From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Who is qualified to worship God? What is the central element of Biblical worship?

As we conclude this series, let me summarize what we have seen, and then emphasize two final points.

1. In order to worship God properly, we must understand His supreme holiness.
2. In order to worship God properly, we must understand our own wretched sinfulness.
3. In order to be qualified to worship God, we must understand that it is His grace in Christ alone that bridges the great gulf between His absolute holiness and our absolute sinfulness. Salvation in Christ is the bedrock and prerequisite of genuine worship; only those who have been saved by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit are qualified to worship the triune God.
4. We must understand that God is the exclusive audience in worship.
5. We must understand that we cannot worship God any way we please, and that God clearly tells us in His Word how He is to be worshipped.
6. We must understand that the way the church conducts itself in worship (as in all things) must represent a day-and-night contrast with the world; we are to be imitators of Christ, not of the world.
7. We must understand that the church is ordained of God to be the pillar and mainstay of the truth, and that Biblical worship is a vital part of the church's high calling as guardian of the truth.
8. We must understand the place of worship within the Great Commission. Worship is part of the edification component of the Great Commission; thus by definition it can only be offered to God by saved people. Therefore, the purpose of worship is not to attract the unsaved to the church on their terms, but for the redeemed to glorify their Lord on His terms because of what He has done for them, and to be built up in the most holy faith through the preaching of the Word.

The Act of the Regenerate

In our time, an essential element of Biblical worship is severely neglected, to the peril of the church: Biblical worship must be the act of those who have been made alive by the Holy Spirit through the proclamation of the Gospel, which is Christ's first stated purpose for His church. In John chapter four, Jesus said that God is seeking a redeemed people to be His true worshippers:

The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such [a people] to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. (John 4:23-24)

For this very reason, the so-called worship of much of present-day Evangelicalism is an offense to God. The prayer that God must first hear from any person is this: "God be merciful to me a sinner."

Large segments of the nominally Evangelical church - including many of its pastors and leaders - have never truly prayed that prayer. They have never been regenerated by God the Holy Spirit. If they were truly regenerated, they would be preaching the truth and obeying the truth. They would be leading their people to worship God in truth. Instead, they are preaching and promoting Satan's lies.

Here is the great tragedy of counterfeit worship: By making the church a comfortable place for the unsaved, the church is never showing them the depth of their sin problem by confronting them with the claims of God's holy law. Therefore, the church is never presenting the Gospel remedy in all its power. The result is that postmodern Evangelicalism is rapidly turning many once-sound churches into gatherings increasingly populated and even dominated by unbelievers. Such people cannot, by Jesus' own definition, worship God "in spirit and in truth."

An Act Instructive in Sound Doctrine

This brings us to a final point: Worship itself must be instructive in sound doctrine. It must declare God's eternality and holiness; our creaturehood and sinfulness; God the Father's approachability only through His Son, Jesus Christ; our access to the very throne of God purchased by Christ with His own blood; and, the necessity of the sanctification of every blood-bought saint of God as a citizen no longer of this world, but of the world to come.

This is the reason that preaching is central to worship. Clearly, true worship is the act of those who have been instructed in Christ's commands (Matthew 28:20).

In a lecture delivered to seminary students in the late 1960s, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones frankly discussed the vital primacy of preaching in the worship of the church:

I would lay it down as a basic proposition that the primary task of the Church is not to educate man, is not to heal him physically or psychologically, it is not to make him happy. I will go further; it is not even to make him good. These are things that accompany salvation; and when the Church performs her true task she does coincidentally educate men and give them knowledge and information, she does bring them happiness, she does make them good and better than they were.

But my point is that those are not her primary objectives. Her primary purpose is not any of these; it is rather to put man into the right relationship with God, to reconcile man to God. This really does need to be emphasized at the present time, because this, it seems to me, is the essence of the modern fallacy. It has come into the Church and it is influencing the thinking of many in the Church - this notion that the business of the Church is to make people happy, or to integrate their lives, or to relieve their circumstances and improve their conditions. My whole case is that to do that is just to palliate the symptoms, to give temporary ease, and that it does not get beyond that....

...the moment you begin to turn from preaching to these other expedients you will find yourself undergoing a constant series of changes. One of the advantages of being old is that you have experience, so when something new comes up, and you see people getting very excited about it, you happen to be in the position of being able to remember a similar excitement perhaps forty years ago. And so one has seen fashions and vogues and stunts coming one after another in the Church. Each one creates great excitement and enthusiasm and is loudly advertised as the thing that is going to fill the churches, the thing that is going to solve the problem. They have said that about every single one of them. But in a few years they have forgotten all about it, and another stunt comes along, or another new idea; somebody has hit upon the one thing needful or he has a psychological understanding of modern man. Here is the thing, and everybody rushes after it; but soon it wanes and disappears and something else takes its place.

This is, surely, a very sad and regrettable state for the Christian Church to be in, that like the world she should exhibit these constant changes of fashion. In that state she lacks the stability and the solidity and the continuing message that has ever been the glory of the Christian Church....

These proposals that we should preach less, and do various other things more, are of course not new at all. People seem to think that all this is quite new, and that it is the hallmark of modernity to decry or to depreciate preaching, and to put your emphasis on these other things. The simple answer to that is that there is nothing new about it.

The blindness and darkness of man's heart and mind...can only be exposed to light by the work of preaching. Understanding the central issues of theology - the nature of God, the nature of man, the nature of sin, the nature of salvation - involves above all the impartation of knowledge. That knowledge must be Biblical knowledge, and the vehicle for imparting this knowledge is expository preaching.

The church alone is qualified to proclaim these truths, to impart this knowledge, and the preacher in particular is the one whose office is Biblically designed to do it. Other human agencies, political and social, can spend their time dealing with the symptoms of man's sin problem. But only the church and the preacher can proclaim the cause and the cure. If the preacher and the church spend all or most of their time only dealing with symptoms and little or no time proclaiming the cure, they are doing worse than second best. As far as eternity is concerned, as far as Christ's Great Commission is concerned, they are doing nothing at all. At its core, the abandonment of the primacy of preaching is an insult to God.¹

The people of God must heed such counsel, and our worship must reflect it. May God weigh our spirits and find that His truth alone permeates and motivates our worship. May He find us to have hearts that are fixed upon Him, and not tainted by the evil influences of the world.

References:

1. From Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1971), pages 26-35.

bw0020

Copyright 1998-2024

TeachingtheWord Ministriesmmmmmwww.teachingtheword.org

All rights reserved. This article may be reproduced in its entirety only,
for non-commercial purposes, provided that this copyright notice is included.

We also suggest that you include a direct hyperlink to this article
for the convenience of your readers.