I would suggest, in light of this, that our Sunday morning worship should look somewhat different than it currently looks. Let me add a key verse to the mix:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind (Matt. 22:37).We have already seen that worship is an ongoing act, a life of obedience, and that God wants purity in our worship. We have seen that it is dangerous to exceed the prescribed range of acceptable worship. But here I wish to examine Sunday’s worship. These two verses add an additional concept. In these verses we see something that is rarely found as “part of worship” in churches today – “the mind”.
In most worship services, we have boiled down our “worship” to that section called “singing”. Furthermore, that singing is almost exclusively aimed at encouraging believers to feel warmly toward God. That is, an enthusiastic leadership will try to impart some measure of their excitement about God to a hopefully receptive congregation. In so doing, we bypass the Scriptures I’ve included above as well as the human being himself. Allow me to explain.
When we set out to encourage a warm feeling about God, we are, in essence, encouraging worship from the emotional center. While it is certainly a good thing to feel warmly toward God, when that warmth is our aim, we have missed the mark. In the human being, emotions are the direct result of perception. Perception is how we think about things. Therefore, when we attempt to encourage an emotional response without engaging the brain, we are getting the cart before the horse. Furthermore, we are offering shallow worship. We are not loving God with all our minds – we aren’t using them at all. And if we do impart that warm feeling toward God, how long can it last without being sustained by our perception? It is like allowing someone to stand close to your fire. They get warm, but when they leave they have no sustained warmth. If, on the other hand, we could engage the perceptions, then they would have the opportunity to “self-generate” (so to speak) that warmth toward God. To reacquire that warmth, it would merely require returning to those thoughts.
Music itself is a powerful tool. It has the capacity to bypass the brain and impact the emotions. It is useful in the proper hands, but dangerous when handled carelessly. In one case it is supportive. In the other, it is manipulative. What does God say about how we are to use music?
Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God (Col. 3:16).Here we have Paul’s idea of the proper use of music: as a teaching tool. He offers music in three forms. Psalms are songs sung from the Psalms themselves. We have many of these in today’s contemporary music. Hymns are praise songs written by Christians. It appears, for instance, that Paul himself imbeds such songs in Scripture (Eph. 5:14; 1 Tim. 3:16; 2 Tim. 2:11 14). Spiritual songs are joyous pieces on sacred subjects. We have all of these available to us, but rarely do we find them being used to teach and admonish. Paul says we are to sing “with thankfulness in your hearts to God”. Does that not require that we have something about which to be thankful?
Of what then does the worship service consist? It must consist of purified people whose minds are being engaged through “the word of Christ” and through song. The announcements, the offering, the singing, the preaching, all are part of, not ancillary to worship. Worship begins before we start the service by setting ourselves right before God. The songs must engage the mind before we can expect them to engage the emotions. They must teach before they inspire emotions. The preaching, the imparting of the Word of Christ, is integral to worship. Giving to the work of the Lord is part of prostrating ourselves before our Master.
On a personal note, while I find modern praise songs to have admirable qualities in reaching the emotions, they are typically lacking in content that engage the mind. I am not implying in the least that these songs have no use in the worship service. I am merely suggesting that they be the response to the prior engagement of the mind with the glory of God. Modern songs tend to be repetitious and simple, while older songs tend to have more theological depth. When we exclude these from our worship, as is the habit of so many today, we are cutting ourselves off from some of the finest teaching tools in song available to us today.
(The other disturbing trend is this. Try looking in a topical index of contemporary worship music for such things as "the Cross" or "the Blood of Christ". You will find it completely lacking. Look in a hymnal, and you'll find lots of such themes. If the Gospel is "Christ and Him crucified", why this disturbing trend away from mentioning the Cross?)
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