We Have It Backwards

It's been a long time since the last post. Two months, in fact. Alas, the busyness of life! But this one is a long one, so feel free to read it in multiple sessions and pretend it's multiple posts, if you like. :)

I've had a sense of unrest in my spirit for some time regarding the state of praise and worship in the modern church. Something has just seemed “wrong.” To be sure, there are pockets of “right,” but at large I've just sensed something “wrong,” I've been trying to put my finger on what exactly the problem is, all the while praying for guidance and revelation. On the local level at my own church we've had issues with things like sound quality, musicianship, preparedness, and just a general air of mediocrity. But it was more than that (I should point out here that much of this has been addressed by a recent change in leadership). There was just a feeling that something was “wrong,” and I couldn't describe it, except to say that it seemed as if the Holy Spirit was simply absent in so much of the praise and worship I was witnessing, just as the Holy Spirit's presence is palpable when things are “right.”

God is faithful, and lately He's been answering the desperate question I've been lifting up to Him for months: What's wrong? The answer? In short, I think we have it backwards.

We've made our times of corporate worship about us, and not about God. We are coming to worship – to church – to get something for ourselves rather than to bring an offering to God.

We do not approach our worship services with a sense of awe and reverence. We casually walk into a building (running late, more often than not) moments away from participating in what should be a sacred event: the Church – the very Bride of Christ – coming together to bring offerings, sacrifices of praise before Him and His Heavenly Father and lay them at the foot of his Throne of Grace – a Throne that, by the way, we can only approach because of and through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And we do it by rote, perhaps even flippantly in some cases.

But A.W. Tozer says in That Incredible Christian that “No one who knows Him intimately can ever be flippant in His presence” (pg. 129). Our times of corporate worship should be times of response to God, but how can we respond to God if we are not experiencing Him intimately? If we don't know Him? Are we encountering God in significant ways during the week so that we come to worship together filled up to the point that our praise offerings overflow in songs of adoration? I think for many of us the answer is “no.” For many of us, encounters with God are all but absent Monday through Saturday, and are lives are indistinguishable from that of anyone else, Christian or no. We've consigned God to 90 minutes on Sunday. And cynical as it may sound, I would not be surprised if He didn't even bother to show up, if that's all we have for Him.

God has been trying to get this through my head for a very long time, I now realize. This conviction that worship is a time of offering that is meant to be a response to God and who He is, what He has done, and what He is doing in our lives. It is a time that is all about God. It is for Him, to Him, and through Him.

At first God was subtle, using lyrics to the praise songs I was drawn to over and over:

• “How can I stand here with You and not be moved by You?” – Lifehouse, Everything
• “How can I keep from singing Your Praise?....I know I am loved by the King/And it makes my heart want to sing” – Chris Tomlin, How Can I keep from Singing
• “I'm coming back to the heart of worship/And it's all about You/All about You, Jesus/I'm sorry, Lord for the thing I've made it/When it's all about You/It's all about You, Jesus.” – Matt Redman, Heart of Worship
• “From the top of the world I will sing/Of the joy that flows from my glorious King” – MercyMe, Beautiful
• “So Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss/And my heart turns violently inside of my chest/I don’t have time to maintain these regrets, When I think about, the way… He loves us!” – John Mark McMillan/David Crowder, How He Loves
• “You make everything glorious/And I am Yours/What does that make me?” – David Crowder, Everything Glorious
• “You reached down and lifted us up/You came running, looking for us/And now there's nothing/And no one beyond Your love/You're the overflow/You're the fountain of my heart” – Chris Tomlin, Let Your Mercy Rain
• “Let me tell you what He/Has done for me/He has done for you/He has done for us/Come and listen to what He's done...” – David Crowder, Come and Listen
• “Oh, You bring life and breath/In You we live and move/That's why I sing!” – Shane&Shane, Yearn
• “If we could see how much You're worth/Your power, Your might, Your endless love/Then surely we would never cease to praise!” – Matt Redman, Let Everything that Has Breath Praise The Lord

Plus dozens of others!

