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Is your worship three-dimensional?

David Esau

One of the crises facing the church today is a crisis of worship. We live in an age of unprecedented change, prompting many people to cling to what they hope will be an island of stability in the sea of change: the church. In a sense, the church needs to be that stabilizing force in the whitewater of life. But the stabilizing force comes not by simply resisting change but by understanding and responding to it.

We live in turbulent times, in worship as in so many things. Different people understand worship differently, and have different expectations and needs in worship. During such times of crisis, transition and change, we need to rethink the basics, to rethink what we are doing and why.


What is worship? A biblical overview

Churchgoers today regularly express dissatisfaction and confess that they are uncertain about the meaning and purpose of what is commonly called worship. Many are defensive about their traditions because they cannot see the need for significant change. Others wander from church to church, looking for the particular style that appeals to them. Above all, what seems to be lacking in congregational life and in books on worship is a biblical understanding of worship. What, after all, does the Bible mean by “worship”, and how does it relate to other important aspects of the Christian life?

When we open the Bible, we discover that “worship” is far bigger and broader than what many of us have come to believe. In everyday speech, Christian worship is usually identified with certain public religious activities, such as going to church, singing songs, saying prayers, listening to sermons and participating in the Lord’s Supper.

One way that we reinforce this idea of worship is by the language we use when we describe what we do on Sunday mornings as our “worship service” and when we refer to the building we gather in as “God’s house”. What we are doing in both cases is adopting the Old Testament imagery of the Temple and applying it to our current setting. For example, in the Old Testament Temple, two altars were prominent features, one for animal sacrifices and the other for incense. Today, we leave out the animal sacrifices and speak of bringing “a sacrifice of praise” to our worship services. We leave out the incense and focus on the offering of public prayers that the rising incense was intended to symbolize. Like the Temple worshippers of old, we gather at a special building so we can focus on attributing worth to our God.

The problem with this common understanding of worship is that it does not fully reflect what the New Testament writers meant when they wrote about Christian worship. We have made our understanding of worship far more narrow than the New Testament does. We err in our idea of worship because we have missed the shifts that happened between the Old and New Testaments. The emphasis on worship in the Old Testament was on sacrifices and rituals associated with the Temple. The New Testament, however, focuses on worship as service or ministry to God in the church and in the world. Romans 12:1 illustrates this New Testament emphasis most clearly when it says that worship is primarily about us being “living sacrifices”. Worship occurs not merely in specifically defined places and times, but in the midst of a life of service and ministry. Worship is mission, service to God with one’s whole life. The worship chorus “My Life Is In You, Lord” expresses this in the line: “I will praise You with all of my life”. David Peterson, in his book Engaging With God: A Biblical Theology of Worship, notes, “Jesus’ life was the expression of perfect worship.”

A closer look at the Old Testament reveals that despite the emphasis on worship activities in the Temple, these activities were in fact pointing to the New Testament emphasis on worship as a life orientation or total relationship with the true and living God. Obedience to God in religious activities was to go hand in hand with obedience in matters of everyday life. The test of authentic worship is how we live the rest of the week. This can be seen most clearly in the words of the Old Testament prophets through which God told the people to put an end to religious rituals that were not reflective of their weekly activities:

“Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22). “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to Me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations – I cannot bear your evil assemblies. Your New Moon festivals 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 in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:13-17; note also Jeremiah 7:1-26; Hosea 6:6; Amos 5:21-24; Micah 6:6-8).

Why gather for corporate worship?

If what I am saying about worship is true, we need to come back to the why question. If worship is primarily service to God with one’s whole life, then why do we gather as a church on Sunday mornings? The answer to that question is found in 1 Corinthians 11-14, the most complete description of worship we have in the New Testament. The primary answer that Paul gives to the why question of the church’s corporate gatherings is “so that the church may be edified . . . built up . . . [and] strengthen[ed] (1 Corinthians 14:5,12,26).

We gather in order to scatter. Our daily obedient service to God in everyday life is built up by our regular weekly small and large group gatherings as the people of God. We meet in homes and in the church building to focus on God and to build one another up for our worship through service in daily life. I call this three-dimensional worship because it engages God (an upward focus), one another (an inward focus on edifying God’s people) and the world (an outward focus). Worship is what we as Christ’s body do both when we are gathered and when we are scattered.

