We continue our journey through the core values of our worship this week with the ninth value, Engaging the whole person. As I keep saying, you may be surprised that none of the things the Elders have adopted as core values of our worship are necessarily music-oriented. Actually none of them deal with elements at all, but rather with the essentials of worship. They are more the why than the what of worship, if you will.
When you even begin to consider the why of worship all you have to do is consider the beauty of God which we focused on last week. Worship is the epitome of other-centeredness, partly because it should consume the entire worshipper in the act of adoration. Archbishop William Temple said it this way.
Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of the will to his purpose-and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for …self-centeredness.
The way we are choosing to put it is, worship is… engaging the whole person. There are any number of Scriptures that speak to this value, but here are the ones we have adopted for inclusion in the philosophical document:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Mark 12:30
So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind. If you are praising God with your spirit, how can one who finds himself among those who do not understand say "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since he does not know what you are saying? I Corinthians 14:15-16
There is more to a person than what can be seen, but the intentions of those unseen things, heart, soul, mind, conscience, imagination, will are demonstrated through that which is seen, the body. When we worship, scripture clearly shows that both the seen and the unseen parts are to be engaged or active.
So what about the unseen portion in particular. In contemporary thought, the soul of a person is often regarded as the combination of the intellect, the emotions and the will. These are to be engaged in worship as we can see in the first passage, but what about the spirit. As Paul shows us in the second passage, there is something else at work here.
Worship is more than singing songs, and praying prayers, it is engaging the spirit. Worship really begins in the spirit of a person, as they are invigorated and brought to life by God’s Holy Spirit. This is made clear in the lack of understanding mentioned by Paul. Not everyone understands this aspect of worship. I am not talking about tongues in particular, but the activity of the Spirit in general. It simply will not be understood apart from the work of the Spirit in the spirit of a person. [This distinction is not easily understood, but clearly spoken of in Job 7:11, Isaiah 26:9, 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12.]
Let us worship God with our spirit, soul and body.
Stay tuned…NEXT WEEK…Worship is…Recognizing the priesthood and ministry of all believers.
In Christ,
Pastor Scott
No comments:
Post a Comment