What do you think about when you hear the word “drive”? You might think about driving a car. If so, then you are already driving down the right road for this discussion. When you drive, you go from one place to another. You go on a journey. After you get there you might stay there or go back to where you came from. This is a good illustration for a worship service. What drives a worship service? Where is a worship service going? What journey is it on? What story is it a part of? One way to determine what drives a service is to look at what its purpose is. Some of the options for the purpose of worship are: expression to God, evangelism of the lost, entering in to experience God, education of the believer and/or the edification of the body of Christ. While most of these options are a part of worship, all but one of them falls short as the core driving purpose of worship.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 14 verse 26, Paul drives home the one main purpose of worship as the edification of the Body of Christ. One of the problems that Paul was addressing by making this point was that the Corinthian believers were caught up in individual expression of worship to God. This is a common problem that the modern church has as well. In past years, there have been many worship debates about what is the best way to express ourselves in worship to God. As we all know, the “best way to worship” is a relative debate based on a person’s preferences of relating to God. More specifically, the preferences usually revolve around styles of music. It is important to keep Paul’s purpose for worship in mind in this modern day expression battle. The purpose of worship is not personal or intimate expression from us to God. The purpose of worship is to edify the collective body of Christ. This means we all need to take a step back from the mentality that the way we choose to express ourselves to God should be the driving force behind worship. This wrong mentality has produced the contemporary vs. traditional approach to worship. This approach lets personal expression drive worship to the point that the Body of Christ is separated into groups of people who worship God with their preferred style of music in different kinds of services. This contradicts the whole purpose of worship, which is to edify the body together in Christ, not separate it.
Paul more specifically unpacks this point in verses 24-25 of chapter 14 when he debunks evangelism as the purpose of worship. In these verses, Paul tells the Corinthians that the way to reach out to the lost is for them to let unbelievers watch them worship, and when they see genuine worship happening the unbelievers will then fall on their knees to worship the one true God. There is no hint of creatively putting together worship services in ways that makes evangelism drive worship.
Another popular purpose of worship that needs to be rejected is the idea that worship is about entering in to experience God. This view often seeks to experience heaven on earth by making the exchange of praise to God from man the driving of worship. The thought is that since heaven is ultimately a place where we sit around and forever sing to God, then the goal for worship is to get a taste of what that will be like as we sing and connect with God in worship now. The order of worship and the words that the leaders use to lead worshipers become highly focused on experiencing this connection or feeling. One of many problems with this approach is that it is based on a wrong view of heaven. Biblically speaking, heaven is a place where we reign with Christ and serve Him and His nation forever. It is a place that will probably involve singing to Him, but it will also involve things like serving Him with our hands and eating food. The glory of this is that work and food will be without the affects of sin and the curse. Ultimately, heaven is a physical place and this means that we will no longer need to relate to God in a spiritual way. In heaven we will have a real body and real eyes to relate to a real God in a face-to-face way without having to have faith. Hopefully we can recognize that trying to mesh the future face-to-face experience of heaven with our current faith-based experience of worship has some concerns that keep it from being the driving force behind worship. It is also important to note that the phrase “experiencing God” is not found in scripture and is not a biblical driving force for worship. In fact, the book of Colossians is devoted to teaching a lifestyle of worship that is contrary to this “entering in” approach to worship. The Colossians were faced with a problem of seeking to “enter in” and experience the God of Gnosticism. Their goal was to reach God during a highly emotional feeling or connection with a hidden spiritual world. This whole mentality is the exact opposite of what the totality of the bible teaches about worship. The bible proclaims that worship is about God’s kingdom coming to the physical earth through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Another subtle but important thing to keep in mind here is that Paul calls us to edify the body of Christ in worship, not educate it. Edification and education are not the same thing. Education is about learning knowledge. Edification is about building our whole being up in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit. This involves knowledge, but learning knowledge is not the driving force of edification. In 1 Corinthians 13:2, Paul points out that knowledge is nothing without love. Edification involves developing the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. This is done with more than knowledge. It takes more than mental knowledge to develop virtues and character that lead to Christlike attitudes and behavior. One important thing about edification is that it’s concerned with what is being caught, not just what is being taught. It takes into account what is being modeled in worship. The modeling aspect of worship is key to developing habits in worshipers that happen not only in worship services, but in the life of worshipers on an everyday basis. This is key to Paul’s thrust of making edification the driving force to worship. Paul develops this further in many places in scripture. One of these places is in chapter 9 of 1 Corinthians when he compares following Christ to the habits of a runner and a boxer. For Paul, living a lifestyle of worship involved the development of a consistent regimen of worship practices that take discipline in order to be successful. A marathon runner does not just run a race, he has to train. A boxer does not just box, he trains his whole body to work for the goal of winning. We too need to develop habits that train us in worship if we are going to succeed in living a life of worship. How can we do this?
