as geographical in the present.

SPIRIT

Jesus said: “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
In our English Bibles, it is “spirit” with a small “s”. Jesus was not talking about worshipping God with the Holy Spirit – though that is important too.
But, He is saying there that, when we worship God, we are to do so with our spirit.
In other words, not just with our bodies.

True, we employ our bodies in the worship God: our feet to come together, our eyes to read, our ears to hear, our lips to praise God. Bodies are important in the worship of God: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice… holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” (Romans 12:1)

But, if it is only the body, then we fail to worship.
If we just go through the motions of worship with our bodies, but our spirit is down the beach, or planning for tomorrow, or working out how to get that girl to notice me… then, we’ve lost the plot.

Jesus quoted Isaiah, talking about such people; He said:

“Hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying: ‘These people draw near to Me with their mouth, and honour Me with their lips. But their heart is far from Me!’ ” (Matthew 15:7-8)

To be present in body, but far away in heart, is an offence to God.

Once I was having a discussion about iPhone etiquette. The person I was talking to remarked how highly offensive it was to her, when a group was together, and they’re supposed to be all enjoying each other’s company – but then, someone gets out their iPod, or mobile phone, or whatever, and starts texting away, or playing a game or something.
Then you try and have a conversation; and they give you to understand they’re listening… until, you ask them a question and they go, “What?”
The person I was talking to thought this was incredibly rude. I imagine, most of us would think the same.

Worship is our conversation with God. It is His conversation with us.
It is incredibly rude to pretend to be listening to God… but your heart is a long way away.

“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

TRUTH

How we worship God must be true; it must be according to truth.
“Truth” refers to both the content of our worship (what we sing, what we pray, what we say must be true); and to sincerity in worship (we must also truly mean it).

1) The content must be true.
This applies to the whole of worship, especially what we sing
“It is well known that the character of its song, almost equal with the character of its preaching, controls the theology of the church.” (Preface to the Trinity Hymnal)

When a song, or a chorus, says little more than “Jesus is my Boyfriend”, that is going to have a huge effect upon the understanding, not to mention the maturity, of Christians in the church.
That is not worshipping God “in truth”.

Truth must also be in balance.
This will mean praising God in all His attributes, not just one or two.
It will mean praising Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It will mean a good mix of penitence for sin, and joy in salvation etc.

Some years ago we were taking the Youth Group Camp on Fraser Island. The talks were on basic Christian doctrines, and it was my turn to take the talk on repentance.
The song book we had was one of the early editions of “Mission Praise”; yet, in the whole of that book, I had trouble finding one song about repentance and confession.
In the Bible’s own hymn book – i.e. the Book of Psalms – at least half the Psalms are laments; many of them laments over sin and failure.
Yet in this song book, I had trouble finding one song like that.
Equally, of course, it would be wrong if every hymn sung in every worship service was mournful, and none ever expressed the joy of the Gospel.

2) Our worship must be true, i.e. sincere.
Let us sing thoughtfully, meaning what we sing.

• “Just and holy is Thy Name; I am all unrighteousness; false and full of sin I am, Thou art full of truth and grace…”  If we are singing these words sincerely, we won’t get too upset when our sin is pointed out to us.
• “Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave, and follow Thee; destitute, despised, forsaken, Thou from hence my all shalt be…” We cannot afford to be thoughtless singing words such as these.
• “In Christ alone my hope is found, He is my light, my strength, my song… My comforter, my All in All, here in the love of Christ I stand…” What wonderful words they are.

Let’s sing these words.
Let’s sing them “lustily and with good courage” as Wesley used to say.
And, let’s sing them sincerely!