A Sacred Assembly: The Why and What of Local Church Worship

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A Sacred Assembly

The Why and What of Local Church Worship

A Picture of Heaven

Do you ever daydream about what heaven will be like?  What kind of images and sensations and experiences come to mind?  Is there any place on earth where you see something of what you hope to see in heaven?

If you have ever worshipped God with a local church according to the Word of God, you have seen something of heaven on earth.  I would even dare to say that what’s happening in this room this morning is a picture and taste of heaven on earth.

How can I say that?  Because the church is where God lives on the earth.  The God of heaven, who needs no home, has chosen to live with his people on the earth.  His people are his temple, the place where his Spirit dwells.

Local churches show the world what heaven looks like because they’re little outposts of the kingdom of God on the earth.  The world is full of despair and fighting and doubt and fear and hate and selfish promotion.  But, in a healthy local church, people can find peace and joy and hope and faith and love and righteousness.  They find something of God’s kingdom on the earth.

As our culture continues to darken and fracture, the opportunities for the gospel only increase.  Carl Trueman says, “In a world where the old ways of community have collapsed, people still want to belong.  The church can be a stellar example of community to those crying out for love and a place to belong.  The church can be an attractive place to those who are lost or wandering.”

A Sacred Assembly

Today I want to talk to you about what the church is and how it that relates to its worship.

The church is God’s house and the bride for whom Christ died.  The church is the corpus, or body, of Christ.  The church is the visible presence of Jesus in the world.  The church is made up of those who’ve joined their lives to Jesus through faith and joined their lives to other believers out of love.

The church is made up of sinners who’ve been declared righteous by God through faith in Christ.  The church is a “holy nation” made up of all the nations.    God’s people are his holy people, not because of intrinsic purity, but because of an alien purity that God has clothed them with.

God’s people have been called out of the world and into the family of God.  God has made us family, brothers and sisters, bringing us together from a wide variety of backgrounds, making the many one.

This oneness is most clearly displayed when the church gathers.  The word “church” literally means “gathering” or “assembly.”  The church is therefore God’s sacred assembly, called out of bondage to sin and Satan and death and the world, and called together to God.

 

These truths mean that the church isn’t a building to be opened or closed, not an event to watch online, but a community that gathers regularly around the word of God.  Churches aren’t content providers, they’re families.  The church isn’t what happens on stage but is the gathering of God’s people.  The church isn’t some sacred space to go to so that we can experience some mystical power.  Rather, the church is a group of people who come together to worship God and encourage one another.  The church isn’t a building we want to be in but a people we want to be with.

 

Some people think of Christianity as an experience like a monk would have, thinking that our individual religious experience is the essence of being a Christian.  Many Christians think that their faith is private and personal, an interior thing that they practice by themselves.  But this way of thinking is not found anywhere in the Bible.  In Acts, the first Christians wanted to be together.  They began their week by gathering together and met in homes throughout the week.

 

From the beginning, the gospel has called people together to worship God and serve one another.  God’s intent is that these gatherings or assemblies be the clearest reflections of his character and presence on the earth.  The local church is meant to be a slice of heaven here and now.

Connection between Doctrine of Church and Worship

In the Old Testament, God’s presence dwelt in the tabernacle and temple, in a specific geographical spot.  But Jesus’ coming changed all of that.  In the new covenant, the Lord’s house is his people, not a spot with a tent or temple.  Jesus stresses this to the Samaritan woman in John 4 and to his disciples in Matthew 18 in the context of church discipline.

God’s presence, and therefore where God should be worshipped, is no longer tied to a spot or structure, but to a gathered people.  The special presence of God is now with the gathered body of believers, wherever that may be, in a storefront, a living room, under a tree, or in a massive auditorium.

When we understand what a church is, we’ll no longer see the church as an optional add-on to the Christian faith, or just a place where all the super-spiritual believers get together to hang out, or an evangelistic rally designed to attract as many people as possible.

When we understand what a church is, we’ll see that there’s a connection between how we understand ourselves to be a church and the way we worship as a church.  In other words, our understanding of the church helps our worship as a church.

It’ll also protect us from approaches to worship that aren’t biblical, like the “liturgical pragmatism” that says churches must do whatever works to get as many people in the doors in order to evangelize unbelievers.  Or things like a consumer mindset that gives us the attitude of a customer rather than a worshipper, an attitude focused on preferences rather than God, an attitude that leads us to say things like, “I didn’t really like the music today” or “I didn’t get much out of the sermon today,” rather than considering whether the congregational singing was filled with truth or whether the sermon was faithful to the Bible or not.

