Van-guard (văn’gärd), noun: “The foremost or leading position in a trend or movement.”
the journey forward... exploring the emerging church... navigating spiritual formation... seeking to transform the world... ...through Christ
|
Van-guard (văn’gärd), noun: “The foremost or leading position in a trend or movement.” the journey forward... exploring the emerging church... navigating spiritual formation... seeking to transform the world... ...through Christ |
|
|
Vanguard Church A Philosophy of Worship By Pastor-Teacher Bob Robinson
Genuine Worship: "Shout for joy...Worship the LORD with gladness, come before him with joyful songs ...Enter His gates with thanksgiving... For the LORD is good and his love endures forever" (Psalm 100). We glorify God in genuine worship that inspires seekers to love God for the first time, and believers to love God more, never forgetting that the primary audience of worship is the Lord.
What is Worship? Worship is gladly confessing to God our awe of the His glory and sincerely expressing our love to God as the object of our affection. If I can sum up my purpose for being a pastor, it is this: To get people to understand and apply one, just one, crucial concept of Christian living: True Joy, true satisfaction, is found in loving God above else. As I have lived the Christian life, and as I have pastored and counseled people, I have come to this conclusion. Most every problem we have in our lives—be it marital problems, stress from work, a lack of joy or satisfaction in any area of life—is directly related to the fact that the person has not grasped this amazing truth. I’m convinced that there is a direct correlation between joy and our love for God. As Paul Thigpen once wrote, “To discover joy, we must abandon the search for it, and go looking instead for the One who is Himself joy to see, to know, and to love.” This proposal isn’t new or original—this is an ancient truth that has proved itself over the ages. It is the truth found in the pages of Scripture and tested in the trenches of difficult and distressful lives for centuries. Every age has its own peculiar blindness. Somehow, our generation in the Church seems to have forgotten that the pursuit of happiness, if it is not defined clearly as the pursuit of God, is a futile and idolatrous journey. I am convinced that we are built for a pursuit of joy. We have an insatiable appetite for deep satisfaction. This almost hedonistic appetite in and of itself is not wrong; it is given by God! It is his way of making us yearn for him. And that is in loving God. When we seek ultimate joy in our jobs, our houses, our yards, our bank accounts, our sex lives, our pats on the back from the boss, our importance in the church or business or family; even when we seek our happiness in our love for our spouses or our children—we are never going to find the joy that lasts, that satisfies, that fulfils the deepest desires of our hearts. I am convinced that if we enter into an ever-deepening LOVE-RELATIONSHIP with God the issues that so often disturb our lives and drag us down into stress and depression would be eliminated. In Isaiah 55:1-2, God calls out to us, beckoning us to come to him for the satisfaction of our soul’s deepest longings. Look at the passage: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no -money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.” God offers us unending joy in HIMSELF! The true source of joy is in loving God! Life-giving water is the biblical metaphor for the joy of being in a love relationship with God! Let me be clear, I do not mean that God is a means to our worldly pleasures! The pleasure or joy that a Christian seeks is GOD HIMSELF! God is not some sort of stepping stone on our climb toward some other pleasure. Keep that clear, or the Bible is terribly distorted! GOD is the Christian’s ultimate desire! Not any money, not anything else by way of living standard, not any other blessing on earth or in heaven, but a deeper, loving fellowship with the one who IS Love, who IS joy! Psalm 43:4 says, “I will go to the altar of God, To God my exceeding joy!” Not God… and then something else! GOD IS THE EXCEEDING JOY! That is what is meant in Psalm 37:4 by,
“Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.” God is promising, I believe, to give himself to those who delight in Him! So, the goal of worship is to express the joy we have in loving God. I believe that the first step to true joy in loving God is to behold God’s love for us. You see, joy is a response. Joy is dependent on our encounter with something or someone that is delightful to our souls, someone whom we love. Jonathan Edwards called it “the affections.” Today, we would maybe call them deep feelings of love. In Jeremiah 31:12, we find a tremendous promise to those who will be part of the new covenant: “They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion; they will rejoice in the bounty of the LORD—the grain, the new wine and the oil, the young of the flocks and herds. They will be like a well-watered garden, and they will sorrow no more.” Joy is a gift of grace from our loving God. We can never earn it. Who could ever say that they are worthy of the joyous presence of God? Yet despite our rebellion, He has graciously joined us on this dry desert planet, first in flesh as the Lord Jesus, and now in His Holy Spirit. No wonder the New Testament Greek word for grace, charis, actually comes from chara, the word for JOY! Grace originally meant “that which causes delight!” God desires each of our souls to become a well-watered garden. GOD supplies the water, because His presence is the living waters of joy. But He calls
us to prepare our hearts to receive the flow of joy so that we can bear fruit. That is why our Core Value #8 reads that we will be “Multidimensional: We will balance the rational/mental dimension of our faith with the relational/emotional dimension. Sound evangelical doctrine will be coupled with dynamic spiritual relationship with God through His Holy Spirit." This affects our approach to worship. If we see worship simply as duty out of obedience, we essentially cease to worship. The Greek word for worship used 59 times in the New Testament literally means, “to turn toward to kiss.” If I were to turn toward my wife to kiss her only out of my duty as a husband, I would not be honoring her. She would be insulted! John Piper writes in Desiring God, “Neither God nor my wife is honored out of a sense of duty. They are honored when I delight in them! Therefore to honor God in worship we must not seek him disinterestedly, for fear of gaining some joy in worship and so ruining the moral value of the act. Worship is nothing less than obedience to the command, ‘Delight yourself in the Lord!’ Misguided virtue smothers the spirit of worship…Worship services across the land bear the scars of this process. For many, Christianity has become the grinding out of general doctrinal laws from collections of biblical facts. But childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator. And the irony is that we have aided and abetted the desecration by telling people they ought not seek their own pleasure, especially in worship.” C. S. Lewis, in Reflections on the Psalms, sheds light on what we are doing in worship. He writes, “But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise…the world rings with praise—lovers praising their spouses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite sport. My whole, more general, difficulty about praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regard the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” |
|
Ministry Transformation- The Emerging Church Personal Transformation- Spiritual Formation World Transformation- Social Action Interact with Bob Robinson about the emerging church, spiritual formation, or social action by e-mailing vanguard church with your comments. |