And when the songs were not quite getting the job done, He led me to read some specific books:

• Praise Habit, by David Crowder
• Facedown, by Matt Redman
• The Air I Breathe, by Louie Giglio
• Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
• Exalt Him!, by Terry Howard Wardle

And to cap it all off, I attended Crowder's Fantastical Church Music Conference in Waco, TX earlier this month, and the speakers (Crowder, Giglio, and Redman among them) and workshop moderators would come back to this idea again and again: that we have it wrong. We have it backwards. We've made what should be about Him about us.

Louie Giglio in his book, The Air I Breathe, addresses this concern:

We aren't designed to operate on a weekly worship cycle, but on a moment-by-moment connection of personal worship that's as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe... Most of my life, I thought that you went to church to worship. But now I see that the approach is to go worshiping to church.
Church is a lot better when our gatherings are filled with people who have been pursuing God for six days before they get there. Church as a “refill” or a “tank-up” is a disaster. Corporate worship works best when we arrive with something to offer God. As opposed to only coming to get something for ourselves from God...
Church is supposed to be a celebration of our personal journeys with God since we were last together...
What would happen if we came worshiping to church, filled with an awareness of His presence before we even reached the door...?
Usually no one has given the service a moment's thought until they arrive. We come through the door like we're shopping at the mall. We sit and chat. We wait for someone to guide us before we ever stop and connect with the privilege of it all. (pages 114-117)

The privilege of it all! What a blessing – an undeserved honor – to be able to worship our Heavenly Father! A privilege paid for with the blood of His Son. But we – I – rarely contemplate this before worship. I'm thinking about the chaos in my house trying to get out the door so we could be on time. I'm thinking about the yard work that is waiting for me later that afternoon. We're thinking about the arguments we had with our spouses that morning, or how much of the football game we're going to miss because of this inconvenience called worship.

I have come to realize that to some degree, the frustrations that led me to question what was wrong with our worship were actually symptoms of the very thing that was wrong. I was dissatisfied with my experience during our praise and worship times. It did not measure up to my standards or expectations, nor those of many of my fellow congregants. We were not getting what we wanted out of the services. We weren't “experiencing the presence of God” as we had in the past. I was frustrated.

Notice all of the pronouns in the previous paragraph. “I” appears three times. “Me/my” appears four times. “We/our” appears seven times. My concerns were almost all about myself or “us” collectively, the congregation. And it's not even supposed to be about us! It's all about God! But honestly, did I ever really ask myself if the worship was pleasing to God? Acceptable in His sight? I don't know, perhaps I did. But certainly not much. That was not my primary focus.

Isaac Wardell of Bifrost Arts put it this way speaking recently at Crowder's Fantastical Church Music Conference: “We come to worship full of expectation, looking for a moment of transcendence, and we get disappointed when we don't experience it.” We have become almost hedonistic in our approach to worship, judging its success or failure by how it made us feel, or whether or not we were satisfied or “filled-up.”

Terry Howard Wardle, in his book, Exalt Him!, states similarly:

Those in the pews sit and watch as the person up front performs. They evaluate the service based on what they receive rather than on what they put into the experience...We are a generation of spectators who watch television, sports events – most everything. And this has affected our understanding of the worship service. It has become another place where we watch and where we expect to be entertained (page 15).

Francis Chan, also speaking at Crowder's Conference, said this: “The goal is not that we leave and say 'that was good,' but rather that God would look down from heaven and say, 'that is good!'” Francis went on to share the following words from Amos Chapter 5 wherein Amos, the prophet of God, is delivering God's words of judgment to Israel. Israel had been neglecting and oppressing the poor, taking bribes, tolerating corrupt courts, and generally loving evil more than good. And God had this to say to them through Amos:

I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your assemblies.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.” (Amos 5:21-23, NIV)

As I look back now on the past several months, I see my motives more clearly. But my observations were no less valid, and I think that even had my motives been more rightly aligned, and I had been asking myself if our worship was pleasing to God, I'm not sure what the answer would have been. Because so much of what makes our worship pleasing and acceptable to God is based on what is going on outside of the time of corporate worship. How are we living our lives? If we are not right with God, if the church is not living as the Church should live, ministering to a fallen, hurting world, loving justice and mercy and walking with God in humble obedience (to paraphrase Micah 6:8), then no matter how good our worship is – how polished and prepared – we cannot expect God to accept it or even listen. Woe to us if God were to ever say to us “I cannot stand your assemblies...Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.”