The most important thing we can do is accept that the edification of the body of Christ is the only driving force to worship worth pursuing. While expression to God, evangelism of the lost, entering in to experience God, and the education of the believer are all a part of worship, they are not the driving force of it. It’s crucial that we see that all of these things are the affects of worship. They do not make worship effective. Edification is the one driving force that is heavily focused on letting the things in a worship service be driven by building up worshipers in effective ways that spill over into their daily habits and practices.
How can we make edification drive worship? If we are driving a car through the order of a worship service where would that car take us? What journey would best edify the local body of Christ?
Since developing habits and practices are key to edification, the car needs to drive worshipers through practices of worship that can be mimicked in their daily lives. This involves having elements of the complete scope of worship, discipleship, and evangelism. How can we do this?
Jesus Christ is the center of the totality of scripture. He is the one person that can be followed who can develop the right habits in our lives. If we are going to edify the body of Christ in the right way, the person of Jesus Christ needs to drive every element of the service. How can we allow Jesus do this? Until we see Jesus face to face, we worship by faith. We worship the person of Jesus that is presented in the scriptures. The whole bible concerns itself with one story that is centered on Jesus. This story is called the gospel, and it involves the following key things.
Jesus created the world perfect and walked with man face to face. Mankind sinned against God and wrecked God’s plan for glory in the world. In order for glory to be restored, there needed to be a perfect person to pay for the damage that man created. No human being is perfect, so Jesus Christ came to the world to die and rose from the grave in order to redeem the world back to God. One day, Christ is coming back to fully redeem the world and His Children to a face-to-face relationship with Him. Until that happens, the best way for us to let Christ be the driving force of worship is to center ourselves around His gospel story. As we do this, we will develop the habits and rhythms of adoration, confession, assurance, thanksgiving, petition, instruction, charge, and blessing. These things happen as we immerse ourselves in the story of Jesus in ways that form our daily rhythms and habits. The result of this is edification.
This is what we seek to do here at WBC as we allow the gospel to drive our worship. We seek to do this in a way that leads us through the whole story of Christ in the order in which we worship. The gospel is not just something to know with our minds or speak with our mouths. It is the way of true worship and the only real true way of life. We seek to point to this in our services so that we are all more fully edified in Christ in our daily lives.
In conclusion, it is true that worship is more than what happens on Sunday, but at the same time worship will never be more than what our services contain. What happens on Sunday forms all the other parts of the Christian life. Therefore a fully developed Christian life depends upon what is included in worship. This is why it’s important to let edification be the driving force of worship. Doing this will allow us to be continually formed by the whole story of the gospel so that our whole life will be more like Christ. As Psalm 115 says, we become what we worship. If we want to be like Christ, we have to worship Him and Him alone.
Psalm 115
Not to us, O Lord, not to us,
But to Your name give glory
Because of Your lovingkindness,
because of Your truth.
2 Why should the nations say,
“Where, now, is their God?”
3 But our God is in the heavens;
He does whatever He pleases.
4 Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of man’s hands.
5 They have mouths, but they cannot speak;
They have eyes, but they cannot see;
6 They have ears, but they cannot hear;
They have noses, but they cannot smell;
7 They have hands, but they cannot feel;
They have feet, but they cannot walk;
They cannot make a sound with their throat.
8 Those who make them will become like them,
Everyone who trusts in them.
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