ELEMENTS OF WORSHIP

 

Elements of Worship

There was a well-known preacher of a previous generation named A.W. Tozer who wrote a slender pamphlet titled Worship:The Missing Jewel of the Evangelical Church. Below are a few quotations from that book regarding the elements which go into true worship of God. There is also a full-length book on that same subject and with a similar title, Worship: Recovering the Missing Jewel by Allen and Borror. I would recommend it for those who wish to go into the subject in more detail.

But I would like to stick to a few comments by Tozer, who begins introducing the subject with a few general thoughts:

    “Worship is a moral imperative.” He references Luke 19:37-40 in regard to that statement.

    “We have almost everything, but there's one thing that the churches, even the gospel churches do not have: that is the ability to worship.”

    “It's an attitude, a state of mind, a sustained act, subject to degrees of perfection and intensity.”

    “...worship is capable of running from the very simple to the most intense and sublime.”

    “If there is one terrible disease in the Church of Christ, it is that we do not see God as great as He is. We're too familiar with God.”

Regarding that last statement, I remember feeling highly uncomfortable in church singing the old hymn “In the Garden” with its lyrics:

“I come to the garden alone
while the dew is still on the roses,
and the voice I hear falling on my ear,
the Son of God discloses.
Refrain:
And he walks with me, and he talks with me,
and he tells me I am his own;
and the joy we share as we tarry there,
none other has ever known.”

I had always assumed it had been written by some overly sentimental, repressed old maid until I found out that the author was in fact a man. At that point, it felt downright creepy to be singing those words. In any case, the hymn certainly does not portray the sublime and perfect God of the whole universe or His Son, but instead an intimate romantic lover.

Of course, there is always an equal but opposite fault present in the Church, and that is often found in the high churches – denominations coming straight out of the Reformation who could be often characterized as “the frozen chosen” to use a favorite phrase of a friend of mine who considered himself one of them.

Getting back to Tozer, he next sets out the necessary elements he feels need to be present in worship:

Boundless Confidence

“You cannot worship a Being you cannot trust. Confidence is necessary to respect, and respect is necessary to worship. Worship rises or falls in any church altogether depending upon the attitude we take toward God, whether we see God big or whether we see Him little. Most of us see God too small...You can't make God big, But you can see Him big.”

In that regard, I highly recommend a little book written in the 1960's by J. B. Phillips titled appropriately Your God Is Too Small. He exposes many of the mistaken and woefully inadequate conceptions people have about the nature of God. And such misconceptions were rife in the pagan world for millennia in their stories of deities who had totally flawed personalities and could be easily tricked by mere mortals.

Such misconceptions are alive and well today in the “Name It, Claim It” and Prosperity Gospel schools of preachers who show their parishioners the techniques they can use in order to get God to do their bidding. One such budding preacher was in a Sunday school class I attended. And he even taught us that if you can find the proper verse in the Bible that contains an appropriate promise, simply claim it for your own and God has no choice in the matter but to give you whatever you desire.

Admiration

As Tozer goes one to say, “Man is better qualified to appreciate God than any other creature because he was made in His image and is the only creature who was...The God of modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much within the constitution...He's a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much one of us...The God of the modern evangelical isn't a God I could have much respect for.”

At one church I attended and taught Sunday school at for years, I only heard a preacher once point out the obvious by warning that we had better not become so in love with our “perfect doctrine” and “perfect method of church leadership” that we leave no room for God to come along and interfere with it. Unfortunately, I saw no indication that the eldership of that congregation ever paid any attention to that warning in subsequent years.

Fascination

Tozer defines this as being “captivated and charmed and entranced. Excited, not with how big you're getting or how big the offering was. Not with how many people came out to church. But entranced with who God is...” I have honestly seen very little of this element in any church I have attended over the years, and actually it appears that most church leaders, at least outside the pulpit, would be more than a little upset if God came down and brought a sudden end to all their worldly plans and ambitions for their congregation.

We each have our own way of being fascinated by God's work. For some it is found in the way He has guided and superintended their lives over the years, and for others it is found in the contemplation of the wonders of nature. My personal fascination is primarily with the perfect manner in which His Word, the Bible, is constructed.

Adoration

Again, quoting Tozer, he explains this means “to love God with all the power within us. To love God with fear and wonder and yearning and awe. To yearn for God with great yearning, and to love Him to a point where it is both painful and delightful...I think God is disappointed because we make Him to be no more than a source of what we want. Even our Lord Jesus is presented too often much as 'Someone who will meet your need.'...Well, He is that indeed; but ah, He's infinitely more than that.”

Conclusion

Each of us is constituted differently with a different make-up in terms of the three aspects of personality: intellect, emotion, and will. Therefore I find it interesting that to a certain extent the various branches of Christianity tend to appeal more to one or another of those three. To grossly oversimplify, we might say that the Pentecostal wing has a somewhat greater attraction for the emotional believer; the liberal churches stresses the importance of the will in terms of doing good works; and the High Churches stress the intellectual aspect in terms of teaching and maintaining perfect doctrine and appealing to those who hold to a proper reverence for God and His ordinances.