What does all of this say about our perception of God? Because let's be honest, our worship is a direct representation of our view of God. C.S. Lewis said, “Praise is the culmination of our enjoyment of anything.” In other words, if we enjoy it, we'll praise it. Watch any NFL game or rock concert, and you see this truth at work. Do we enjoy God? Are we enjoying him throughout the week, and coming to worship on Sunday (or whenever/wherever you gather to worship) to deliver the culmination of our enjoyment of God up to Him?

In The Air I Breathe, Louie Giglio writes:

When you break it all down, true worship is simply catching sight of the greatness, majesty, glory, and grace of an infinite God.
When God is not greatly praised, it's only because we don't think He's that great of a God. When our worship is small, it's because our concept of God is small. When we offer God little-bitty sacrifices, it's because we've somehow reduced Him in our hearts to a little-bitty God (page 60).

David Crowder, in Praise Habit, writes:

Remember how effortlessly we sang the praises of things we enjoyed? It was so easy and fluid and natural. What if this kind of praise freely leaked from us in delightful response to God? What if life were like that all the time? What if we were so moved by who God is, what He's done, what He will do, that praise, adoration, worship, whatever, continuously careened in our heads and pounded in our souls? What if praise were on the tip of our tongues like we were a loaded weapon in the hands of a trigger-happy meth addict and every moment might just set us off? This is what we will do for eternity. What makes us think our time on earth should be any different? What keeps it from being so? (page 23)

I think what keeps it from being so is that we've turned our worship – our entire spiritual lives – into a spectator sport. We are not participating. We're not experiencing God in our lives and in the lives of others, and so we have nothing to which we can respond. As my Pastor, Kurt Horting of Still Water Community Church in Rowlett, TX, likes to say, “Don't stay on the sidelines! Get in the game!”

But what causes someone to get off the sidelines and into the game? It's one thing to just love the game. But you can love the game and be satisfied watching it on your big screen from the comfort of your couch. Getting on the field and facing down a 280 pound defensive lineman who wants nothing more than to roll over you like a Sherman tank requires that you love something more than just the game. Kids put themselves into the game, take the hits, put in the practice, the sweat, the tears, suffer the injuries, dance in the end zone, and celebrate the victories because they love a coach, or an alma mater, or their parents, or their teammates. Something or someone beyond the game. When you love, respect, and desperately want to please the One you are playing for, the sidelines no longer satisfy.

Those of you who know me know that sports analogies are not my forte. I apologize if that one was a little clumsy! Here's how a better writer than I describes this spectator/participant challenge as it pertains to our worship:

Worship isn't something you watch, contrary to the thinking of many of us who attend church. That may be hard to believe, given that in most churches the rows of seats (or pews) are arranged so that you have the best view of what's happening onstage. If that's not enough, the action is often magnified on the big screens. The lights also point to the platform. And to help you with your viewing pleasure, you're handed a program at the door – a lineup card for what's happening in today's “show,” if you will. After all, it's all put on for your enjoyment, right?
But here's a news flash for you. Worship isn't something you attend, like a movie or a concert. Worship is something you enter into with all your might. Worship is a participation sport in a spectator culture. (Louie Giglio, The Air I Breathe, page 54)

We need to get to know God and experience Him every day, every moment of our lives, so that our times of worship – whether alone or corporate, in our prayer closet, our cars, or gathered in our houses of worship – overflow as we pour out our response to an Almighty God who sacrificed His son so we could enter in to His presence. Matt Redman puts it this way: “God reveals and we respond. God shines, and we reflect.” (Facedown, page 14)

We have it so much better than the Israelites had it! We get to approach God, the Father. We get to come before the Mercy Seat and place our offerings at His feet. For the Hebrew Children, God, while present in their daily lives, was personally out of reach. He dwelt inside the Holy of Holies, which was at the center of the Tabernacle behind a veil, and inaccessible to all except the High Priest, and even he could only enter once a year and only after offering a blood sacrifice.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has provided for us a final atonement for sins, making those who accept Him as Lord and savior holy in God's sight and allowing us to enter into the Holy of Holies – to have a relationship with God the Father directly. The Gospels tell us that when Christ died, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies was torn (Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23), and Hebrews Chapter 10 goes on to say that the very Body of Christ was the veil, and that when the body was broken, the veil was torn, and therefore “we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:20)

