Worship and the Glory of God

V. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

In closing I would like to come back to our ministries of music and worship and draw a couple of
practical implications for those ministries from the big themes we have been discussing of the glory
of God and worship.

A. Reordering Our Priorities

The first has to do with the pettiness of many of our squabbles over matters of taste and style in
worship. "Worship wars" (as Marva Dawn and others have termed these conflicts) are a scandal
and a travesty to the body of Christ!

If God is looking above else for faces turned heavenwards towards Him in adoration and worship,
how it must grieve Him when to instead see us facing off against one another in our provincialism,
our territorialism, and our narrow-mindedness. We acknowledge that worship is primarily for God;
but then we assume that our particular taste in music just happens to exactly coincide with God's
taste in music!

The unity of the body of Christ is such a precious thing (see Ephes. 4:1-6); yet today issues of
worship and music are causing more disunity in the body than anything else! If there is anywhere
that the unity of the body needs to be lived out in the life of a local congregation, it's in corporate
worship. How is God's glory served by disharmony among His children? How can we bring a
sacrifice of praise to God with our hands defiled from mudslinging? How can we love Him with all
our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and still worry like Martha about so many little things?

If worship is our highest calling and our ultimate response to God's work in our lives, then it should
overshadow all earthly and human considerations as we find ourselves "lost in wonder, love, and
praise," as Charles Wesley put it. And the trivial matters on which we expend so much energy
should pale in significance as we bask the warmth of God's splendor and beauty.

We must earnestly seek the Lord in a dry and weary land where there is no water, to see His
power and His glory (Psalm 63:1-2). And we must invite our people to join us in that journey, to
thirst and yearn for Him as well, to drink deeply of His glory and be satisfied. Only a grander vision
of God will overcome our nearsightedness, and cause worship wars to cease and be no more.

B. To Be Worshipers

The second implication is the fairly obvious assertion that if we are going to lead and facilitate and
prompt worship, we must be worshipers ourselves. Obviously we cannot lead people where we
have not been ourselves. As Piper wrote, "we can't commend what we don't cherish." (LNBG,
p.11) If we want to be about building more and better worshipers for God's glory, we must be
worshipers ourselves.

This implication also applies to our congregations: if our congregations are going to join together for
meaningful times of corporate worship, our people must first become worshipers themselves and
come together on Sundays out of a week of worshiping and walking with God.

1. What others have said

a. C.S. Lewis wrote about the intensity of the desire, even appetite for God which one finds
expressed in the Psalms. David and the other Psalmists spoke of thirsting for God, hungering for
Him, yearning for Him; they said things like "A day in Your courts is better than a thousand
outside?" (Psalm 84:10), and "Whom have I in heaven but You?" (Psalm 73:25)

We need to cultivate, or ask God to give us, that kind of appetite for God.

It is not a given. Chuck Swindoll wrote a little book recently entitled Intimacy with the Almighty.
In the introduction to the book he describes how in his own ministry he realized that he allowed
busyness for God to supplant an intimate walk with God. Then he goes on in the book to relate
some of the ways in which he was able to develop that kind of walk.

2. What Paul said

The NT teaching is that all of life is to be a response of worship to God. Paul wrote in Romans
12:1:

"Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God [harking back to all of
the tremendous truths about salvation which Paul has dealt with in chapters
1-11], to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God,
which is your spiritual [or "fitting"] service of worship."

Our appropriate response to becoming a recipient of the "mercies of God" and of the "riches of
His grace" (Ephes. 1:7) is to regularly offer ourselves to Him as an act of love and worship. The
soul which has tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and has learned to cherish His glory, will be
ready to present himself in this way.

3. Stone Soup

Perhaps you are familiar with the children's story entitled Stone Soup.

In this story, three soldiers are returning home from the war. They approach a village, but the
villagers, seeing them coming, scurry to hide all of their food, because there is a shortage and they
do not want to have to share with outsiders. They tell the soldiers that they have no food to give
them.

The soldiers, being rather shrewd fellows, tell the villagers that they will make some stone soup, and
ask simply for a large kettle filled with water. They choose several large, round stones and add
them to the kettle, with the curious villagers looking on. Then the soldiers remark, "This soup should
be excellent; but if we only had a couple of potatoes, it would be even better. One of the villagers
says, "I think I might have a few to spare," and goes off to retrieve some potatoes from her stash.
The soldiers add these to the pot, taste the soup, and say: "Wonderful! Now if we just had a few
carrots..." and someone runs off and gets some. The same happens with onions, and cabbage, and
so forth, until a hearty soup has been prepared. The soldiers invite the villagers to join with them in
their feast, and the villagers are amazed that such a marvelous soup could be made with just
stones!

In our corporate worship, our rituals, hymns, anthems, even our sermons are like those stones--
they are nothing that particularly impresses God: they're just a framework, a skeleton.

What makes it special and makes it worship is when our members come and add to the
pot from what's been stored up in their hearts during a week of worshiping and walking with God,
a week of loving God and cherishing and savoring His glory-- then we are ready to worship God
together. When our corporate adoration is the overflow of many hearts rejoicing in the goodness
and greatness of God, which the Spirit can then energize and transform into something far more
than the sum of the parts-- then our congregational worship will truly be a nourishing and
invigorating feast for the people of God, and-- more importantly-- a fragrant aroma to the God of
glory, who delights in the worship of His people.