"O Magnify the Lord with Me"

Therefore, what we do in the “worship service” on Sunday mornings is in fact just a single expression of a life of worship. A church service itself is not worship, only a setting in which worship may occur. But corporate worship is where this series is focused, so what does Scripture say about the worship of the gathered Church? Is Jesus Christ glorified by what we do on Sunday mornings? Are our worship services authentic, biblical worship, or mere entertainment?

What kind of worship does God seek? I’ll tell you first of all the kind of worship God doesn’t want: worship from insincere, disobedient hearts. In Isaiah 1:12-15 the prophet scorches Judah because though they love to worship, they don’t love to obey: “When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood”

In other words, you can sing God’s praises at the top of your voice, you can weep for joy, you can raise your hands in praise, but if you aren’t living in obedience to God, get this: He hates it! If you aren’t living in obedience, the only prayers God wants from you are prayers of repentance.

So first and foremost, our worship must come from sincere, obedient hearts. But beyond that obvious truth, what must characterize our worship if it is to please God? I believe there are three crucial characteristics for such worship: it must be 1) Trinitarian, 2) Gospel-oriented, and 3) Word-saturated.

Our Worship Must Be Trinitarian
We must worship God as he has revealed Himself, the Three-in-One, Triune God. To worship God as anything less is to worship another god entirely. So we worship God as Triune, with an awareness of the distinctive work of each person of the Trinity, giving glory to the Father for the gift of His Son through the Spirit.

First, we give glory to God as Father. We saw earlier that we are to proclaim His excellencies. Our puny minds can’t grasp His greatness, yet we are called to magnify, to exalt, and to praise the Father for all that we can grasp—as He has revealed Himself in His Word.

We praise Him for who He is, as in Psalm 21:13, “Be exalted, O LORD, in your strength! We will sing and praise your power.” And we praise Him for what He has done, as in Psalm 105:2, “Sing to Him, sing praises to Him; tell of all His wondrous works!”

Focusing on what God has done turns our attention to the second Person of the Trinity, giving glory to the Father for the gift of His glorious Son. In fact, we cannot glorify the Father apart from the Son’s atoning work on the cross. When we come to the Son of God as our Savior, He becomes our great High Priest who gave His own life for us, who always lives to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25-26), and who opens a new and living way for us to the Father.

It is in God the Son that the God the Father is seen most clearly. Hebrews 1:3 states, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power.” God has given us the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6), whom all creation will one day worship.

The Son is immeasurably worthy of worship, as Paul shows us in Colossians 1:15-20, a truly astounding picture of Christ who is our Creator, “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…all things were created through him and for him” (verse 16); our Sustainer, “And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (verse 17); and our great Redeemer, “And He is the head of the body, the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross” (verses 18-20).

To worship Jesus as anything less than God Himself is not to worship Him at all.

Finally, Trinitarian worship is empowered by God the Spirit. In worship we give our minds and hearts to God in praise, but we cannot do that apart from the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 2:18 says that through Christ we have access “in the Spirit” to the Father. We worship “by the Spirit” according to Philippians 3:3. More than once we are told to pray in and through the Spirit (Rom. 8:26; Eph. 6:18, Jude 20).

The Holy Spirit is present every time the Church gathers, but His presence isn’t shown primarily by outward signs, it is shown by inward change. When we get a sense of God’s glory, that’s the Spirit at work. When we are convicted of sin, that’s the Spirit at work. When we are encouraged and comforted in the Scriptures, that’s the Spirit at work.

This is exactly what we should expect if we trust God to keep His word, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).So worship that pleases God gives glory to the Father, for the gift of His Son, empowered by the Spirit.

Our Worship Must Be Gospel-Oriented
Worship that pleases God must be Gospel-oriented, but being Gospel-oriented doesn’t mean we preach a salvation message every Sunday. It means making the Gospel the foundation and theme of our worship, doing what David does in Psalm 96:2, “Sing to the LORD, bless His name; tell of His salvation from day to day.”

We “tell of His salvation from day to day” by reminding ourselves what God has done for us. His acts of salvation stretch from the Creation through the Fall, the Flood, the Covenant, the Exodus, the Exile, Return, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the filling and indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The most important, absolutely central message of His salvation is the Gospel, the good news of the atoning death of Christ on the cross for us and His resurrection to new life. God’s mercy and grace to us in the Atonement must be the foundation of all our worship. It is the very “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,” Romans 1:16-17 says, “for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘But the righteous man shall live by faith.’”

By the good news proclaimed in the Gospel, evil hearts are changed, guilty consciences cleansed, fallen men and women are brought to repentance and made new, and the very righteousness of Christ is imputed to us. Reminding ourselves of these things awakens our thanks and praise to God for His incredible blessings to us.

Our Worship Must Be Word-Saturated
Finally, worship that pleases God is Word-saturated. God’s Word is our life and our food, as Jesus said in Matthew 4:4, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Just as it is indispensible to life, so it is indispensible to worship.

That’s why Paul told the Colossian Church, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” (Colossians 3:16) Someone has said “We are what we sing,” so we are careful to make sure that the songs and hymns we sing reflect biblical truth, focused more on who God is than how we feel about  Him.

In my church, we purposely start each service with a call to worship taken directly from Scripture, and we end each service with a benediction taken directly from Scripture. And in between, we give lots of time to reading it, praying it, singing it, and studying it, so that ultimately we will live in submission to it.

That is worship that pleases God. Trinitarian, giving glory to the Father for the gift of His Son, empowered by the Spirit; Gospel-oriented, proclaiming His saving acts thru history, and saturated by His Word from start to finish.

How do we put that kind of worship into practice? What is the role of music and emotion in worship? Those are topics we’ll examine in coming articles.

Tim Schoap is co-pastor of Signal Mountain Bible Church in Signal Mountain, Tenn.

Sources: As the author of Ecclesiastes might have said, “Of the writing of books on worship there is no end,” and I’ve read most of them. I’m indebted to many authors for their serious thinking on biblical worship, particularly John Frame, Don Carson, and Bob Kauflin. To the degree that their thoughts are echoed here, I give full acknowledgement of my indebtedness.