Biblical, Corporate Worship: Where do we start?
God commands us to “love the truth” about Him (2 Thessalonians 2:10). He desires everyone “to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). This truth is been shown in God’s Word as the Spirit of truth (John 16:13)
When we come to know God deeply through His holy Word, the better our worship will be. We are engaging in idolatry when we stray from the truth of God’s word in our worship. It doesn’t matter how we feel or what we think, true worship will only happen with an accurate knowledge of God.
So, where do we go to find this true knowledge of God? We look to the Scriptures. To be a faithful worship leader, church leader, and Christian, we must discipline ourselves to study the Bible and immerse ourselves in everything it says about God.
These two words make many Christians uncomfortable: Theology and Doctrine. But Biblical worship isn’t possible without them. Theology means “the study of God.” As Christians, are we good or bad theologians? Doctrine means “what is taught.” It’s how we find out what God is like and how He wants us to worship Him. So, all this means we really need to be reading our Bibles! True worship starts with the Bible and growing in our knowledge of God.
Studying theology and doctrine is hard. It requires discipline and it may not always be fun. It will consume our time. But there are no shortcuts. It is a pursuit that we will walk on the rest of our lives.
As worship leaders, we must careful to understand that being moved emotionally is different from being changed spiritually. Music alone is helpful, but it can never itself help us understand the deep truths of God such as the Incarnation, or Christ’s substitutionary atonement. Good theology helps us keep music in its proper place. Music is a way of expressing the worship that is already in our hearts because of Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross.
We must always clarify who Jesus is as we lead others in worship. When our theology is sketchy, we are really saying we want our own made-up version of Jesus. But our worship can’t be based on our ideas in order to be true worship. We should always make sure that at least one song within our set is heavy on the Gospel: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. At every gathering we should sing songs about the cross and our sin. God has a history, a real theology. And He demands to be worshipped in Spirit and in truth. Our study of God will always bring about the realization that what we don’t know far out-weighs what we do know. As true Christian’s, we will be life-long students of theology and we should desire to be.
Musical style is not what’s important. Some like to sing hymns, some praise and worship and some like a mixture of both. But what we do know from scripture is that our worship is not acceptable because of anything we’ve done but only because of what Jesus has done. Our job as worship leaders, is to keep people’s focus on what Jesus did two thousand years ago, not what we did 20 minutes ago. If we do this, they will find themselves overwhelmed with the grace of God.
It is our prayer, as we pray the same for every worship leader, that we desire to become as familiar with the Bible as we do our instruments. Hopefully we will desire God’s Holy Word even more than becoming more skillful on our instruments. Our goal is that people walk away from our church, more in awe of Jesus than by our music.
-BIBLICAL CORPORATE WORSHIP STARTS WITH SCRIPTURE-
