Orders of worship
February 12, 2010 | Comments Off
As a part of the work we’re doing to update the website (and by we, I mean mostly Helen Lewis and Deanna Hanson), I have added a new section under the Music Ministry page where you can access orders of worship for our Sunday services. They will be posted on Friday for the following Sunday, and they include the Scriptures, songs (with lyrics), and sermon text and title for the service. If you have trouble accessing them, please feel free to let me know, either by email (andrewsheff@faithcommunity.com) or in person.
The reason for putting the order of worship up for access is for your benefit in preparing for the service each week. Use the selected Scriptures and songs for family worship on Saturday, or for personal devotions, or to help you as you pray for the service each week. This way, we can come to corporate worship already ruminating on the themes and truths of each week’s service, which will help us to engage with God more spiritually and truly.
Click here to go to the Orders of Worship page. May God bless our weekly gatherings more and more!
All I Have Is Christ
February 7, 2010 | Comments Off
We began learning a new song–All I Have Is Christ–on Wednesday. It is a song of testimony, declaring to each other and to God that our only possible salvation is in Christ and His work on our behalf.
This video is a live version of that song, put together by Sovereign Grace Ministries, whose music publishing arm published and recorded the song.
You can download the song or the entire album here.
What makes a Gospel-centered church
November 24, 2009 | Comments Off
The Gospel Coalition (a group organized to build up local churches toward Gospel-centeredness) articulates on their website the distinctives for Gospel-centered ministry. The first item on their list is empowered corporate worship:
The gospel changes our relationship with God from one of hostility or slavish compliance to one of intimacy and joy. The core dynamic of gospel–centered ministry is therefore worship and fervent prayer.
In corporate worship God’s people receive a special life-transforming sight of the worth and beauty of God, and then give back to God suitable expressions of his worth. At the heart of corporate worship is the ministry of the Word. Preaching should be expository (explaining the text of Scripture) and Christ-centered (expounding all biblical themes as climaxing in Christ and his work of salvation). Its ultimate goal, however, is not simply to teach but to lead the hearers to worship, individual and corporate, that strengthens their inner being to do the will of God.
This is what we strive for weekly in our services. Please pray toward this end, that we might gather to both encounter our God and respond to Him rightly. And pray for the ministry of the Word, that we would be continually strengthened in our inner being to do the will of our God.
(ht: Justin Taylor)
Fervent in spirit
October 20, 2009 | Comments Off
Continuing on the theme of giving God the honor due His name, I’d like to share some excerpts from an article I just read by Kevin DeYoung. (Some of you may know his name from the book Why We’re Not Emergent.) He is writing concerning the issue of reaching the next generation, but he makes an excellent (and needful) point about worship:
You can have formal services, so long as you do not have formalism. You can have casual services, so long as you do not approach your faith casually. Your services can have a lot of different looks, but young people want to see passion. They want to see us do church and follow Christ like we mean it.
We would do well to pay attention to Romans 12. “Let love by genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord” (9-11). We would be far less likely to lose our young people and far more likely to win some others, if the spiritual temperature of our churches was something other than lukewarm. People need to see that God is the all-consuming reality in our lives. Our sincerity and earnestness in worship matter ten times more than the style we use to display our sincerity and earnestness. (emphasis added)
“Do not be slothful in zeal; be fervent in spirit.” This is actually a command from the Lord. And note the context–these verses come in Paul’s fleshing out of the directive to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice…which is your spiritual worship” (12:1). Right worship is zealous, fervent worship.
Here is an essential point for us to understand: Even if the services or songs or prayers take different forms of expression than you prefer, the truths we are expressing are still the same; therefore, the level of passion we express should remain the same. Our zeal and passion come not from a style of music but from the truth of the Gospel, and who God is for us in Christ. If we can unite in passion for God in Christ, then people will clearly see that what we say and sing and express has affected us deeply. If we can only unite in passion for a style of music or a level of formality or casualness, then people will see that what matters most to us is only superficial and no different than any group of sports fans or concertgoers.
So the next time we gather, set your sights on the Gospel, and on the God of the Gospel. Let Him be what drives your passion. And notice how styles and forms begin to matter less and less.