But the Israelites had us beat hands-down when it came to understanding that times of corporate worship were to be about, for, and to God – a response offering to all He is, has done, and is doing in our lives. The Song of Ascents is a title given by the Jews to 15 Psalms, 120-134 in our modern Bible. These Psalms were sung by people as they went up to – ascended to - Jerusalem for the three Jewish pilgrim festivals, and by the priests as they would climb the steps to minister at the Temple. The Jews understood the importance of preparing to enter in to worship, of rightly aligning their hearts and thoughts so that they would not profane the sanctity of what was about to take place: a coming close to God. For Christians, who know Jesus Christ as Messiah, it is a time during which Jesus Christ presents his Bride, the Church to His Father, and we respond to all the Father is and has done.

I won't quote all 15 Psalms here, but I encourage you to read them, and read them often. They are songs to God, songs of humbling ourselves before our Maker, acknowledging our need for Him. They are songs about rightly aligning ourselves with our creator and acknowledging that we are the created, and that all that is good comes from God. And they are songs about what separates a people of God from the rest of the world.

This is one of the reasons I miss liturgies in our modern worship services sometimes. I understand the Church's desire for cultural relevance and I've heard church leaders say that for some, the trappings of traditional church can have negative connotations. So we've done away with those trappings in an effort to make people more comfortable in church. But that begs this question: should we be comfortable in church? If we can truly enter in to worship comfortably, haven't we lost a sense of who we are and who God is? God is in Heaven, and we are here on earth. We should be guarding our steps when we go to the house of God (Eccl 5).

And what's more, aren't we kidding ourselves if we think it's the Church's traditions or rituals or the buildings or the décor that have turned people off of church? No, rather I believe it is hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and a lack of love – whether perceived or real – that turn people off of church; or more accurately, turn people off of Christians. The truth is that the Spirit of God is attractive. God is pursuing his people, and everyone in their heart of hearts yearns to be restored to God. If we preach truth with grace in our churches, testify to the redeeming, life-changing power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in and through our lives, and we love others – love EVERYONE – as Christ first loved us, then I believe our sanctuaries will be filled to overflowing with people drawn by God to Himself, hungering for more of what they have only just begun to taste. And they won't care one little bit about the décor or whether or not there is a worship order or choir or whether they are sitting in a pew or chair, or whether the pastor is in a suit or jeans, or even if there's a pipe organ or an kick drum. *gasp*

Traditional liturgies serve a similar purpose as the Song of Ascent. They help prepare our hearts for worship, for responding to God. There are as many different liturgies as there are denominations, but almost all of them begin with a call to worship where we acknowledge God's holiness, followed by a time of confession where we have a chance to prepare ourselves to receive His Word. We hear of our forgiveness and then enter in to a time of response, after we've been reminded Who and what we have to respond to.

For the better part of 1200 years, the Roman Catholic Church was the Christian Church, and one of the most powerful forces in the Western world. This period in church history saw more than its fair share of shameful acts committed in the name of God and His Church. From the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, from the selling of indulgences to the burning of heretics, it was a dark time for the Church.

But there were bright spots as well. This period, especially the latter part, gave the world some of the most glorious and beautiful architectural achievements it has ever seen, namely in the Gothic Cathedrals built to glorify God. The basic design of these cathedrals, the traditional Basilica layout, formed the shape of a cross when viewed from above. This was during a period when the builders lacked the technology to fly above and see the symbol for themselves, but it was also during a time when God and Heaven were still thought of as “up.” This design was for God alone. Inside, the cathedral layout was designed to lead to the sacristy and the altar, and the architecture was grand and lofty, drawing the eyes upward toward heaven and reminding the people of the majesty of God and their own relative insignificance.


The designers and builders of the great Gothic Cathedrals understood worship. They must have had a definition similar to the famous definition from Dr. Bruce Leafblad, Professor of Church Music and Worship at Southwestern Theological Seminary: “Worship is centering our mind's attention and our heart's affection on the Lord.” You could not – cannot, even today – enter a cathedral and not have your mind's attention and heart's affection instantly directed toward the things of God.

