More thoughts on worship

So the new vision statement at my church is, you may recall, "A people for Christ, for the kingdom, and for the world." And in the first installment of a 5-sermon series intended to "unpack" this statement, our pastor focused first of all on all-out worship as a characteristic of such a people.

Now, I've been saying on all along that modern evangelical Christianity is losing its Christ-centeredness. In a nutshell, we have decided not to talk about sin as sin, and therefore we do not convey an accurate and profound understanding of the human condition. In fact, much of the time we gloss all this over, and in doing so, the cross itself and the doctrine of justification (sorry, I've stopped trying to "winsomely" avoid using such terms) gets shunted aside as no longer quite serving the needs of the moment. With the human condition misunderstood, and the cross thus "deconstructed," the very ministry of Jesus is narrowed and misunderstood.

With these thoughts in mind, I want to go back to the matter of worship. If we combine these two matters -- 1) the imperative to worship the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and 2) the centrality of the cross to all matters of faith and understanding -- then we see that the cross (and the justification it bought for us) becomes the indicative upon which the imperative to worship is based. We worship God, in other words, because Jesus saved us from our sins.

If, on the other hand, we focus on worship while shunting the cross aside, we will probably focus instead on ourselves (since there must, there will always be, something in the focus). We will begin to talk and sing about ourselves worshiping, will begin to describe attitudes of worship in terms of our fervor, rather than in terms of what God has done in Christ. We will even speak routinely of worship without reference to Jesus at all, or routinely interchanging the name of Jesus with that of God in a blurring of the trinitarian persons.

But back to the sermon last week. Under the heading of worship, our pastor spoke among other things of being a people who "celebrate Christ." He cited 1 Peter 1:8, and then the passage in 2 Samuel in which David says to the chiding Michal, "...I will become even more undignified than this..." Also, he cited Ps. 100:1-3, not stopping to show what Christ had to do with either of these passages.

So, I was a little disappointed about this. Not angry, not disgruntled, not terribly put-out, but a little disappointed. It was a missed opportunity. If I were going to speak about celebrating Christ, I might speak of his supremacy in all things, about his being the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I might note Hebrews 10:10, or Romans 3:21-26, or Philippians 2:1-11, or especially Colossians 1:15-23. I would go to Christ's upper room talk with his disciples ("for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God"). Perhaps you can think of a few dozen more passages that show the worthiness of Christ, or the centrality of the cross for our worship.

The point. Yes, let us celebrate Jesus. But we will never come close to understanding his worthiness until we understand the depths of our own unworthiness. If it was necessary that Jesus go to the cross for sinful men, that is then the fundamental basis of all our celebration. Our joy is based on nothing less.