That mighty bridge
July 16, 2009 | Comments Off
“The bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. I can hear their trampings now as they traverse the great arches of the bridge of salvation. They come by the thousands, by their myriads, e’er since that day when Christ first entered His glory.
They come and yet never a stone has sprung in that mighty bridge. Some have been the chief of sinners and some have come at the very last of their days but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them, trusting to the same support. It will bear me over as it has for them.”
- Charles Spurgeon
via Vitamin Z
The real worship war
July 14, 2009 | Comments Off
Found in the Fall 1994 edition of the Indiana Baptist Proclaimer:
The First Church of Faith and Family in Gloryton, Indiana has come upon rocky waters of late. It seems that the young new pastor decided, without consulting even the first deacon or choir lady, to move the church’s 1978 Electone organ (for which a prominent choir lady very gladly and very publicly made the down payment) into storage. His reason? “That dusty old thing just doesn’t cut it for our increasingly contemporary worship style.” This, of course, has caused outrage among the older generation within the church, who say that “the Broadman hymnal was good enough for the apostle Paul, so it’s good enough for us.” It seems FCFF is just the latest congregation to fall prey to the ongoing worship wars.
What’s wrong with this (completely made-up) scenario? Many things, of course, and to address all of them would fill volumes (and already has done so). But at the root there is a shallow and incomplete view of worship at work, and it has to do with the idea of a “worship war.”
What do we really mean by “worship wars”? Most people use this term to refer to the battle over style in church life: style of music, style of architecture, style of décor, style of clothing, etc. The two sides are commonly referred to as “contemporary” and “traditional,” the one holding for dear life to the piano-and-organ hymns of yesteryear and the other throwing out the hymnals and declaring the newest song by the newest, hottest “worship artist” to be the new move of God in the church today.
However, this way of thinking assumes that “worship” comes down to a set of external things, and that “right worship” involves what those external things look like or sound like. And as we saw last week, worship involves not just a few things we do when we get together each week, but all of life; and its root is not in any external things, but rather in the heart.
This reframes the question of what is right worship.
Man was created to worship, to serve someone or something greater than himself. This is evident empirically (the creation of myriad world religions, the need for “purpose” in life, etc.) and it is evident in the Scriptures (Genesis 1:26-28—man is made in the image of God, meaning man shows forth God’s worth; man is instructed in how to show forth God’s image, setting the life of man up as service to God).
Man’s problem is not failing to worship; it is failing to worship rightly. Satan’s ploy in the garden was not to make man cease worshipping; it was rather to corrupt man’s worship—to diminish God’s worth and exalt his (Satan’s) own worth, in order to win man’s worship for himself. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and follow Satan’s temptation, they showed by their actions that their hearts had wandered away from true worship of the one true God, having embraced idolatry.
From the point of the fall through the rest of history, we have seen unfolding a battle of cosmic proportions. The story of human history after the fall is the story of the great, true worship war—the battle over who will win the worship of humanity. From the beginning, Satan set up his strategy of deceit and murder, in order to exalt himself (in the form of myriad cleverly-disguised idols) to the place of the object of man’s worship. And God allowed him to do so in order that God’s worth might be exalted in his triumph over all false worship, as His remnant offer him true, victorious worship in defiance of Satan and his minions.
In the light of this reality—the reality that not only is all of life (i.e., each individual life) about worship but that all of human history is also about worship—the story of the Bible is opened to us in new, glorious ways. And the debate about styles and forms takes on less urgency and import than the fight to win worship for the only One who is truly worthy of worship—“the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to whom be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” (1 Timothy 6:15-16)
Next time: Transformed worship part 1