Part 1 in a series, The Reformation of Worship

In Holy Scripture, the corporate worship of God’s people, worship on the Lord’s Day in the Lord’s House, is the defining center and the great engine of the life of faith.

Without denying or minimizing the importance of private devotion, the Bible lays unmistakable emphasis on the priority of the church’s worship together.

It devotes much more space to the regulation of that worship. The corruption and reformation of corporate worship is the principle means by which the spiritual health of God’s people is measured. The devout prize it above all other things (Ps 27:4; 84:10). As a rule, there is more of the presence, manifestation, and blessing of God in it than in either private worship (Ps. 63:1-2; 73:17) or family worship (Ps. 87:1-2). It continued to be the center of Christian life in the new epoch (Acts 2:46-47), and it is the corporate worship of God’s people that most nearly approximates the worship of heaven—for, so far as the Scripture describes it, all the worship of the saints in heaven is corporate.

Throughout the ages, the worship of God’s people together, especially the high worship of the Lord’s Day, has conveyed either life or death to the hearts of God’s people. To a far greater degree than most Christians realize, their spiritual health, vitality, and fruitfulness depends mightily on the church’s worship of God being what it ought to be and its reformation according to the Scripture, the gospel, and the practice of the best and holiest eras of Christian history. 

With that conviction and to the end of seeking such reformation and the blessing of it for God’s people we have thought long and hard about our worship at Faith Presbyterian Church and will continue to do so. We have made many changes over the years and will make more as careful study and reflection lead us to recognize in what other ways our worship together may be purified, made more biblical, and brought into closer conformity to the best traditions of the church. 

In this series of articles, I intend to consider Christian worship as a whole and in its parts, to describe the principles that govern our worship at Faith and to explain the changes we have made over the years. I offer all of this in hopes of helping others join us in deepening our understanding of—and our sense of meaningful participation in—corporate worship, and of enlarging our expectations when we come to the house of God on the Lord’s Day.

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Liturgy

Many evangelical Christians associate the word “liturgy” with Episcopalian and Roman Catholic churches. It suggests to them a highly structured, formal, and probably lifeless ritual. But the truth is, every church has a liturgy. 

The liturgy is simply the order of things in a worship service. If a church only sings a hymn, takes an offering, offers a prayer, and hears a sermon—it has a liturgy. Too often the difference between “liturgical” churches and “non-liturgical” churches is simply that liturgical churches have thought carefully about their worship services and non-liturgical churches haven’t.

The Bible does not give us a liturgy precisely. Even the OT sacrificial services, portions of which are described in detail, are not described from beginning to end. But that does not mean that we are to attach little or no importance to what things should be done in Lord’s Day worship and in what order. By direct instruction and commandment, by illustration, and by implication, the Bible teaches us that the church’s worship should begin with a call to worship, should contain hymns, prayers, offerings, the reading and preaching of God’s Word, and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and should conclude with a benediction. Certain of the actions in this worship are reserved to ministers and there is considerable freedom in the arrangement of others (e.g. both choir and congregation sang in the worship service of the temple; both ministers and people prayed in the worship service of the church in Corinth).  

More than that, the particular order of events itself conveys meaning in worship.  Order is everything in life. Sex before marriage is the order of death; sex in marriage is the order of life. The difference can be life and death but the only thing that has changed is the order in which things are done. In Lev. 1:3-9 there is a scrupulous attention to the order of events in sacrificial worship. It is one religion, paganism, if the worshipper killed the animal and then put his hands on its head. It is another religion, Christianity, if the worshipper put his hands on the animal’s head and then killed it. The acts are the same, only the order is different. As Paul often made clear in his letters, it is legalism if ethics (God’s law and our obedience to it) come first and then salvation. It is Christianity if salvation comes first and then ethics. And so his letters display that order: the exposition of God’s work in saving us through Christ from sin and death (Rom. 1-11; Eph. 1-3; Col. 1-2) followed by a “therefore” and his exposition of the Christian life (Rom. 12-15; Eph. 4-6; Col. 3-4). We must obey God’s law, but it matters mightily whether that obedience is put before or after our salvation, that is, whether we obey in order to be saved or because we have been saved!

(It is because of the powerful way in which the order of events conveys the meaning of those events that in the history of Christian worship there have been many arguments over the order in which things should be done in a worship service. For example, should the reading of God’s law come before or after the confession of sin? The Lutherans said before, the Reformed said after.)

Our worship at Faith Presbyterian Church follows a definite order. It is the order of the gospel and, for that reason, we hope that it instills in us and in our children a gospel instinct and an in-depth understanding. Our liturgy takes its cue from the order of Isaiah’s encounter with God in Isaiah 6:1-9. 

• After a call to worship (a liturgical element taken from other texts and many psalms),

• God is set before us in his holiness in the form of a hymn, like the “Sanctus” the angels sang (v.3). 

• That sight of God leads to the recognition of our sin and need of forgiveness which we express in a prayer of confession (v. 5). 

• There follows the absolution or the assurance of pardon (vv. 6-7) which we follow, further, with

• A confession of our faith in God our Savior and Christ’s atonement (a hymn to Christ, a creedal statement, etc.). 

• Then follows in our service a set of biblical elements all of which, in different ways, amount to our response to God’s grace and our saying to Him, “Here we are, send us!” (v.8): The reading of God’s law, offerings, and petitionary prayer.

• Then comes the preaching and hearing of God’s Word with the intention to believe and obey it. 

• That is followed by the sacrament, that signifies and seals the whole of the gospel that has been recapitulated in our worship, both God’s gracious gift and our response of faith and love. 

• The whole is concluded with the benediction in the words that God appointed to be used by his ministers to bless his people (Num. 6:22-27; 2 Cor. 13:14).

The gospel logic of this service is sufficiently obvious that our service is very like the worship services of mainstream Christianity from the earliest days until the present. It is very like the service, for example, that John Calvin developed for the church in Geneva in the days of the Reformation. In this way, with this liturgy, we go over the sacred ground of the gospel and of our relationship with God by his grace every Lord’s Day. We not only hear about the gospel, we actually practice it and embrace it for ourselves all over again.

Someone has said, “The main thing in life is to keep the main thing in life the main thing in life.” Properly ordered worship, offered to God from the heart and with the heart, is one of the most important means God has given us to do just that.