A prayer for worship
October 15, 2009 | Comments Off
This is from The Valley of Vision, the collection of Puritan prayers we’ve used in corporate worship several times. In light of the previous post, I thought this might be helpful for you in your preparation for worship.
GLORIOUS GOD,
It is the flame of my life to worship You,
the crown and glory of my soul to adore You,
heavenly pleasure to approach You.
Give me power by Your Spirit to help me worship now,
that I may forget the world,
be brought into fullness of life,
be refreshed, comforted, blessed.
Give me knowledge of Your goodness
that I might not be overwhelmed by Your greatness;
Give me Jesus, Son of Man, Son of God,
that I might not be terrified,
but be drawn near with childlike love,
with holy boldness;
He is my Mediator, Brother, Interpreter,
Branch, Shepherd, Lamb;
Him I glorify,
in Him I am set on high.
Crowns to give I have none,
but what You have given I return,
content to feel that everything is mine
when it is Yours,
and more fully mine when I have yielded it to You.
Let me life wholly for my Savior,
free from distractions,
from worldly cares,
from hindrances to the pursuit of the narrow way.
I am pardoned through the blood of Jesus -
give me a new sense of it,
continue to pardon me by it,
may I come every day to the fountain,
and every day be washed anew,
that I may worship You always
in spirit and truth.
-from The Valley of Vision, ed. Arthur Bennett, ©1975 The Banner of Truth Trust.
Worthy of worship
October 15, 2009 | Comments Off
Matthew Henry writes regarding Malachi 1:6-2:9, “Nothing profanes the name of God more than the misconduct of those whose business it is to do honor to it.” Malachi’s rebuke was primarily directed toward the spiritual leaders of Israel; but as Tim showed us last Sunday, it applies to us as well. We are those whose business it is to honor God with every breath. And we profane His name by our misconduct in the business of worshiping Him.
Worship is all of life, as I have written earlier. However, when we gather on Sundays, we gather for a special time of worship, namely corporate worship–worship as a body. We come together, as God’s people have for millennia, in His presence as He inhabits our praises and speaks through His word. He imparts special grace to us in our corporate gatherings, and in our corporate gatherings our worship is fuller and greater than it could ever be were we to only worship individually. Our Sunday gatherings are special times, and the way we approach them reflects our mindset about not only the gathering itself but, more significantly, the God to whom and for whom we gather.
If our God is worthy of highest praise and honor and glory, we should strive to engage in corporate worship of the highest order. We should wholly devote ourselves to worshiping God all the time, but we should place particular emphasis on our corporate worship.
With this in mind, I want to share with you some ways in which we can prepare for corporate worship so that we come ready to meet the Lord, both to hear from Him and to respond to Him in worship worthy of Him. (Most of the following is based on an article John Piper wrote several years back.)
Practical ways to prepare for corporate worship
1. Pray for the Lord’s help in preparing your heart. Pray to the Lord His promise from Jeremiah 24:7–”I will give them a heart to know Me.” Make it your constant, consistent prayer that He will give you a heart that humbly and honestly seeks after Him, a heart ready and eager to hear and believe and obey His word.
2. Make Saturday night a time devoted to worship preparation. You can do this in a few ways:
- Meditate on the Scriptures. Piper writes, “read some delicious portion of Scripture with a view to stirring up hunger for God. This is the appetizer for Sunday morning’s meal.” I would add to this that, since we are in the habit of preaching through books of the Bible, you can also begin to meditate on the next portion of the book we’re currently in. For instance, since we’re currently in Malachi, and Tim preached from 1:6-14 last week, you can focus on 2:1-9 this week, and add to that some great Gospel passage like Romans 5 or Ephesians 1, to whet your appetite for meeting God in corporate worship.
- Turn away from worldly entertainment. James 1:21 instructs us to “put way all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” Your soul is at stake in how you listen to the word; so do your soul a favor by not filling it with worldliness on the eve of the weekly corporate worship gathering. This is an area that takes discipline; I find that Saturday evenings are a prime time for me to just sit down and relax with a movie or a television show. But better to sit down and renew my rest in the Gospel than to turn my eyes to the world for those last hours of the day.
