Paul Davison  

Old Testament Worship In New Testament Churches

If there is any element of church life that can spark conflict it has, over recent decades, been church music. For many the true determiner of a good church is the quality of the music. Music, it is claimed, is the key to either attracting or repelling the newcomer and the non-Christian. Prayer, by contrast, is often the poor cousin of singing. If the last 30 years has seen an increase in the amount of time in a church meeting devoted to singing, there has been a corresponding decrease in the amount of time in a church meeting devoted to praying.

For most people the word that encapsulates what we do in church when we sing and pray is the word “worship”. Singing and prayer are about worshipping God. 

• So that people will say they go to church to worship God
• Ministers will say “welcome, we have gathered here this morning to worship the Lord”
• The person who leaders the meeting is frequently called the “worship leader”
• And this person will then introduce a time of singing with words like: “Let’s stand now and give God our worship”. And the congregation will sing.

So that in many churches worship is synonymous particularly with singing. In some of the more charismatic and Pentecostal churches – songs are divided into praise songs and worship songs. So worship happens only when the worship songs are being sung. Now given that this singing usually happens in the same building week after week it isn’t a big stretch to have the building being called a worship centre.

• And so we have a special place for worship
• And a special time for worship
• And special people to help us do worship
• And special words and actions to perform our worship

Somehow we have re-invented for ourselves a temple, and a priesthood and a religious system – all with the goal of trying to win God’s favour.

We act in church as though God were the audience and we are the participants. He sits in his great throne in heaven and we perform before him hoping to please him, maybe get from him some heavenly applause. If we can just do it in the right way, in the right place, at the right time, with the right people and with the right intensity – then God would smile from heaven – and we can go home comforted by the thought of a job well done for another week. Ours is the modern, clean, bloodless version of animal sacrifices to appease God. Somehow we think the Lord needs us to sooth him with our singing, lull him with our lyrics.

And so we turn up to church looking to do our thing for God. We’ll do it with intensity and sincerity – and we’ll give God all that we’ve got. And secretly we think that God should be pleased with that and reward us. Reward us with an emotional high and reward us with a good life.

Jesus Is The True Worshipper

The problem is that Jesus is bypassed in all this – his words his work are forgotten. Christ is the turning point of world history. After he has come nothing can be the same. Down through the centuries, Christians have failed to appreciate this. They jumped from Old Testament patterns of worship straight to their own, without filtering it through the New Testament. Applying Old Testament temple patterns to 21stC Christian churches is a serious error; so serious as to effectively deny the gospel message. We can’t base our AD churches on BC practices.

For in the New Testament Jesus is the temple. He is the place where God meets Man. His body is the temple where the Holy Spirit dwells – it was destroyed and rebuilt in three days. In Jesus we have also become the temple of God. In the new age of the Spirit there is no need for a physical temple, for God lives within each Christian and within the church as it gathers together.

Jesus is the great and final High Priest, procuring complete and eternal forgiveness for God’s people. Jesus is the sacrifice once made for all. Jesus lived the perfect life of obedience before the Father. And Jesus is the one true worshipper. It’s obscured by the translation in Hebrews 8:2 – but there Jesus is literally the “liturgy leader”, Jesus is the worship leader. Like everything else, Jesus has offered to the Father whatever needed to be offered on our behalf. He offered up his life on the cross - and he offered up the true praise and worship required by the Father that we are unable and unfit to present.

We have to have the right understanding of the gospel – of the good news of Jesus life, death, resurrection and rule from heaven – if we are to understand what Church is about.

Worship Is Gospel Thankfulness Expressed Through Obedience

In the New Testament we no longer have a special place and a special time and a special person all needed for worship to take place – there are no longer sacred times and sacred buildings and sacred people. Now that Christ has come – all the time is worship time, all places are worship places, all Christians participate in worship.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.
(Romans 12:1-2)

Paul has spent 11 chapters explaining and expounding the gospel to the Roman church and this is his call of response to the gospel. He uses the language of Old Testament worship and sacrifices – but completely changes the emphasis. Worship is no longer some special ceremony that must be performed – it is rather a new life that must be lived in a new pattern. And then Paul goes on to set before Christians 4 chapters' worth of how Christians can get on with one another and their society. According to Paul worship is to be worked out primarily as obedience to God in all of life.

We see the same thing in Hebrews:

How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! (Hebrews 9:14)

The writer of Hebrews is contrasting the Old Testament ministry with Jesus’ ministry. It is through Christ’s death that we can have our consciences cleansed – so that we may serve (literally worship) the living God! It isn’t worship that makes us acceptable to God – we are made acceptable through Christ, so that we may worship. And again what does that worship look like?

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
(Hebrews 12:28-29)

Since we are receiving a kingdom … let us be thankful, and so worship God. To receive the kingdom is to become a Christian – to acknowledge in mind and heart that Jesus is king overall and to submit oneself to him and his rulership. And our response to the gospel is to be thankfulness for what God has done for us – and in this way worship God acceptably with reverence and awe. The writer of Hebrews goes straight from 12:28-29 to 13:1ff. Acceptable worship is to:

• Keep on loving each other as brothers
• Do not forget to entertain strangers
• Remember those in prison
• Marriage should be honoured by all
• Keep your lives free from the love of money
• Remember your leaders
• Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings

Worship of God is to be primarily worked out as obedience in life to his will and his ways. Worship in the New Testament is first and foremost about obedient living as a response of thankfulness to the great and wonderful rescue and relationship offered to us in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it’s at this point that I start to run into the wall of a lifetime of thinking about church as worship. You hear me say that worship is about all of life: but you think “yes, I knew that already” – but the problem for me is that you think that worship is 5% all of life and 95% what we do in church on a Sunday. Remarkably, the one place in the New Testament where worship language is absent is in describing what we do in church.

Church Is A Place For Building Up Others

When the New Testament talks about what goes on in church it doesn’t use words like “worship” or make reference to special buildings or special times or special people. For example see Hebrews 10:19-25. Or the apostle Paul trying to help the Corinthian church sort out what they should be doing in their meetings together. What is the criteria they are to use to decide what should be done in their church meetings – is God worshipped by this or that? No, does it build up the other believers – 1 Corinthians 14:

• But everyone who prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, encouragement and
  comfort. (v 3)
• … so that the church may be edified. (v 5)
• Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, try to excel in gifts that build up the church. (v 12)
• What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. (v 26)

The predominant purpose for church as a group of gathered Christians is: “How do we encourage and build each other up?” It’s not that we worship God all the time except when we gather as a church. The critical idea to grasp is that worship is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week response of thankful obedience – and that the form of that response of thankfulness includes what we do as we gather as a church. Worship includes our singing and praying – worship is not defined by our singing and praying. Our corporate singing and praying are just a small part of our whole life lived as worship to God.

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