Reformed Worship is Biblical Worship

We have another Winter Storm rolling through W. Michigan today and now into the evening. No PM service at church. Besides sleeping for over 3 hours I've listened to a sermon, and watch Tenth Pres's live stream. I just finished reading a chapter in D. G. Hart's Recovering Mother Kirk. For anyone serious about worshiping God in spirit and truth this book is a must read. This my second time reading the book, and Chapter 4, "Reverence and Reformed Worship" has struck me once again. Hart laments the fact that then (early-mid 1990s) there were Evangelicals leaving their Evangelical churches to join Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches because of their dissatisfaction of the onslaught of contemporary worship practices and styles in their churches. They prefered the majesty and dignity of Roman Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. Hart's argument is that Reformed worship offers the same in its historical liturgy. He wonders why these folk bypassed Geneva on their way to Rome, or Athens.

Since I've been Reformed my whole theology of worship has changed. I was locked in the cultural captivity of my Missionary Baptist upbringing and failed to appreciate historic worship let alone liturgical worship. I mocked liturgical worship as being dead to the Spirit, and being "European." As a Reformed Christian, I realize that God has provided liturgy for his people. Liturgy is a gift to the Church so that we can worship as he proscribes. What we have in Reformed worship is the dialogical cadence and rhythm: God speaks, we listen, we respond. All must be tempered in godly fear.

Some may criticize this as worship that is dull and staid. If someone responds such as this, he/she fails to recognize that even regenerate people cannot approach God on our own and with our own program. The starting point of Reformed theology is God's holiness and our unqualified (on our own) position to even offer him one iota of praise from our own. This is why our worship is mediated by Christ and the Spirit. This implies that we must worship God on his terms. He has dictated that we sanctify him in our worship. Our posture must be that of humility, but also joy in the fact that God has drawn near to us by Christ and the Spirit.

As one who believes that God has commanded us to sing psalms exclusively in the praise, psalm-singing offers us a variety of ways to offer the sacrifice of praise to God. Many psalms are sung prayers, others are majestic hymns, and some are laments and confession of sin. All of these elements of praise must be part of the entire corpus of liturgy. To neglect these elements time and time again means that our praise will be limp and will fail us.

The Heavenly Father invites us to worship him, but we must do so "acceptably with reverence and godly fear" (Heb 12:28).