- Have family worship. Even if every other night of the week is too hectic for you to get your whole family together for family worship, make it a priority on Saturday night. This will both help your own heart and teach your children the importance of corporate worship.
- Spend time in prayer for all that will take place on Sunday morning. Pray for your pastor as he is finishing his sermon preparation. Pray for the musicians as they lead the musical praises of God. Pray for those who will read Scripture and lead in prayer. And pray for those who will gather, that all might gather with whole heart and mind seeking the Lord.
- Go to bed on time. You know the weakness of your flesh, and how sitting still for an extended period of time (such as a sermon) can provide an excellent opportunity to doze off if you are not well-rested. So make it a priority to get plenty of sleep on Saturday night. Figure out how much sleep you need, what time you need to get up on Sunday morning, and then what time you need to go to bed to get the needful amount of sleep. Make this a priority in your family–parents of teenagers especially have the opportunity to teach their children the importance of corporate worship by exhorting them not to stay out late with friends on Saturdays. “It is a terrible thing to teach children that worship is so optional that it doesn’t matter if you are exhausted when you come.”
3. Make a special, concerted effort to show grace to your family on Sunday morning. How many times have we heard (or experienced!) the typical Sunday morning story of the family that wakes up quarreling, drives to church quarreling, and then gets out of the family van at church with the happiest, most pleasant demeanor imaginable–all the while still fuming at each other in their hearts. This is no condition to be in when it comes time to meet your God. Set a tone of love, grace, and forbearance in your home so that you are free from the distractions of grumbling and quarreling on Sunday morning.
4. Come with a meek, teachable spirit. As we saw in James 1:21, the proper way to receive the Word is with meekness. Skepticism, prideful self-assurance, and superiority have no place when it comes to approaching God. Humble yourself before God, and He will exalt you at the proper time; approach Him haughtily, and He will cut you down.
5. Enter the worship place with quiet, eager expectation. Even though there is nothing sacred about the place where we worship, our worship itself is sacred–so when you arrive at the place where corporate worship will happen, let it be a cue to you to quiet your heart before God and to “focus your mind’s attention and your heart’s affection on God.” And if you are worried about having the chance to fellowship with fellow believers, or to greet visitors, keep this in mind: “We will not be an unfriendly church if we are aggressive in our pursuit of God during the prelude and aggressive in our pursuit of visitors [and each other] during the postlude.”
6. Engage with your whole being. Many of us tend toward either emotion without truth or truth without emotion. Stated another way, this means that we are either “head” people or “heart” people. But when it comes to the worship of God, both head and heart must be involved. We must “think earnestly about what is prayed and sung and preached.” And we must feel deeply the significance of the same. We must not allow ourselves to sing or hear mindlessly or heartlessly. “I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.” (1 Cor. 14:15) And in addition to all of this, we show with our bodies how engaged we are in our heads and hearts. Our facial expressions, our posture, our uplifted hands or bowed heads, and our full-throated singing–all of these show our whole-being engagement in worshiping God together.
So when it comes time to get ready for this Sunday’s gathering, I hope and pray your attitude will be that of eager expectation, of the sort that leads you to thoroughly prepare your mind and heart and body for worshiping God together with His people.
Worship as response
October 7, 2009 | Comments Off
I’m currently reading the book Christ Centered Worship by Bryan Chapell. The central point of the book is that the Gospel should form not only the content but also the structure of our corporate worship. This excerpt is from a section titled “The Soul of Worship,” in which Chapell drives home the point that in all our debating about what our worship services should look like, the central consideration must be the Gospel, not personal preference or cultural relevance or propriety or excellence or anything else.
Worship primarily driven by concerns for propriety and acceptance feeds pride and burdens hearts. This is the inevitable consequence of making anything but the grace of the gospel the soul of our worship. If our worship is not an expression of redemptive truths, it inevitably drifts from being a response to God’s saving acts. Instead, the worship itself begins to be perceived as saving acts generated by us–moving us to sacerdotal or cultic attitudes. By re-presenting the gospel we remind ourselves that our worship is a response to God’s grace, not an infusion or conjuring of it. We are blessed by the reality of his presence but we do not create it. The responses we offer in worship are only enabled by the power of the Spirit and are further evidence of God’s grace, not the cause of it.