Again, Louie Giglio from The Air I Breathe:

The corporate gathering is a sacred thing. A special thing. A holy thing. Maybe we need bigger buildings after all. Cathedrals that remind us that we're really small and God is really big. Buildings that force us to look up.

Matt Redman in his book, Facedown, quotes David Crowder as saying “I want to build cathedrals. I want to use words and notes rather than stone and mortar.”

But somehow we've come from a place where we built buildings to show the grandeur of God to remodeling churches that look and feel like our living rooms. I'm not sure that's such a good thing. Any time we try to mold that which is of God into something that looks like ourselves, we're on dangerous ground.

Now I'm not saying we need to spend gazillions of dollars building lavish modern cathedrals while our country wallows in a recession, people are out of work, children are homeless, and there are entire people groups in the world that have yet to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. We are called to be good stewards of the resources God has given us and to help those less fortunate. But I am saying that perhaps we need to make houses of worship that look more like somewhere God would dwell and less like somewhere I would kick my feet up and watch TV. Something that hints at the majesty and mystery of God – the otherness of God. Something I can respond to vs. something I can relate to. Because if I can relate to God, then I have lost track of who God is. He is so far above me, beyond me, that I can never relate to Him. But I can certainly respond to Him, submit to Him, honor Him, worship Him, love Him, adore Him. And be loved by Him.

Louie Giglio, in his foreword to Matt Redman's book, Facedown, addresses this tendency to shrink our God down to a more comfortable size and offers tips on how we can avoid it:

Without true glimpses of God we will invariably try to shrink Him down to our own size rather than allow even the tiniest taste of His infinite glory to stretch our mind and soul upward as we try to Fathom His. That's why worship without revelation is so lackluster, dull and void of the awesome wonder that belongs to God alone – the kind of nearsighted worship we can comfortably offer standing up or sitting down. But when our eyes are opened to the drink in His matchless beauty, we are intrinsically drawn facedown to the ground – that place of worship where we are both secure and somewhat afraid, in love and in awe, bowed low yet somehow lifted high. (page 9)

Because as Christ followers, our entire lives should be lived as responses to God. Matt Redman expands on the responsive nature of our relationship with God:

Worship is our response to God. In other words, we don't initiate worship; God does. … Our whole relationship with God works the same way:
He loves. We love in return.
He calls. We answer.
He leads. We follow. (page 55)

Unless we see God, we cannot worship Him. Worship is what spontaneously flows out of us when we come face-to-face with Him. It's the natural response to all of who He is – our uncalculated response to all He has done... At it's core, worship is all about God. It's for Him. Our worship is to Him. (page 59)

When someone says, “Worship is not really my thing,” then clearly they have not come face-to-face with God. We need to glimpse His greatness. We need to be ministering to each other in such a way that we provide opportunity to come face-to-face with the loving Creator of the universe. We throw around words like “mighty,” “majesty,” and “awesome,” but the meanings have become watered down and lack the potency they once had.

Louie Giglio spoke on the second day of Crowder's Fantastical Church Music Conference, and he called on God's people to restore the Church's awe of God:

To restore the awe – to keep the awe –you must stay orbiting around the cross of Jesus Christ. Christ has awakened us from the dead. Awakened people – alive people – sing. That's what they do. (Giglio, Fantastical, 10/1/2010)

I know that I am an Awakened Person. Christ has awakened me from the dead! And so I will sing! Every time I experience God, I pray I will respond with authentic worship that is for Him, through Him and to Him. I challenge you – and myself – to purposely seek God out this week. This day. This moment and every moment. Be on your knees in prayer, be in God's Word, and take risks daily to take the message of God's grace, healing, and love to every person He puts in front of you. Seek out opportunities to experience God so that when we meet together again to worship, it will be a “gifted response,” not about us, but all about Him, and His Son who's blood makes our worship possible.

I'll leave you with a little bit more from Matt Redman in Facedown:

The more we delve into the otherness of God, the more we grasp the truth that worship is quite simply “all about Him...” The whole of our existence – our creation, our salvation, and our sanctification – is first and foremost all about God...We are the created, and He is the uncreated. Isaiah 43. (page 30-31)

It's time for the singing Church to once again encounter the beautiful otherness of God. But we cannot sing of that which we have not seen. ( page 36)

Amen.