When the church scatters

So what does this understanding of worship mean for us? One aspect that Paul underlines in 1 Corinthians 12 is that if we are going to build up the people who gather together in our church, we must meet a diversity of needs. The spiritual body building exercises we engage in on Sunday mornings must be diverse because the people who gather together as Christ’s Body are diverse and the needs we bring are diverse.

At the beginning of this article, I referred to the challenge of the rapid pace of change we experience today. We also face the profound reality of diversity. To nurture and build up a diverse church, we need to embrace the diversity of gifts and abilities that God has provided to the church (1 Corinthians 12, Colossians 3:16).

If we take the church’s corporate nature and needs seriously, then we will find the need for variety and balance in our corporate worship times. This will mean that we not merely tolerate various forms of worship, but learn to actually appreciate them. After all, won’t worship be diverse in heaven? One of the exercises we did at our church’s annual general meeting to foster an appreciation for this was to divide into small groups during our worship elder’s report and spend 5-to-10 minutes sharing a memorable worship experience from the past year and why we were impacted by it. One of the things that came out in that sharing time was how many different ways God worked at building up His Body in our times of corporate worship.

Three-dimensional worship

Practically speaking, how can we experience worship that is three-dimensional? Here are some suggestions.

Worship must be God-centred. By far the most significant factor in my ability to worship God is the attitude that I bring to our time of corporate worship. As one writer put it, “When the heart is set upon God, true worship will not depend upon outward stimulus, it will be in constant progress.” The Psalmist said that he “rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD’ ” (Psalm 122:1). Do we rejoice at the prospect of gathering with God’s people to worship? That is a question we ought to ask ourselves on a regular basis. I find that reflecting on certain scriptural images can also help keep us God-centred in our worship. In the book of Revelation, for example, we are given a clear picture of heavenly worship where the people of God are gathered around God’s throne and focused on the Heavenly King, praising Him for both who He is and what He has done. As we gather in God’s presence, we should find that our lives are drawn away from the powers and compulsions of this world (see Psalm 73:16-17) and reoriented around “the one who sits on the throne” (Revelation 4). Worship must be people-sensitive. Those who regularly measure the value of what takes place in church only in terms of its impact on their own spiritual growth and development need to recover the New Testament emphasis on the horizontal dimension of worship – coming prepared to attend to the needs and relational health of the community gathered for worship. Prayer and praise cannot be purely private, God-directed activities when others are present. Indeed, as we discover throughout the Bible, the vertical and horizontal dimensions of worship are intimately linked. The Old Testament example of Eli’s prayer for Hannah in 1 Samuel 1 resonates with the morning I arrived at church dressed up on the outside but broken on the inside. On that particular morning, I was able to leave as Hannah did (“no longer downcast”) because someone was sensitive to something I had said and obedient to the Spirit’s inner prompting to come alongside and pray for me. That is an example of the kind of people-sensitive worship Paul had in mind and that the early church practised. (See Acts 2:42-47 for more examples of how to be people-sensitive.) Passages such as Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 are further illustrations of this, where even “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” are understood to function both as expressions of faith and thankfulness to God, and as instruction and admonition to one another. Practically speaking, if we are to use our songs for both of these functions, it is imperative that the congregation be able to hear and be heard by one another. This also means that the words we sing should be seen both as praise to God and as a prayer for others who may be battling with illness or other problems and finding it hard to sing songs such as “For the Lord is good”. Worship should be Spirit-driven. The Holy Spirit is by His very nature focused on God’s mission in the world. It was in the context of the community gathered for worship on Pentecost that the early believers found themselves filled with the power of the Spirit to be Jesus’ witnesses (Acts 1:8; 2:1-13). It was in the context of a worship service in Antioch that Barnabas and Saul found themselves being called out and equipped to spread the gospel (Acts 13:1-3). I also find that inspiring corporate worship spills out into the week. Often I find songs coming to mind mid-week. Sometimes it’s a skit the youth did, the Scripture reading or a prayer time that I carry with me into the week. This “overflow” power of worship was illustrated for me some time ago. I had been preaching a series called “In the Wilderness School” and had arranged for one of the couples in our church to share their own “wilderness experience” on my Sunday off. Though I had been away that Sunday, everyone I bumped into from my church that week had been so impacted by their story that they had to tell me about it and its impact on their life. That is three-dimensional worship!

David Esau is senior pastor of Cedar Park Church in Delta, B.C.

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Last modified April 18, 2002.

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