Worship as Performance

Institutional worship is something done to you, in front of you, or for you, but not by you. The congregants come as passive recipients, unconsciously thinking, “I hope this is good today.” People arriving for corporate worship in this frame of mind can leave worship as unmoved as when they arrived. After all, pastors are paid to put together the order of worship, exude charisma, insert moving musical selections, and then preach a stirring message. Since the dynamic is essentially a performer-audience relationship, the worshipers are put in the position of being critics of the latest pastoral effort.
Somehow we don’t think it unusual for the remarks at the door after a church service to focus on evaluating the morning message or worship service. This audience-performer mentality had become so much a part of our mind-set that George Plagenz, who wrote a weekly column for a Cleveland newspaper, took to rating the quality of worship. Churches dreaded this clandestine reporter sneaking in and slipping out of worship, for the next day a review of their service would appear in the local newspaper.

Greg Ogden, Unfinished Business: Returning the Ministry to the People of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010).

Be Careful How You Worship

Deuteronomy 12:11–15

11 Then there shall be a place which the Lord your God shall choose to cause his name to dwell there; thither shall ye bring all that I command you; your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, your tithes, and the heave offering of your hand, and all your choice vows which ye vow unto the Lord: 12 And ye shall rejoice before the Lord your God, ye, and your sons, and your daughters, and your menservants, and your maidservants, and the Levite that is within your gates; forasmuch as he hath no part nor inheritance with you. 13 Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every place that thou seest: 14 But in the place which the Lord shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there thou shalt do all that I command thee. 15 Notwithstanding thou mayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates, whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, according to the blessing of the Lord thy God which he hath given thee: the unclean and the clean may eat thereof, as of the roebuck, and as of the hart.

Modern Christianity seeks to worship God in their own way, but in Deuterium 12:11-14 we see that God is the one who directs our worship. Ignoring His protocols negates His power. Have you fallen into the trap of worship God in spirit with out truth? Is your worship centered on truth or your feelings. The high places in the Old Testament were intended to make the people feel close to their god because they were high.(Walter A. Elwell and Philip Wesley Comfort, Tyndale Bible Dictionary, Tyndale reference library (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001), 604.) Be careful that hymns and songs sung in church are not simply an emotional experience. Make sure you are focusing on the truth presented.

Satan always seeks to counterfeit and many fall in to his trap in the realms of “feeling spiritual” when they are living in direct opposition to God’s commands. At other times when a believer has confessed their sin and accessed the blood Satan makes them “feel” that they are not right with God. Be careful to worship God in Sprit and truth and accept what He says.

 

John 4:23–24

But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. 24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

Worship

 

And he pitched his tent having Bethel on the west and Ai on the east;

and there he builded an altar.

Genesis 12:8.

Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If you hoard a thing for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded. God will never let you hold a spiritual thing for yourself; it has to be given back to Him that He may make it a blessing to others.
Bethel is the symbol of communion with God; Ai is the symbol of the world. Abraham pitched his tent between the two. The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time; there is always plenty of time to worship God. Quiet days with God may be a snare. We have to pitch our tents where we shall always have quiet times with God, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not three stages in spiritual life—worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God’s idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986).