Theology of Worship: It's not what we give to God but what God gives to us
If you can believe it, worship is greatly misunderstood in most of our churches today. Amid a wave of exuberance rolling through the American megachurch today, with preachers regaling tales of joy, hope, and prosperity, and with bands of “contemporary” Christians singing how it’s not about them but about how they want their listeners to “Shout to the Lord,” it’s clear that the true understanding of what it means to worship, that is to pay “reverent homage and honor” to God, is being drowned. Reverent homage, one modern definition of worship, is not what you can give to God, what you will give for God, what you must give to God. We don’t necessarily find adoration, honor, and reverence, in a sea of raised hands that bend and sway in the breezes of deceitful schemes telling us that if we don’t worship this way, we aren’t filled with the spirit. True worship isn’t found the moment you sense some kind of inner divining rod tingling the spine.
If you can believe it, in the most basic sense, worship is nothing more than believing, and to believe is worship. What greater reverence and honor is there beyond recognizing who Christ really is, where He really is, and that the promises of forgiveness He has given us through the Word are really true and everlasting? What greater tragedy is there when preachers and singer/songwriters neglect to share the gospel that Christ has come to us, and continues to come to us, forgiving us, renewing us? God isn’t a six-armed blue deity seeking your love offering. He isn’t pleased by bloody sacrifices of bulls, goats, and doves, and the ensuing smell of burning flesh. God isn’t in the wind, the water, and the dirt; nor is he a golden calf or pot-bellied man. God isn’t impersonal or unjust.
No, God is the way and truth revealed in the light of life, the Word that became flesh in Jesus, who poured out the Holy Spirit in Word, Water, Bread, and Wine. And this is worship: To believe that the creator and author of life loved us so much that He humbled himself to take the beatings we deserve, submitted himself to our punishment -- a stoning on the cross -- so that He could defeat the eternal death man deserves for the corruption we created by denying the author of life itself. To believe in the ultimate grace is a miracle in and of itself, thus making it true worship, in the most basic sense as we rejoice in the sacrifice and sacraments of God.
True worship is not something we do per se; although we will do per se. True worship is something God does for us and through us to bring us closer to him, and we respond to His grace with a reverent adoration that bears abundant fruit our neighbors receive from Him through us. In true worship, we don’t believe in God on our own accord. Instead, He calls us to believe as we hear the proclamation of His gospel in our worship, where He proclaims His inspired and inerrant Word, which then heals our eternal soul before burying our sin in His grave. This Word, His Word, rises beyond the grave to eternal life with the Father, and in hearing it, He breaks forth to His glory, regaling all of our senses in the ultimate experience that allows us to actually see and hear and taste and touch and perceive that we truly are no longer be separated from Him, as we once were, by sin. Our Lord is there on the altar and in the fount, when we believe. In belief, we hear our sins are forgiven, again. In worship, we discover we have faith, another gift from God that calls to us from His Word. It is through faith that God wants to worshipped, because through faith, His faith spreads like a mustard plant.
Coming forth from this true worship is what we find in the Divine Service of the traditional Lutheran church today. While worship is predominantly God’s work to us, in the Divine Service, with its sacraments, man does respond with reverent and praise-filled rites and ceremonies because God continues to proclaim the Word and to deliver His life changing absolution, body, blood and water.
This service is alive like no other service. Today’s large contemporary services are often lacking in Word and gospel, leaving minions starving for God’s truth. But in the Divine Service, where the sacraments that He gave us to share with each other are faithfully proclaimed, the king who came to serve turns our worship on our head by setting aside mercy in favor of grace. We discover God’s grace in abundance in today’s Divine Service from the very beginning with absolution, which is followed quickly by our jubilant response to him, as He assures us of peace and salvation in and through our prayers and recitations of Scripture. God then continues to His service to us as we deliver His gospel, sacraments, and forgiveness, enriching our belief.
We do respond to all of God’s work in the liturgy, which shouldn’t be confused with The Liturgy. The latter narrowly describes God’s work to us; the former encompasses the latter along with our own rites and ceremonies that serve as part of our reverent response. But still all of our work is really His work as His Spirit works in us. In our liturgy, we may respond to God’s service by prostrating ourselves or simply kneeling, bowing, in ritual and ceremonies. We also may respond with offers of our first-fruit sacrifices offered in faith. But even here, the God who is with us serves us through His sacrifices. While we do get to offer our forgiveness to each other in the sharing of the eucharist, God still comes to us, through the means of grace.
Through our rites, we recount God’s service by structuring them the way He taught us, separating law and gospel to glorify His name. Through our ceremonies, we aim to harmonize and connect our lives with each other, developing patterns that help us recognize who God is and what He expects of us in our relationship with Him and with each other. We should be careful not to confuse these patterns with what is truly, good, right, and salutary as we develop and conduct our ceremonies, and remember that Scripture speaks against adiaphora in our services. Christ freed us from Levitical practices of the law that mandate how, when, where we should worship for good reason, to unite us with Him who serves.
In the end, we must recognize that the theology of worship is really a science of recognizing and studying how God comes to us, forgiving us, renewing us, enabling us to believe, to forgive and be forgiven, to nourish and be nourished and bearing His rich fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that enrich our belief.