Giving God the First Word

Robert Nordling of the Calvin Institute of Worship once told the story of taking his five-year-old son Jackson to a young friend’s birthday party. Jackson is all dressed up and brimming with excitement and enthusiasm as he rushes into his friends’ house to join in the festivities. However, when his father comes to pick him up after the party, Jackson comes out looking dejected and depressed. His father asks, “Jackson, what’s the matter? Didn’t you enjoy the party?” Jackson responds with a terse, “No.” So his father asks,” But you were looking forward to this party so much! Why didn’t you have fun?” And Jackson answers, “I didn’t get any presents!!” To which Dad can only reply, “But Jackson, it wasn’t your party!”

The lesson Nordling draws from this real-life parable is all too apparent and convicting. The worship service is, so to speak, God’s party, not ours. And we come primarily, not to receive (though we certainly do that also), but to give to God the presents of our faith, our gratitude, our praises, our confessions, the commitments of our hearts.

So how do we look at our gathering for worship? Who’s in the driver’s seat? Whose party is it anyway? And how should that affect how we approach worship, and how we begin worship?

Worship is indeed God’s “party.” He is simultaneously the Inviter, the Host, and the Guest of Honor. Coming to God in worship is God’s idea, after all, not ours.

In fact, we need to recognize that all of our movement toward God occurs because God acts first. After all, it is God
•    who created us;
•    who made us with the ability to respond to Him as creatures to their Creator.
•    who has revealed Himself to us through the pages of Scripture, through creation, and through his Son, Jesus Christ.
•    who has given us salvation through Christ and drawn us into relationship with Himself.

God initiates

God always initiates; we can only respond. And our primary response is worship. In worship we respond in praise to our God for the glory and greatness that He has revealed to us; we respond in thanksgiving to our God for the saving grace that He has lavished upon us; we respond in wonder and delight to our God for the relationship that He has initiated with us.

Even our response to God depends not on our own strength but on the Holy Spirit working in us. “Are you so foolish?” Paul asks the Galatian believers. “After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by human effort?” (Gal. 3:3). The obvious answer to Paul’s rhetorical question is, Of course not! We are saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, and there is no way that we are then going to be perfected through our own effort! (Paul indicates that it would be “foolish” for the Galatians to even entertain that thought!) As believers are in continual need of the Spirit’s help to grow in righteousness and, indeed, to do anything that is truly pleasing to God . . . including worship him.

God invites

Our worship is an obedient response to God’s invitation. We may invoke God to bless our worship and to make his presence known. But in a greater sense we cannot invite God to be present in our worship; He never left—we did! Rather it is God who invites us to worship. It is his Word which tells us to “Come, let us worship and bow down. . . .” God has revealed himself to us and has established a relationship with us by his power and grace. God delights in that relationship and desires (and deserves) our worship as a means of affirming and strengthening our relationship with him. “Worship the Lord with gladness,” says the psalmist, “come before Him with joyful songs” (Ps. 100:2). Coming to God is not an option for Christians but rather our obedient response to God’s gracious invitation.

The work of Christ has opened the way for us into God’s presence, as the book of Hebrews makes clear (Heb. 4:16; 7:19, 25). 10:19-22 exhort us to take full advantage of that free access to the Father which Christ has made available: by all means, the writer urges us, “Let us draw near” with confi-dence, assurance and faith. Our living High Priest has not only made the way clear through his blood (10:19-20), but indeed actively leads us (10:21) into fellowship with God.

Hearing again God’s call to worship

Those truths have profound implications for how we “come to God in worship.” Many worship services begin with either some innocuous words of greeting by the worship leader—focused on the weather or on the size of the crowd or on the pleasure the leader has in seeing the people gathered—or else the service launches right into songs written about or to God.

But the question is, who deserves the first word in worship? And that takes us back to question of whose gathering it is. The fact is, we have been invited by God himself into his holy presence. He has taken the initiative for that access to be possible through the work of his Son. God is the host of this gathering, the subject and the object of our worship. God is the main event, our purpose for gathering.

God doesn’t “show up,” at worship, as the popular catchphrase goes. Although the phrase is obviously intended to communicate a vivid sense of fellowship with God, let’s be careful about suggesting both that God was somewhere else, and that we did something to bring Him close! As Steve Fry puts it:

    I’m concerned that some of us have perceived worship as a spiritual talisman we employ to get God to     show up, rather than seeing worship as a simple response to His grace. . . . If we perceive worship as a     mechanism that triggers His presence, we’ll inadvertently focus on the act of worship itself instead of     the One we are worshiping—worshiping worship if you will.
    (“Unity, Worship, and the Presence of God,” Discipleship Journal [Nov./Dec. 2002])

Since God is the Inviter, the Host, and the Guest of Honor, shouldn’t we hear first from him? Isn’t it infinitely appropriate to hear a Word of invitation and welcome and testimony from God himself as the one who has made our gathering both possible and meaningful? Let us hear first from God through his Word, and then respond to Him with our songs, prayers, and words of praise.

A biblical pattern

In this way our worship will reflect the biblical pattern of all God’s dealings with humanity. This pattern, seen throughout Scripture, can be represented thus:

      

            ↓               ↑
            Revelation     Response

(See an extended development of this theme in Worship Notes 1.5, May 2006.) God always takes the first step to reveal Himself and to initiate a relationship with his creatures; our part is always that of responding to his first move. In our worship, it is ultimately true that, until God first speaks to us, we really have nothing to say to him. We cannot respond appropriately until we have heard something to respond to!

And this pattern should not only be reflected at the beginning of the service, but throughout as an alternating rhythm of revelation and response, so that our worship be-comes a true dialogue between God and his people . (An interesting exercise is to take an outline of your worship service and put an
arrow up or down besides each element to indicate whether in that part of the service God is speaking to us or we are responding to him; horizontal arrows can also indicate those times when we are speaking to each other for our mutual edification.)

The Word can provide a God-centered, divinely focused means of transitioning be-tween songs or parts of the service. Consider the difference between these two examples of transitions:
•    “And now we’re going to sing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ Let’s all sing out!”
or:
•    “In the words of Isaiah 6:3, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory!’” (followed by singing “Holy, Holy, Holy”)
Which is a more powerful lead-in and is more likely to enhance the flow of worship and the worshipers’ concentration?

We need to hear from God more than God needs to hear from us! And while God deserves and desires and relishes the praises of his people, how much more fervent and heartfelt those praises will be when they are fueled by God’s own self-revelation.

Worship is a dialogue, a conversation between God and his people. What a blessing to be able to express our adoration and praise to him! But oh, how we need to make sure we are listening to God and not doing all of the talking! And let’s honor Him and his gracious invitation by letting Him have the first word:
“that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 15:5-6)

© 2008 Reformed Worship
(by Ron Man; published in Number 87 [March 2008]:38-39, under the title “Whose Gathering Is It Anyway?” Used by permission.)

Comments

[susan]

Very interesting and helpful post. Sometimes in a worship service I find myself feeling critical of the music or some other aspect of worship. I have to remind myself that I'm not the audience -- the question isn't whether I'm pleased and entertained, but whether the Lord is pleased. I suspect he appreciates a wider range of styles than I do.

[Jon william Johnson]

thank you so much for this post, I have been really working on this exact feeling in the "sunday morning experience" mostly the part about using scripture(Gods word) instead of OUR words sometihng I will most deffinatly use next sunday! this is a great Blog, very usefull!!

blessings

Jon

[Bobby Gilles]

The exercise with the up-and-down arrows is a wonderful idea.

Great post!