This is nothing new.  Eighty years ago, in his classic book on spiritual warfare Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has Screwtape tell his demon student Wormwood that if he can’t get someone to stop going to church, then he should try to make him into a taster or connoisseur of churches, saying, “the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.”[1]

A good understanding of what a church is helps us avoid these postures and also helps us see that there’s a connection to who we are and what we do when we gather.  We don’t just come together as a group of Christian friends.  We come together as brothers and sisters in a covenant relationship with God and one another.  We come together for God’s glory and our good and so that the world might see something of heaven in our midst.

How Do We Know What To Do When We Gather?

So what should we do when we gather as a church?  Should we just do whatever John or the elders tell us to do?  Should we do whatever will get the most people here?  Should we do what all the “successful” churches are doing?

Again, our doctrine of the church helps us answer this question.  God is the one who gathers us, so our worship is a response to his grace.  God is the central actor in the church, so he gets to decide what happens when the church meets.

Remember, by definition, the church is a corporate phenomenon.  To be in Christ means to be in his body.  To be in his body means to gather with his body.  As Matt Merker says, “A church service is not a bunch of individual Christians who happen to be standing next to one another, offering their own worship to God through a private portal of praise.  It’s a family gathering.”[2]

This means that when pastors plan worship services, we must ask ourselves if we have warrant to require the whole church to engage in each aspect of the worship.  Pastors must decide each week what their church members will do when we meet together on the Lord’s Day.  This could leave the church open to doing things that go against their consciences, or only doing things because they’re aligned with the pastor’s preferences.

How does the God protect the church’s worship from these things?  How does God help pastors shepherd their people through worship?  As in everything else, he does it through his Word!

The Regulative Principle

God governs the worship of his church with his Word.  This principle has been called the “regulative principle” and it’s been practiced by Protestant churches for 500 years.  You may not know it, but it’s the principle I’ve worked from since I became pastor here in 2014.  It’s a simple principle that says that Scripture should regulate the church’s worship.  It’s based on a conviction that God hasn’t left it up to us to decide how the church should worship, that he has revealed these things to us in his word.

The regulative principle is more like a posture than a list of rules.  It doesn’t mean that Scripture dictates every detail or form of worship.  It simply says that Scripture tells us what we should do in public worship, not that it gives us every detail about how to do it.  It’s concerned with the essential elements of worship, not so much with the forms.  It says that churches should do what Scripture commands us to do when we gather for worship.

It’s important to note, as D. A. Carson does, that those who adhere to the regulative principle and those who don’t “often have more common content than either side usually acknowledges.”  He also points out that “there is no single passage in the NT that establishes a paradigm for corporate worship.”  This is undoubtedly true.

But those who use the regulative principle believe that, when we lead God’s people in worship, we’re in some sense binding their consciences to participate in each part of the service.  And the only thing that should bind our conscience is Scripture, so we seek to do what it says.

The Old and New Testaments are full of examples about God caring about the “how” of his people’s corporate worship.  There’s Aaron and the golden calf incident in Exodus 32, where Aaron led the people of Israel to worship the Lord by bowing to the golden calf.  Or the incident of Jeroboam setting up two golden calves in Israel so that the people could worship the Lord there without going to Jerusalem (1 Kgs. 12).  These are wrong ways to worship the right God.

Or, in the New Testament, when Jesus taught the woman at the well, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn. 4:24).  Jesus was saying that true worship is not just sincere, but also must be consistent with who God has revealed himself to be.  She thinks that God should be worshipped on a particular mountain.  Jesus tells her, no, God must be worshipped through the Spirit.  In other words, Jesus says that there’s a right way and wrong way to worship God.  Worship must be regulated by revelation.

Even in the Garden of Eden, before sin came into the world, Adam and Eve needed God’s instruction to know how to engage with him (Gen. 2:16-17).  God is transcendent and incomprehensible, so all we know about him we know because he revealed it to us.  Why should we trust our ideas for how to praise him when we gather with his people?

The regulative principle keeps us from planning worship services by asking, “What would we like to do?” or “What do we assume would ‘reach’ people?”  Rather, it leads us to ask, “What has God called us to do?”  When planning our worship services, thankfully, I don’t have to start with a blank canvas.  God has already written in permanent ink on that canvas, showing us how we’re to engage with him when we gather together.[3]

How Should We Order the Gathering?

So what are we supposed to do when we gather for worship?  What elements of worship should be included in our church’s liturgy, or “order of service”?

