Category Archives: Worship

Features of Reformed Worship

Posted on by
Reply
  • God-Centered

Worship is the expression of praise, glory, thanks, honor, submission and devotion and is to be given to God alone. All else is idolatry. Therefore, Reformed worship is intentionally God-ward, celebrating all that He is and all that He has done in creation and redemption. Worship is not about our feelings or ‘worship experience’ and therefore is not devised according to what will attract or satisfy the sinner. God alone is our target audience in worship. It is for God,about God, and focused solely upon God. We recognize that if God is pleased it does not matter who is displeased, and if He is displeased, it does not matter who is pleased.

  • Triune in Orientation

God has revealed Himself in creation and especially in the Bible. Biblical worship recognizes we worship the one true God who is eternally existent in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All of our worship is shaped by this revelation.

  • Covenantal

Biblical worship is based upon a covenant relationship. Not everyone can legitimately call Him ‘Father’ but only those in covenant relationship with Him. We also recognize that this relationship is made possible only by the sin bearing, atoning cross-work of the Lord Jesus Christ in His death for us, and the perfect obedience and righteousness He achieved for us in His life. Based on the sure foundation of Scripture alone, justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.  

  • Regulated by Scripture

God determines how He will be worshiped and He has not left us to guess what that involves. The Regulative Principle of Worship acknowledges that we are to do only those things in worship which God has commanded in His Word. We are not free to innovate, revise, or supplement the elements of worship commanded by God in Scripture. We are to be careful to do according to the mandates laid out for us.

  • Sober, Yet Joyful

The Bible makes it clear that worshiping God is a highly serious matter and yet Christians ought to do so with reverent and overflowing joy. Worship is not a concert for man’s enjoyment. Preaching is not a public speech to dispense information or to entertain. Preaching is a central component of our worship. God addresses His people through the reading and proclamation of His word, and His people respond in faith, thanksgiving, and praise.

  • A Holy Dialogue

Worship in the Bible was a dialogue between God and His covenant people, and so should it be in churches today. Our service begins with God addressing His gathered people in His solemn call to worship. Hearing His call, we respond with joy.God reveals His holy Law and we recognize our guilt and confess our sins. God, through the preacher, makes proclamation of His word, and we believe and renew our commitment to Him. He serves His people a family, covenant meal at His Table and we believe His gospel promise and feast on Him. As we turn from sin and trust the finished and perfect work of the perfect Savior alone, He assures us of His full pardon. We respond with thanksgiving and praise. Our worship ends with God addressing His children with words of benediction. This dialogue between God and His assembled covenant people is the rhythm of worship in Scripture, and it shapes the structure of our liturgy every Lord’s Day.

John Calvin’s Views on Worship

Posted on by
Reply

Original source here.

A review of a lecture by Dr. Robert Godfrey

In Taylors, South Carolina on March 11, 2OO3, at the Greenville Seminary Conference on Worship, Robert Godfrey, President of Westminster Theological Seminary in California, discussed John Calvin’s views on worship. Dr. Godfrey, who is also a church history professor as well as a minister in the United Reformed Churches of North America, began by reading Psalm 2 and by addressing common misapprehensions regarding Calvin. People think of him, stated Dr. Godfrey, as a “joyless killjoy, ruining people’s lives in Geneva.” People have had this sort of negative reaction to Calvin since the l6th century when, ‘His enemies circulated the rumour that his wife had died of boredom”

Nearly as many misapprehensions abound about Calvin among Calvinists because we think of him as more of a theologian than as a pastor. We must not, Dr. Godfrey said, divorce Calvin the theologian from Calvin the pastor, one concerned not only with the truth but with the application and ministration of that truth.

The great danger the church faces today is the separation of our theology from our practice or the viewing of the Bible as somehow separate from theology. Calvin believed that there was no theology that did not come out of the Bible, but that out of the Bible came a theology of coherence. It is distressing, President Godfrey said, when people dismiss the theology of the Reformation as being not adequately Biblical. Concerned with being “mean spirited” in his reply, Godfrey responded that most people today who would make such a charge do not know one tenth as much about the Bible as John Calvin or Martin Luther did.

Calvin did not separate his theology from the Bible or from his pastoring. He was an extraordinary preacher, a devoted pastor, a catechist who wrote his own catechism, a visitor of the sick, a counsellor, and one deeply concerned about missions, ecumenism, church polity, and church discipline.

He was, according to the seminary president, a pastor in every area of life, and he was a pastor in the matter of the careful thought he gave to worship.

In his treatise, “On the Necessity of Reforming the Church,” a document to be presented by the leaders of the Protestant movement to the Emperor Charles V, Calvin wrote.

“If it be inquired, then, by what things chiefly; the Christian religion has a standing existence amongst us, and maintains its truth, it will be found that the following two not only occupy the principal place, but comprehend under them all the other parts, and consequently the whole substance of Christianity, viz., a knowledge, first, of the mode in which God is duly worshipped; and, secondly, of the source from which salvation is to be obtained.”

The speaker stated that Calvin’s ranking worship as first in importance over salvation is due to one very important fact, namely that salvation is a means to an end, with worship being the end itself: We are saved, Dr. Godfrey said to worship God, now and eternally, with our public worship being a foretaste of the heavenly worship that awaits us. So, worship was not peripheral to John Calvin but fundamental. Continue reading →

The Church’s Worship

Posted on by
Reply

The Life of the Church Series: Sermon Three

(Transcription of audio file started at 05:18 and stopped at 26:40. Headings added by Christian Library.)

Original source here.

Reading of Hebrews 2:10-18; Hebrews 8:1-2; Hebrews 12:18-24.

If you go into a room full of Christians today and the conversation turns to the particular church that you attend, one of the almost inevitable questions you will be asked is: What is the worship style in your church? And it may not be long in the conversation before what the journals and the magazines today call “worship wars” break out. Christians today have developed an entire vocabulary to describe the way they worship God.

And the fact of the matter is that the worship wars of the 21st century are not the first worship wars the Christian Church has ever faced or endured. Indeed, in a sense, for the very souls and Christian lives of these early Christians to whom the letter to the Hebrews was first written, in their souls there was a kind of worship war going on. They found themselves embattled. Many of them had very literally been disinherited. Some of them had been imprisoned for the sake of the gospel. And because it looks as though their background was a Jewish background – with the worship of the temple, the great ritual of the temple occasions, the great feasts, the thronging crowds – one of the things that tempted them to go back was the glory days of worshipping together in the temple. Now they were worshipping together in one another’s homes in the biggest room they could find, or perhaps somewhere down by the riverside. And there were voices that said, “Oh, if you would just come back to the glory days of the worship style that you used to have!”

And one of the things the author of the letter to the Hebrews says over and over and over again to these Hebrew Christians is this: “Do not be mistaken by appearances. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, because the one glory and the one Person that was absent from the Jerusalem temple, with all its ritual and all its splendour and all the different ways in which it pointed forwards to the future, was the One who transforms Christian worship – the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.” Continue reading →