Worship is a dialogue between God and his people which the Lord initiates and the congregation responds to in reverence, gratitude, and love. God calls, and we come into his presence. He confronts us with his law, and we confess our sins. The Lord pronounces absolution, and we respond joyfully in faith with thanksgiving. He consecrates us by his Word and Spirit, and we receive, embrace, affirm, and obey his revealed will. Yahweh prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies, and we come to the Table as his children, grateful to be seated in a place of honor and to commune with the Holy One. He commissions us to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it by preaching the gospel and discipling the nations by baptizing them in the Triune Name and teaching them to observe all that King Jesus has commanded.
Many Christians show up for church each week and have a very different experience. They may be entirely passive in their attendance, spectators and consumers rather than participants. If they are in a traditional church, the worship may seem more formal than joyful, patterned more by post-war 1950s Americana than the books of Acts and Leviticus. If they are in a big-box evangelical-ish church, the liturgy will consist of three parts recognizable as: Concert, Ted Talk, and TimeShare (fundraising) presentation. In the traditional American church, attendees are spectators; in the contemporary evangelical-ish church, they are consumers; but in the Bible, both OT and NT, worshipers are participants in a sacred act of conversation and communion with God.
Lord’s Day worship has traditionally been called the Divine Service. God is drawing near to his people to love, serve, and sanctify them. The people are being lifted into the heavenlies and serving God by words of praise and thanksgiving and acts of prayer and obedience. The worshipers are neither spectators nor consumers. Worship is neither a performance that we watch nor a product or service that we purchase. There is no “Tell Us How We Did” survey at the end of your visit. The church does not exist to reinvent itself and adjust in order to meet its donors’ felt-needs. God is our audience, and the Church is the recipient of his grace, mercy, and love.
We talk a lot about worship and liturgy at Kuyperian Commentary because we believe worship is how God is changing the world. It is not merely by rational arguments, though we like those too, nor by cultural and political engagement, as important as that is. It is by worship that God transforms his people and equips them to bring all nations to the feet of King Jesus. Liturgy is not merely what we do on the Lord’s Day. Liturgy is the rhythm of life, the pattern of our daily existence: calling, confession, consecration, communion, and commission. Liturgy shapes our understanding of who we are, whose we are, why we are here, and what lies ahead of us.
Many of us became “Reformed” because of biblical arguments. The weight of Scripture, the persistent theme of sovereign grace running through the entire Bible, creates an overwhelming and inescapable conviction that the Lord is not only in charge of this world and our salvation, he is actually in control. But being a Christian is about more than just theology, as important and necessary as it is. Doctrine informs, clarifies, directs, and protects us. But it is in communion with God that we come to know and love the Lord Jesus Christ and to know that we are known and loved by him. So read your Bible, review your catechism, and keep plugging away at that book of theology that you are reading before bed each night, but do not neglect the Lord’s Day, either by staying at home or by treating it as a spectator or consumer would. Come before the Lord at Zion’s holy mountain, confess your sins and your faith, rejoice with loud singing and the sincere cry, “Thanks be to God!” Taste and see that the Lord is good. He has been good to us, and he always shall be.