Our church has followed the Reformed Protestant tradition here.  In our worship gatherings, we want Scripture to give our services shape and be our substance.  Scripture guides us and fills us.  So, in our worship gatherings, we seek to read the Bible, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible, and see the Bible.

Read the Bible

We read the Bible out loud to one another because Paul says to Timothy, “Devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim. 4:13).  Not counting the Scripture that will be read during the sermon, we have three different “public readings of Scripture” in our services.  We call the church to worship with Scripture because we want to remind ourselves that God takes initiative in our services, that he calls the meeting to order.  We read a longer portion that corresponds to the sermon in order to train our minds to see the unity of Scripture.  And we read a closing benediction, or blessing and exhortation, from Scripture.

Preach the Bible

We preach the Bible because, again, Paul says to Timothy, “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2).  Pastors are commanded by God to preach Scripture to the church.  Expository preaching, or preaching through specific books or sections of Scripture, making the main point of the text the main point of the sermon, is normally how pastors should do this.  The people of God need meat, not just milk to survive (Heb. 5:11-14).  The church needs to hear the Bible explained and applied every week.  If it’s not explained, it’s not expository.  If it’s not applied, it’s not preaching.  God creates and sustains his people through his Word.  We can’t live if we don’t eat.

Pray the Bible

We pray the Bible by offering public prayers of different kinds during the service.  Prayer is part of our worship because, by definition, prayer is a looking away from ourselves and looking to God.  Pray is one of the clearest ways we express our faith in God together.  Our public prayers are also a part of the teaching ministry of the church.  Our prayers of praise, confession, thanksgiving, and petition are meant to show you the different kinds of prayers we find in the Bible.  We want to pray so much in our church that, as Mark Dever says, “nominal Christians will grow bored talking to the God they only pretend to know.”[4]

Sing the Bible

We sing the Bible by obeying Paul’s command that we should, “Address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph. 5:19).  In a parallel verse in Colossians, Paul connects our singing with the teaching ministry of the church, saying, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (3:16).  Our songs should reflect the “word of Christ” and “teach and admonish us” in sound doctrine.  In other words, our songs should be more about God and less about our experience of God.  So we seek to sing songs that are rich in theological and gospel content, not just ones that are popular or familiar.  The church is built up and encouraged as we remind ourselves of the great truths of the gospel, and as we sing to “one another.”  One of the best ways to encourage your brothers and sisters is to sing in worship like you really mean what you’re saying!  My faith is probably the strongest it is all week when we’re singing together.  Singing reminds us that we’re not alone, that the truths we believe aren’t just ideas in our heads but realities that have gripped our hearts and changed our lives.  Singing unlocks the emotions God gave us to glorify and enjoy him with.  So when we close our service with “Oh, How Good It Is,” sing to King Jesus and to one another like you mean it!

See the Bible

Finally, we see the Bible in our services through the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  Each of them are dramatic presentations of the gospel.  They’re pictures meant to reveal the realities of the gospel.  The bread and juice portray Jesus’ body and blood, given for the forgiveness of our sins.  The water of baptism portrays our dying and rising with Christ and his cleansing us of our sins.  The ordinances are where the gospel is spoken to us in tangible form, the visible signs and seals of the new covenant, the physical reminders that we belong to God and to God’s people.

Why This Sermon?

I struggled in deciding whether to preach this message today.  After talking to Nick and Jared, I decided to do it because I wanted to give sustained attention to the why and what of our worship because your worship this year will have a life-shaping effect.  You’ll be formed and shaped and discipled by something this year.  Your friends, family, coworkers, roommates, the news cycle, and the world want to train you in a certain way.  Regularly worshipping God with your local church according to Scripture is a defense against bad training and a spring of living water in a desert.  Give yourself to God and your church this year and watch where he takes you.

I also decided to preach on this because I want you to know why we do what we do.  I want you to have a model to follow after I’m dead.  And I want to help you to know what to look for in a church if you leave this one.

A Life-Giving Gathering

We need God and we need each other.  The primary place we find him is when we gather together to read, preach, pray, sing, and see his Word.  This gathering is not incidental, but fundamental to what it means to be a Christian.  This gathering is life-giving.  This gathering is unlike anything else on the earth.  This gathering is a glimpse of heaven, of what life with God and his people looks and feels and sounds like.  This is a sacred gathering.  May it become an even deeper part of who you are in this new year.

[1]Quoted in Matt Merker, Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s People (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 16.

[2]Ibid., 79.

[3]Ibid., 84.

[4]Quoted in Bobby Jamieson, The Path to Being a Pastor: A Guide for the Aspiring (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 107.