Worship
At the heart of the life of any church is worship. This is not necessarily the “get a guitar and sing ‘My Jesus my Saviour’” type worship, though that is great. Rather, it is living our lives with God at the middle. With our words, our thoughts, our actions and our lives, we put God at the rightful place as Lord of all. We praise him for his power, his goodness, his glory, his wisdom, his holiness and his grace. As the much-quoted William Temple said, ”To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, and to devote the will to the purpose of God.”
“Worship is like the great cheer echoing around a football stadium as the critical goal is scored. Like the roar of a crowd, worship tells us that something has happened which has made a difference to the way things are. And as we listen to the chant, we can tell who scored the goal.” (Chris Cocksworth)
In C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of the children comes upon Aslan, the Christ-figure of the Narnia stories, after a prolonged absence. “Aslan, you’re bigger,” she says. ”That is because you’re older, little one,” answered he. ”Not because you are?” ”I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.” So it is with us and God. This is why the story of Peter walking on the water must end in worship. Worship, in a sense, closes the loop on the whole story. Worship consolidates and expresses the disciples’ new understanding of who Jesus is. (John Ortberg?)
“Worship, in other words, isn’t primarily about singing songs, chanting anthems, getting a warm fuzzy feeling or being overwhelmed by the mystique and mystery of the Eucharist. It’s about how we live our lives. It’s not a case of ‘God turning up’ in our services every Sunday; it’s about us following him out to serve in places where perhaps we’ve never been but he’s never left. So the kind of sung and acted worship we have in our meetings each Sunday is just the tip of the iceberg, and certainly not an end in itself. As James might have said, ‘”Worship” by itself, if it has no works, is dead’” (see James 2:17). (Steve Chalke)
Worship has to be at the heart of the life of every individual Christian and at the heart of the life of the Christian community gathered together. It is the appropriate expression of the relationship into which they have entered as children of their heavenly father. If worship is not the central, abiding passion of Christians, then they are in danger of dethroning God from his rightful place, and putting something else there instead. It may be something that deserves considerable attention – such as a concern for social action or evangelism – but even these should derive from a relationship with God rather than be a substitute for it.
When Iona communities meet each day for morning prayer, their conventional service has an unconventional ending. To be more precise, it has no ending at all. Unlike most worship services, there’s no blessing or benediction…. until the end of the evening service. Instead, community members go about their everyday tasks as if they were a continuation of the worship service – which they are. There’s no hard distinction between worship and work, liturgy and life. Nor should there be.
“The only value of religious services is that they concentrate into an hour or so of public, vocal, congregational activity the devotion of our whole life. If they do not do this, if instead we sing and say things in church which have no corollary in our everyday life outside church, at home and work, they are worse than worthless; their hypocrisy is positively nauseating to God.” (John Stott)
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