We must grasp this in order to maintain unity in our corporate worship, and, more importantly, in order to worship rightly. We worship God because of and through the Gospel, and the Gospel will be the driving force behind our gatherings–not any particular hymn, or song, or affect, or prayer, or style, or doctrine–outside of the Gospel of Christ.
Thoughts from WorshipGod 09 part 3
August 25, 2009 | Comments Off
In my usual fashion of inconsistency, I have missed an entire week of blogging. But I pick up where I left off–with the second session of the WorshipGod conference, in which John Piper preached once more, this time on The Heart of Worship. Again, his message came straight from the heart of his theology, namely that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”
The focus is on the heart because of what Jesus says in Matthew 15:8, quoting Isaiah 29:13–”This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Lipservice (or any sort of external action) without the animation of a right heart results in vain worship.
In addition, the New Testament de-externalizes worship, placing the focus squarely on the heart–where the Old Testament fills entire books with instructions for every detail of the worship of God, right down to the threads and the colors of the threads, the New Testament is stunningly silent as to the external forms of worship. The focus is not even on a posture or a certain act; it lies entirely in the heart.
So the central question Piper posed in this message was, “What experience of the heart brings glory to God?” Answer: Being satisfied with God. We see this demonstrated in Paul’s life and theology in Philippians 1:19-21 and 3:7-8. Christ is praised in death as Paul prizes Him above life; and Christ is praised in life as Paul prizes Him above life. All things in life and death can be for the praise of Christ if our hearts are so oriented that He is our supreme joy through all of life and death.
Remember that God’s goal in the Gospel is to shine in our hearts to enable them to see the light of the knowledge of His glory in the face of Christ (2 Cor. 4:4-6). So our goal in responding to the Gospel–and in worshiping God for and through the Gospel–should be to be satisfied in Him who is the end of the Gospel.
This has several implications for our lives.
1)The pursuit of joy is not optional. The pursuit of joy equals the pursuit of Christ, and we pursue Christ to be satisfied–to rejoice–in Him, which magnifies Him. We come to Him not to give Him something but to get something–namely, Himself. Deer panting for water do not come to give but to get.
2)Worship must be radically God-centered. If the pursuit of satisfaction in God is central, then God is central.
3)Worship is protected as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Worship is delighting in and seeking after God, not as a means to getting something else but simply for the satisfaction of getting God. As soon as we try to think of delight in God as a means to get something else, we expose our true delight and desire in other things–which constitutes idolatry.
4)This explains why all of life is worship–not just corporate gatherings. All of life should express the heart condition of being satisfied in God. Our bodies will be living sacrifices, and our actions will be spiritual acts of worship, when our hearts are satisfied in Christ.
So the goal of our corporate gatherings is to renew our satisfaction in God. We come to see Him–to see the light of His glory in the face of Christ. Any other pursuit is vain, and it is idolatry.
Thoughts from a fellow WorshipGod 09 attender
August 14, 2009 | Comments Off
Zach Nielsen, a fellow church musician and a blogger I read (and to whom I’ve linked a few times here), writes some significant and helpful thoughts gleaned from his time at the WorshipGod conference. His main point:
If a majority of the songs that we sing are more weighted towards how I feel about God or my response to God, it may tend to produce false affections that have no enduring value. Think about it like this. When I tell my wife I love her, I have a backdrop of 11 years of experience of living life with her that colors my deep affection for her. Pondering all the ways that she has loved me, served me, and blessed me makes my statement, “I love you” have significant depth and meaning. Telling her, “I love you” about fifty times on our first date (while being extremely creepy) would be hallow, shallow, and rather meaningless. The depth of my love for her is informed by the content of our past shared experience and the ways she has loved me so well.
In the same way, in our worship gatherings, our time of singing should start with reflection on who he has revealed himself to be in the scriptures and in Jesus and also what he has done through all of redemptive history. With this backdrop of his greatness, compassion, mercy and love in view, we can fix our minds upon these glorious truths. How could we keep from responding with joy, thanks, and heartfelt gratitude?
This falls right in line with what we’re trying to do here at FCC. We want to focus on the reality of who God is and what He has done for us in Christ–to celebrate these realities, to revel in them, and to respond to them in adoration and service to our God.
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