Holy Trinity Presbyterian Church

A Reformed View of Worship

by Dr. Robert L. Reymond

     We should worship God in a way that befits his revealed perfections, that is, with reverence and awe (Heb 12:28). William Temple’s definition of worship is one of the best I have ever read:

     "To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God."

     Now this is hardly what goes on in the average church today. I would state categorically that, in my opinion, the intrusion into the contemporary church of the superficial, flippant worship styles that abound everywhere today, with their applause for the church’s “performers” and their sappy contemporary music, is not and should never have been regarded as simply a matter of “cultural preference.” Rather, as a wholesale infusion of the popular culture into the church it is a symptom of what A. W. Tozer describes in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, as

     "the loss of the concept of [the] majesty [of God] from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be unworthy of thinking, worshiping men….

     The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians [today] is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.

     With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability…to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience…life in the Spirit. The words, “Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper in this…century.[1]

     This is a dreadfully serious situation due to the fact that idolatry does not consist merely in bowing in adoration before man-made images. The essence of idolatry, as Tozer reminds us, is “the entertainment of [any] thoughts about God [as true] that are not worthy of him.” [2] And the major cause of this “loss” and its resultant idolatry is the failure of preachers to preach on the biblical attributes of God, thereby allowing their people by their silence to acquire and entertain thoughts about God that the Bible does not endorse. They seem to have forgotten that the primary purpose of worship is to turn the mind of the worshiper toward God.

     So we must ask ourselves whether our worship services and our church music do this today? Do they direct our thoughts to the true God? Do they encourage us to praise him for who he is? Not if the preacher does not inform his people about God’s perfections. Do they evoke gratitude for his mighty acts of deliverance in Jesus Christ? Not if the preacher does not proclaim the cross. Is our church music the best music? Not if the preacher does not apply what Paul said—that “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right,

whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think on these things” (Phil 4:8)—to the church’s music. Paul’s admonition would suggest that we should use the best music we can find with which to worship God, for he is worthy of our best.

     I believe the debate that rages in the church today over worship styles—whether worship should be “traditional” or “contemporary,” “liturgical” or “non-liturgical,” formal or “revivalistic”—would disappear overnight if the church at large recovered “her once lofty concept” of the majesty of the living God. Were that to occur, many worship leaders would know great shamefacedness because of their shallow, self-willed, irreverent styles of worship. For the triune God of Holy Scripture is an absolutely sovereign, transcendently holy, infinitely righteous, incomprehensible Deity—perfections that ought to inspire awe, humility, and reverence in the creature.